Tom — granted, and don’t sweat forgetting the title — the fact that you could pull the related stories and authors from your memory is quite impressive.

Alex — you’d think that in a room full of “younglings” practicing with lightsabers there would be at least the occasional decapitation.

You know at some stage someone is going to use one as a backscratcher.. and then suddenly by accident that badboy gets turned on.

James Kelly’s brilliant short story “Think Like a Dinosaur,” made into a pretty good “Outer Limits” episode, deals with some of these ramifications.

Walter Jon Williams wrote another really good story on the topic of transporter doubles… blankin’ out on the title.

Against such competition, that would be the year I chose to write a transporter-gone-wrong story. Perfect timing.

Android sex, as in Tarsha Yar with Data.

I man, I’m fine with female androids, due to my personal bias, but having male androids available for flesh and blood females to use would destroy civilization as we know it.

Come to think of it, holodecks are the worst. Who would ever, ever want to deal with reality again? I expect that the Star Trek universe civilization would come to an within just a few years of the introductions of holodecks.

My beef was never the inventions being goofey as much as how they used or did not use the technology they had . They kept finding new and better tech in the original show and then ignored it come next episode . It did get much better in ds9 , and voyager.

In ds9 they had a long running war with the Klingons and then the founders. Ships like Enterprise had the removable saucer section so why did they not have mission specific saucers. The all purpose saucer for normal times and a kick ass saucer that was all reactors and weapons for war?

We only ever saw one ship class that was purposely meant for war.

And wasn’t there an episode in the Next Gen where the dr beamed someone back aboard using an earlier version of them that was stored in the memory of the transporter in order to avoid some disease? Anyway, I thought, hmmm… why don’t they just do that every time someone’s injured or sick in Star Trek? Just beam up an earlier, healthier, more intact version of them. Sick bay might go on strike, though.

And yes, the ‘food in pill form’ sounds awful, although, perhaps, preferable to soylent green.

My personal sci-fi pet peeve: those incredibly uncomfortable beds that they always have, often without a decent pillow or sheets. What’s with that?