We Were Here First!

Kathy came home Saturday with a book purchase she'd been looking forward to for months. She let roe look at the weighty tome as she unsacked her assorted packages, but cracking it open for the first time was her privilege. It was, after all, her book, and her area of expertise: Star Trek.

I've written about Star Trek fans before in this column, as well as other places. They make an interesting contrast to Sherlockians (in the places where the two don't overlap). But up to this point it was always  just playing around.  You
couldn't seriously compare fluff like Star Trek to the Sacred Writings. After all, more has been written about Sherlock Holmes than anyone except Jesus and Napoleon, right?

Well,  Kathy's  Saturday  purchase  put  a  whole  new perspective on that old bit of bragging. She came home with The Star Trek Encyclopaedia by Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Debbie Mirek. I immediately looked up Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, knowing they both had Trek incarnations. They were in there, all right, and the Moriarty entry was quite lengthy. And they weren't the only things in the book, by a long shot.

Coffee table sized, and 394 pages of mostly text. The Star Trek Encyclopaedia was hard to pass off as fluff. A lot of hard work went into the book by Trek insiders who knew where to find the info. It's as comprehensive and definitive as Jack Tracy's The Encyclopaedia Sherlocklana could ever hope to be. And when you put the two next to each other, the Trek book is a lot bigger.  Sure it only has 394 pages, compared to 411 in Tracy, but Tracy's type is spaced out more.

Star Trek has been around for twenty-six years now, and the number of books put out about it increases with every year. Where Sherlockians put out journals, Trekkies have put out  fanzines  —  and  like  their  new  encyclopaedia,  the fanzines  are  bigger  and  thicker  than  any  journal  ever printed. And as Sherlockian pastiches have been inhibited in this country by the efforts of Dame Jean Conan Doyle, Star Trek pastiches  have  been  released  month  after  month  by Paramount's licensees. They're even coming out in hardcover and getting on bestseller lists.

We're talking big numbers here.

I think it would have been fascinating to see what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have done had he created Holmes in the modern day, rather than a hundred years ago. As it was, he wrote the sixty tales over the course of 40 years. When he tried  to  kill  Holmes,  the  public  demand  (and  monetary rewards)  eventually persuaded him to bring the detective
back. Today the demand and rewards would have placed much more pressure on him, and I think we would have seen at least a Holmes book a year. And if he got tired of Holmes, he could always let somebody ghost-write the tales and release them with his name under the words "as created by" on the cover. (That approach has sold millions of copies for a more than one modern day fictional hero.)

Who knows?

As things now stand, however, it may be a matter of time before certain Sherlockian bragging rights are gone. We can probably hang on to "translated into more languages than anything except maybe the Bible." And eldest cult status, complete with ancient and obscure rituals, is pretty much a sure thing. But there is still one other thing ...

If you do run into any Trekkies, and they do start going on about the weight of their Trek libraries, we still have one hole card you can play. Ask them about the movies.

There have been six Star Trek movies so far, with one more on the way this winter. Seven in total.

Gee, you might mention coyly, Arthur Wontner only made five Sherlock Holmes movies. Only five. Mot quite up to Basil Rathbone's fourteen Holmes movies. And Rathbone was certainly no Eille Norwood, with his 47 silent Sherlock Holmes movies. But, gee, there weren't any silent Star Trek movies, were there? And didn't we just have two Holmes television movies last year?

If that doesn't shut them up, just mention "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," one of the worst films ever made. And hope they don't know about the Dudley Moore "Hound." We all have skeletons in our library closets ....