The (Gender) Trouble with Tribbles!

I had to cross-post this because it is just SO true. And please notice that this was one of the "Kirk in the sexy dress uniform pajamas" episodes. The same uniform he wears when he switches bodies with a woman (the last episode, I believe, and I need to check to be sure that is true about the uniform).

This will have to be a full entry later on!

Coming Soon: The Last Supper in Space

Skate Wars?

This line of research is leading down a dark alley from which I may never return. My god, how many of these fanfic videos are there? And why does this video make me feel like I am 14 again?

The Disposable Rocket by John Updike

Apollo 15 launch.

The following essay by John Updike was very influential on my way of thinking about gender and how men perceive their bodies. I may get a "cease and desist" order for reprinting it, though as an academic writing a not-for-profit blog I may be somewhat protected. If this entry suddenly disappears, just Google it. The use of archetypal language in this essay is truly astounding. I will be returning to this later for a more in-depth look. And an interesting point from a writer's point of view: Updike's paragraphs are here almost exactly the same length. Damn.

The Disposable Rocket
John Updike

Inhabiting a male body is like having a bank account; as long as it’s healthy, you don’t think much about it. Compared to the female body, it is a low-maintenance proposition: a shower now and then, trim the fingernails every ten days, a haircut once a month. Oh yes, shaving—scraping or buzzing away at your face every morning. Byron, in Don Juan, thought the repeated nuisance of shaving balanced out the periodic agony, for females, of childbirth. Women are, his lines tell us,

Condemn’d to child-bed, as men for their sins
Have shaving too entail’d upon their chins,—
A daily plague, which the aggregate
May average on the whole with parturition.

From the standpoint of reproduction, the male body is a delivery system, as the female is a mazy device for retention. Once the delivery is made, men feel a faith but distinct falling-off of interest. Yet against the enduring realm heroics of birth and nurture should be set the male’s superhuman frenzy to deliver his goods: he vaults walls, skips sleep, risks wallet, health, and his political future all to ram home his seed into the gut of the chosen woman. The sense of the chase lives in him as the key to life. His body is, like a delivery rocket that falls away in space, a disposable means. Men put their bodies at risk to experience the release from gravity.

When my tenancy of a male body was fairly new—of six or so years’ duration—I used to jump and fall just for the joy of it. Falling—backwards, or downstairs—became a specialty of mine, an attention-getting stunt I was still practicing into my thirties, at suburban parties. Falling is, after all, a kind of flying, though of briefer duration than would be ideal. My impulse to hurl myself from high windows and the edges of cliffs belongs to my body, not my mind, which resists the siren call of the chasm with all its might; the interior struggle knocks the wind from my lungs and tightens my scrotum and gives any trip to Europe, with its Alps, castle parapets, and gargoyled cathedral lookouts, a flavor of nightmare. Falling, strangely, no longer figures in my dreams, as it often did when I was a boy and my subconscious was more honest with me. An airplane, that necessary evil, turns the earth into a map so quickly the brain turns aloof and calm; still, I marvel that there is no end of young men willing to become jet pilots.

Any accounting of male-female differences must include the male’s superior recklessness, a drive not, I think, toward death, as the darkest feminist cosmogonies would have it, but to test the limits, to see what the traffic will bear—a kind of mechanic’s curiosity. The number of men who do lasting damage to their young bodies is striking; war and car accidents aside, secondary-school sports, with the approval of parents and the encouragement of brutish coaches, take a fearful toll of skulls and knees. We were made for combat, back in the postsimian, East-African days, and the bumping, the whacking, the breathlessness, the painsmothering adrenaline rush form a cumbersome and unfashionable bliss, but bliss nevertheless. Take your body to the edge, and see if it flies.

The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at forty thousand feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar—these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose. Of course, no one is ideal, and the sexes are somewhat androgynous subdivisions of a species: Diana the huntress is a more trendy body time nowadays than languid, overweight Venus, and polymorphous Dionysus poses for more underwear ads than Mars. Relatively, though, men’s bodies, however elegant, are designed for covering territory, for moving on.

