Sheppard best known as MacGyver’s resident Hannibal stand-in, Dr. Zito.

What happened to that Mantis maquette?

“Pull the lever, Kronk!”

Kronk pulls the lever. There’s a small fizzing noise, and Yzma disintegrates into a little heap of pixels in various shades of purple and black.

[very faintly] “Wrong lever!!”

Kronk pulls a different lever. Yzma’s pixels reassemble themselves…but her usual color scheme is reversed.

“Why do we even have that lever?”

Kronk peers at a small metal plate on the wall next to the first lever.

“I’m not sure, ma’am. It says ‘PULL TO RESET REACTOR COMMENT ENGINE.'”

“That makes no sense whatsoever!” A pause. “Wait a moment – it must be those two preposterous mice, trying to conquer the world again!”

Kronk frowns. “But don’t they belong to an entirely different multiverse?”

Yzma glares. “When has that ever stopped a mad genius from sticking their nose in where it doesn’t belong?”

“Good point, ma’am.”

I agree! While reading I found myself thinking “I don’t want her to reconcile with Harry, but I also don’t want her to just lash out at him.” But that was perfect—it was a fitting and fair punishment. I think it helped that Josie was so calm and matter-of-fact, even though Harry was hysterical.

This is why I think genetic engineering and transhumanism will eventually be accepted despite present-day fears. We always fear the worst of new advances, and write cautionary tales about how they can be abused, but they often end up being taken for granted by later generations when the doomsayers’ predictions aren’t borne out and the benefits become evident.

The frequently used idea of entire living clones being grown as slaves to be harvested for organs strikes me as particularly silly, because if you can clone a whole person, why not just clone individual organs as needed? Growing entire people to be harvested for parts is like building entire cars to be harvested for spare car parts. Why not just build the parts individually? It’s far less wasteful.

Also, in that Shayol story, if the technology exists to regenerate the organs of the unwilling donors, why do they need organ donors at all? Just regenerate the sick or injured person’s organs. Or is that the point, that the forced donation is no longer necessary but they keep doing it for purely punitive reasons?

Yeah, before genetic fingerprinting happened in real space, Larry Niven’s future Earth used “tissue rejection spectrum” to identify biological samples with the people that they came from.

I’ll be lazy and not look up the name… sometime between let’s say 1984 to 2020, I believe a female scientist, British, claimed to have a promising technique basically to wash the rejectability out of transplant organs, so you might not need an exact tissue match or possibly drugs. Obviously that isn’t available after all. However, in F. M. Busby’s “The Proud Enemy”, a humanoid alien transplant patient is discharged from alien hospital with wearable machinery that does something like that to the transplant tissue and that eventually can be removed.. Of course, alien biology is alien.

In George O. Smith’s “Venus Equilateral” setting – maybe specifically in the last story, set many years after the others – it’s reasonably routine that tricky surgery is done on a patient by matter-duplicating the patient first and testing the surgery on the duplicate. Not for donor parts, though, or even blood, and duplicating a live person is either illegal or extremely rude. And I think the protagonist has the shame of a natural-born twin brother.

I’m thinking Spock because he’s Burnham’s adoptive brother, and it would be a way to bring some full-circle closure to the series. Those other characters have significance to Trek in general but not to Discovery or its characters.

I think the most natural choice would be Dr. Crusher, because she was on hand for the initial discovery, she specializes in bio-science, and she could have fit it into the timeline in between First Contact and Insurrection (or between Insurrection and Nemesis, perhaps). Alternatively, it could be a very old Doctor McCoy or (I suppose) Spock. Or Data.
Anyways, I’m going to assume that it was a pre-Lower Decks Dr. T’Ana until I’m inevitably proved otherwise.

Not dragging out a rift between Saru and T’Rina based on the conflict introduced here is very, very welcome.

Moll’s name is given the double-l spelling on-screen, just FYI to Keith and/or Reactor editors as well as other commenters — although I’d be delighted to see Gretchen Mol turn up on Trek sometime.

I found it interesting that he stuck with some of his early discredited ideas (like Mars being inhabited) in his later Known Space stories, rather than decanonizing or correcting them.

Which suggests that the personal transporters aren’t really built-in transporter devices in themselves, but simply remote controls for the transporter back on the ship. If they had all the necessary equipment built in, then they could just aim their signal onto a path clear of the rocks and teleport away that way.

Which is the interpretation I prefer, since it makes no sense that a transporter a) could function while it was itself in a dematerialized state and b) could contain the particles of an object larger than itself within its transport buffer.

Niven was following the latest developments in physics and mining them for story ideas, so it’s not surprising that some of them held up better than others.

We will eventually hear mention of Hwel the Playwright.

Book 10. Deliverer. And yes, I love Cajeiri and how he is also between two worlds.

Sometimes from the same author; Heinlein’s Friday is set a generation or two after “Gulf” and makes a contemptuous reference to the latter’s project of finding and breeding superhumans.

“I am thorry that I have trethpathed on your time.” “Trethpathed” hanging in the air added considerably to the water drops hanging in the fog. I don’t think he’s ever warned us before that one shouldn’t stand face-to-face with an Igor.

She didn’t have a career; they were for people who could not hold down jobs.

“But he might have destroyed the whole university, sir.”

More elastic than solid wood is easy. I’ve never heard a standard soccer ball go “gloing!“, or seen one bounce almost as well as a Superball, as described just after its appearance. I also note on rereading that the ball is described in the US edition as brown, and shown on the cover in the form I remember from 60 years ago (6 sets of 3 bulging rectangles connected like the sides of a cube, each set with its internal boundaries at right angles to the boundaries of its neighbors); the first UK edition uses the image above, which is similar. However, when Nutt is shown the ball a minute later he describes the hexagons&pentagons-making-a-truncated-icosahedron that is ~standard in more-recent decades (outside of versions influenced by marketroids).

I agree. And I think it’s telling when its fans so often point to hope, optimism, and inclusivity when highlighting the positives. I mean, sure, but what Trek series hasn’t had those qualities? Could we maybe have those things AND something that is a well-written adult drama?

I would like to point to SNW as an alternative, but that series is pretty goofy, too.

The first season was about a war that endangered the Federation. The second was about a threat to all life in the galaxy, though not the universe. The third was about rebuilding after a cataclysm that had already happened a century earlier, although the threat of its recurrence was a minor element of the climax. The fourth season was about an ongoing threat to random individual parts of the galaxy, more something that could threaten anywhere in the galaxy rather than everywhere, but ultimately it was more a story about achieving contact and understanding with something profoundly alien. And the fifth season so far is about a treasure hunt for a powerful technology that could be either beneficial or harmful depending on the intent of the user. I’d say the last three seasons have used their large-scale threats more as a MacGuffin to create stakes for stories about diplomacy and exploration than as a central driving element.

The symbiont life expectancy was shorter than I’d expected, but it settles a question I had. If 800 years is near the maximum symbiont lifespan, that means that Dax, which was 300 years old in the 24th century, was probably already long gone by the time the Burn happened. Which is disappointing — I’d hoped we might get to see their current host.

Reminds me of the Vidiians, the Star Trek: Voyager civilization whose medical skill wasn’t sufficient to cure “the Phage” afflicting their people, but it was good enough for them to treat the symptoms by appropriating and adapting organs from other species.