Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Can a Shatner become self aware?



While I know I probably should be, I'm really not ashamed of the very short period in my life when I was really, really into William Shatner's Tekwar novels. It didn't last long, and I swiftly moved on to Vonnegut and Heller like all good people. There was just one summer where I was taking what I could get, and all I could get was fucking TekWars.

But nothing Shatner ever wrote was as good as the end of one of his autobiographies, where he goes to have a chat with his old shipmates, and is mortified to discover they all hated his guts, and thought he was an arrogant prima donna who treated them all like shit. Also, he was often just a horrible person, and continues to be so to this day.

Shatner has long been an avuncular and narcissistic presence, but surely he must have known how much he was disliked by a lot of the cast. His bafflement is almost convincing, but that would just make his narcissism even more real.

The novels where they bring Captain Kirk back to life after Generations might have been tempting once, but I haven't read anything by Shatner in 25 years. And yet, I think about that delusion and whether he was fooling anybody. 

I don't even know if I've been fooled, but I still think about that a whole lot more than I think about bloody TekWars, anyway.

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