Gulliver's Star Trek

Captain Gulliver?

Marking Herb Solow’s death last year, I was among those who recalled his suggestion of the Captain’s Logs as one of his contributions to Star Trek. The idea came to him in discussions with Gene Roddenberry about a book they both admired, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. But that was not this book’s only influence. Gulliver’s Travels is an important ancestor not only of Star Trek but of science fiction in general. 

 Apart from Roddenberry, the key participants in developing Star Trek from a concept to a television series were probably executive Solow, producer Robert Justman and writer Sam Peeples. In the early pages of Star Trek: The Real Story, the book Solow authored with Justman, Solow recounts how enthusiastic he and Gene Roddenberry were about Swift’s classic in one of those early discussions. It got to the point, he wrote, that they were ready to rename the entire series Gulliver’s Travels, and instead of Captain Pike or Kirk, the starship would be led by Captain Gulliver.

 A few days later they thought better of it and returned to the original title. Solow wrote that, having studied Swift’s 18th century book in college, he had more easily suspended disbelief in the fantastic story because the narrator was recounting travels he’d had in the past, in the matter-of-fact manner of a report. Swift was commandeering for his own purposes a well-known narrative form, the traveler’s tale, or the tale of exploration that flourished from the 15th century well into the 19th. Solow theorized that the Captain’s Log voiceovers, placing the voyages in the past, would make them more credible.

 Unfortunately that’s not what the Captain’s Logs actually do in the series or its descendants. They are updates in the midst of a mission such as questions a Captain is trying to answer, actions they intend to take, or simply summaries of events that have taken place off-camera (during the commercials perhaps)—but the mission being described is not in the past. 

 

Still, Gulliver’s Travels was a major influence on Star Trek, and on Gene Roddenberry. He talked about one important aspect in an interview. “I thought with science fiction I might do what Jonathan Swift did when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels,” Roddenberry said. “He lived in a time when you could lose your head for making religious and political comments. I was working in a medium, television, which was heavily censored, and in contemporary shows I found I couldn’t talk about sex, politics, religion and the other things I wanted to talk about. It seemed to me that if I had things happen to little polka-dotted people on a far-off planet, I might get past the network censors, as Swift did in his day.” 

 Indeed, Swift saw his work as a veiled critique of his times. So in his account of Gulliver’s first voyage, Lilliput stood in relation to the neighboring kingdom of Blefuscu as 18th century England did to France, and a number of characters were based on statesmen and military leaders of the time.

 But had these parallels to now long forgotten people and events been the dominant aspect of Gulliver’s Travels, by now it would be an obscure literary footnote.  Other features of Swift’s tale kept it alive through the centuries, and in the process, deeply influenced even the science fiction and fantasy of our time, including Roddenberry’s Star Trek.

 Most modern science fiction can be traced directly back to one author in the last decade of the 19th century: H.G. Wells. In his book Alternate Worlds science fiction writer and teacher James Gunn lists fourteen classic themes of science fiction. Wells is the first author to employ eight of them, and the second or third writer to use four more—which is all the themes except two. Scholar Frank McConnell comments, “The omission of Wells from those two is debatable.” Science fiction scholar Darko Suvin is even more specific: “...All subsequent SF can be said to have sprung from Wells’ The Time Machine.”

 

In a preface to a collection of his science fiction novels, Wells noted: "My early, profound and lifelong admiration for Swift, appears again and again in this collection...” And while he also cited its influence in his “predisposition to make the stories reflect upon contemporary political and social discussions," what else he learned from Swift—including ways to use a connection to even earlier sources—is evident in the range of his science fiction. 

 At this point it might be useful to briefly review what Gulliver’s Travels contains. Most people are first exposed to it as children, but almost entirely to the story of Gulliver’s first voyage, to Lilliput, where he is an immense giant in comparison to the tiny size of the Lilliputians. In fact, a Google image search for Gulliver’s Travels yields illustrations mostly of this episode. The illustration I use here is from the My Book House series, and the very book where I first saw the story. At least the words I read were Swift’s—most children today see film or cartoon versions that use the premise but not Swift’s writing.

