the Enterprise as it is to be seen in the enhanced original series episodes soon to be in syndication. Photo courtesy CBS studios.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
TrekCheck: The Continuing Adventures
UPDATE: Countdown to 40: Star Trek as Sci-Fi Redefined now follows.
This past week the outline of Star Trek continuity from the original series to the upcoming feature film became a little clearer.
The ties were strengthened by two bits of real news. The first was the announcement that Star Trek original series episodes will begin returning to syndication this month in High Definition, with new CGI and audio enhancements. (Details are here at startrek.com.)
Anyone who has seen what fans have done by just replacing old ship, viewscreen and planet shots with their own models or animation or computer graphics will probably be excited by the prospect of seeing similar new shots of professional quality. We can hope they will take care to match the new and the old so they still look like they belong together, which may be especially difficult in high definition. The same establishing Enterprise shots used repeatedly on the series look especially grainy on DVD, but what made them seem worse was the difference in quality of the images.
Also last week, Leonard Nimoy mentioned in an interview that his contract with Paramount gives him casting approval of anyone else who plays Spock, and Paramount confirmed this and added that William Shatner also has approval of any new Kirk ( though this apparently escaped Shatner’s notice.) Nimoy also mentioned that Paramount has called him and Shatner to tell them the studio would like them to participate in the new movie project, without saying what that participation might be.
That, along with doubt cast on the rumor that the movie won’t be about Kirk and Spock (Anthony Pascale at trekmovie.com swears that’s exactly what it will be about), suggests that Paramount is going to try to keep peace with old fans. The old series will be honored (and more revenues obtained from it) with its pride of place in the Star Trek saga secure. Paramount and Abrams will get Shatner and Nimoy on their side, probably with “consultations” on the story as well as actor approvals, perhaps even cameos in the film.
In part this shows respect, and in part it’s realism: Trek fans cannot be controlled, and no official entity is going to successfully banish the original cast or the original series from conventions, and so on.
Still, there is likely to be some major break of continuity with the people who created and made Star Trek up until now, including the Next Generation actors and everyone in the Berman era. And if any past Trek era is revisited, it will be with a new look. Some anonymous benefactor left an enlightening comment on an earlier post here at Soul of Star Trek:
…anyone who registered with Christie's auction coming up in October, can see from the lots that they are auctioning off, that Paramount really wants to get rid of EVERYTHING that isn't already part of the Star Trek Experience exhibit in Vegas.Every prop, set dressing, costume and model imaginable are part of this auction. In sharp contrast to what Paramount is doing, take for example George Lucas - he keeps EVERYTHING from all of his movies archived and preserved. Paramount is letting the models of NCC 1701-A, NCC 1701-D, NCC 1701-E, Deep Space Nine and Voyager walk out the door to the highest bidder.While it's a great time to be a fan w/money and the ability to try to get a piece of the past 40 years, these are not exactly the actions of a studio that feels ANYTHING that was created in those past 40 years is even remotely valid or important to how it tells stories set in that same future on an ongoing basis.
I’m not willing to go quite that far, but it is one of a number of signs that a new generation is eager to put its stamp on Star Trek future. Nothing wrong with that, but it also needs to be connected to the integrity of its past, and there are plenty of people around who can provide them with that continuity. That needs to be part of the mix.
I’ve seen the comparisons of J.J. Abrams as the new Nick Meyer, but for all his invigorating ideas, Meyer had lots of people around him—like Nimoy and Shatner and the other original series actors, not to mention an unofficial but still powerful Gene Roddenberry for most of the time—to keep him from going too far astray from the essence of Star Trek. Harv Bennett also re-invigorated Trek for the glory days of its famous feature trilogy (Trek films 2, 3 and 4) but again he was kept from making not-Trek in Trek clothing by these others. Even he finally had to admit that it was Roddenberry’s Star Trek, not his. (To see how important this interplay was--even to the extent of DeForrest Kelley explaining the Kirk-Spock-McCoy relationship to Bennett--see my essay on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.)
Personally I’ll rest easier when I hear that creative people who learned Star Trek from Roddenberry himself are involved in some meaningful way in this project, such as Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton or others from TNG, as well as Shatner and Nimoy in more than a symbolic nod to public relations.
As for this neck of cyberspace, there will be two more “Countdown to 40” posts. I’m not sure when the next one will be up but it will be posted at this date. Then the last one, plus a 40th anniversary commentary on the Soul of Star Trek, will be up during the week, before I leave for the Seattle convention on Thursday.
UPDATE: Countdown to 40: Star Trek as Sci-Fi Redefined now follows.
This past week the outline of Star Trek continuity from the original series to the upcoming feature film became a little clearer.
The ties were strengthened by two bits of real news. The first was the announcement that Star Trek original series episodes will begin returning to syndication this month in High Definition, with new CGI and audio enhancements. (Details are here at startrek.com.)
Anyone who has seen what fans have done by just replacing old ship, viewscreen and planet shots with their own models or animation or computer graphics will probably be excited by the prospect of seeing similar new shots of professional quality. We can hope they will take care to match the new and the old so they still look like they belong together, which may be especially difficult in high definition. The same establishing Enterprise shots used repeatedly on the series look especially grainy on DVD, but what made them seem worse was the difference in quality of the images.
Also last week, Leonard Nimoy mentioned in an interview that his contract with Paramount gives him casting approval of anyone else who plays Spock, and Paramount confirmed this and added that William Shatner also has approval of any new Kirk ( though this apparently escaped Shatner’s notice.) Nimoy also mentioned that Paramount has called him and Shatner to tell them the studio would like them to participate in the new movie project, without saying what that participation might be.
That, along with doubt cast on the rumor that the movie won’t be about Kirk and Spock (Anthony Pascale at trekmovie.com swears that’s exactly what it will be about), suggests that Paramount is going to try to keep peace with old fans. The old series will be honored (and more revenues obtained from it) with its pride of place in the Star Trek saga secure. Paramount and Abrams will get Shatner and Nimoy on their side, probably with “consultations” on the story as well as actor approvals, perhaps even cameos in the film.
In part this shows respect, and in part it’s realism: Trek fans cannot be controlled, and no official entity is going to successfully banish the original cast or the original series from conventions, and so on.
