

It was upbeat, not dystopian or cautionary-180 degrees from paranoid scenarios about nuclear Armageddon and cosmic doom, which percolated through the '50s and came to a high boil in the early '60s.
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Created by Gene Roddenberry, who'd flown B-17 bombers in WWII and worked as a pilot and a cop before becoming a TV writer, the show took the old trope of a multiethnic military unit and spliced it into the most optimistic science-fiction scenario imaginable. "Star Trek" debuted on NBC in September 1966, and nothing quite like it had been seen before. We were witnessing the gestation of a new brand of fan culture, and on our way to a paradigm that would redefine geek as chic. I couldn't see it then, but we were pioneers in a techno-nerd meritocracy that people like Bill Gates would come to embody. More important, we'd begun to push what had been marginal movie-genre ephemera-science fiction, fantasy, costumed-superhero stories-into the mainstream. McCoy's perpetual declaration, "He's dead, Jim"-though the clear favorite, uttered by chief engineer Scott, was, "I canna change the laws of physics, Cap'n." We knew the product better than the people who'd made it. We loved the ritualistic invocation of our favorite catchphrases-"Beam me up," "Warp factor 10," "Set phasers on stun," and Dr. Still, I don't remember feeling a trace of shame. Potay-to, potah-to.) We were largely a band of pasty-faced mouth breathers, many wearing thick, black-framed glasses and sporting long, stringy hair. I was surrounded, for the first time, by like-minded "Trekkies." (Later that term took on a pejorative ring, and fans coined "Trekkers" instead. (Story continued below.)īut it was the company, not the second-hand smoke, that made me lightheaded. Captain Kirk, hadn't yet acquiesced to participate in the convention-scene carny, though he soon would.) You could get away with smoking in hotels back then, and I remember an area called the "dealers' room"-a space where sellers trafficked in comic books, Super-8 home movies, sci-fi books and magazines, and oodles of "Trek" memorabilia-reeking of tobacco. We went to screenings of favorite episodes, watched a parade of people dressed up as "Trek" characters and sat rapt at reminiscences delivered by some of the show's cast, including a surprise visit from Mr. I went with my older brother and my dad, and what had brought us and 10,000 others together at five bucks a head was the beautiful corpse of a great TV show that had been off the air for nearly five years.
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Held in a bunch of overcrowded ballrooms in New York City's Americana Hotel, where anxious fire marshals kept interrupting the festivities to clear the aisles, it was a charming, amateurish, collegial celebration-one of the earliest in what became a torrent of Trek conventions over the next few years. It was called the International Star Trek Convention. On a February weekend in 1974, when I was 11 years old, I went to the happiest wake I've ever attended.
