Like I said yesterday, I’ve got a whole mess of topics I’ve wanted to write about but haven’t gotten around to because of various distractions (like work — curse the necessity of having a job, anyhow!) Unfortunately, some of these things are pretty old news by now.

For instance, you’ve probably already heard that George Takei, the actor who played Sulu on the original Star Trek, is gay. I don’t have much to say about that, except that it certainly does explain a few things.

You may not have heard, however, that one of the primary creative voices behind the later versions of Star Trek has died. Michael Piller started as a writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and eventually became an executive producer on that show as well as the co-creator of its subsequent spin-offs, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. He also co-wrote one of the Trek feature films (Insurrection — not one of the better entries in the series, unfortunately) and created with his son Shawn a non-Trek TV series called The Dead Zone, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name.

Piller is most revered in fan circles for writing the two-part Next Gen episode “The Best of Both Worlds,” in which our noble Captain Picard is kidnapped and “assimilated” by a race known as The Borg. This episode is often hailed as the best of that series, and it represents a major turning point for a show that had struggled until then to find its own voice. I myself was only an occasional (and highly critical) viewer of Next Gen until this episode. Although I personally find “The Best of Both Worlds” disappointingly anti-climatic in its second half, it was good enough to convince me that the show as a whole was worthy of my steady attention. It wasn’t the original Star Trek, no, but with this episode, it had finally stopped trying to be and was instead on its way to becoming its own animal.

Piller died of cancer on November 1st, at the age of 57. If you’re interested, Ron Moore, a writer who was discovered by Piller, worked with him on Next Gen, and has since gone on to launch the highly acclaimed remake of Battlestar Galactica, wrote a long and heartfelt rememberance on his Battlestar Blog, while Javier Grillo-Marxuach of Lost fame wrote of the one time he met Piller — and promptly stuck his foot in his mouth by being a fanboy.

Meanwhile, and on a lighter note, I read a while back that the Air Force is researching a new transparent window armor made of a ceramic compound that contains aluminum. Transparent aluminum is, of course, the futuristic substance that Mr. Scott is looking for in modern-day San Francisco in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home; he settles for plexiglass instead, but not before giving the formula for transparent aluminum to a 20th Century engineer. When Dr. McCoy questions him about creating a possible time paradox, Scotty’s rationalization is perfect: “How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?”

I love it when life imitates Star Trek…