Still, there is likely to be some major break of continuity with the people who created and made Star Trek up until now, including the Next Generation actors and everyone in the Berman era. And if any past Trek era is revisited, it will be with a new look. Some anonymous benefactor left an enlightening comment on an earlier post here at Soul of Star Trek:
…anyone who registered with Christie's auction coming up in October, can see from the lots that they are auctioning off, that Paramount really wants to get rid of EVERYTHING that isn't already part of the Star Trek Experience exhibit in Vegas.Every prop, set dressing, costume and model imaginable are part of this auction. In sharp contrast to what Paramount is doing, take for example George Lucas - he keeps EVERYTHING from all of his movies archived and preserved. Paramount is letting the models of NCC 1701-A, NCC 1701-D, NCC 1701-E, Deep Space Nine and Voyager walk out the door to the highest bidder.While it's a great time to be a fan w/money and the ability to try to get a piece of the past 40 years, these are not exactly the actions of a studio that feels ANYTHING that was created in those past 40 years is even remotely valid or important to how it tells stories set in that same future on an ongoing basis.
I’m not willing to go quite that far, but it is one of a number of signs that a new generation is eager to put its stamp on Star Trek future. Nothing wrong with that, but it also needs to be connected to the integrity of its past, and there are plenty of people around who can provide them with that continuity. That needs to be part of the mix.
I’ve seen the comparisons of J.J. Abrams as the new Nick Meyer, but for all his invigorating ideas, Meyer had lots of people around him—like Nimoy and Shatner and the other original series actors, not to mention an unofficial but still powerful Gene Roddenberry for most of the time—to keep him from going too far astray from the essence of Star Trek. Harv Bennett also re-invigorated Trek for the glory days of its famous feature trilogy (Trek films 2, 3 and 4) but again he was kept from making not-Trek in Trek clothing by these others. Even he finally had to admit that it was Roddenberry’s Star Trek, not his. (To see how important this interplay was--even to the extent of DeForrest Kelley explaining the Kirk-Spock-McCoy relationship to Bennett--see my essay on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.)
Personally I’ll rest easier when I hear that creative people who learned Star Trek from Roddenberry himself are involved in some meaningful way in this project, such as Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton or others from TNG, as well as Shatner and Nimoy in more than a symbolic nod to public relations.
As for this neck of cyberspace, there will be two more “Countdown to 40” posts. I’m not sure when the next one will be up but it will be posted at this date. Then the last one, plus a 40th anniversary commentary on the Soul of Star Trek, will be up during the week, before I leave for the Seattle convention on Thursday.
Countdown to 40: Star Trek as Sci-Fi Redefined
by William S. Kowinski
By the mid 1960s, prime time television was awash in westerns, still the dominant drama series form but starting to fade, and networks were looking for the next big thing. Gene Roddenberry thought he could sell them on science fiction.
In its first decade or so, as it became more technically sophisticated and experimented with what it could do differently, television relied on adapting successful formats and programs from radio, theatre and movie serials for its entertainment offerings. One of the primary genres taken from radio but especially from movie serials and B movies was the western. These were classic horse operas, very simple stories with clear heroes (and comical sidekicks) and villains, plenty of galloping palominos and barking six-shooters. They were family entertainment, especially popular with children. They usually played in the early evening, gradually migrating to weekend afternoons and Saturday morning, the kid heaven.
So when television was ready to make its own kind of programs, it reinvented this popular genre by adding more dimension and depth to characters, and some complexity to the plots of western adventures. “Gunsmoke” with James Arness at Marshal Matt Dillon, and “The Legend of Wyatt Earp,” with Hugh O’Brien in the title role, premiered the same week in 1955. They were wildly successful, and began the dominance of the “adult western” for more than a decade. At one time, there were some 30 of them on the three networks in a single season. (“Adult,” of course, didn’t mean that Marshal Dillon was graphically getting it on with Kitty, let alone Chester or Doc. It referred to the greater degree of realism and character interaction. It also meant they were broadcast later in the evening.)
As a successor to westerns, Gene Roddenberry pitched the potential of another genre imported from radio and movie serials that wound up on Saturday morning: he proposed the first adult science-fiction series. To make the connection clear, he described Star Trek as a “Wagon Train to the stars.” “Wagon Train” was the most successful adult western next to Gunsmoke. It peaked at number one in 1961 and went into a slow decline until leaving the air in 1965. As one of the chief writers for Have Gun, Will Travel, (starring Richard Boone) the third of the top three westerns and a top five show for nearly its entire six-year run, Roddenberry had the credibility to make the comparison.
There were good reasons why this could work. Humans had been in space, and the U.S. space program was entering its busiest decade, with launchings of space probes and manned rockets, as it ramped up to sending astronauts to the moon. Astronauts were the new American heroes. Plus, the kids who grew up on Saturday morning sci-fi were old enough for prime time shows.
NBC eventually found another reason: it pioneered color TV and was getting ready to do all its prime time shows in color. Some colorful spacesuits, florescent pink alien plants and maybe even a few little green men would help attract viewers.
But there were also formidable reasons why adult science fiction wouldn’t work, some of them part of the history of the sci-fi genre. Yet Star Trek’s eventual success over forty years and counting was due to learning the lessons of that history, and respecting all that good science fiction could do.
continued after illustration
by William S. Kowinski
By the mid 1960s, prime time television was awash in westerns, still the dominant drama series form but starting to fade, and networks were looking for the next big thing. Gene Roddenberry thought he could sell them on science fiction.
In its first decade or so, as it became more technically sophisticated and experimented with what it could do differently, television relied on adapting successful formats and programs from radio, theatre and movie serials for its entertainment offerings. One of the primary genres taken from radio but especially from movie serials and B movies was the western. These were classic horse operas, very simple stories with clear heroes (and comical sidekicks) and villains, plenty of galloping palominos and barking six-shooters. They were family entertainment, especially popular with children. They usually played in the early evening, gradually migrating to weekend afternoons and Saturday morning, the kid heaven.
So when television was ready to make its own kind of programs, it reinvented this popular genre by adding more dimension and depth to characters, and some complexity to the plots of western adventures. “Gunsmoke” with James Arness at Marshal Matt Dillon, and “The Legend of Wyatt Earp,” with Hugh O’Brien in the title role, premiered the same week in 1955. They were wildly successful, and began the dominance of the “adult western” for more than a decade. At one time, there were some 30 of them on the three networks in a single season. (“Adult,” of course, didn’t mean that Marshal Dillon was graphically getting it on with Kitty, let alone Chester or Doc. It referred to the greater degree of realism and character interaction. It also meant they were broadcast later in the evening.)
As a successor to westerns, Gene Roddenberry pitched the potential of another genre imported from radio and movie serials that wound up on Saturday morning: he proposed the first adult science-fiction series. To make the connection clear, he described Star Trek as a “Wagon Train to the stars.” “Wagon Train” was the most successful adult western next to Gunsmoke. It peaked at number one in 1961 and went into a slow decline until leaving the air in 1965. As one of the chief writers for Have Gun, Will Travel, (starring Richard Boone) the third of the top three westerns and a top five show for nearly its entire six-year run, Roddenberry had the credibility to make the comparison.
