This time he didn't save the ship!

Okay, I may have been, just slightly, one of the Trek fans who was of the "Die Wesley Crusher, DIE!" variety.

It seemed, back then, that lazy writers who had little idea of good science fiction would, too often, after having gotten the Enterprise and her crew into trouble, resort to using a brilliant idea by Wesley as the "Deus ex Machina" to get the ship out of the jam. That got old even the first time we saw it, given the other badness they gave Wil Wheaton as dialog. But he was just a teenager and didn't realize it or didn't really care about it. I won't dwell on this too much except to put it into context. I didn't think much of the actor and really didn't like the character. I did see "Stand By Me", it was a good movie and I enjoyed it, but I couldn't really bring Wil to mind recalling the film.

Then, and I don't recall how, I found his blog at http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/ (these days). I started reading because I was in our operations center and sometimes we don't have much to do except wait for the phone to ring with people calling about problems. He was a geek like me, got to work on Star Trek and was a pretty good writer. Enough to come back. And in the days when lots of people were blogging but they mostly didn't have a lot to say. I even ended up buying his first two books, "Dancing Barefoot" and "Just a Geek". I enjoyed JaG but haven't actually read the first yet.

So when he published his latest book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives I bought that one too, after reading about how much fun he had packing envelopes to the folks who had already bought it. There is a warning in the first few pages that most of the material in there he's published on his blog already. And as I read the stories I recalled first reading them. But that doesn't seem to matter. I just finished it today and I enjoyed it very much. I just passed it to a friend of mine who on reading the first few pages already laughed out loud. I think he'll like it. And I'm fairly certain he doesn't read Wil's blog so all the stories will be new to him. And he'll relate to them just like I did because he's a geek too.

So without going into much detail about the book itself, I will heartily recommend it to anyone whose youth may have included;

• playing Atari
  
• playing pacman (or any other arcade game) in any of a variety of stores, offices or other places
  
• geeks growing up in the 80s
  
• role playing geeks
  
• gaming geeks
  
• computer geeks
  
• geeks who are parents
  

Or anyone else who enjoys good, well told stories that will make you feel something. :)

Try it, you'll like it.

If not you can come back here and hit me with a fish!