Tag: memoir

J’s Take on Wil Wheaton’s Memories of the Future, Part 1


I’m so out of things, I never would’ve known Wil Wheaton had another book out if K hadn’t told me. In this book, he collects summaries he wrote for TV Squad of first season Star Trek: TNG eps. It’s summary, it’s snark, it’s reminiscences, it’s geek.

At first I thought this would be a quick read, but when I started reading, I changed my mind about that. It has to be read slowly, to appreciate all the jokes. And to take the humor in small doses.

But then I changed my mind again. The episodes after the first couple didn’t seem as funny. I don’t think it’s really because they were less funny, but more that he’d lost my sense of newness and surprise by that point. Which is a key component of humor. But of course I plowed ahead anyway. It ended up being a very quick read for me.
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Memories of the Future, Volume One (Wil Wheaton)

The Plot
For many shows, the first season is a season of finding the right voice and settling in; of characters who are still in development and premises that are still undergoing revision. This was the case for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Wil Wheaton, a cast member, revisits his memories of the making of the first half of the first season, evaluating the episodes from the perspective of 20 years.

My Thoughts
When I was very small, I had an irrational prejudice against certain shows and movies. I quite liked Star Wars, but I was anti-Indiana Jones, anti-TOS, anti-Doctor Who and anti-Battlestar Galactica for reasons I can’t now remember.

All the same, I don’t remember protesting at all when my dad took myself and my brother to see ST4 at the movie theatre. The rarity of such an outing cannot be overstated: I can’t remember a time before or after (until we became near adults) that my dad willingly took both of us to the movies by himself. I assume my mother had flatly refused to see this movie and my dad, not willing to appear so very selfish as to head out and see it on his own, decided we would be reasonable camoflage. And really, if you had to pick a Trek movie to which you should take two elementary school kids, ST4 is the one. By osmosis, I knew enough about the characters to identify them by name, but very little more than that (the significance of the end of the movie, where the Enterprise-A is revealed, was lost on me.)

Somehow, in between viewing ST4 and the arrival of TNG on television, I became a fan. Not of TOS (that came later still), but of the idea of Star Trek. I was SO EXCITED there was going to be a new one. I was worried (and cynically sure, even at age 11) that it would soon be cancelled. There were girls! Three of them! and a kid! (A boy, sadly, but I will rant about that later) and the guy from Reading Rainbow! By the time TNG ended, 7 years later, I was about to leave for college, I was an unabashed fan of all things Star Trek, Doctor Who, and I’d found a few sci-fi authors to follow as well.

Star Trek, and especially TNG, was a big part of my life for a lot of years. I watched it faithfully: new episodes, which were in first-run syndication, could be viewed at four different times during the week on a couple of different channels (five, if you count the station that only came in with much squinting and tinkering with the antenna). Older episodes were rerun at 6pm and at 7pm every weekday night. And I tuned in about 99% of the time.

Wheaton, who, as people (everybody?) know, played Wesley Crusher on the series, divides his thoughts on each episode into two or three sections. The bulk is found in the synopsis, which will be familiar for anyone who frequented Television Without Pity back before it went all to hell. Wheaton does not spare the snark in evaluating the success of these early episodes, and with his insider knowledge is often able to put his finger on the exact problem, be it the writers, the director, or the powers that be.

At times, I think he was a little hard on both himself and the writers in his reaction to Wesley in these episodes. It’s a fact that Wes annoyed a lot of people, but his presence also served a purpose — he gave kids watching an entry point, a character with which to identify, and helped to create a new generation of Star Trek fans. As an 11 year old, I didn’t find him annoying, and I found his behavior perfectly reasonable. The show lost something when Wheaton made his departure, and even though the later seasons were far stronger than the first two, I still wish there had been a better resolution for the Wesley character before Trek went off the air. (With all the time travel that was going on, he could totally have showed up on Enterprise…)

I also liked his insider’s view of the episodes, the bits he remembered from production and encounters with the guest stars. This is the kind of stuff that you don’t usually hear about (Wheaton has written several production diaries in the past couple of years when he’s guest starred on other shows, and this is the same sort of thing.) It also helps to drive home the work that’s involved in the creation of these shows that appear magically on our televisions. I know I can’t be the only one who has a difficult time thinking of acting as hard work requiring lots of training and effort, and as he’s done before, Wheaton really brings that side of things to life.

