April | 2019 | Stephen G. Parks

I’ve had an idea in my head for a while, and along with it, a word: fanon.
It seems to me that there is a very real but simple problem in much of science fiction fandom. For our beloved universes, the wrong people get to decide what is canon.

I’m not deeply into the Star Wars mythology. Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (“the sequel to Star Wars!”) is one of the few Star Wars books that I’ve read, and I was growing beyond comic books around that same time.

I understand that LucasFilm (a.k.a. Disney) has moved a lot of material out of the Star Wars canon, making it ‘legend’. I don’t have a beef with that, because I don’t know the rich history of the multitude of characters and myths that get lost by such a move.

Even as some people have been getting pissed that The Last Jedi is canon while Thrawn isn’t (update, apparently he is now), I’ve been doing a slow burn over the other franchise that J.J. Abrams has wrecked: Star Trek.

Yeah, I’m an old-school Trekkie. I’ve been to those conventions (Met Jimmy Doohan once). I love Star Trek the Motion Picture. It’s Star Trek’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I grok Spock. And I love Lucy. Basically I’m the type of fan that was being mocked in Galaxy Quest. And if you don’t understand those references, then, well… you’re young, aren’t you?

The Kelvin timeline was an absolute annoyance. Chris Pine will never be my Captain Kirk, I’ll never accept that you can beam the whole way to Qo’noS. Kahn was played by Mr. Roarke, not Sherlock Holmes.

I’m just old enough to remember seeing the Star Trek cartoons on Saturday mornings. And I loved catching the original series when it came on after school. I bought those giant poster magazines with the pull out posters of the Enterprise, Kirk at the OK Corral, etc.

Hell, I owned the Starfleet Technical Manual (and also, somehow a tech manual on the cockpit of the Huey AH-1 Cobra gunship – don’t mess with me, man, I got game!)

Over the years, Star Trek has made some questionable choices (like the theme to Enterprise. Everybody sing it now: “It’s been a long road getting from there to here…”), but for me the most questionable was creating Star Trek: Discovery. This show isn’t Star Trek and you can’t convince me otherwise. It keeps trying to link to the existing canon, but in ways that are far more damaging than Enterprise ever was.

The bean counters at CBS, who may or may not have even seen Star Trek, are declaring what is and isn’t canon.

And I’ve decided NO. You don’t have the right to decide for me what is and isn’t canon. I’m and adult, I’ll do that for myself. And I’ll call it “Fanon”.

But this got me thinking about how I would define what is or isn’t fanon in Star Trek.

First there are three simple rules that filter out much of the crap.

1) Spock is an only child.

This gets rid of Star Trek Discovery in its entirety, and also Star Trek V, a film so bad I can’t even remember its name (The Final Frontier, I looked it up. You’re welcome. Now forget it. Please. Uhura finally gets a boyfriend, and it’s Scotty? Lass, ye kin do much better.).

2) Data is a singular and unique creation.

This gets rid of all of the stupid Next Generation stories involving Lore and removes B4 (and thus Star Trek Nemesis).

3) The Enterprise was built at Utopia Planitia, a facility based on Mars.

This gets rid of the whole “Kelvin timeline” in which the Enterprise was built on the surface of Earth and could do atmospheric landings. (“But, Roddenberry wanted that in the original series.” Yeah, but he gave the Big E straight struts to mount her engines, not curved shit that would collapse.)

Those three rules clear a lot of the crap out of Star Trek, but of course, there are also singular episodes that may need to be culled from the remaining canon.

For example, the last episode of Enterprise, the one that turns the whole series into a holodeck reenactment designed for fat William Riker and thus undoes the whole series. Yeah that’s gone. Along with it I’d throw out the Borg episode and the Nazi time travel episodes (I’m OK with the temporal cold war and the Xindi. I thought it gave an interesting look at the evolution of Starfleet’s codes of conduct. I miss the MACOs).

I guess we should eliminate the Voyager episode where Janeway and Parris are turned into slugs and have sex.

