FIFTY YEARS ON LEAVE

Here's an odd-oddity from the Sibley cabinet of curiosities...

It's a pin badge celebrating 'Shore Leave', Episode #15 of the original Star Trek science-fiction television series first broadcast – fifty years ago today – on 29 December 1966.

Repeated on June 8, 1967 'Shore Leave' was scripted by the distinguished science-fiction author, Theodore Sturgeon, and directed by Robert Sparr. 

It is Stardate 3025.3 and the Federation Starship USS Enterprise, under the command of Captain James T Kirk, arrives at a planet in the Omicron Delta system. Scans reveal the planet as congenial, and since the crew is exhausted from three months of continuous operations, Kirk announces shore leave for all off-duty personnel.

Not long after beaming down, the landing parties experience strange occurrences. Chief Medical Officer Dr Leonard McCoy sees a large, anthropomorphic White Rabbit hop by in a hurry followed, a moment later, by Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, who asks McCoy if he's seen a rabbit has pass by.

The story was novelized in the first volume of Star Trek stories published by Bantam Books in 1967, adapted from the original scripts by another sci-fi legend, James Blish, whom I fleetingly met when he was for a short time a member of the Lewis Carroll Society and I was its secretary...