An erection, too, defies gravity, flirts with it precariously. It extends the diagram of outward direction into downright detachability—objective in the case of the sperm, subjective in the case of the testicles and penis. Men’s bodies, at this junction, feel only partly theirs; a demon of sorts has been attached to their lower torsos, whose performance is erratic and whose errands seem, at times, ridiculous. It is like having a (much) smaller brother toward whom you feel both fond and impatient; if he is you, it is you in curiously simplified and ignoble form. This sense, of the male body being two of them, is acknowledged in verbal love play and erotic writing, where the penis is playfully given a pet name, and individuation not even the rarest rapture grants a vagina. Here, where maleness gathers to a quintessence of itself, there can be no insincerity, there can be no hiding; for sheer nakedness, there is nothing like a hopeful phallus; its aggressive shape, is indivisible from its tender-skinned vulnerability. The act of intercourse, from the point of view of a consenting female, has an element of mothering, of enwrapment, of merciful concealment, even. The male body, for this interval, is tucked out of harm’s way.

To inhabit a male body, then is to feel somewhat detached from it. It is not an enemy, but not entirely a friend. Our being seems to lie not in cells and muscles but in the traces that our thoughts and actions inscribe on the air. The male body skims the surface of nature’s deeps wherein the blood and pain and mysterious cravings of women perpetuate the species. Participating less in nature’s processes than the female body, the male body gives the impression—false—of being exempt from time. Its power of strength and reach descend in early adolescence, along with acne and sweaty feet, and depart, in imperceptible increments, after thirty or so. It surprises me to discover, when I remove my shoes and socks, the same paperwhite, hairless angles that struck me as pathetic when I observed them on my father. I felt betrayed when, in some tumble of touch football twenty years ago, I heard my tibia snap; and when, between two reading engagements in Cleveland, my appendix tried to burse; and when, the other day, not for the first time, there arose to my nostrils out my [sic] own body the musty attic smell my grandfather’s body had.

A man’s body does not betray its tenant as rapidly as a woman’s. Never as fine and lovely, it has less distance to fall; what rugged beauty it has is wrinkleproof. It keeps its capability of procreation indecently long. Unless intense athletic demands are made upon it, the thing serves well enough to sixty, which is my age now. From here on, it’s chancy. There are no breasts or ovaries to admit cancer to the male body, but the prostate, that awkwardly located little source of seminal fluid, shows the strain of sexual function with fits of hysterical cell replication, and all that male-bonding beer and potato chips add up on the coronary arteries. A writer whose physical equipment can be minimal as long as it gets him to the desk, the lectern, and New York City once in a while, cannot but be grateful to his body, especially to his eyes, those tender and intricate sites where the brain extrudes from the skill, and to his hands, which hold the pen or tap the keyboard. His body has been, not himself exactly, but a close pal, potbellied and balding like most of his other pals now. A man and his body are like a boy and the buddy who has a driver’s license and the use of his father’s car for the evening; once goes along, gratefully, for the ride.

If I Only Had the Balls

So here I was working on an entry on food (shout out to all the FBers assisting, but especially Jennifer for passing the word along on her page) and SF-ninja Mark Bould posted this cartoon:

And it just so happens that one of my early conference presentations was about The Wizard of Oz and was entitled "If I Only Had some Balls". I forget the subtitle, but I think I dropped that one off my resume (aka Curriculum Vitae) at some point. I probably should put it back now that I am a full professor and have tenure (and crayons, which is another matter, but I do like crayons). That said the literalness of this little gem (go Mike!) is haunting. I'd like to see that movie. Is Terry Gilliam still making movies? My argument went something like this:

Wants                   Symbolically Represents
A Brain                  Intelligence
A Heart                  Emotions
??                          Courage

Taking the male body from top to bottom, what does the cowardly lion want?

And before anyone who knows me well asks: yes, I have finally found a way to recycle every single idea I have ever had! I love blogging. Academic publishing can bite me--excepting those editors who will soon see more stuff from me, of course.

