Customer Reviews

Star Trek Voyager: A Vision of the Future

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Being a Voyager fan I found this book very informative. It gives you insight into the lives of the cast and crew and how the episodes come about. Very detailed, I especially liked the cast interviews. Well worth a purchase if you are into Voyager.

No one's going to buy a book about the making of Voyager if they don't like Voyager, so it's understandable that the writer refrains from any criticism. Yet he adopts the tone that Voyager is unrivalled high-quality drama and whether you believe him or not it rankles enough to make you wince through even the really interesting sections on the making of the show's pilot film. There's also a peculiar habit of trying to force a structure to the book by leaving bits out from the beginning and throwing them in at the end which you might live with if there were an index. Poe is a name in Star Trek circles because he wrote The Making of Star Trek (under a psuedonym) but where you can excuse the poor journalism of that book because he was new and fresh, thirty years later you feel he should have improved.

I bought this book based on the reviews and they were right. This book is great! The photos alone are worth the price. If you love to read behind the scenes stories and are a Star Trek fan to boot, you will thoroughly enjoy reading this book. It gives you the insider's view of the making of the series to the point where you feel as if you were a part of the production.

This is a great book. I liked seeing the construction pictures of the bridge and other areas of the ship. I also enjoyed seeing the list of actors who play background extras most ofted. (TARIK ERGIN plays Lt. Ayala)

Very interesting. Photos are wonderful. Entertained my curiosity about Star Trek" Voyager. However, several times I looked for an Index, yet there is none. I would have also liked the book to be a little more organized.

As a fan of Star Trek Voyager, I found this book to be an incredible glimpse into how the show was created. Mr. Poe has done a wonderful job of exploring the "how's, why's, and almost's" of this often underrated series. After reading it I felt as if I actually was part of the Voyager creative process, that is how invitimg the authors writing is. A must have for the Voyager fan.

A wonderful look behind the scenes of a great show. It makes you appreciate all the effort that so many people put into the details. The only thing lacking in this book is an index.

This book must have started as a snapshot of the events leading to the creation of Voyager, culminating in a busy weekend of filming shortly before the pilot aired. At some point it drifted off course, adding a final chapter from the conclusion of the second season. Then, like V'ger from Star Trek 1, it collided with an unknown force that pushed publication back until the fourth season, adding hasty references to Jeri Ryan. What's left is a mess.

The good news is that the pre- and first-season information can be interesting. I didn't know that Chakotay's character was based on Moby Dick's Queequeg. The best part of the book is its account of Genevieve Bujold's disasterous day-and-a-half of filming as Captain Janeway, particularly when she was to launch the new shop for the first time. "...(R)eaching the point where Janeway gives the 'Engage' command ... Genevieve solemnly walked over to the chair, sat down, folded her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and said in a small soft voice, 'Engage.' Stunned silence."

The bad news is most everything else. The book is copyright Paramount Pictures, so you know there isn't anything negative about anyone who was still on the payroll. The author's deification of the executive producer is particularly creepy: "Complex, driven, with an unquenchable thirst for perfection, Rick Berman is precisely what Star Trek needs. It is highly unlikely that anyone else on the planet would be willing to devote the extraordinary amount of time and energy required to do what he does." No one else on the planet? Really?

The reader gets to meet the crew the same way we meet game show contestants -- who they are, how they got here, and a sentence of two about family or hobbies. We get that over and over again; there are a lot of people in the crew. There's also some sanitized behind-the-scenes info about call sheets and costume designs and exactly what sets are on what stages.

In between there's a lot of filler with the author pontificating on the affect of the Star Trek franchise on society, usually expressed in awkward sentences. "One example is the subject of diversity -- a hot topic only recently discovered by cultural and sociological pundits and politcos of every persuasion. Yet, one need only look at a single episode -- any episode -- of The Original Series (now more than thirty years ago) to see the evidence of diversity in action on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise."

In sum, this is an early history of Voyager as put together by a high-school yearbook committee, with some nice pictures, pleasant information, writing of erratic quality, and a disappointing amount of insight into what happened. If you really miss Voyager, well, here's that yearbook.

This is a book that probably should have been released in 1995, soon after Voyager started. I don't know why it was delayed until 1998.

A Vision of the Future thoroughly documents the step-by-step creation of Voyager, from the first inklings of a plan for a series to follow TNG, through the initial broadcast of the first episode "Caretaker." Poe does a great job of showing just how seat-of-the-pants the creation of a TV series is, from adjusting to last minute cast changes (and hair changes), to having to deal with directives from on high that force a guerilla re-structuring of a story already in production, because the number of commercial breaks has suddenly been changed.

We get to follow Poe, doing what we'd all have loved to do: wander around backstage without getting accosted by set security. We can vicariously talk to the crew putting everything together and find out the preposterous hours they work, see how things get put together behind the scenes, and find out why this or that thing was done the way it was. It really puts a human face on what can all too easily be looked at as a monolithic studio making just another piece of The Franchise.

If I'd had this book early on in the series run, I'd probably have been significantly more forgiving toward Voyager than I was at the time. (I've since become rather more fond of Voyager than my initial reaction back then would have suggested... Maybe I'm just getting old?) Perhaps Voyager would have gotten a bit more warm welcome from the fans if this had been available on time. It's tough to say.

The book being released three years into the series did allow the author to add a brief look at the addition of Seven of Nine to the cast and the effect that had on things, but that's really just an aside, not even a full chapter. As I mentioned, this book is really about the creation of Voyager the series, and Caretaker specifically, and it's extremely effective at that.

(I also quite like the scattering of set blueprints that are reproduced in the book. After seeing the layout of the corridor set for example, it's somehow bizarrely entertaining to see how the cast keeps walking past the same sections again and again even in a single conversation -- and the fact that I never noticed it before speaks volumes about the quality of set design and cinematography!)

This book was an enjoyable, easy read. Don't let the title (or even a brief thumb through) fool you...this book is not about the show, as an ongoing entity. Poe will extremely briefly mention something that occurs in the 4th season; he has a small section on 7 of 9 and her addition to the show. However, this is only a few pages in a large volume. The vast majority of the book is about the process getting the Voyager pilot on the screen. It talks about the very early preproduction meetings with Rick Berman, Jeri Taylor, and Michael Piller, and how the three of them honed the idea, and moved it forward. It talks in much detail about the designing of the Voyager sets, as well as the model of the ship itself, the computer graphics, casting, shooting, etc. I found it to be an interesting, entertaining read, however I expected it to talk more about the series itself, not to be virtually all a "making of the pilot" book. Be aware that is what this is. Don't let a few pages on 7 of 9 and a photo that includes her fool you.