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 Worlds Collide In "The Star Trek Encyclopedia." By James DiGiovanna The Star Trek Encyclopedia, by Michael and Denise Okuda (Pocket Books). Cloth, $50. IN JORGE LUIS Borges tale Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius, a cabal of creative thinkers from every field of inquiry meets to create a false encyclopedia for a world strikingly different from, yet reminiscent of, our own. The narrator of Borges' story finds one volume of this work, rife with cross-references to hundreds of imaginary books, and becomes lost in the world of Tlön that it describes--so much so that he conspires with others to produce the missing volumes. Soon, the world of Tlön begins to merge with Earth as its artifacts are produced by those who wish to further its reality, and as more and more people are taken in by the strange customs, clothes, ideas and sciences that its reference works describe.
In spite of how geeky this all becomes, I can't help but imagine
Borges would've been delighted to know that "Hupyrian beetle
snuff" was an "inhalable substance," and that perhaps
he would be happy to see the artifacts of the Star Trek
universe, like flip-open communicators and pen-based computer
pads, becoming commonplace in our own world, just as the impossibly
heavy metal worship-cones of Tlön began to appear in the
Earth that he imagined.
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Skimming through The Star Trek Encyclopedia, one can imagine
how it would feel to discover a volume of the Encyclopedia
of Tlön. Entries like "duridium alloy: metallic
material used in the construction of throwing darts," mingle
with more familiar items like "oatmeal: traditional Earth
porridge made from rolled or ground oats." The most amusing
aspect of this book is the cross-referencing, not only to itself
("inverter: device used by the Ansata terrorists of planet
Rutia IV...see 'Ansata' ") but to other works in the Star
Trek canon ("stardate: timekeeping system used to provide
a standard galactic temporal reference, compensating for relativistic
time dilation...See appendix 1 of Star Trek Chronology: The
History of the Future.")
There's a disturbing element to this work, though: The fanatic
devotion to details of the various Star Trek series causes
the most obscure moments in a television storyline to make their
way into an Encyclopedia entry: "uttaberry crepes:
food. Benjamin Sisko ordered uttaberry crepes at Quark's bar on
Deep Space 9." It's hard to fathom what it would take to
produce a human who could pay this much attention to a television
show. One can even find, in a separate entry, the fact that "uttaberries
(are) a blueberry-like fruit found on Betazed."
