>>718787239
>Incident: During the third weekend in June, for three thousand dollars—the only thing short of bamboo shoots under the fingernails that could get me to do it—I spoke at something called Space-Con IV, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In the neighborhood of ten thousand people attended this combined Star Trek/space science/tv addict media melange: a hyperventilated whacko-freako-devo two-day blast that served as cheap thrill fix for a tidal wave of incipient jelly-brains who would rather sit in front of the tube having their minds turned to puree-of-bat-guano than have to deal with the Real World in any lovely way.

>Traditionally, the dealers' rooms, wherein one can buy (at usurious rates) Spock ears, Federation starship gold braid and frogging, German versions of Star Trek comics and hairballs called tribbles, has been a place where Star Trek reigned supreme. A wad of Kleenex, authenticated as being the very item William Shatner honked into during the legendary phlegm epidemic of the second year of the series, could bring a price that would permit the dealer to return to his native island a rich grandee.

>In June, however, Star Wars had been open for nearly three weeks; and those who formerly festooned themselves with buttons that said LIVE LONG AND PROSPER or TAKE A KLINGON TO LUNCH now paraded around wearing buttons that proclaimed LET THE WOOKIEE WIN and JEDI KNIGHT and the catch-phrase that has replaced the splay-fingered Vulcan greeting of Star Trek, MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU. Dealers loaded down with Star Trek memorabilia had their annuities flash before their eyes in a brief two-day nightmare as Star Wars posters, light sabers, Darth Vader masks and Ballantine Books paperback novelizations vanished as if they'd been warped into hyperspace. Even panels of erudite writers and NASA space shuttle engineers were overwhelmed with trivial badinage about Star Wars and the effects it would have on the course of Western Civilization.