In Short
The whole idea for this book was brilliantly conceived, and I really hope that rather than stop at season one, Wheaton continues through and does the rest of the seasons in which he was involved (plus the handful of episodes where he was a guest after he stopped being a regular). I’m a sucker for snarky show recaps, especially ones as well done as these. Could have spared a bit of the OMG the writers! It was all the writers! [who made Wes obnoxious!] but overall this was great and I can’t wait for the next one.

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The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton: B+

From the back cover:
Readers of Wil Wheaton’s website know that he is a masterful teller of elegant stories about his life. Building on the critical success of Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek, he has collected more of his own favorite stories in his third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. These are the stories Wil loves to tell, because they are the closest to his heart: stories about being a huge geek, passing his geeky hobbies and values along to his own children, and painting, as vividly as possible, what it meant to grow up in the ’70s and come of age in the ’80s as part of the video game/D&D/BBS/Star Wars figures generation.

In all of these tales, Wheaton brings the reader into the raw heart of the story, holding nothing back, and you are invited to join him on a journey through The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

Review:
The Happiest Days of Our Lives, a collection of stories by actor, writer, and blogger Wil Wheaton, focuses primarily on childhood and adolescent memories as viewed through the nostalgic lens of an adult and experienced parent. In “Blue Light Special,” for example, Wil tells the amusing story of how he ended up with a Lando Calrissian action figure. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek” charts his entry into the world of gaming. And in “The Butterfly Tree,” he recounts the story of how he got in trouble at school for the first time, and manages to perfectly capture the painful moment when a child first discovers the fallibility of adults, as his teacher punishes him unfairly and his parents fail to defend him. Having had a similar experience myself once (though, happily, with much parental defense), I thought he nailed the feeling precisely.

I’m not a regular reader of Wil’s blog, so nearly all of this material was new to me. Sometimes this worked to my detriment, though, as there were references to other stories—one about a homemade Star Wars toy and the other an in-joke shared between Wil and Jonathan Frakes—that I just didn’t get. Still, growing up in the ’80s myself, there was much with which I identified, like watching Poltergeist and being scared silly (“Close Your Eyes and Then It’s Past”) or forever being tempted to equate raspberry sorbet with a certain song by Prince (“Exactly What I Wanted”).

I also enjoyed stories like “Suddenly It’s Tomorrow,” which is about Wil’s desire need to spend more time with his family. The story that resonated with me the most, though, was “Let Go – A Requiem for Felix the Bear.” This story, about the efforts of Wil and his wife to prolong the life of a sick and beloved kitty, had me in tears. It also made me love Wil quite a lot, not only for the efforts he made to help Felix, but for how profoundly affected he was by his death.

There’s not much negative to say about the collection. A couple of the stories aren’t really stories, but are more just snapshots of recollections, like “Beyond the Rim of the Starlight,” which is about Wil’s experiences attending Star Trek conventions, and “My Mind is Filled with Silvery Star,” in which Wil puts the ’80s music on his iPod on shuffle and writes about the memories that each song conjures up. While I preferred the tales with linear narratives, I still found both pieces to be entertaining. The only real sour note is the final story, “Lying in Odessa,” which has nothing to do with being a geek or being a parent. Instead, Wil writes about an illegal poker tournament that he participated in. Since I am not a poker aficionado, there were many terms that I didn’t understand and I questioned the choice to end with this story and not one of the warm and fuzzy “family togetherness” ones.

I’m not sure the experience of reading The Happiest Days of Our Lives will convert me into a faithful blog-reader, but it has at least sparked an interest in reading Wil’s other books one of these days.

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The Happiest Days of Our Lives (Wil Wheaton)

The Plot
A loosely related collection of essays by blogger Wil Wheaton. The theme here seems to be memories.
My Thoughts
I’ve been a reader of Wheaton’s blog for years, and I read his first two books when they first came out. I anticipate that I’ll continue to read after this one, even though I […]

The Plot
A loosely related collection of essays by blogger Wil Wheaton. The theme here seems to be memories.