There was a Next Generation episode where Riker gets stung by a flower and hallucinates his past. It was a clip episode, Nothing happened in it that we hadn’t already seen – apparently he had no life before the show started and it’d only been on for two years.

Let’s get rid of the “Tasha Yar fights a woman to the death” episode too. It was, well, racist.

Maybe because it was all I had for the longest time, but I have a hard time finding any original series episodes to cut from canon. I know many people dislike Spock’s Brain or The Way to Eden, but I’ll take them.

Additions:

I’d include Star Trek Continues as canon. It was a respectful and well-done extension of the original series, even if creator Vic Mignogna has become a troubling figure.

I’ve read a few Star Trek books, all original series crew, and I’d include them as canon, except maybe Spock Must Die. Even then, I could be talked into it.

What about you? What’s your canon? What isn’t? Who should get to decide what’s truly canon, the fans or the money-grubbing weasels (“There is no bias detected in the wording of this question.”)?

Hit me up with Star Trek, Star Wars or MCU.

I wish she’d learn “get out of the bloody way!”

The science is in: cats know their names. New research proves what every human ~~slave~~ has known for centuries. In science-speak: “We conclude that cats can discriminate the content of human utterances based on phonemic differences.”

As someone who has lived with cats for most of my life (and occasionally dogs) this seems like a forgone conclusion, but I guess we needed the science to make it official.

I have a cat right now, and she understands a lot more than just her name. Here’s a list:

No. If she’s contemplating something that I don’t want, I can tell her ‘no’ and she’ll object, but won’t do it.

Her name. She knows her name applies to her.

Belly rubs. Say “belly rubs?” and the cat meows, moves to the middle of the kitchen floor and rolls over so you can rub her belly.

Food. When the cat is insistently meowing, I can say a bunch of words to her and gauge her reaction. If she’s hungry, when I say ‘food?” she changes her meow and walks to her dish.

Second scoop. Her first food is wet meat, delivered on a plastic lid in the back, her second scoop is dry food delivered in the kitchen. She knows the difference between ‘food’ and ‘second scoop’ and will lead me to the appropriate place.

Beautiful girl, love you lots, hope you enjoy it. She won’t start eating her food (wet or dry) until I say these “the magic words.”

Show Me. If I can’t figure out her needs, I say “show me” and she walks me to whatever is bothering her (her dish, her water, her box, a door she wants to get through).

(edited to add these two)
Play? I can ask her ‘play?’ and if she wants to play, she springs off to a corner and I’m supposed to chase her. Sometimes, rarely, she chases back, but usually it’s up to me to ‘catch’ her.

Treats. Each afternoon, around 5pm, she gets three small treats. When the time is right (often in her head, that’s two hours early) she asks for them by sitting in the middle of he kitchen and meowing until I say the word “treats?” then she heads to the fridge where they’re kept.

And here are a few that I’m not sure she understands, or that she sometimes appears to understand (but that may be coincidental):

Dig. when she wants to scratch something, she has limited places that it’s allowed. I’ll put her on a spot and say “dig” and she does.

Stretch. This one I say when she’s doing it, but a couple of times I’ve said it and she’s looked at me, then done it. Again could just be coincidental, more me predicting what she’s going to do than suggesting it to her.

Sshhh! My wife works shifts. When the cat’s making noise, I can say “sshh,” and she will lower the volume, but not shut up. This one has taken a long time and I still don’t know that she gets it.

My wife’s name. The cat also seems to know that my wife’s name applies to my wife. It’s worth noting that my wife and my cat don’t get along all that well, so it’s hard to judge if my cat always recognizes my wife’s name and only choses to react some times or if she doesn’t quite get that one yet.

I know that she also recognizes a lot of body-language clues and physical gestures. If I snap my fingers three times, moving my hand from her towards me, she knows it means come to me.

So, what does your cat know? How many words or expressions can he or she process successfully?

Stephen G. Parks

Monthly Archives: April 2019

Shouldn’t fans decide what’s canon?

The Research Is In: Cats Know Their Names

Writer • Nomand • Educator