“I looked up from the screen of my iPad to my father, lying unconscious, amid tubes and wires, in his starship of a bed, in the irresolute darkness of an I.C.U. at 3 a.m. Ordinarily when my father lay on his back his abdomen rose up like the telescope dome of an observatory, but now there seemed to be nothing between the bed rails at all, just a blanket pulled as taut as a drum skin and then, on the pillow, my father’s big, silver-maned head. Scarecrow, after the flying monkeys had finished with him. His head was tilted upward and his jaw hung slack. All the darkness in the room seemed to pool in his open mouth. Hey, Dad, I need a line, I said, breaking, if only in my head, the silence that reigned between us. I’m writing dialogue for Mr. Spock.” In The New Yorker, the excellent Michael Chabon on writing Star Trek and mourning his father. The Final Frontier.