Latinos in Space: Patricio "Pato" Guzman & Star Trek

Enterprise sketches by Jeffries working under Guzman. 

Patricio "Pato" Guzmán (1933-1991) was a Chilean native who worked on the original design of the Enterprise and it's bridge. I ran across his name while reading The Making of Star Trek and became interested because I did not remember seeing his name before. It turns out he is often left out of mainstream histories as he ended up being uncredited on the series as he left before the pilot was actually shot to return to Chile (the hearesay is he was "homesick," though he later returned to the US). I like the fact that a Latino worked on the design of the Enterprise, so I decided to add an entry for Guzman on Wikipedia as part of my project there. It is a short entry, though this is probably about as much as Wikipedia will allow for Guzman unless more significant research on him has been done. That sounds like a great project for a graduate student!

The entry with citations and links is HERE. Though the text is also following. Please rate the article on Wikipedia if you have time.

Patricio "Pato" Guzmán (1933-1991), a native of Chile, worked in the United States as an art director, production designer, and producer of television and film. He worked on such notable shows as The Jack Benny Program, I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show, That Girl, and the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills. He also served as a production designer for the Star Trek: The Original Series pilot "The Cage" (uncredited) and in that capacity worked directly with art director Matt Jeffries and creator-producer Gene Roddenberry on the original USS Enterprise NCC-1701 exterior and bridge.

The Space Truck and The Bomb: Space Shuttle Discovery and the Enola Gay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Discovery_on_display_at_Udvar-Hazy.JPG

We recently returned from a trip to the DC area where we had a chance to go to the Smithsonian Institute's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (which is a separate facility of the National Air and Space Museum). The main reason for the trip was to the the Discovery and it was Amazing! Our guide was incredible. Though I am tired of hearing the shuttles referred to as "space trucks," I can understand the colloquial appeal this probably has for many visitors.

The Discover seemed simultaneously large and small. It was physically smaller than I thought it would be (I did not see the Enterprise when it was in the same location) but sort of emotionally large. The shuttle was really my generation's space program. We read about it at school and at home. We watched flight tests of the Enterprise live on TV in school. We grew up with it and even watched as people died in two shuttle crashes (Challenger OV-099, in 1986 and Columbia OV-102 in 2003). A piece of Columbia was found near my home in Texas.

I guess the whole feeling of standing there was sort of epic. I actually could not look at it for very long without feeling very emotional and sad. It had never really occurred to me how much death and destruction is associated with going into space. And part of me was guiltily thinking "We should have gone to Mars instead."

Kubrick certainly got the juncture of eros and thanatos in space explorations right. I realized this as my wife and I looked about at all the rockets and missiles and bombs in the Shuttle hanger and, later, at all the planes from two world wars and innumerable other conflicts. The tour officially ended with the Enola Gay. Yes, that one. The real one. My wife could barely look at it and had to walk away.

"She get bored?" The tour guide joked a little nervously.
"Nah," I replied. "She doesn't do nuclear bombs."
"Ah. She doesn't do nuclear bombs." He was an OK guy--a retired marine. He thought the Enola Gay was great. And I must admit the old girl is pretty impressive. She's very shiny. "That is the original hand-painted name right there. 'Enola Gay' named after his mother."

Courtesy of Wikipedia.

OK, what? I had forgotten that bit. So his mother's name is forever connected to the history of nuclear destruction. There is something so Freudian in that as to be downright scary. Colonel Paul Tibbets named his specially deigned B-29 after his mother to blow the crap out of Japan.

That is certainly on the "think it over" list.

In other news: unfortunately, I was not able to see the model of the Enterprise at the National Air and Space Museum on the D.C. mall, but I have that planned for the next trip this Fall, so I hope to have a new profile pic with the model soon!

A Black Female Number One! The Making of Star Trek

I read the first couple of chapters of the classic The Making of Star Trek which was the first book about the show and written while it was being produced. The interesting thing is that the co-writer, Stephen Whitfield, is neither and academic nor a Hollywood writer or director or any of that, so he pays attention to things that other writers from the other perspectives might not.