My Thoughts
I’ve been a reader of Wheaton’s blog for years, and I read his first two books when they first came out. I anticipate that I’ll continue to read after this one, even though I found it a bit more disjointed than his previous efforts. Perhaps it suffered in comparison to Just a Geek, which I had reread most recently, and which was really a _book_ rather than a collection.

The essays in this entry into the Wil Wheaton oeuvre are of varying lengths. Some are just a handful of short paragraphs and others continue for pages — either greatly expanded from their origins as blog entries or a combination of many posts, because blog entries are rarely so epic.

The writing flows, at its best when he doesn’t try too hard to be literary and just lets the story have its own voice. It’s probably no coincidence, but I found that the writing was at its best in the entries where he’d clearly felt the most emotion while the event itself was happening. “The Butterfly Tree” and “Let Go – a requiem for Felix the Bear” really stood out for me. The former especially — I felt so badly for little Wil, and it was so easy to see myself at the same age feeling the same way in a similar situation. The deep embarrassment compounded by the unfairness of it all and his parents’ reaction: it’s the sort of thing that sticks forever in your mind.

Aside from the disjointedness of the content, which I’ve already mentioned, the only other thing that started to bother me was the continual injection of song lyrics and music into the text. However, this is not really a failure of the author — clearly song lyrics and bands are important to him. Unfortunately I just find them annoying. About the only thing that turns me off more than random quoted song lyrics in a blog entry is a long rambling discussion of the dream you had last night.

In Short
I wouldn’t call this Wheaton’s strongest book, but it holds up well enough next to his others. An expanded/revised/superspecial version of this is supposed to be out from Subterranean press some time soon (I believe he’s sent off the final copy to them now). I’d be interested to know what he felt like adding and/or changing now that the book has had a while to settle in his mind. Bear in mind that the title is sort of ironic, as quite a few of these memories have the potential to leave you in tears.

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J’s Take on The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton

Did you know you can go to a science fiction convention and tell someone you’re going to read one of Wil Wheaton’s books and get asked ‘Who’s that?’
For those who don’t know, yet somehow manage to be cool anyway, Wil Wheaton was the kid version of the narrator in the movie “Stand By Me”, he […]

Did you know you can go to a science fiction convention and tell someone you’re going to read one of Wil Wheaton’s books and get asked ‘Who’s that?’

For those who don’t know, yet somehow manage to be cool anyway, Wil Wheaton was the kid version of the narrator in the movie “Stand By Me”, he was Wesley Crusher in what most people consider the second best Star Trek series, he’s a geek, he’s a blogger, he’s a poker player, he’s an author. He’s like one of the top people being followed on twitter. How do you not know who he is?!

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He wrote a book. Several, in fact. Collections of blog entries, loosely themed. If you haven’t visited his blog, it’s over here. Called Wil Wheaton Dot Net, though it’s not longer at dot net, or WWdN if you’re in the know. And now you’ve read this, you’re in the know.

The Happiest Days of Our Lives is one of the books he wrote. Or, if you prefer, collected. It’s a collection of some of his favorite blog entries, about being a big old geek, and about growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, and a bit about Star Trek. I gather more of the Star Trek and lots of other geeky stuff is in the other two books, which I had fully intended to buy, and to read. I cite lack of money at the time they came out and plethora of too many other interesting books coming to my attention since as to why I haven’t bought or read them.

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Summer, York Beach, Maine, near that cheesy animal park. In a camp right next to the cheesy animal park, so you could hear the lions and things at night. Which, okay, maybe made the camping experience a little more surreal and I shouldn’t call the park cheesy. It wouldn’t be, really, if it’s wasn’t the biggest amusement park in all of Maine. And that’s just pathetic. (I grew up near Great Escape; I am, perhaps, jaded.)

I had recently gotten into watching TOS and reading science fiction. I had and/or bought a copy of the novel Enterprise I was reading on that trip. But also, a Starlog. (Okay, I’m not entirely certain it was Starlog, but odds are pretty good it was Starlog and I just heard Starlog published its last issue this month, which totally bums me out, so.. if it wasn’t Starlog, it is now.) This Starlog had a whole big article on a NEW STAR TREK. Totally awesome. Totally confusing. Because I’m reading along, and it’s saying how the doctor has a son. And I’m like.. chyea, dudes, McCoy has a daughter okay. Get it right.