There were good reasons why this could work. Humans had been in space, and the U.S. space program was entering its busiest decade, with launchings of space probes and manned rockets, as it ramped up to sending astronauts to the moon. Astronauts were the new American heroes. Plus, the kids who grew up on Saturday morning sci-fi were old enough for prime time shows.
NBC eventually found another reason: it pioneered color TV and was getting ready to do all its prime time shows in color. Some colorful spacesuits, florescent pink alien plants and maybe even a few little green men would help attract viewers.
But there were also formidable reasons why adult science fiction wouldn’t work, some of them part of the history of the sci-fi genre. Yet Star Trek’s eventual success over forty years and counting was due to learning the lessons of that history, and respecting all that good science fiction could do.
continued after illustration
Further Than We've Ever Gone Before
"Attempting to define science fiction, " writes Arthur C. Clarke, contemporary science fiction eminence and elder, "is an undertaking almost as difficult, though not quite so popular, as trying to define pornography."
Issac Asimov once divided the history of sci-fi into three eras, and whatever their accuracy, his categories do suggest three of the major components of sci-fi that all became part of the Star Trek synthesis.
As a genre, sci-fi was defined during Gene Roddenberry’s boyhood, through the pulp magazines founded and edited by Hugo Gernsback and others, beginning with Amazing Stories in 1926. By publishing new work and illustrations in the context of stories and novels by Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe, Gernsback (who was also a writer) established what he at first called scientifiction, and later, science fiction.
Though the pulps introduced millions to half-forgotten classics and exciting new writers, their often lurid covers and often less than stellar writing marked the genre forever as outside the mainstream, if not downright disreputable and weird.
In terms of story, Asimov suggested the first era that began before the pulps and continued for their first decade was science fiction as tales of adventure. Some of these stories simply took the basic operatic melodrama of hero overcoming powerful villain to save the virginal maiden, and transposed it to other planets and times. Some dramatized the adventure of discovering new worlds, and the dangers of new inventions in the hands of mad scientists or evil beings, human or otherwise. Many of these tales had their roots in 19th century stories responding to the wonder of new machines, the fear they inspired and the change they brought. In a more specific way, they fed off the 19th and early 20th century expeditions to the last unexplored areas on Earth.
Many now-classic novelists of the period, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, owed their first successes to public curiosity and appetite for chronicles of adventures on the high seas and among unknown peoples in distant locales. Such explorations were made possible by new technologies, also a subject for writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Jules Verne, who was not content with actual technologies or explorations, and became famous for inventing new examples of both.
By the 20th century, there were few undiscovered countries on Earth, so, following Edgar Rice Burroughs (who went from Tarzan’s adventures in African jungles to John Carter’s on Mars) new imaginary adventures took place on others planets, and in the process of getting there.
Inherently dramatic, sci-fi as adventure was the first emphasis of radio and movie serial science fiction stories, derived from books (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon) or as original “space opera.” Television continued the adventures, at first simply re-running movie serials. One of the earliest original TV dramas of any kind was a sci-fi series: Captain Video, which premiered in 1949 as a series seen in the early evening every weekday. Saturday morning became the favored venue for a host of sci-fi shows, from the quirky Johnny Jupiter to the action adventure of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger.
Captain Video was a huge hit in early TV, despite being on an underfunded network that didn’t make it out of the 50s (Dumont.) But it wouldn’t be until Star Trek went into syndication in the 70s that another sci-fi show would be seen everyday, often in the early evening.
But even before then, Star Trek linked back to several those Saturday morning shows, which many in Star Trek’s 1966 audience had seen as children. One of the most popular, Space Patrol, had originated in Los Angeles in 1951, when GR was in the LAPD and thinking about how he could write for television. The show as about the police arm of an otherwise peaceful federation of interstellar governments, United Planets.
Another popular show was Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, which had the distinction of appearing on all four broadcast TV networks (including Dumont) at one time or another, and for awhile appeared simultaneously on two. It was based on the Robert Heinlein juvenile novel, which GR read as he prepared Star Trek, and which affected him profoundly. The series pioneered special effects techniques, despite the fact that like most of these early sci fi shows, it was done live. Its viewers were prepared for Starfleet Academy because Tom Corbett was a graduate of the “best school in the universe—Space Academy,” where he took an oath to “safeguard the freedom of space, protect the liberties of the planets and defend the cause of peace throughout the universe.”
Corbett served aboard the spaceship Polaris with a crew that---like the first crew of the Enterprise-- included a woman and an alien (the Venusian cadet, Astro). It was the 24th century, when all nations formed the Commonwealth of Earth, which had eliminated warfare and banned deadly weapons. The show ended its last episode with the Polaris was ready to head off into space. “Where are we going?” a crewman asked. “Out,” Tom Corbett replied. “Further than we’ve ever gone before!”
"Attempting to define science fiction, " writes Arthur C. Clarke, contemporary science fiction eminence and elder, "is an undertaking almost as difficult, though not quite so popular, as trying to define pornography."
Issac Asimov once divided the history of sci-fi into three eras, and whatever their accuracy, his categories do suggest three of the major components of sci-fi that all became part of the Star Trek synthesis.
As a genre, sci-fi was defined during Gene Roddenberry’s boyhood, through the pulp magazines founded and edited by Hugo Gernsback and others, beginning with Amazing Stories in 1926. By publishing new work and illustrations in the context of stories and novels by Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe, Gernsback (who was also a writer) established what he at first called scientifiction, and later, science fiction.
Though the pulps introduced millions to half-forgotten classics and exciting new writers, their often lurid covers and often less than stellar writing marked the genre forever as outside the mainstream, if not downright disreputable and weird.
In terms of story, Asimov suggested the first era that began before the pulps and continued for their first decade was science fiction as tales of adventure. Some of these stories simply took the basic operatic melodrama of hero overcoming powerful villain to save the virginal maiden, and transposed it to other planets and times. Some dramatized the adventure of discovering new worlds, and the dangers of new inventions in the hands of mad scientists or evil beings, human or otherwise. Many of these tales had their roots in 19th century stories responding to the wonder of new machines, the fear they inspired and the change they brought. In a more specific way, they fed off the 19th and early 20th century expeditions to the last unexplored areas on Earth.
Many now-classic novelists of the period, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, owed their first successes to public curiosity and appetite for chronicles of adventures on the high seas and among unknown peoples in distant locales. Such explorations were made possible by new technologies, also a subject for writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Jules Verne, who was not content with actual technologies or explorations, and became famous for inventing new examples of both.
