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D.C. Fontana, who helped craft the lore of “Star Trek” and developed one of its signature characters, Spock, as the first female writer for the 1960s television series, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Burbank, Calif. She was 80 and lived in Los Angeles. The cause was cancer, according to her husband, Dennis Skotak. Ms. Fontana was part of the “Star Trek" universe from its early days, working alongside its creator, Gene Roddenberry, on the series as a story editor and writer. The original series, which premiered in 1966, introduced audiences to Captain Kirk, the United Federation of Planets...

*** Roddenberry never stopped rewriting. “The problem,” says his biographer Joel Engel, “was that he basically couldn’t write well enough to carry it off.” For 25 years, a script never left Roddenberry’s hands without becoming worse. For all of the control Roddenberry exercised over Star Trek, the franchise prospered only when it was under the aegis of others. As early as one month before the show’s premiere, an exhausted and embattled Roddenberry took a vacation. Television veteran Gene L. Coon, a Marine veteran of the Pacific, was hired as producer. “To a large degree,” write Gross and Altman, “it would...

Leonard Nimoy’s death in February brought to a close his unusual career continually playing a single role for half a century. Between 1966, when the television show Star Trek premiered, and 2013, when the movie Star Trek Into Darkness hit the screens, Nimoy portrayed the franchise’s beloved first officer, Mr. Spock, in two TV series and eight films. As he acknowledged, the key to Star Trek’s longevity and cultural penetration was its seriousness of purpose, originally inspired by creator Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction vision. Modeled on Gulliver’s Travels, the series was meant as an opportunity for social commentary, and it...

Sorry to all you Star Trek fans out there. I may be the only science fiction fan in the universe that really hates his guts. He stands in the annals of history with Karl Marx as one of the most vile perpetrators of socialism and communism this planet has ever known. I call him the used philosophy salesman…. and he was good at that job, one of the best. Today is the anniversary of his birth and I have been constantly reminded of this all morning. Tributes everywhere I look to the man who turned the brains of a generation...

Gene Roddenberry's wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, an actress who also served as the voice of the USS Enterprise's computer, set up a nifty little multimillion-dollar trust for her beloved pooches to ensure that they would remain in the lap of luxury after she was gone. According to probate documents obtained by E! News, Roddenberry set aside $4 million so that her dogs could go on living in one of her mansions, while their longtime caretaker, Reinelda Estupinian, gets $1 million and residential rights in the expansive home. "I do not want the animals to be placed in a kennel or...

Majel Barrett Roddenberry, "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry's widow who nurtured the legacy of the seminal science fiction TV series after his death, has died. She was 76. Roddenberry died of leukemia Thursday morning at her home in Bel-Air, said Sean Rossall, a family spokesman. At Roddenberry's side were family friends and her son, Eugene Roddenberry Jr. Roddenberry was involved in the "Star Trek" universe for more than four decades. She played the dark-haired Number One in the original pilot but metamorphosed into the blond, miniskirted Nurse Christine Chapel in the original 1966-69 show. She had smaller roles in all...

NEW YORK - Majel Barrett Roddenberry, the widow of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry, has died. She was 76. Roddenberry, an actress who appeared in numerous "Star Trek" TV shows and movies, died Thursday of leukemia at her home in Bel-Air, Calif., her representative said. Her romance with Roddenberry earned her the title "The First Lady of Star Trek." A fixture in the "Star Trek" franchise, her roles included Nurse Christine Chapel in the original "Star Trek," Lwaxana Troi in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and the voice of the USS Enterprise computer in almost every spin-off of the 1966...

What: A spacecraft that travels at faster-than-light speeds by distorting, or “warping,” the fabric of spacetime. Instead of trying to move through space, the warp drive moves space itself. The ship sits inside a bubble of spacetime bound by a negative energy field that races across the cosmos. Why: Chemical and nuclear propulsion, solar sails and ion thrusters all are too slow to reach the nearest star systems within a human life span. At faster-than-light speed (more than 186,000 miles per second), a warp-drive ship would travel 4.5 light-years to Alpha Centauri, the closest sun to our own, in about...

Does Star Trek Even Make Sense? by J. Neil Schulman Let’s get this out of the way. I’m a Trekkie. I’ve been watching Star Trek since it hit the air in 1966. I know every episode of the original series by heart. I watched the Star Trek animated series. I’ve seen all ten of the theatrical Star Trek films, and the spin-off TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and now the latest Star Trek series, Enterprise. Carrying a press card from the tabloid newspaper, The Star I covered the first...

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