After Katrina AP Photo

There is one persistent and not very pretty theory as to why the poorer residents of New Orleans were left exposed to the catastrophic results of the hurricane, and why there was not more urgency in rescuing them. It is, the theory goes, because they are poor, and largely African-American.

In Star Trek lore, the choice of New Orleans as the home of Star Trek’s first African-American captain was probably not accidental. New Orleans is one of the greatest sources of African-American culture, and as the place where the great gumbo of jazz music was cooked up and sent to northern cities, it is a major source of American culture, as it has grown here and as it is known around the world.

The blues of New Orleans also were a major source for rock music, which itself has combined with other forms in other cultures. This connection was made more poignant when Fats Domino, one of the pioneers of rock and roll from New Orleans, was found among survivors in New Orleans several days after the hurricane.

The Mississippi River ends there, and the music of all the rivers that flow into it came to New Orleans, like Appalachian mountain music with some of its origins in the British isles. It is an ocean port, once held by the French, and a place where French Canadians from Nova Scotia came as exiles, and brought their music. Perhaps the most underrated musical influence is American Indian (the in-“jun” in Cajun) but it is clearly present in the blues as well as New Orleans jazz. And of course, the music of Africa that came with the slaves to this slave ship port.

As Michelle Erica Green points out in her column on Star Trek and New Orleans here, the ethnic mix of New Orleans includes English, Spanish and Caribbean Islanders, and there have been new immigrants in the area from various parts of Asia and the Middle East.

This was diversity that combined to make meaning and beauty for all the world. But it is also heir to a century of slavery and several centuries of racial prejudice. It wasn’t over when Louis Armstrong couldn’t play with white musicians. It wasn’t over when Nichelle Nichols, touring as a singer, was refused hotel lodgings.

All that is apparently gone in the 24th century. But even though it takes less obvious forms, it is not gone in the 21st.. Applied to the issue of New Orleans now, it is worth considering it as a component. The only way to combat unconscious racism is to raise the question, and make the possibility conscious.

Sisko's in Star Trek's 24th century New Orleans 

There is another factor that seems to have contributed to the ongoing catastrophe, besides a weak sense of the public good and the role of governments in it, and perhaps a prejudice or blindness that leads to neglecting the poor and the sick and non-whites. Though it is different from them, it is related.

It is the failure to plan for the future. Star Trek fans are used to seeing Starfleet officers gather in the observation lounge or at Starfleet headquarters to describe an anticipated problem, suggest ways to solve it, debate those solutions and develop a plan. In fact, lots of science fiction films---even not very good ones---often show scientists and government leaders coming together to discuss a future threat and then devote whatever resources are necessary to combating it.

That doesn’t seem to happen often enough in our time. Scientists and engineers have known for years how vulnerable New Orleans is to hurricanes and floods. It’s been written about in the National Geographic and elsewhere. New Orleans lies below sea level; Sebastian Junger (author of “The Perfect Storm”) speaks of the sensation of looking up to see oil tankers on the river above.

The levees protecting the city were built to withstand a category 3 hurricane, when the stronger category 4s are less common but still expected, and the category 5 is always possible. The federal government under the current administration cut back funds to complete needed work on the levees. (This is one possible way the resources devoted to the war in Iraq also was a factor. Most controversial is that nearly half of Mississippi’s National Guard is in Iraq, as is more than a third of Louisiana’s, including the 3,000 member brigade with the kind of equipment most needed now in New Orleans.)

Moreover, other problems were known: for example, the city was protected by outlying wetlands, but as a result of development they have been shrinking and weakening. This exposes the city to more of a hurricane's power.

But what is most tragically apparent is lack of preparation. There apparently were no emergency plans or provisions in place for what scientists said was the most likely natural catastrophe in the US. There especially was no plan, and there were no resources provided, for evacuating New Orleans, other than telling people with the means to leave, when to leave.

Mr. Spock would find this illogical, and it’s likely that most Star Trek fans would agree. But even if a human propensity for denial, and the inefficiencies and illogic of bureaucracy are factored in, the reasons for this failure to plan for the future are still incomplete.

Planning for the future requires more than the know-how and devoting some attention to more than today. Planning for the future requires that you care about the future. It is an act of compassion, not only for people of the present and the present world, but for people in the future. That necessarily means all the people of the future.

This requires commitment to the common good, not only of now, but of the future. It requires commitment to diversity not only of the moment, but of posterity.

This basic principle does not require a leap in human evolution. It may have been the human species greatest advantage. Anticipating the future and planning for it is a chief rationale for human cultures. Even traditional cultures hand down their traditions because they fervently believe this is the way to live and approach the future.

