Annotations for "You Are Not in Space"

by Edgar Governo

The following is a set of annotations for the short story "You Are Not in Space," which appears in the anthology Strange New Worlds 10. The page numbers are from the print edition, although the book is also available in various electronic formats (such as the Amazon Kindle Edition) which may not have the same page numbering.

Most of the links are to Memory Alpha, an excellent information resource for the Star Trek universe, where you can look further into any of these references at your convenience.

All episodes mentioned are from Star Trek: Enterprise unless otherwise indicated.

Needless to say, this page contains many spoilers for the actual story, along with various other Star Trek episodes and films, and at least one John Hughes movie. You're well-advised not to read on until after you've read the story itself.

If you have any questions, you've found any mistake(s) on my part, or you think an annotation should be here which I haven't added already, please feel free to contact me with your thoughts.


Title
The titular phrase is a plot point in the story, but on a more metatextual level, I also wanted a title that seemed dissonant for Star Trek, since it's exceedingly rare for an aired episode or film not to take place at least partially in space.
Historian's Note
For you timeliners out there (and I count myself among you), I placed this story in the third week of June 2152. (Movie Night is Tuesday, June 20.) That's in the middle of Enterprise's second season, where dates get a little vague--no specific date is mentioned onscreen between "Carbon Creek" (April 12) and "Singularity" (August 14). I've conjectured that my dates place the story between "Marauders" and "The Seventh."
Page 251
Hoshi Sato is shown speaking Russian in "Observer Effect," though I wrote the first version of this story before that episode aired, assuming that the forty languages she speaks would include the top ten languages spoken on Earth. Sources vary, but Russian usually ranks around eighth.
Page 252
Hoshi previously boasted to Ravis that she's never heard a language she couldn't learn in "Two Days and Two Nights."

Movie Night, where films are played for the crew of Enterprise in the mess hall, was first established in "Cold Front" and actually shown in "Dear Doctor."

Page 253
"Broken Bow" establishes that Jonathan Archer already knew Hoshi before commanding Enterprise.

Though not named, the movie being shown is Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), written and directed by John Hughes, starring Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller, Alan Ruck as Cameron Frye, and Mia Sara as Sloane Peterson. I went with this particular movie for a number of reasons:

We join the film during the Von Steuben Day Parade sequence, as Ferris lip-syncs The Beatles' 1963 cover of "Twist and Shout." (I didn't name that song, either, as I was trying to avoid any potential trademark issues.)

Hoshi is confused by the combination of English and German lyrics in Wayne Newton's 1963 cover of "Danke Schoen," which also comes up later.

Page 254
It always seemed to me that Hoshi "I Can Tell Where You Went To Junior High By Your Inflections" Sato would have a hard time watching movies, where characters are almost never supposed to be from the same place as the actors portraying them, even when those actors aren't affecting an accent for the role. To that end, both Matthew Broderick and Mia Sara are New Yorkers, while Alan Ruck is from Cleveland, Ohio. (This wasn't a factor in my choosing the movie, but Ruck also played Captain John Harriman of the Enterprise-B in Star Trek: Generations.)

If you're really curious, the scenes in the story go from about 1:02:50 to 1:06:00 on the Bueller...Bueller...Edition DVD.

Page 255
The phonetic symbols used by Hoshi are presumably from some descendant of the International Phonetic Alphabet which has evolved to include qualities of speech that are present in extraterrestrial languages.
Page 257
The five most common writing systems on Earth are referenced, including the Arabic alphabet, Devanagari, and Chinese characters, along with Japanese kana. Hoshi is shown reading Japanese in "Singularity."

The design of the written Vulcan language is partially based on musical scales, according to The Star Trek Encyclopedia.

"Broken Bow" shows Hoshi on leave from Starfleet and teaching exolinguistics at an unnamed university in Brasil at the time Captain Archer recruits her to join the Enterprise crew.

Professor Turner is named for a friend of mine, a linguist who looked over this story to make sure I wasn't including any egregious errors in its depiction of linguistics.

