House of Zeor and Star Trek
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | House of Zeor and Star Trek |
| Creator: | Betty Herr |
| Date(s): | 1976 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Sime~Gen and Star Trek: TOS |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
House of Zeor and Star Trek is a 1976 essay by Betty Herr.
It was published in the first issue of Ambrov Zeor in 1976.
The essay is a bit of cross-marketing and illustrates Lichtenberg's deliberate product placement efforts to utilize not only emotion and tropes found in Star Trek: TOS, but also to "copyright" certain terms she had made up, such as the Tailored Effect: "Alien Effect," "Psychological Visibility Effect," "Goal Effect and Optimism Effect," and "Future Shock Effect" and many others as she promoted the book Star Trek Lives!. The article also operates as a sort of "if you like Star Trek, then you might like House of Zeor."
Excerpts
For readers of STAR TREK LIVES! and other devoted Trekfen, it should come as no surprise to discover that Jacqueline Lichtenberg has used many of the Tailored Effects she isolated in Star Trek in writing her own novel, HOUSE OF ZEOR. The only surprise is finding out how deep such similarities can go, if pushed hard enough. STAR TREK LIVES! goes into great detail in describing the various Tailored Effects and their relevance to Star Trek, so there is not need to repeat everything here. (Time Out, while everyone dives for a copy of STL!).
The Future Shock Effect concerns the ability or inability of members of a society to cope with change. In HOUSE OF ZEOR, the channels are a fairly recent Sime evolutionary development. Neither Sime nor Gen are yet used to this development, and it frightens them for different reasons. Simes consider the channels perverts and Gens aren't altogether too sure it isn't some kind of deceit intended to lead them to their deaths. Yet it is possible for a radical change in social patterns to take place, as it does in the Householdings, without a complete undermining of society as a whole. True, the advent of the channels does create a social change, which in HOUSE OF ZEOR, is reinforced by the growing public knowledge of Zelerod's Doom. This "perversion" will have to become the norm if anyone is to survive. But the Householdings show that change oan be beneficial to all concerned.
For the Psychological Visibility Effect, it would be hard to beat the Simes' ability to read emotions. Skilled and compassionate channels like Klyd can truly understand what another feels and help him over the hardest spots. And it would seem that the Householdings, anyway, operate under something like IDIC. They accept Hugh for himself — for his abilities — without a qualm. They even put up with his tantrums — or at least Klyd does — because they understand the cause and accept Hugh as good In himself despite his somewhat eccentric behaviour.
Relationships between the HOZ characters and the Star Trek triad are a little harder to pin down. Hugh and Klyd do relate to each other very much the same way that Kirk and Spock do, but specific similarities between characters tend to "float".
Perhaps the closest consistent identification is that Hugh's emotional makeup is very much like McCoy's. The first reaction of both in a new or tense situation is to go off half-cocked, before thinking the matter through completely. Both will mask their concern with an angry word, but both care very deeply.
Part of the reason for Hugh's caring, though, has to do with his acceptance by Zeor — he has found a home among aliens, where his own people would reject him. It calls to mind Spock's comment about the hippies in "The Way to Eden": "They regard themselves as aliens in their own worlds - a condition with which I am [pause] somewhat familiar." Zeor could be as much a home to Hugh as Starfleet is to Spock.
Klyd has much more of both Kirk and Spock in him: the understanding, the acceptance of another's ambiguous feelings, the desire to be supportive, the "command aura" of Kirk; and the ability to severely control himself (regarding the death of the captive child in the Runzi camp, and his control under stress of approaching need at the beginning of the book), dedication to the acceptance of necessities however painful (the deaths of his wife, grandfather and stillborn son), without crumbling, the emotion-level reading so very similar to the Vulcan mind-meld, of Spock.
Klyd seems, then, to have moat of the control and quiet understanding of the Star Trek threesome. Hugh Is the "noisy" one, like McCoy. Still, Hugh is the one who must contend with two opposite urges, his Gen training and his growing love for Klyd and Zeor, just as Spock must somehow reconcile the two halves of his heritage and inheritance.