By the 20th century, there were few undiscovered countries on Earth, so, following Edgar Rice Burroughs (who went from Tarzan’s adventures in African jungles to John Carter’s on Mars) new imaginary adventures took place on others planets, and in the process of getting there.
Inherently dramatic, sci-fi as adventure was the first emphasis of radio and movie serial science fiction stories, derived from books (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon) or as original “space opera.” Television continued the adventures, at first simply re-running movie serials. One of the earliest original TV dramas of any kind was a sci-fi series: Captain Video, which premiered in 1949 as a series seen in the early evening every weekday. Saturday morning became the favored venue for a host of sci-fi shows, from the quirky Johnny Jupiter to the action adventure of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger.
Captain Video was a huge hit in early TV, despite being on an underfunded network that didn’t make it out of the 50s (Dumont.) But it wouldn’t be until Star Trek went into syndication in the 70s that another sci-fi show would be seen everyday, often in the early evening.
But even before then, Star Trek linked back to several those Saturday morning shows, which many in Star Trek’s 1966 audience had seen as children. One of the most popular, Space Patrol, had originated in Los Angeles in 1951, when GR was in the LAPD and thinking about how he could write for television. The show as about the police arm of an otherwise peaceful federation of interstellar governments, United Planets.
Another popular show was Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, which had the distinction of appearing on all four broadcast TV networks (including Dumont) at one time or another, and for awhile appeared simultaneously on two. It was based on the Robert Heinlein juvenile novel, which GR read as he prepared Star Trek, and which affected him profoundly. The series pioneered special effects techniques, despite the fact that like most of these early sci fi shows, it was done live. Its viewers were prepared for Starfleet Academy because Tom Corbett was a graduate of the “best school in the universe—Space Academy,” where he took an oath to “safeguard the freedom of space, protect the liberties of the planets and defend the cause of peace throughout the universe.”
Corbett served aboard the spaceship Polaris with a crew that---like the first crew of the Enterprise-- included a woman and an alien (the Venusian cadet, Astro). It was the 24th century, when all nations formed the Commonwealth of Earth, which had eliminated warfare and banned deadly weapons. The show ended its last episode with the Polaris was ready to head off into space. “Where are we going?” a crewman asked. “Out,” Tom Corbett replied. “Further than we’ve ever gone before!”
Adventures in the Fantastic
The TV westerns that appealed to children prepared the way for the adult western, and in a way, the same process was repeated in sci-fi. The difference was that sci-fi adventures weren’t set in a recognizable reality as the westerns were, and low budget sets and effects weren’t that convincing. With weird aliens and talking robots, sci-fi adventures seemed too much like fantasy for the buttoned-down 50s and early 60s.
But the fantastic was part of the sci-fi adventure from the very beginning. Both new technologies and new lands expanded public notions of what was possible, which encouraged what writer Italo Calvino called "one of the most characteristic products of nineteenth century narrative:" tales of the fantastic.
These included tales of the uncanny and the mysterious. Though these were ancient themes, technology and the change it created encouraged an openness to the fantastic. Dickens described his railroad and mechanized boat trip across the English channel as "realizing the Arabian Nights in these prose days." Such experiences naturally suggested more wonders to come, and if the limits of what had previously been thought possible was violated, who knew what other limits would fall? In a world where suddenly you were able to speak directly to a relative living many miles away and who you haven't seen for twenty years, who is to say that tomorrow you won't be able to speak to a relative who has been dead for that long?
This infusion of the magical into everyday life countered almost ironically the rationalist assumptions—and rationalist propaganda—of industrial science. This experience of the marvelous sent people back to stories of other ages, to folk tales, ghost stories, fairy tales and myth— and to the superstitions that science was supposedly eradicating. So through tales of the fantastic, old stories were assuming new guises, and the continuity of story in all its dimensions was still alive.
One popular writer who combined adventure and the fantastic was H. Rider Haggard, who began with an African adventure in King Solomon's Mine and extended his imaginative speculation to include elements of the mystical and philosophical in She and its sequel. His explorers were romantic heroes (prototypes of the Speilberg and Lucas film character, Indiana Jones) but part of the adventure was also the search for philosophical truth in the underlying mystery of things. Such an exploration is the often unacknowledged but irresistible purpose of scientific inquiry, as well as the perennial attempt to illuminate the human soul. (The phrase, “the heart of darkness,” appears in She, years before Joseph Conrad’s famous story of a journey up an African river.)
Like the adult westerns that kept the basic horse opera situations and action, Star Trek built on a sense of the adventure of exploring the strange new worlds of outer space—in fact, the culminating adventure of humanity, facing its final frontier—a theme that would be expanded and deepened to include many other explorations necessitated by this one, as the saga developed.
The TV westerns that appealed to children prepared the way for the adult western, and in a way, the same process was repeated in sci-fi. The difference was that sci-fi adventures weren’t set in a recognizable reality as the westerns were, and low budget sets and effects weren’t that convincing. With weird aliens and talking robots, sci-fi adventures seemed too much like fantasy for the buttoned-down 50s and early 60s.
But the fantastic was part of the sci-fi adventure from the very beginning. Both new technologies and new lands expanded public notions of what was possible, which encouraged what writer Italo Calvino called "one of the most characteristic products of nineteenth century narrative:" tales of the fantastic.
These included tales of the uncanny and the mysterious. Though these were ancient themes, technology and the change it created encouraged an openness to the fantastic. Dickens described his railroad and mechanized boat trip across the English channel as "realizing the Arabian Nights in these prose days." Such experiences naturally suggested more wonders to come, and if the limits of what had previously been thought possible was violated, who knew what other limits would fall? In a world where suddenly you were able to speak directly to a relative living many miles away and who you haven't seen for twenty years, who is to say that tomorrow you won't be able to speak to a relative who has been dead for that long?
This infusion of the magical into everyday life countered almost ironically the rationalist assumptions—and rationalist propaganda—of industrial science. This experience of the marvelous sent people back to stories of other ages, to folk tales, ghost stories, fairy tales and myth— and to the superstitions that science was supposedly eradicating. So through tales of the fantastic, old stories were assuming new guises, and the continuity of story in all its dimensions was still alive.
One popular writer who combined adventure and the fantastic was H. Rider Haggard, who began with an African adventure in King Solomon's Mine and extended his imaginative speculation to include elements of the mystical and philosophical in She and its sequel. His explorers were romantic heroes (prototypes of the Speilberg and Lucas film character, Indiana Jones) but part of the adventure was also the search for philosophical truth in the underlying mystery of things. Such an exploration is the often unacknowledged but irresistible purpose of scientific inquiry, as well as the perennial attempt to illuminate the human soul. (The phrase, “the heart of darkness,” appears in She, years before Joseph Conrad’s famous story of a journey up an African river.)