Hoshi recalls how a language barrier of sorts didn't get in the way of her shore leave tryst with Ravis in "Two Days and Two Nights."

Page 258
"Observer Effect" establishes that Hoshi was initially discharged from Starfleet after running a floating poker game and then breaking the arm of the officer who tried to shut it down, and that she was only allowed back on probation because of Starfleet's need for language specialists. This seemed like an odd detail for her character until it occurred to me that card games have a language all their own, with the added benefit that her probationary status raised the emotional stakes for her in this story.

Hoshi makes a blatant reference to the Queen of Hearts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

Page 259
The phonetic processor is a component of the Universal Translator, mentioned in "Broken Bow" and "Fight or Flight."

The Rosetta Stone is an Egyptian stele, originally inscribed in 196 BCE and rediscovered by Pierre-François Bouchard in 1799. It was instrumental in the modern translation of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, making it easily the most famous discovery in the history of linguistics--and the most obvious reference Malcolm Reed could've possibly made when talking to Hoshi. True to its familiarity, there is an Enterprise novel also centred around Hoshi titled Rosetta by Dave Stern, and it is referenced in both the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Contagion" (as well as later being the basis for the title of the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Rosetta") and the language-themed short story "Friends with the Sparrows" by Christopher L. Bennett in the Star Trek: The Next Generation anniversary anthology The Sky's the Limit.

Page 260
Leonard McCoy will later (in the chronology) ask more sarcastically if an alien probe is saying "Hi there" to the people of Earth in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Trip Tucker first explicitly mentions growing up in Florida (Panama City, to be precise) in "Fusion."

Hoshi translated a Romulan language in "Minefield," but she is missing the forest for the trees here--the reason it reminded her of Vulcan protolanguages is because (unbeknownst to her) Vulcans and Romulans are related.

Hoshi rattles off various references to core elements in the field of linguistics, including language families, linguistic typology, semantics, and syntax.

Page 261
Phlox is first shown speaking Denobulan to Hoshi in "Dear Doctor."
Page 262
Hoshi refers to several terms related to the work of Noam Chomsky in theoretical linguistics, including transformational grammar (a form of generative grammar) and its phrase structure rules.

Geissler variations are something I made up, on the other hand, named after one of my beta readers. I have no idea what they're supposed to do, but I wanted to give the general impression that there had been some unspecified advances in linguistics between the present day and the Enterprise era.

My linguist friend did her master's thesis on response tokens, so I mentioned them specifically as another shout-out to her.

Page 263
The sweet spot, a location on "every ship" where the artificial gravity gets inverted, is shown being visited by Travis Mayweather in "Broken Bow" and "Horizon."

Hoshi recalls successfully translating new languages under pressure, like the Axanar language in "Fight or Flight" and the language of the symbiotic lifeform in "Vox Sola."

Page 264
Vega Colony was first referenced way back in Star Trek's original pilot episode, "The Cage." Travis mentioned that he was born on the ECS Horizon, halfway between Draylax and Vega Colony, in "Fortunate Son."
Page 265
Crewman Elizabeth Cutler was a recurring character on Enterprise, played by the late Kellie Waymire, who first appeared in "Strange New World." I really enjoyed Waymire's presence in the series and was saddened by her untimely passing, so I included this cameo as a tribute to her.

Crewman Dickison is named after another one of my beta readers. I think of that crewman as looking like her, but if I had to "cast" her with an existing onscreen character, she'd be the otherwise unnamed crewmember played by Elizabeth Magness in "Minefield" and "The Catwalk."

Linguistic algorithms (an aspect of computational linguistics) are mentioned by Hoshi in "Vanishing Point" and (obliquely) by T'Pol in "Vox Sola."

Page 267
Constructing a translation matrix to decipher a new language is mentioned in numerous Enterprise episodes, including "Fight or Flight," "Civilization," "Vox Sola," and "Azati Prime."

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