These days, I write whenever I want to – or when I’m not busy exploring the world with my wife or kids or grandkids. I write and read constantly. Then I discovered that I was writing longer and longer pieces. My new focus is to write shorter; and to write HUMOR. On purpose. Maybe I can still irritate people while being funny. It works pretty well for John Scalzi! We’ll see what happens. Unfortunately, the alien GORN are NO laughing matter – these suckers (especially the 21st Century iteration, are seriously CREEPY!)
As a long, long time fan of STAR TREK (watched my first episode when I was 11 in 1968…and have SINCE watched all the episodes of every series that followed that one…I finally saw it on reruns. While I’d missed the appearance of the Gorn (1967), my wife and I got married August of 1987 before NEXT GENERATION premiered, and have watched all the shows that have come on ever since.
The Gorn, however, only ended up in ST: The Animated Series; ST: Enterprise (though only on the Mirror Universe; ST: Discovery…as a skeleton; ST: Lower Decks (entirely in a comedic role; and finally, seriously, in ST: SNW in seasons 1, 2, and 3. It’s this last that has given me serious chills. LONG gone are the Gorn is thick rubber costumes, perhaps more depicting our history was of a single bone sketched by English naturalist Robert Plot published the first known illustration of a dinosaur bone in 1677. It took a long time after that for Humans to begin the understand WHAT the dinosaurs were. Here in the US, it took even longer for dinosaur bones began to be discovered, categorized, and studied – in 1876, Arthur Lakes, a professor at Jarvis Hall and eventually at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, discovered many fossils on the west side of the Ridge.
Of course “monster dinosaurs” appeared in movies – though Godzilla wasn’t precisely a dinosaur (I don’t know if it was ever clearly explained WHAT it was!) – they didn’t become serious opponents of Humans (and other non-saurian intelligences!) until 1963 with Doctor Who’s Draconians, along with Silurians, and Sea Devils, as well as another Star Trek reptilian race, the Xindi, and a peculiar attempt by paleontologists who created the ‘Dinosauroid’, a sculpture by Dale Russell and Ron Seguin in 1982, for the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Canada and was a serious exploration of an intelligence who might have developed on Earth if the Extinction Asteroid had not struck and Troodon then evolved into bipedal humanoid intelligence (see it here: https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/dinosaurintell.html). There are some who would argue that WE wouldn’t be here but for a random asteroid strike…and also explain why “saurian aliens” give us the heebie-jeebies…as you know what the main food source for those saurian would have been? Small, pre-mammalian rat-like things…which might very well eventually become Humans…
Inspiration: ST:TOS and ST:SNW Gorn appearances and behaviors (!!!); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorn
ACTUAL DINOSAUR BONES: in the US - https://dinoridge.org/about/history-and-discoveries/