Like the adult westerns that kept the basic horse opera situations and action, Star Trek built on a sense of the adventure of exploring the strange new worlds of outer space—in fact, the culminating adventure of humanity, facing its final frontier—a theme that would be expanded and deepened to include many other explorations necessitated by this one, as the saga developed.
Ready for Vega
So Star Trek had an adventure story hero in Captain Kirk, based largely on the hero of C. S. Forrester’s naval adventures, Horatio Hornblower. The conventions of fictional shipboard adventures were observed in characters like Scotty, the constantly-in-crisis, miracle-working engineer. The crusty, skeptical doctor with a heart of gold was familiar from westerns as well. The element of the fantastic was represented, of course, in the mysterious, otherworldly Mr. Spock.
The adventure is an aspect or a “level” of more sophisticated sci-fi: and the romance of the strange and unknown, as well as the attraction of heroes who use their minds and hearts as well as their brawn, is part of the best science fiction of all eras. It has been important in inspiring young readers and viewers, including those who would continue and expand the literature, as well as those who would become doctors and engineers, scientists and astronauts.
The adventure that combines the apparent magic of technology with the bright and mystical appeal of strange new worlds, carrying along with it so many other perennial fantasies and yearnings, sparks the imagination, particularly of the young. For instance, twelve year old Ursula LeGuin, who found a little leather bound copy of Lord Dusany’s A Dreamer’s Tale in the living room bookcase one boring evening. Later she and her brother shared copies of Thrilling Wonder Magazine, making favorite phrases from the stories a part of their secret language.
Or young Margaret Atwood, hiding from homework in the basement by reading H. Rider Haggard and H.G. Wells in old volumes forgotten by her father. Or young Issac Asimov, devouring the new issues of the sci-fi pulp magazines, reading in "vivid and agonizing transport because I wanted to be part of the story and couldn't…" These science fiction stories "ravished my soul and opened it to a music of the spheres that few can hear…"
Or young Henry Miller poring over Rider Haggard's tales in a secret hillside cave with his blood brothers—"these books were part of our Spartan discipline, our spiritual training…..Our grown-up boys, the scientists, prate about the imminent conquest of the moon” (he wrote in the 1960s); “our children have already voyaged far beyond the moon. They are ready, at a moment's notice, to take off for Vega—and beyond. They beg our supposedly superior intellects to furnish them with a new cosmogony and a new cosmology. They have grown intolerant of our naïve, limited, antiquated theories of the universe."
Or young Jose Luis Borges, exploring strange new worlds through the words of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. “Wells’ fictions were the first books I read,” he would later recall; “perhaps they will be the last.”
“Something so absurd as a boyhood book momentarily captures the mind and never quite releases it,” a character muses in a novel by Jim Harrison. The “childishness” in sci-fi adventure continues to speak to the child’s sense of possibility and yearning for purposeful action. It’s a chord that Star Trek continues to strike, forty years later.
So Star Trek had an adventure story hero in Captain Kirk, based largely on the hero of C. S. Forrester’s naval adventures, Horatio Hornblower. The conventions of fictional shipboard adventures were observed in characters like Scotty, the constantly-in-crisis, miracle-working engineer. The crusty, skeptical doctor with a heart of gold was familiar from westerns as well. The element of the fantastic was represented, of course, in the mysterious, otherworldly Mr. Spock.
The adventure is an aspect or a “level” of more sophisticated sci-fi: and the romance of the strange and unknown, as well as the attraction of heroes who use their minds and hearts as well as their brawn, is part of the best science fiction of all eras. It has been important in inspiring young readers and viewers, including those who would continue and expand the literature, as well as those who would become doctors and engineers, scientists and astronauts.
The adventure that combines the apparent magic of technology with the bright and mystical appeal of strange new worlds, carrying along with it so many other perennial fantasies and yearnings, sparks the imagination, particularly of the young. For instance, twelve year old Ursula LeGuin, who found a little leather bound copy of Lord Dusany’s A Dreamer’s Tale in the living room bookcase one boring evening. Later she and her brother shared copies of Thrilling Wonder Magazine, making favorite phrases from the stories a part of their secret language.
Or young Margaret Atwood, hiding from homework in the basement by reading H. Rider Haggard and H.G. Wells in old volumes forgotten by her father. Or young Issac Asimov, devouring the new issues of the sci-fi pulp magazines, reading in "vivid and agonizing transport because I wanted to be part of the story and couldn't…" These science fiction stories "ravished my soul and opened it to a music of the spheres that few can hear…"
Or young Henry Miller poring over Rider Haggard's tales in a secret hillside cave with his blood brothers—"these books were part of our Spartan discipline, our spiritual training…..Our grown-up boys, the scientists, prate about the imminent conquest of the moon” (he wrote in the 1960s); “our children have already voyaged far beyond the moon. They are ready, at a moment's notice, to take off for Vega—and beyond. They beg our supposedly superior intellects to furnish them with a new cosmogony and a new cosmology. They have grown intolerant of our naïve, limited, antiquated theories of the universe."
Or young Jose Luis Borges, exploring strange new worlds through the words of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. “Wells’ fictions were the first books I read,” he would later recall; “perhaps they will be the last.”
“Something so absurd as a boyhood book momentarily captures the mind and never quite releases it,” a character muses in a novel by Jim Harrison. The “childishness” in sci-fi adventure continues to speak to the child’s sense of possibility and yearning for purposeful action. It’s a chord that Star Trek continues to strike, forty years later.
Machine Dreams
Asimov’s second phase of sci-fi centered on science and technology themselves. The machinery imagined in the 30s and 40s—much of which became part of our lives in the 60s and since—took center stage as objects of fear and wonder, determining the future.
For some, future technologies were the essence of science fiction (some Star Trek commentators still stress this.) While these stories deal with dangers and misapplied technologies, they also suggest the wonder of what these technologies could do and how they expand the human presence and power in the universe.
Machine-centered sci-fi sought to convince readers these technologies were possible if not probable, and time was spent explaining how the technologies worked. The best authors created believability by showing how recognizable humans interact with these machines (to my mind, exemplified by the Russian sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem in Pirx the Pilot and other fictions.) At times, the technologies—particularly robots and space ships-- evinced personalities, and were often treated as characters.
Science was a basis for storytelling in other ways as well. A newly discovered or poorly understood scientific phenomenon could center a story, and scientifically-minded sci-fi heroes saved the day by applying their knowledge in large ways or small (as in the clever solutions used by the TV series hero, McGuyver.) Stories often offered a scientific basis for alien life on other planets, in general or in relation to a planet’s physical characteristics, or in explaining radically different forms of intelligent life.