 However, Lilliput represents only the first of four voyages in Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver’s second voyage is to Brobdingnag, a nation of giants in which Gulliver is about the size that Lilliputians were to him. 

 

The third voyage took him first to Laputa, an island floating in the sky, with a population of intense thinkers whose tortured musings on science, mathematics and music led them to contempt for anything practical, like a well-built house. Also, due to their astronomical observations, they were excessively fearful of catastrophes in the far future.

 Laputa ruled over the continent below, called Balnibarbi, where Gulliver went next. There he found a society that had amplified and misinterpreted a few shreds of science from Laputa, and devoted their society to utopian projects of impossible complexity to be realized in an ever-receding future, while neglecting the work and the efficiency available to them in the present.

 Making his way home, Gulliver visited Glubbdubdrib, described as in North America west of California. It is an island of magicians, where the Governor had the power to call into being any historical personages that Gulliver desired to meet. Then among the Luggnuggians he learns the disadvantages of living too long.

 

On these voyages, Gulliver had signed on as a ship’s doctor, but for his fourth voyage he began as the captain of a merchant ship. But when several of his crew died of a sickness, he was forced to hire unscrupulous replacements who soon engineered a mutiny and left him on an unknown shore. There he was captured by the Yahoos, primitive humans, then rescued by the Houyhnhmns, a race of intelligent horses.

 This brief outline itself suggests any number of science fiction stories, including Star Trek episodes. They also suggest science fiction’s roots in folklore, and the basic stance, the secret ingredient, that makes science fiction work in its role of illuminating our present. 

 Centuries after the society Swift was criticizing and satirizing has disappeared, Gulliver’s Travels retains its charm, its magic, and even its relevance. A major reason why is its connection to more ancient folk and mythological stories, and to figures that may intrigue and delight us, but may also have deeper relationships to archetypes of human experience.

 For example, Swift’s best-known invention, the Lilliputians, were preceded by the “little people” in various mythologies of Europe, Asia and the Americas, as well as Tom Thumb, the first fairy tale to be published in English.

 There are giants and satyrs in Greek mythology, and magicians capable of conjuring up ghosts in many folk traditions. The very idea of a voyage to unknown lands where strange beings and strange societies exist—I’m trying hard not to say strange new worlds—is the theme of many fairy tales and folk tales.

 Like Swift, H.G. Wells populated his science fiction with new versions of old wonders. This was a key insight by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin in his perceptive essay on Wells. (Zamyatin was the author of the pioneer dystopian novel We, as well as a book editor who published Wells in Russia). “The motifs of the Wellsian urban fairy tales are essentially the same as those encountered in all other fairy tales: the invisible cap, the flying carpet, the bursting grass, the self-setting tablecloth, dragons, giants, gnomes, mermaids, and man-eating monsters,” he observed.

 But the essential lesson is suggested by that bit of misdirection that both Wells and Roddenberry mentioned—by setting the tale in some strange time and place—some Out There—its relevance to this time and place can either be inferred or ignored. It can even be denied. It’s just a story.

 But that has more general and more profound applications. For another place and time provides a perspective, a place to step back and look with fresh eyes. That idea can then be expanded in all kinds of ways, as Swift did, and as science fiction does. It’s about perspective, about a place to stand and look. 

In science fiction, it’s about looking at humanity from an alien’s point of view, or looking at an alien society and seeing more clearly the hopeful or uncomfortable aspects of one’s own world. Or, as often happens in 23rd and 24th century Star Trek, clarifying the insights and principles humanity has come to embrace.

 Strange new worlds provide a perspective—a way to view humanity and its societies as from the outside, or in contrast to very different beings and societies. This ability to stand outside the contemporary world, even a little, is essential to science fiction, and two of its primary modes: the dystopian and the utopian tale.

 Swift did this partly by inference and allegory, but also directly as when Gulliver discussed his own society with the leaders of the various places he visited—first with great pride, but then with increasing doubt and dread. In science fiction this can be accomplished by time travel, as when the 23rd century Enterprise crew visits the San Francisco of the 1970s in Star Trek: The Voyage Home. Similar scenes can be found in many science fiction tales over the years. 