OK, Trekkies and Trekkers don't hate on me, but I did not know (or had forgotten) that the First Officer was possibly "West African" in the original series outline. (Eventually, I am going to need to get my terminology under control so that I don;t mix up "outline" and "treatment" and so on.) I knew the First Officer was intended to be a female but she was also intended to be black? Yowza. Though, of course, we do see some of that played out with Uhura on the bridge. Roddenberry certainly had some cajones--and good for him!

Spock was possibly "half-martian", and reddish, with pointed ears. I am glad that idea evolved some. Though now I am realizing very strongly the whole "Vulcan" thing (Mars, the Devil, Hell), and McCoy--doesn't McCoy call Spock "green-blooded devil" on occasion?

Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (A Book Review)

And now a book review!

The premise of Decoding Gender in Science Fiction is, as Brian Attebery states in the first chapter, that “Science fiction is a useful tool for investigating habits of thought, including conceptions of gender. Gender, in turn, offers an interesting glimpse into some of the unacknowledged messages that permeate science fiction” (1). What we have in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction is the most comprehensive analysis of gender tropes in Science Fiction from its origins in Gothic literature to today. Attebery states in his introduction that he was surprised to find there was no historical study of the development of sex and gender in SF. While there certainly are reams of critical articles and books on sex and gender in SF (the work of Marleen S. Barr, Robin Roberts, and Ximena Gallardo C. immediately come to mind), Attebery is correct in the sense that there has not been a systematic, chronological introduction into the changing representations of gender roles in SF that covers all the major periods. This was a vital omission in SF studies particularly if SF is to continue being read and taught as a serious literature and, perhaps, finally help lift genre fiction out of the literary ghetto.

Nine compact chapters comprise this study and each follows a clear chronological progression through a particular theme. “Chapter One: Secret Decoder Ring” serves as both an introduction to the full work and also sets the historical stage with concise definitions of terms. As Attebery states, “Gender is a way of assigning social and psychological meaning to sexual difference, insofar as that difference is perceived in form, appearance, sexual function, and expressive behavior. Science fiction is a system for generating and interpreting narratives that reflect insights derived from, technological offshoots of, and attitudes toward science” (2). Though I might argue that characters in a novel have no sex as they have no “real” body, Attebery is perfectly clear that any definition of gender or Science Fiction is open to interpretation and that this particular framework was derived through the interplay of both terms. Thus, though his definitions may be questioned outside the context of this work, Attebery cogently defines the terms under which the logic of Decoding Gender in Science Fiction proceeds. His concise definitions of both science fiction and gender—both hotly debated terms—admirably set the stage for the clear and lucid discussion of the representations of gender in science fiction to follow.

“Chapter Two: From Neat Idea to Trope” surveys the literary origins of both “genre fiction” and “science fiction” in the gothic romance and particularly in the work of Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, and the almost forgotten writer Jane Webb Louden. Each of the other seven chapters likewise focuses on the emerging (if not in every case the prevailing) gender theme in a particular era. In “Chapter 3: Animating the Inert: Gender and Science in the Pulps,” Attebery takes on the Golden Age pulps and the early “boys toys” narratives by looking for slippages and gaps in the predominantly male-dominated narratives where women generally are confused, serve coffee, and/or have green skin. His “against the grain reading” emerges from a full study of virtually every SF pulp published in one year (1937, or the year that marks the culmination of the Golden Age in SF) and, therefore differs markedly from Robin Robert’s more specific reading of the female alien in the Pulps (A New Species, 1993) in its sheer depth. Most interesting is the role of women as both fans and writers of the pulps (yes, there were both from early on) in helping shape what SF was to become.