Somehow I totally didn’t spot the cast pictures going along with the article until I’d read more of it. So eventually it dawns on me that this is a whole new Trek. Android. Awesome. Kid. Awesome.

(Totally unrelated, but the other thing I remember when I think about this campsite is War and Peace. So I must have read that along about this time. Or, started to, all the names eventually bogged me down and bored me to tears, so I stopped.)

I’m not sure if I realized it then, but TNG was about to become my Star Trek.

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Back at school. Junior high cafeteria. Sitting at a table with some girls (with the girls may be pushing it) and they’re looking at Teen Beat. And there’s a picture. A full page picture of Wil “Stand By Me” Wheaton. My friend must’ve noticed me wanting it. I demurred. Much giggling. I didn’t want them to think I had a crush on him or anything, because I really didn’t. Not even on Wesley. But regardless of what they thought, I did want that picture. (Even though it shocked me that she’d even offer to tear a page out of bound, written material for any purpose!) It hung on my wall, with an accumulation of Star Trek posters, for a good long time.

I totally did not have a crush on him.

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Wesley was treated badly by the adults. Especially Picard. How can you hate kids?! How can you treat him like a kid? He’s my age! Probably even a bit older. He’s totally not in the same category as the little kids you made him run around with in a couple episodes. You suck, Picard.

But at least Wesley didn’t die and make me cry in the first season.

Stupid mumblegrumblegrr writers.

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I started going to Star Trek conventions with Dad. Mostly Creation run. This is probably about the time I started hearing rumors that people didn’t like Wesley. (Pre-Internet, at least pre-WWW) That kinda hurt. Because he was one of my favorite characters. And everyone seemed to hate him just because he was a kid. And/or smart.

You’d think Star Trek geeks would have more sympathy for the smart kid. But what do I know?

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Wil Wheaton, at a con. TNG is over by this point, I think. Wheaton’s only about a year older than me, but at this con, he seemed so far beyond my comprehension. He was dressed in what then I would’ve called a dangerous kind of punk style. I was afraid he’d turned into, or always was, one of those kids into drinking, smoking, music. I’m not sure if I thought him unChristian or unCool at this point, possibly both.

But he was involved with Video Toaster, which was used in seaQuest. And seaQuest, of course, is totally cool. And he was funny on stage. So I left that con not quite sure what to make of him.

I realize now that he was just being a teenage geek. I just couldn’t recognize it at the time.

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College – alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die and strek-l, and well, it’s college. I had moved on to DS9 and Pern MUSHing and occasional attendance of classes.

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At some point I started hearing about this blogging thing, which was somehow different from a website, but not. And I’m sure someone, possibly K, must have pointed me to Wil Wheaton’s blog. And I discovered all over again that he’s a geek. I started reading his blog pretty regularly.

But then he got into playing poker. And blogging about poker. Incessantly. I have little to no interest in poker. Though I did watch him in a game on TV. I stopped reading the blog. I haven’t actually gone back. Relying on other people to tell me he’s going to be in an upcoming episode of something. Or that his book is going to a new publisher, so it’s the last chance to get this version.

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There are two entries in this book that I read on his blog. And they’re very, very good ones, that I remember reading. How many blog entries do you remember years later?

The one is about being a stepfather to teenage and near-teenage boys, music, and the generation gap, and being a geek.

The other is about a beloved cat.

Yea, those freaking cats are everywhere around writers and bloggers. But it had me tearing up when I reread it in this book anyway.

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Reading these, you feel like Wheaton is a fellow geek. A fellow child of the 70’s and 80’s. And I get a glimpse of what it’s like to be a father, and an actor, and even a boring old poker player.

I don’t know if it’s from growing up being an actor, how he was raised, his genes, or what, but he’s really, really good at telling an honest, emotional story.

All of the entries in this book are worth reading. All in one gulp, or one by one when you have a spare five minutes.

My least favorite is probably the last one, because it’s about poker. But it’s also about being a minor celebrity in the land of television. It’s a good wrapup to the book. And well, he did need to end it with something more light-hearted than the cat entry before it.

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Buy his book. Read his blog. Enjoy being a geek with him.

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