Taking imaginary technology and the scientific possibilities of alien life so seriously became the defining characteristics of sci-fi fans in the public mind, and a source of ridicule. A divide arose between those who believed in the plausibility of these technologies and stories—for whom they were in that sense “real”—and those who reacted with alarm and contempt against fictional technologies or aliens as too strange and “unreal” began to define the sci-fi genre as outside the mainstream.
For their part, alienated fans and devotees of sci-fi pulps and novels began meeting in conventions and creating their own fan publications. It was this era of sci-fi that solidified the separation of science fiction from mainstream storytelling, and mainstream life. The characteristics of this era’s fiction, as well as the reaction to it, would become important in the development of the Star Trek universe, and in Star Trek’s history and fate.
Being grounded in science and reality was important especially in the conception of Star Trek’s universe in which all stories would take place. It not only honored an important element of sci-fi history (as “Tom Corbett” had done by hiring the eminent rocket expert Willy Ley as its science advisor) but it was also extremely important for television, for telling many stories over time.
For scientific accuracy, the Trek team consulted with scientists at RAND and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, involving technical matters at high and rarified levels, such as whether faster-than-light travel was possible, and if so, what principles might be involved in powering a craft through the immense distances between the stars.
But Roddenberry and other veterans could bring their own experience with large ships and large aircraft in World War II to the concept of a large starship and crew. The Trek team thought carefully about how many people would be aboard, where they would sleep and how they would eat. They thought about how the bridge would work best, and who would be on it. Where would the ideal place for the captain to be?
“My feeling was that if you didn’t believe in the spaceship,” Roddenberry said,”---if you didn’t believe you were in a vehicle traveling through space, a vehicle that made sense, whose layout and design made sense…then you wouldn’t believe in the series.”
As in many sci-fi stories, the ship—the Enterprise—was a major character. But this Enterprise was going to be seen, week after week, and most importantly, it had to be built. Star Trek created a believable, self-consistent technology, and believable, self-consistent universe.
But of course it didn’t sacrifice wonder. It was set in the future, so there was plenty of speculation and invention, generating ideas that forty years later is still generating actual new technologies.
Asimov’s second phase of sci-fi centered on science and technology themselves. The machinery imagined in the 30s and 40s—much of which became part of our lives in the 60s and since—took center stage as objects of fear and wonder, determining the future.
For some, future technologies were the essence of science fiction (some Star Trek commentators still stress this.) While these stories deal with dangers and misapplied technologies, they also suggest the wonder of what these technologies could do and how they expand the human presence and power in the universe.
Machine-centered sci-fi sought to convince readers these technologies were possible if not probable, and time was spent explaining how the technologies worked. The best authors created believability by showing how recognizable humans interact with these machines (to my mind, exemplified by the Russian sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem in Pirx the Pilot and other fictions.) At times, the technologies—particularly robots and space ships-- evinced personalities, and were often treated as characters.
Science was a basis for storytelling in other ways as well. A newly discovered or poorly understood scientific phenomenon could center a story, and scientifically-minded sci-fi heroes saved the day by applying their knowledge in large ways or small (as in the clever solutions used by the TV series hero, McGuyver.) Stories often offered a scientific basis for alien life on other planets, in general or in relation to a planet’s physical characteristics, or in explaining radically different forms of intelligent life.
Taking imaginary technology and the scientific possibilities of alien life so seriously became the defining characteristics of sci-fi fans in the public mind, and a source of ridicule. A divide arose between those who believed in the plausibility of these technologies and stories—for whom they were in that sense “real”—and those who reacted with alarm and contempt against fictional technologies or aliens as too strange and “unreal” began to define the sci-fi genre as outside the mainstream.
For their part, alienated fans and devotees of sci-fi pulps and novels began meeting in conventions and creating their own fan publications. It was this era of sci-fi that solidified the separation of science fiction from mainstream storytelling, and mainstream life. The characteristics of this era’s fiction, as well as the reaction to it, would become important in the development of the Star Trek universe, and in Star Trek’s history and fate.
Being grounded in science and reality was important especially in the conception of Star Trek’s universe in which all stories would take place. It not only honored an important element of sci-fi history (as “Tom Corbett” had done by hiring the eminent rocket expert Willy Ley as its science advisor) but it was also extremely important for television, for telling many stories over time.
For scientific accuracy, the Trek team consulted with scientists at RAND and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, involving technical matters at high and rarified levels, such as whether faster-than-light travel was possible, and if so, what principles might be involved in powering a craft through the immense distances between the stars.
But Roddenberry and other veterans could bring their own experience with large ships and large aircraft in World War II to the concept of a large starship and crew. The Trek team thought carefully about how many people would be aboard, where they would sleep and how they would eat. They thought about how the bridge would work best, and who would be on it. Where would the ideal place for the captain to be?
“My feeling was that if you didn’t believe in the spaceship,” Roddenberry said,”---if you didn’t believe you were in a vehicle traveling through space, a vehicle that made sense, whose layout and design made sense…then you wouldn’t believe in the series.”
As in many sci-fi stories, the ship—the Enterprise—was a major character. But this Enterprise was going to be seen, week after week, and most importantly, it had to be built. Star Trek created a believable, self-consistent technology, and believable, self-consistent universe.
But of course it didn’t sacrifice wonder. It was set in the future, so there was plenty of speculation and invention, generating ideas that forty years later is still generating actual new technologies.
The Wells Rules
While Star Trek took its technology seriously, it did not allow technology to be its master, or the master of its future. Apart from what this said about the future, it was essential to dramatic television . “Drama is people,” GR said. “Too much of science fiction is about gadgets and not about people…. I’m going to try to make it as scientifically accurate as possible and write [these scripts] the way we wrote the old Playhouse 90.”
But this is also a description of the best science fiction, using rules described by H.G. Wells in a preface to his collected science fiction novels in 1934. First, there was the new fantastic element the story introduces, like a time machine, or invaders from Mars. Wells called it “the magic trick.” The trick itself has to be at least plausible, and science provided the rationale. Wells called it “an ingenuous use of scientific patter…as near actual theory as possible.”
It also helped if this element could be “explained in commonplace terms.” So Wells could suggest that the time machine moves you through time like a railroad train moves you through space, or a balloon moves against gravitation and takes you into the air. He could describe what it looked like in familiar terms---nickel bars, quartz rods, ivory and brass--without needing to really say how a time machine would actually work.
But in addition to some intrinsic plausibility, the trick worked best if it is surrounded by other elements of the ordinary---by the familiar. You must “domesticate the impossible hypothesis,” Wells wrote. It was also important to limit the number of magic tricks, Wells warned, or the whole reality would be called into question. “Nothing remains interesting when anything may happen.”
