Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift

strangehorizons.com

4 pointsvilhelm_s3 comments

It was quite interesting, but, as usual with these internet pages, it would have benefitted from some editing to reduce the length, remove much of the vacuous ranting, and make the conclusions of the article clearer.

Yeah, I guess there are less constraints on length than in a print publication. But that can be an advantage as well, I thought the kindof meandering path here was pretty effective, when it starts with extremely detailed and nerdy investigations of Star Trek trivia, and then gradually zooms out to draw conclusions about fiction/society/literary studies in general.

Strange Horizons pay contributors ($80 for an essay), and the author mentions that she discussed the piece with an editor, and that she thought about the essay for 4 years, so I think the format is probably chosen somewhat deliberately.

This article is interesting, but I think many people will stop after reading the first two or three paragraphs, and never arrive at the interesting parts. Imagine someone reading out loud the text. Nobody would deliver the current version of it as a talk or a speech. It is more like reading someone's private diary or a letter to a close friend, where we don't mind them going off the topic. But perhaps that style of writing is not such a bad thing.

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