The forth and fifth chapters, “Supermen” and “Wonder Women” respectively, survey the predominantly male-based evolution stories loosely taxonimized as the “homo superior” theme compared to the somewhat later manifestation of the heretofore “missing superwoman.” While the earlier stories evidenced a clear notion of how men would (and should) evolve—smarter, faster, less encumbered by emotion—these writers seemed to only have a vague notion of what evolution would mean for women beyond Lilith-inspired super-sexed being. The eternal problem of “what do women want” finds its answer in the Wonder Women (named, of course, after Marston’s thinly veiled S&M superhero). Yet, however sexist these texts remained, they did pave the way for stronger females in SF and eventually served as the basis for the misogynistic dystopias and feminist utopias to follow, which are the subject of chapter six, “Women Alone, Men Alone.” Chapter seven, “Androgyny as Difference” heads into the liminal territory of “othered bodies.” Attebery bases his discussion on The Left Hand of Darkness and then branches out to examine the ongoing discussion of differently sexed bodies. “Chapter Eight: ‘But Aren’t Those Just . . . You Know, Metaphors’” addresses postmodernism and SF in terms of how tropes generated in fiction can shape reality. I was reminded throughout this chapter of a how a space shuttle was named after Star Trek’s Enterprise and then we later see the shuttle on the wall of the Enterprise in a Star Trek movie. But even more important is the real feedback loop that has developed between SF and science. These are, indeed, the fictions of which our stuff is made.

Finally, chapter nine, “Who Farms the Future” serves as a call to action, a manifesto of sorts, for staking out claims in the future through SF. We already have, of course, a few examples; those that immediately come to mind are the work of African American feminist Octavia Butler and the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel (of Like Water for Chocolate Fame), who penned the futuristic-mystical The Law of Love that featured body swapping and a starship named The Intergalactic Cockfight, but the predominance of the white middle class in SF authorship, readership, and scholarship still forecasts that the future as far as these tropes predict will be (god help us) white and middle class. But we still have hope. As Attebery states in chapter one, “The history of the genre, at least in my alternative vision, reflects the ongoing hope that if we change the signs, the world might follow” (15), and what is SF if not a literature of hope?

Decoding Gender in Science Fiction is, by and large, a straightforward chronological survey of the appearance and function of gender and gender issues in Science Fiction. The presentation is so clearly written and expertly researched, belying the breadth and depth of knowledge of a true master of the subject, that it is often easy to forget that Attebery has presented us with quite a complex argument for the role and use of gender in science fiction. This is the book we all should have written, but I’m glad we didn't because he did it better.

**This review originally appeared in the journal Reconstruction (4.3 [Fall 2005]). Decoding Gender in Science Fiction is available on Amazon.com.**

Operation Petticoat (1959)

And what is not to like about a pink submarine? 

And what is not to like about a pink submarine? Operation Petticoat is on the "watch list" for this week. It will balance out the grumpiness of Battlestar Galactica and might make a fun comparison. The good thing about studying film and television is that the industry is so psychologically inbred that everything is connected--and you can usually prove it with a little research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Petticoat

Simulating Space

This article popped up in my inbox this morning and since I write on both virtual reality and starships, this is very cool! You can read the article HERE.

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/sep/25-astronauts-in-a-new-era?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiscoverTopStories+%28Discover+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=FeedBurner

T'Pol's Breasts: Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2004)

An alien Empire waistline, or just silliness?

What is up with T'Pol's breasts? I mean, do Vulcans really need breasts that big? What is the biological sense behind that? How can they not have some emotion around those things?

I am sure I will have lots of comments on the production-side for why they might have thought this look was a good idea later, but right now I am still just shocked.

I have been watching episodes 18 ("Azati Prime") and 19 ("Damage") of season 3 (or episodes 70 and 71) to get a look at the Enterprise NCC 1701-J (a time ship) and, wow, this series is much more horrible than I remember.

The ship gets blown all to hell and there is some pretty good modeling there, I must say, which visually mimics Archer's beating. All that works, but Archer turning space-pirate to steal a warp coil from a friendly race that they have just met and helped is almost as ludicrous as T'pol injecting an ore into her bloodstream to have feelings. No, wait. Now she is already addicted to the ore so she needs to keep injecting it to control her feelings.

The shower sex dream she has is kind of hot. Almost kind of. And though Commander Tucker is not my style and I still am wondering how they held that sexual tension from season one where in the first episode her and Tucker are rubbing each other down. And why is she now acting like she is in love with Archer? Or is that just me?

