September is already here. Where did the year go? While some of you are winding down from a nice and relaxing summer, ours is just starting. Say what? Here in San Francisco, we statistically have the nicest weather during this month.

Of course, there were more treasures from the Internet Archive to be discovered this past week. 120 years ago, this exact month, author Herman Melville passed away. His legacy is Moby Dick and this classic novel can best be described by narrator Stewart Wills:

“Few things, even in literature, can really be said to be unique — but Moby Dick is truly unlike anything written before or since. The novel is nominally about the obsessive hunt by the crazed Captain Ahab of the book’s eponymous white whale. But interspersed in that story are digressions, paradoxes, philosophical riffs on whaling and life, and a display of techniques so advanced for its time that some have referred to the 1851 Moby Dick as the first “modern” novel.”

The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection, part of the Internet Archive, is offering this recording to you, free of charge.

Grab the torrent here.

The first episode of Star Trek aired 46 years ago today. To celebrate the anniversary of one of the greatest science fiction series of all time, Google featured a magnificent doodle (captured in the photos above) on their home page.

In a recent episode of the London-based series “Reality Check,” aptly titled “Trek Nation,” Alex Fitch and Dr. Marek Kukula conducted an interview with Eugene ‘Rod’ Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, about his father’s legacy and the impact the television show had on its viewers.

Rod learned a lot about the show – its influence, its messaging – and his father, who passed away in 1991, through the fans. These were lives shaped by science fiction and driven by a quest to advance and understand the universe.

Why is Star Trek so important, to this very day? Roddenberry, whose television documentary Trek Nation pays homage to his father’s legacy, sums it up nicely:

“(It) represents this idea of a future where we all work together for the greater good but we no longer fear difference and change. We’ve learned that it’s the diversity on our planet and beyond that we should be thirsting for.”

Many Star Trek fans informed Rod that the show inspired them to work as scientists, engineers, and astronomers. The rest can be discovered through this Community Audio feature from the Internet Archive.

Grab the torrent of the entire Q&A session here. It’s definitely worth a listen: https://bit.ly/treknationia

That’s all for this week. Hope you have a great weekend.