This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

focusing in on mythical creature's ideas and monsters in time, this is going to be yet another omnibus episode collecting four previous

related monster fact entries these are going to cover my my recent journey into the star trek

universe so i hope you enjoy these let's go ahead and kick things off with

the Andorians. In this episode, I'd like to begin a series on various aliens and creatures from

the Star Trek universe. Now, first of all, I will be the first to admit that I am not an expert in

Trek lore, but I very fondly remember, as a kid in the 90s, watching reruns of Star Trek

The Next Generation every weeknight at 9 p.m. I also fondly remember a book that I had a special

order from the local bookstore, Star Trek, the Worlds of the Federation, written and

illustrated by Laura Johnson, writing as Shane Johnson. This was an encyclopedic collection of alien

profiles, you know, think of it as a monster manual, if you will, covering 32 different

Federation member alien species, as well as a number of neutral and hostile aliens.

This was a 1989 publication, so it's far from current and is not considered part of current

Trek canon. And I'm to understand some Trek writers took issue with some of the entries.

Still, it's a book that meant a lot to me as a young Trekkie, and I suspect it meant a

lot to others from this time period as well. So I'm going to go ahead and cite it, along with some

other sources with the caveat that, again, it's not canon, much in the same way I cited, the Dune

Encyclopedia in some of my Dune-related entries. With all of that in mind, let's turn to the Andorians.

These blue-skinned, white-haired, and tinny-equipped aliens are iconic original series aliens,

but they were rather exotic for me, as they're virtually absent from both Star Trek

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