Part of creating a credible world was also a key to science fiction’s function: integrating the human into the science and the fiction by placing believable people in plausible if unprecedented circumstances. “Then it becomes human,” Wells wrote. “’How would you feel and what might not happen to you’ is the typical question, if for instance…you became invisible?”
The intent finally is “to keep everything human and real…the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired.”
The fantastic would at times be the magic trick, and at other times part of the reality. Although not as well known a name as Wells, another British science fiction author (and Wells devotee) was Olaf Stapledon. While Wells originated most of the basic ideas sci-fi authors would use forever after, Stapledon contributed one powerful and lasting one: the galactic history, following species and civilizations across eons of time. Most sci-fi writers have read Stapledon with awe, and that includes Roddenberry, who specifically read his work while he prepared Star Trek, and then again as he was preparing Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here’s what Stapledon wrote about the place of the fantastic in tales of space and time:
“Had I chosen matter in which there was nothing whatever of the fantastic, its very plausibility would have rendered it implausible,” Stapledon wrote in his preface to Last and First Men (one of the novels Roddenberry read). “For one thing at least is almost certain about the future, namely, that very much of it will be such as we should call incredible.”
While Star Trek took its technology seriously, it did not allow technology to be its master, or the master of its future. Apart from what this said about the future, it was essential to dramatic television . “Drama is people,” GR said. “Too much of science fiction is about gadgets and not about people…. I’m going to try to make it as scientifically accurate as possible and write [these scripts] the way we wrote the old Playhouse 90.”
But this is also a description of the best science fiction, using rules described by H.G. Wells in a preface to his collected science fiction novels in 1934. First, there was the new fantastic element the story introduces, like a time machine, or invaders from Mars. Wells called it “the magic trick.” The trick itself has to be at least plausible, and science provided the rationale. Wells called it “an ingenuous use of scientific patter…as near actual theory as possible.”
It also helped if this element could be “explained in commonplace terms.” So Wells could suggest that the time machine moves you through time like a railroad train moves you through space, or a balloon moves against gravitation and takes you into the air. He could describe what it looked like in familiar terms---nickel bars, quartz rods, ivory and brass--without needing to really say how a time machine would actually work.
But in addition to some intrinsic plausibility, the trick worked best if it is surrounded by other elements of the ordinary---by the familiar. You must “domesticate the impossible hypothesis,” Wells wrote. It was also important to limit the number of magic tricks, Wells warned, or the whole reality would be called into question. “Nothing remains interesting when anything may happen.”
Part of creating a credible world was also a key to science fiction’s function: integrating the human into the science and the fiction by placing believable people in plausible if unprecedented circumstances. “Then it becomes human,” Wells wrote. “’How would you feel and what might not happen to you’ is the typical question, if for instance…you became invisible?”
The intent finally is “to keep everything human and real…the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired.”
The fantastic would at times be the magic trick, and at other times part of the reality. Although not as well known a name as Wells, another British science fiction author (and Wells devotee) was Olaf Stapledon. While Wells originated most of the basic ideas sci-fi authors would use forever after, Stapledon contributed one powerful and lasting one: the galactic history, following species and civilizations across eons of time. Most sci-fi writers have read Stapledon with awe, and that includes Roddenberry, who specifically read his work while he prepared Star Trek, and then again as he was preparing Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here’s what Stapledon wrote about the place of the fantastic in tales of space and time:
“Had I chosen matter in which there was nothing whatever of the fantastic, its very plausibility would have rendered it implausible,” Stapledon wrote in his preface to Last and First Men (one of the novels Roddenberry read). “For one thing at least is almost certain about the future, namely, that very much of it will be such as we should call incredible.”
The Gulliver Factor
The third period Asimov identified was dominated by what he called “sociology.” It shifted attention away from technology itself to its effects on people and society. It flourished in the 1950s after the atom bomb and as awareness of environmental damage and anxieties over the possible coming dominance of “thinking machines” permeated all arts and culture.
There is a definite strain of this in Star Trek, especially in the consistent humanizing of technology through the characters’ relationship to the Enterprise, and the explorations of the proper uses of technology. But looked at more broadly, this might include other levels of story that were present in the best science fiction from the beginning—from before there was a sci-fi genre. It’s the level of metaphor and allegory—what might be called the Gulliver Factor.
By 1964 Roddenberry was meeting regularly with Herb Solow to flesh out the Star Trek premise. To reinforce believability, Solow suggested a narrative tactic he remembered from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.” These experiences among fantastic societies no one had ever seen were described matter-of-factly with the vocabulary of a traveler’s report. Because Gulliver talked about them as if they had already happened, it suggested to readers that they should accept these events as having happened. Solow advised they use this approach for Star Trek. Even though the events were to take place in a future inaccessible to the viewer, they could be presented as stories or reports related by a narrator who had already experienced them. This became the subtle tactic of the “Captain’s Log” that began episodes, and also provided useful for exposition and reminding viewers what they’d seen before the commercials.
But Gulliver’s Travels suggested that other possibility. “I recalled that when Jonathan Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels, he wanted to write satire on his time,” Roddenberry said later. By setting his adventure in Lilliput, “he could talk about insane prime ministers and crooked kings, and all of that…Children could read it as a fairy tale, an adventure, and as they got older they’d recognize it for what it really is. It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects, happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by. And it did.”
This feature of Star Trek’s storytelling---the allegorical or metaphorical dimension—became a major part of its identity. Many years later, when he recalled realizing that he could do what Swift had done, Roddenberry described it as a kind of religious experience.
Of course, contemporary commentaries disguised as science fiction had a pedigree going back to George Orwell and beyond; they’d even been done on television very recently. The Twilight Zone told stories concerning fallout shelters and nuclear holocaust that became the topic of conversations across America the next day, but everything was located in an imaginary realm. Stories on The Outer Limits dealt with Presidential assassination and electronic surveillance.
But the Gulliver difference was in the possibility of a continuing exploration by a central character or set of characters, one of which Roddenberry always intended would be the Enterprise itself. In fact, Solow and GR were so enamoured with the Jonathan Swift model that for a brief moment they were going to rename the series “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Besides the believable universe for telling allegorical tales, Star Trek provided an additional dimension. Building a universe from nothing was a difficult task, but it also was a remarkable opportunity. Perhaps it happened intuitively or incrementally over the years, but eventually Roddenberry saw his chance to embody a vision of a better future. For after all, if you have to build a universe from scratch, why not build one you’d like to live in? Not only would that be satisfying and even edifying on many levels, it might turn out to be the kind of universe that viewers will want to live in, too, at least for sixty minutes a week.
