The Scifi Diner Podcast Ep. 421 - Return to Farpoint with Marc Okrand and Steve Wilson; Bobalorian Awesomesauce.

Farpoint is an American science-fiction convention held since 1993 in Maryland. The convention is sponsored by the nonprofit Farpoint Foundation, and is fan-run, giving every attendee a VIP experience without the VIP-size price tag. Typical programming includes panel discussions, a competitive masquerade, independent film and fan videos, a dedicated gaming room, an art show and auction, charity auction, interactive live performances and celebrity guest appearances. It is a successor convention to ClipperCon (1984-1989) and OktoberTrek (1990-1992). The next Farpoint will be held on February 25-27, 2022. See less Steven H. Wilson is an author, podcaster, and publisher. He has interviewed Jonathan Frakes and William Campbell for Starlog, written for DC Comics Star Trek classic and Warlord series, and, most recently, served as principal writer and director for Prometheus Radio Theatre and publisher of Firebringer Press. His original science fiction series, The Arbiter Chronicles, currently boasting nineteen full-cast audio dramas and the novel Taken Liberty, has won the Mark Time Silver Award and the Parsec Award for Best Audio Drama (long form). A second Arbiter Chronicles novel, Unfriendly Persuasion, was released in 2012, and a new series of episodes is currently in development. He is also a contributor to Crazy 8 Press’s ReDeus series edited by Bob Greenberger, Aaron Rosenberg and Paul Kupperberg. As a podcaster, besides hosting the Prometheus Radio Theatre podcast, Steve has recorded Lester Del Rey’s Badge of Infamy for podiobooks.com, multiple roles in J. Daniel Sawyer’s production of The Antithesis Progression, and Nobilis Reed’s upcoming Geek Love audio anthology. Steve entered SF fandom as a fanzine writer in 1984, and worked on the committees and Shore Leave, Clippercon and OktoberTrek before becoming founding co-chairman of Farpoint. He has now retired from convention organizing to focus on writing and publishing. He and his wife Renee and their two sons live in Elkridge, MD. Marc Okrand is an American linguist. His professional work is in Native American languages, and he is well known as the creator of the Klingon language in the Star Trek science fiction franchise. As a linguist, Okrand worked with Native American languages. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1970. His 1977 doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley, was on the grammar of Mutsun, an extinct Ohlone language formerly spoken in the coastal areas of north-central California. His dissertation was supervised by pioneering linguist Mary Haas. From 1975 to 1978, he taught undergraduate linguistics courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before taking a post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., in 1978. After that, Okrand took a job at the National Captioning Institute, where he worked on the first closed-captioning system for hearing-impaired television viewers. Until his retirement in 2013, Okrand served as one of the directors for Live Captioning at the National Captioning Institute and as President of the board of directors of WSC Avant Bard (formerly the Washington Shakespeare Company) in Arlington, Virginia, which planned to stage "an evening of Shakespeare in Klingon" in 2010. While coordinating closed captioning for the Oscars award show in 1982, Okrand met the producer for the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. His first work was dubbing in Vulcan language dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, since the actors had already been filmed talking in English. He was then hired by Paramount Pictures to develop the Klingon language and coach the actors using it in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. He was later hired for the use of the Romulan and Vulcan languages in the Star Trek film in 2009. He also created Klingon dialogue for that movie, but those scenes were cut.[5] He was involved in Star Trek Into Darkness, but only during post-production. Okrand is the author of three books about Klingon – The Klingon Dictionary (first published 1985, revised enlarged edition 1992), The Klingon Way (1996) and Klingon for the Galactic Traveler (1997), as well as two audio-courses: Conversational Klingon (1992) and Power Klingon (1993). He has also co-authored the libretto of an opera in the Klingon language: ’u’[a], debuting at The Hague in September 2010. He speaks Klingon, but notes that others have attained greater fluency. In 2018 he developed the language for the Kelpien race in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery (first appearing in the third Short Treks episode "The Brightest Star"). In 2001, Okrand created the Atlantean language for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, for which he was also used as an early facial model for the protagonist's character design.