And not just any old mycologist, but one who’s very well known in the psychedelic community.
First time I saw Discovery, saw they had Stamets and a “spore-drive” which utilises a discrete subspace domain, I was hyped. A mushroom with “roots” literally everywhere, and that humans can, at least to some degree, connect to this network? Feels rather familiar to most people who’ve tried recreational shrooms, I’m sure.
Also, on a sidenote, Ultima Thule is mentioned in Star Trek: Enterprise as a planet I think in the same episode that they use Iittala’s Ultima Thule glass-collections as “alien” glassware. (Ultima Thule is an old Latin concept for like a mythical land far North, modern interpretations have included Orkney, Shetland, Northern Scotland, the island of Saaremaa.)
I happened to be drinking from an Ultima Thule collection glass when watching the show. So when this scene came on, I looked roughly like Dicaprio in the beer pointing meme. Only with an Ultima Thule glass, ofc.
I know most Trek fans already know all this information but when you’ve been out of the loop with Trek culture and general culture in real life … it was very surprising for me when I first realized the connection between the real world personality and the on screen Star Trek character. And they did a great job of representing the name and associating them to the work that they do.
And like the real life Stamets and the on screen Stamets, our TenForward Stamets has a habit of working their tendrils of connection deep into this community and making it stronger.
spoiler for S2I mean… Stamets basically rescues what could be considered Hugh’s “soul” from the space mushroom transit network, and then the space mushroom transit network interactive entity helps the crew shove Hugh’s soul back into a meatbag regenerated from his DNA, so I’d say it’s still appropriate, just in a very different and less figurative way.
Also, only somewhat related, supposedly, Roddenberry had a friend in WWII named Kim Noonien Singh who he lost touch with and named Khan after him in tribute. The weird thing is that the friend was supposed to be Chinese and none of that name sounds Chinese.
It could also be a butchered understanding of their name, ex. Qin as kim, Nguyen as noonien (Whos to say they werent from down sound with Viet family), song as singh. Etc.
Add to that using the wade-giles or mathews or whatever old timey pronunciation/spelling system, the passage of time, and a bit of 1940s racism in not bothering to get foreign sounding names correct and you could easily end up at Kim Noonien Singh.
It’s just hard to know whether or not it’s a real story. Even if Gene himself told it (which I’m not sure if he did) as he was kind of known for embellishing stories.
I’m probably far from the first person to make this connection, but Noonien seems like a pretty obvious phonetic misspelling of Nguyen to me. I last watched TOS and a lot of material related to Khan as a kid and I don’t know too much about Roddenberry as a person, but given his other stances I think it’s not impossible that this is his “hidden” commentary on the Vietnam war. And even putting all of that aside for a moment; his “friend” (if he really existed) might’ve been ethnically Chinese, but born in a different Southeast Asian country and the native language there then adapted his Chinese name to fit their phonology. But I don’t know, I’m not a professional linguist, I might be way off here… (Ah I just saw Deceptichum had pretty much the same thought as me but was faster in writing them down ^^')
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