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TO BOLDLY GO: Mandel has been
charting the starfleet since high school.
Courtesy Geoffrey Mandel
|
someone,
perhaps an owner
of a genuine hand phaser from the starship Enterprise, will
find an error in this story, something
about Star Trek mentioned in a slightly improper context
or tone.
Fans found an error or two in Geoffrey Mandel’s new
book, and Mandel actually knew what he was talking about.
They loved his book. They said it was long overdue. But
they also relished detecting things he missed. Maybe
a planet he drew a little too large, or a date that seemed
a tad
off.
But then, they live in a whole different world—nay,
galaxy.
Mandel, MA ’81, first entered that galaxy as
a teenager, years after the original Star Trek television
series went off
the air. He drew blueprints of the ships he saw on reruns.
Sometimes he took out his Kodak Instamatic and snapped
photographs from the tv screen. That way, he could
closely examine the
still ship as he copied its image. Soon he was selling
his drawings through the mail and attending Star Trek
conventions.
“He could almost fool a real engineer,” says
Doug Drexler, a senior illustrator on the current Enterprise TV
series
who, at the time, worked at a Star Trek memorabilia store
in New
York City. “The place attracted closet Star Trek geeks
from the New York metropolitan area and beyond. Here
comes this kid. He was a superstar. How did he learn
all of this
stuff?”
Now Mandel has written, designed and illustrated
Star Trek Star Charts: The Complete Atlas of Star Trek (Pocket
Books, 2002). His unusual atlas comes after almost a
decade’s
work as a graphic artist in Hollywood. The 96-page book,
complete with foldout charts, maps the Milky Way quadrant
by quadrant.
Mandel also depicts its civilizations in such detail—the
Commonwealth of Menk and Valakis, for example, one of
the few known worlds with two native humanoid species,
was first contacted
by Enterprise NX-01—that an outsider has to simply
enjoy the bright colors and impressive graphics.
But to true
believers, or “Trekkies,” the finer
points make perfect sense. In fact, some classify the book
as “Star Trek nonfiction” because it doesn’t
deviate from the shows’ plots or make up new story lines,
as many books do. Mandel prefers to call his atlas “reference,” though
he understands the purists’ zeal: it’s been part
of his own life.
Why the fascination, the conventions, the huge constituency?
Mandel says it’s because the show is about an accepting
universe, where appearance and social skills are irrelevant;
its devotees are like that, too. For someone like Mandel,
who says he didn’t always fit in high school social circles,
the Star Trek family of fans quickly became his scene. “It’s
a way for nerds and dweebs to have a social life, and that’s
a good thing,” he says, claiming membership in those
categories. “It’s a positive cult.”
That
cult has long provided work for Mandel. After earning
a master’s
in English at Stanford, then an MFA in film at NYU, he
got a job as a production assistant in the art
department of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. From there,
he became a graphic
artist for more than a dozen TV shows and movies.
It was
during his work on Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise—designing
and producing animation, alien languages and control
panels—that
Mandel created Star Charts. He made a giant spreadsheet
showing all the fictitious planets and the dates of visits
by the shows’ characters,
then spent nine months researching details while on the
set and watching a lot of reruns on UPN at home.
This isn’t
Mandel’s first book. He wrote and illustrated
The Star Trek Maps (Bantam Books, 1980), The Star
Fleet Medical Reference (Ballantine Books, 1977) and a guide
to Word for
Windows 6.0. But his latest work seems to be getting the
most attention. “I don’t think anybody could have
done a better job,” Drexler says. “He made it gorgeous.
It’s spectacular to look at.”
Of course, there
will always be nitpickers. But Mandel, who logs onto
Trekkie chat rooms, is happy with the overall
reaction. And if people call his book nonfiction, so
be it. It’s an accepting universe, after all. |