For one thing, envisioning this as a better future simply made sense. Humanity would have to improve itself as well as its technology simply to survive into the future. As some people who thought seriously about the future were already pointing out, a number of serious problems will need to be addressed if humanity was going to continue in the general direction of its development. There would have to be societies capable of supporting these imagined technological developments, which would mean, for instance, avoiding one catastrophic war too many, and dealing with the limitations of environmental resources.
Envisioning a better future was a philosophical task, and one that at least some science fiction had taken on. It was present in Roddenberry’s thinking about the crew of the Enterprise, and it would grow to become another essential and defining characteristic of Star Trek.
Stories are by their nature explorations. Science fiction stories simultaneously explore the future and the present. They use the future and imagined other worlds and beings to reflect on humanity now. In Star Trek, those reflections become purposeful guides to the future: morality plays or simply probes exploring possibilities that suggest how we need to be and to become in order to get to that better future of humanity fulfilled.
The adventure, the possibilities and the unintended effects of science and technology, the particular allegorical and metaphorical possibilities of science fiction storytelling, and the exploration of soul as well as machinery, are all essential to imagining a better future, and all are part of Star Trek’s science fiction storytelling.
In the introduction to his book, Profiles of the Future (which GR read and admired while developing Star Trek), Arthur C. Clarke writes: "…I would now go so far as to claim that only readers or writers of science-fiction are really competent to discuss the possibilities of the future…A critical—the adjective is important—reading of science-fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead. The facts of the future can hardly be imagined ab initio by those who are unfamiliar with the fantasies of the past."
In another essay, Clarke quotes from a 1957 article by Hermann J. Muller, discoverer of the genetic effects of radiation: "If our art…does not explore the relations and contingencies implicit in the greater world into which we are forcing our way, and does not reflect the hopes and fears based on these appraisals, then the art is a dead pretense…But man will not live without art. In a scientific age he will therefore have science fiction."
The third period Asimov identified was dominated by what he called “sociology.” It shifted attention away from technology itself to its effects on people and society. It flourished in the 1950s after the atom bomb and as awareness of environmental damage and anxieties over the possible coming dominance of “thinking machines” permeated all arts and culture.
There is a definite strain of this in Star Trek, especially in the consistent humanizing of technology through the characters’ relationship to the Enterprise, and the explorations of the proper uses of technology. But looked at more broadly, this might include other levels of story that were present in the best science fiction from the beginning—from before there was a sci-fi genre. It’s the level of metaphor and allegory—what might be called the Gulliver Factor.
By 1964 Roddenberry was meeting regularly with Herb Solow to flesh out the Star Trek premise. To reinforce believability, Solow suggested a narrative tactic he remembered from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.” These experiences among fantastic societies no one had ever seen were described matter-of-factly with the vocabulary of a traveler’s report. Because Gulliver talked about them as if they had already happened, it suggested to readers that they should accept these events as having happened. Solow advised they use this approach for Star Trek. Even though the events were to take place in a future inaccessible to the viewer, they could be presented as stories or reports related by a narrator who had already experienced them. This became the subtle tactic of the “Captain’s Log” that began episodes, and also provided useful for exposition and reminding viewers what they’d seen before the commercials.
But Gulliver’s Travels suggested that other possibility. “I recalled that when Jonathan Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels, he wanted to write satire on his time,” Roddenberry said later. By setting his adventure in Lilliput, “he could talk about insane prime ministers and crooked kings, and all of that…Children could read it as a fairy tale, an adventure, and as they got older they’d recognize it for what it really is. It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects, happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by. And it did.”
This feature of Star Trek’s storytelling---the allegorical or metaphorical dimension—became a major part of its identity. Many years later, when he recalled realizing that he could do what Swift had done, Roddenberry described it as a kind of religious experience.
Of course, contemporary commentaries disguised as science fiction had a pedigree going back to George Orwell and beyond; they’d even been done on television very recently. The Twilight Zone told stories concerning fallout shelters and nuclear holocaust that became the topic of conversations across America the next day, but everything was located in an imaginary realm. Stories on The Outer Limits dealt with Presidential assassination and electronic surveillance.
But the Gulliver difference was in the possibility of a continuing exploration by a central character or set of characters, one of which Roddenberry always intended would be the Enterprise itself. In fact, Solow and GR were so enamoured with the Jonathan Swift model that for a brief moment they were going to rename the series “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Besides the believable universe for telling allegorical tales, Star Trek provided an additional dimension. Building a universe from nothing was a difficult task, but it also was a remarkable opportunity. Perhaps it happened intuitively or incrementally over the years, but eventually Roddenberry saw his chance to embody a vision of a better future. For after all, if you have to build a universe from scratch, why not build one you’d like to live in? Not only would that be satisfying and even edifying on many levels, it might turn out to be the kind of universe that viewers will want to live in, too, at least for sixty minutes a week.
For one thing, envisioning this as a better future simply made sense. Humanity would have to improve itself as well as its technology simply to survive into the future. As some people who thought seriously about the future were already pointing out, a number of serious problems will need to be addressed if humanity was going to continue in the general direction of its development. There would have to be societies capable of supporting these imagined technological developments, which would mean, for instance, avoiding one catastrophic war too many, and dealing with the limitations of environmental resources.
Envisioning a better future was a philosophical task, and one that at least some science fiction had taken on. It was present in Roddenberry’s thinking about the crew of the Enterprise, and it would grow to become another essential and defining characteristic of Star Trek.
Stories are by their nature explorations. Science fiction stories simultaneously explore the future and the present. They use the future and imagined other worlds and beings to reflect on humanity now. In Star Trek, those reflections become purposeful guides to the future: morality plays or simply probes exploring possibilities that suggest how we need to be and to become in order to get to that better future of humanity fulfilled.
The adventure, the possibilities and the unintended effects of science and technology, the particular allegorical and metaphorical possibilities of science fiction storytelling, and the exploration of soul as well as machinery, are all essential to imagining a better future, and all are part of Star Trek’s science fiction storytelling.
In the introduction to his book, Profiles of the Future (which GR read and admired while developing Star Trek), Arthur C. Clarke writes: "…I would now go so far as to claim that only readers or writers of science-fiction are really competent to discuss the possibilities of the future…A critical—the adjective is important—reading of science-fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead. The facts of the future can hardly be imagined ab initio by those who are unfamiliar with the fantasies of the past."
In another essay, Clarke quotes from a 1957 article by Hermann J. Muller, discoverer of the genetic effects of radiation: "If our art…does not explore the relations and contingencies implicit in the greater world into which we are forcing our way, and does not reflect the hopes and fears based on these appraisals, then the art is a dead pretense…But man will not live without art. In a scientific age he will therefore have science fiction."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)