Gack! I am glad I am going to be writing about the ships and not the plots.

Sex is Violent: Civilization and its Discontents (Freud, 1929)

As part of the theory side of this project, I have decided to start by reading some Freud (apologies in advance for any Freudian slips that follow). I have a long list of his works to refresh myself with, but thought the most obvious place to start is with his most famous work (at least in popular culture: Civilization and its Discontents. My reasoning here (such as it is) is that Civilization and its Discontents is the psychological work that quite probably had the greatest impact on Occidental popular culture and, as it was a late work in his career (he passes ten years later in 1939), is also serves as a sort of summary of his previous works--all of which I will not be reading again for this project, though I have my eye on a complete used collection of the Standard Edition of his complete works at the Strand, if I could only find the shelf space and the extra cash. In any case, they are now available online.

Briefly summarized, the core argument (or discovery) of Civilization and its Discontents is that sexuality = aggression = civilization. And suddenly I have that Jane's Addiction song in my "Ted, Just Admit It . . . " (often referred to as "Sex is Violent" due to the refrain) off of their 1988 album Nothing's Shocking. Seriously, no one gets through undergraduate work in the US without some Freud, and his ideas are so iconic and prevalent in this country (this is probably also true in all of the West, but I'd better stick to what I know) that you can hear his core concepts come out of just about anyone's mouth, and his ideas were used (by his nephew, I believe, but I will have to check) to establish modern psychology-based advertising and shape the consumerist society we now live in. Nike? Freud.

This project is taking me weird places already! Cool. Cool. Cool. (*That being a reference to the TV show Community, in case you didn't recognize it.)

Among filmmakers Stanley Kubrick was heavily influenced by Freud and his successors--as is mentioned by virtually every critic on the planet and, as I mentioned in an earlier post (I have read, but will personally check) all of his films feature bathroom scenes, and coming to terms with excrement is one of Freud's major stages of development.

And, since I am always will to go for the scatological reference, it is interesting that most people--even those who know Freud's work professionally as I do--seem to forget his emphasis on the smell of feces (and the importance of smell to human psychology in general). I am not sure I will use that for anything on this project, but its an interesting notion to keep handy. Smell may be one of those things that films easily repress and maybe that is part of our enjoyment of them--they don't stink like real life.

In any case, as many critics have noted in one way or another, "sexuality = aggression = civilization" pretty much sums up the major trend of Kubrick's work right up to his death and nowhere is this more obvious than in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001 (1968) where phallic and yonic objects not only abound (as they do everywhere), but are actually emphasized as such. Ride that bomb!

I am off to listen to some Jane's Addiction and read more Freud and I suppose I had better dig-out my copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I am hoping to visit an archive in London next Spring that has a lot of Kubick's materials. It would be great to get my hands on some of the production notes and etc. for 2001!

Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979): Dog of War

There is no real reason the original Battlestar Galactica (Larson 1978-1979) is the second post (and the first ship) on this blog. I was just in the mood. It is that sort of blog. If I ever finish the book version of this idea (or make it into a wiki, or etc.), it will be in chronological order.

OK, is it just me (sadly, it usually is) or is Battlestar Galactica (1978) conceptually the Bullitt (Yates, 1968) of outer space?  If 2001 (1968) was high-concept near-future, realistic science fiction film, Star Trek (1966) was an egalitarian (mostly) utopian future of exploration and green chicks, and Star Wars (1977) was archetypal space-opera, Galactica was the real war show. Seriously, despite the title and a few plot elements, Star Wars was not really about a war, it was about the archetypal battle between good (in this case low-tech mysticism) and evil (technocracy). You can do that in a war, sure, but you can also do that in a living room. We only really see a war at the end. Saying Star Wars is actually a war film is like saying Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942) is a war film. The events happen during a war, sure, but it ain't The Guns of Navaronne (Thompson, 1961) for crying out loud.

Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, is about a freaking war and the titular ship shows it. Yes, I can hear you now thinking Bullitt was not a war show either. But it is--it is a personal war and the film is very war-like. In any case. I am totally exaggerating because that is how I think and that is just what I am doing here. But let's admit it, compared to Enterprise, Galactica is a hog. She's a big piece of metal in space whose "mission" is to blow shit up. Yes, yes, I know "protect the people and save humanity from the evil Cylons" and all that . . . by blowing them up. Duh.

Does Galactica look like it is protecting anything? The monster ship is shaped like a cross between a casket, usually used for burying dead people, and a six-legged troglodyte which turns people to stone with its gaze, an aircraft carrier which also specializes in blowing shit up, and a ginormous heavily-armed rocket  (have you seen the ass on that thing they call an engine?) that shoots hundred of heavily-armed space planes at whatever happens to be in the way. 

I mean the show starts with the near destruction of an entire species. Twelve whole worlds. That is a war in space, forget your mamby-pamby Alderon (sorry, Princess Leia. I love you, but I am working a point here).

In essence, Galactica does not look like it goes anywhere particularly fast, it looks like it goes everywhere really loudly. Like an aircraft carrier, the point of the design is to announce that it is there. It is not like some species is going to look around and suddenly say "Hey! How long has that Galactica thing been in here?"

References
"Battlestar Galactica (ship) on Wikipedia
http://media.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

The Alien Hermaphrodite: USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (1965)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Enterprise_(NCC-1701),_ENT1231.jpg

Today I am thinking about the iconic USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (1965) designed by Matthew "Matt" Jeffries (1921-2003) under the direction of series creator Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991), may they both rest in peace.

First, an acknowledgement: what follows is based on arguments in an article I am writing with my partner and oft co-author Ximena Gallardo C.

The Enterprise is essentially two rockets strapped onto a flying saucer--which makes it symbolically either a hermaphrodite or a massive flying sex act. Seriously. Rockets are phallic (erect structures that symbolically represent or invoke the penis). Flying saucers are yonic (circular structures that symbolically represent vaginas). I do not make this shit up.

Yes, Matthew "Matt" Jeffries designed a ship that has design elements derived from aeronutics engineers. Get the explosive stuff (fuel and engines) away from the people. Be sure to have some sort of ejection system if possible. So, then engines of the Enterprise are up on stalks that ostensibly can break away and the saucer section ostensibly can also break away from the engineering section. Gotcha.

But they are still rockets strapped onto a flying saucer. Yes, Jeffries knew a lot about aeronautics, but it is still a TV show and Roddenberry, who had worked as an airline pilot, was first and foremost a writer-producer. As a creator, writer, and producer, he wanted a ship to serve as the central symbol and centerpiece for the show, and together Gene and Matt worked up The Enterprise.

Let's just admit it: the ship has to look like it goes with the projected themes of the show and that outranks any "engineering principles" beyond what audiences can possibly identify with and in the 1960's it was all rockets and flying saucers. (Can you imagine Battlestar Galactica in a Star Trek episode?) The Enterprise was one weird looking dude. It made people uncomfortable.

In fact, the studio execs though it was so weird that they hated it and wanted it gone from the show. They hated it almost as much as they hated Roddenberry's female first officer--played by Majel Barret, later Majel Roddenberry. Who knows what deal he made to demote Majel from first officer to bitchy nurse and the voice of the computer, but he kept the weird ship and the "pointy-eared alien".

But that was the point: humans were in contact with aliens already and even breeding with them. Ergo: the half-human/half-vulcan Spock. If both Spock and the Enterprise had to be kept as central to the show and the human female first office could get the axe, then the ship and Spock are tied together. How? Hybridity. The joining of opposites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Enterprise_smithsonian.JPG

Why was the Enterprise more important than the female first officer? Because it was the central symbol of the show. And what did it symbolize? Space sex. Sure I could go on about Kirk's skirt-chasing, but what I mean here is that one of the central themes of the show was that space changes us. Going into space makes us more alien. Suddenly was have weird alien-looking ships that connect masculine to feminine, known shapes to odd ones, and so on.

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(NCC-1701)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_enterprise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Jefferies