hen it comes to pondering four decades of Star Trek, an auxiliary brain could be helpful. The official continuity, combined with the myriad divergences introduced by everyone from writers to modelers to customers, is staggeringly large, but Memory Alpha manages to keep it all straight, thanks to an armada of helpful fans.
The site is a wiki, an encyclopedia-like online construct that allows anyone—administrators, regular readers, casual visitors—to add, update and correct articles. And add they have—the site is composed of just over 14,000 pages, seemingly covering every Star Trek facet imaginable. Episodes and movies from all the series get the royal treatment, with extensive summaries peppered with hyperlinks to related topics. The entry for the classic time-looping Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect" includes links to all the main characters, the role of the senior staff on a starship, the temporally unstable Typhon Expanse, subatomic dekyon particles and the U.S.S Bozeman, among dozens of others.
The amount of detail in each entry can be impressive. For example, the writeup on the aforementioned U.S.S. Bozeman references the origin of its name (Bozeman, Mont.) and its contradictory registry numbers and explains its appearance in the Trek universe several times after "Cause and Effect," including the TNG episode "All Good Things", Star Trek: Generations and Start Trek: First Contact.
As with most wikis, the site's home page has a weekly featured article as well as a "did you know" list displaying an assortment of facts from deep with in the site's core. These make for excellent jumping-off points, but visitors can also make use of its established categories for episodes and movies, society and culture, science and technology, other media, people, space travel and hardware and fandom.
—Ken Newquist
Site of the Week—October 3, 2005
n
online fan club for devotees of Frank Herbert's classic Dune novels, Dreamers of Dune is a cozy online gathering place for discussion of the planet Arrakis, its tangled history and all the Imperium's
diverse and memorable characters. Covering everything from video games to recent TV adaptations of Dune, this site studies and celebrates one of the most complex SF universes ever created.
The enthusiasm at Dreamers of Dune is infectious: Its discussion forums are busy, and site features include whimsical quizzes, fan fiction, a long links page, cartoons, news, interviews and even a gift store. Dreamers also has an ultra-useful glossary of key words from the Dune universe's rich pool of languages and cultural constructs—planet names, religious terms, technological devices and creature names. Paired with this glossary is a handy "Who's Who"
section, with biographies of the important characters in the series.
In its "Miniseries" area, the Web page features an interesting breakdown of fan reaction to 2000's Dune and the 2003 Children of Dune miniseries, noting differences among viewers who read the books, those who saw the 1984 film adaptation directed by David Lynch
and others who came to the miniseries wholly unspoiled.
Dune has never lacked for fans, but as Brian Herbert continues to expand the universe with new novels, interest—in the series and in this excellent fan site—can only continue to rise.
—A.M. Dellamonica
Site of the Week—September 26, 2005
ith the success of this summer's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the recent release of Corpse Bride, tracking the fast-moving personality that is Tim Burton is, without doubt, a more daunting task by the day. Rising to this challenge is the mission of The Tim Burton Collective, a quirky, fan-run compilation of articles, links, images and news about this versatile director and all his creative projects.
The Collective does a fantastic job of serving heaps of Burton information in pleasant, bite-sized morsels, offering an extensive biography and filmography, a newsblog with the latest on his movies and even the occasional contest. The site's discussion forums have separate topics dedicated to each film and to longtime Burton collaborators like composer Danny Elfman; they also have areas for general chit-chat and a section where fans can post poetry, Burton-inspired art, script ideas and fiction.
The Collective's archive contains more than 200 articles on Burton's career and pictures. Meanwhile, profiles of actors who have appeared in more than one Burton film—Christopher Walken, for example, and, of course, Johnny Depp—are under construction. Web surfers seeking more esoteric content can check out the "Lumplings" section, a grab bag of everything that doesn't fit tidily elsewhere—chat room, shopping guide, indexes of actors who have worked in Burton films and the Star Wars pictures and information about Burton's book of poems, The
Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy.
Finally, the site contains a small but growing multimedia section, with links to an assortment of commercials, images, downloadable fonts for films like Sleepy Hollow and The Nightmare Before Christmas and wallpapers related, in various ways, to Burton's career.
The energy and focus that go into making a top-notch fan site are remarkable, and The Tim Burton Collective has both equalities in abundance. Informative, funny and brimming with enthusiasm for the work of one of Hollywood's most imaginative filmmakers, this site is a dream come true for researchers, movie buffs and all Burton's hard-core fans.
—A.M. Dellamonica
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