 Wells learned the lesson of contrasts, which intrigue us and provide new perspective. Just as Gulliver learned about his own pretensions when he found himself humbled by giants, Wells’ stories work out how perspectives change when someone is the only person who can see in a country of the blind, or who has taken a drug that speeds up his perceptions so that he effectively becomes invisible (an idea that recurs in Star Trek.)

 Science fiction has often followed these patterns. Sometimes Gulliver’s Travels influenced science fiction directly. Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, particularly the Buster Crabbe movie serials, made Flash a kind of Gulliver, as well as pretty much copying the island floating in the sky. And there is at least a glimmer of Spock in the fourth book, where the intelligent horses are models of restraint who, when hearing Gulliver describe his human society, consider it totally illogical. 

 There’s even a little 18th century preview of Star Trek technobabble that opens the second book, where Swift goes into detailed and nonsensical nautical jargon (“We reeft the Foresail and set him, we hawled aft the Foresheet.. belayed the Foredown-hall...and hawled off the Lanniard of the Wipstaff...”), which he copied out of a mariner’s magazine. 

 The lessons of contrast may link Swift to Star Trek in a more specific way. In one of the critical analyses included in the Norton Critical Edition of Gulliver’s Travels, Samuel Holt Monk wrote about the idea of “man’s middle state” that was prominent in the 18th century. Swift’s friend, the poet Alexander Pope expressed it this way: “Placed on the isthmus of a middle state/A being darkly wise, and rudely great.” Roughly speaking, humans were below God and the angels, and above the animals, but human nature contained elements of both higher and lower beings.

 In its 23rd century way, Star Trek explored humanity’s middle state as the Enterprise confronted beings vastly more powerful and intelligent, and civilizations much more primitive. By changing proportions the way Swift did in Lilliput and Brobdingnag, features of human society and attitudes are revealed more clearly.

The Organians in Errand of Mercy

 Sometimes the more powerful beings are revealed as arrogant and failing in feeling, especially compassion. One such original series episode even included the Greek god Apollo to emphasize human growth from a more primitive and passive time. Occasionally, the higher civilization reveals the follies of human (and Klingon) preoccupations, as in the classic episode “Errand of Mercy.” Often the more powerful beings test humanity through the Enterprise crew. 

 On other voyages, the Enterprise encounters societies that suggest humanity in earlier stages of cultural evolution, or even societies almost equal in development that lack a key insight that 23rd century humans have adopted. These encounters often lead to the Enterprise crew recognizing the strengths and weaknesses, but above all the reality, of their middle state: their combination of physical passions, emotional connections, mental intelligence and spiritual yearnings and commitments—the constituents taken together and harmonized, say contemporary writers, of the human soul. 

 

Sometimes their ability to imagine or conceptualize alternatives proves important; other times their emotions (especially when the more powerful beings are machines.) Seeing himself split in two revealed to Kirk the need to accommodate all sides of his nature.

 This interplay of qualities is mirrored in the crew itself, especially the so-called triumvirate of the original series: the cerebral and ethical Spock, the emotional McCoy, the passionate Kirk, who understands his need as Captain to preserve the balance of these qualities. The Captain is the hero of the middle state.  

The Traveler in TNG

The middle state also implies diversity: the diversity of humans on the bridge, the diversity of humans and aliens working together. This also is an example for “higher” beings and “lower” civilizations that tend to be one-sided. (The emphasis changes somewhat in the Next Generation and later, where some “higher” or just vastly different beings are viewed with humility and respect, and lesser beings are honored as all life forms are.)

 For just as Star Trek stories about the Federation v. Klingons or Romulans are in some sense allegories for encounters between human societies, other Trek stories or aspects of stories find models in folk tales and teaching stories about animals and magical creatures, although often filtered by earlier science fiction or television plots.  All of them function as a place to view some aspect of humanity from the outside as well as subjectively.

 But the potential for using such figures to tell stories about the human condition was demonstrated by Jonathan Swift. And by going along on Gulliver’s travels, storytellers from H.G. Wells to Gene Roddenberry and beyond defined and demonstrated what science fiction could uniquely do.  So maybe it was Gulliver's Star Trek after all.