It is, after all, one of the great traditional cultures of America that gave us a profound guide to thinking about the future, in the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee: “In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come.”

Anticipating problems and preventing them almost always is less difficult and less costly than trying to rectify the damage. Yet anticipating future problems also means devoting resources in the present to something that may not happen, and therefore may not be necessary. In a present-centered culture, this is very difficult politically.

So in this sense, to go forward is to recover an aspect of cultures of the past. Even now, there may be a residual sense that our leaders and governments should take responsibility for at least preventing predictable near-future catastrophes, and certainly be prepared for emergencies that may never come. Reponse to the New Orleans catastrophe may tell us what this culture expects in its leaders and institutions, in taking responsibility for the common good, and acting responsibly for the future.

But even that is not quite enough. We need to anticipate and plan more positively, for the common good and the common future. This is an important role for Star Trek and Star Trek fans. The future depends on establishing cultures that not only consider the impact of present actions on the future, but actively believe in the future as a value and a priority.

This is a role for Star Trek viewers because they have seen this better future--that is, they have seen what it could be. They have participated in it through the imagination of those who created Star Trek and their own imaginations as viewers. This is also an important process in learning empathy, compassion and concern for the common good, as well as concern for the future. Drama makes the future real now.

If we can create a culture that cares about the future, perhaps our 24th century will also have a vibrant, diverse and connected New Orleans in it, where Starfleet officers can touch earth again, grasp the reality of the human family and the generations, while savoring some Creole cooking created before their eyes, but with an age-old recipe, and ageless care.

past and future hero of a present mythology of the future: James Doohan as Scotty.

Star Trek: A Mythology of the Future

by William S. Kowinski

“We’re here to remember one of the heroes of the Scottish culture,” begins Black, festooned in a red Enterprise uniform T-shirt and speaking in a Glaswegian burr, as he takes the microphone. “Cmdr. Montgomery Scott—Scotty.”

A ripple of laughter washes through the audience at the pub. Black pauses in mock ignorance.

“Why are you all laughing?” he ask mischievously.”

“Pub Pays Tribute to a True Scot—Canadian James Doohan”
by Jane Ganahl, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug 23, 2005.


Most myths are set in the past, implying that the age of heroes and defining deeds is in the remote long ago. This is especially appropriate for certain kinds of myths, such as explanations of how the world or a people came to be; the foundation stories of a culture.

But in the modern era, a belief in progress through time made myths of the future possible. There is also the sense of a challenging future shaped by changes we can’t really foresee. This is especially true about the far future and the “final frontier” of outer space, which adds the dimension of territory unknown to us, and probably filled with immense yet not completely defined dangers, as the great oceans and the lands beyond them were in the past of many cultures on earth.

The future, and outer space in particular, create conditions that encourage new mythologies---that may even call for a mythology of the future, to give us some framework for conceiving how humanity can see itself in this future.

Still, when such a mythology exists in the present, it can cause some confusion and, let’s say, temporal anomalies. When a contemporary man named James Doohan died, something of a hero in his own right as a severely wounded veteran of D-Day, the character he is best known for playing is suddenly the center of a controversy: where in Scotland will Montgomery Scott be born in several hundred years? Three cities want to claim him now, and erect a plaque in his honor. According to the SF Chronicle’s Jane Ganahl, it’s led to “quite the tempest” in Scotland’s press.

But this temporal oddity only emphasizes an important feature of mythology: whether the heroes and events described in the myth are said to be in the past or in the future, the mythology is very definitely in the now. It is the effect on the present that makes myth important.

This is especially relevant to America, where Star Trek itself was born. Native American cultures have many stories of their past. But as a nation, America has few. Because our age is characterized by looking ahead, and because the future has always been essential to the American identity, our culture is also defined by myths of the future. It may well be that our foundation mythology is the mythology of the future.

But just because the future and outer space furnish the occasion for myth, and our culture has the need, doesn’t mean such myth will emerge. If the Star Trek saga is that mythology of the future---and no other story or set of stories has a better claim---it is only because of all the things it did right. Many of these elements were carefully thought through, some the product of apparent accident, some of a special time, some of artistic responses to the times and to the exigencies of form and business, some to inspiration, talent, intelligence and soul, and much which can be essentially attributed to love.

text continues after photos

To think like a hero...

What’s Mything in the Present?

What can mythology mean when it’s applied to the future? It depends on what mythologies represent in the present.

Some believe myths are to cultures what dreams are to individuals. The literary critic Northrup Frye says this explicitly: “Ordinary life forms a community, and literature is among other things an art of communication, so it forms a community, too,” he writes in "The Educated Imagination." “In ordinary life we fall into a private and separate subconscious every night, where we reshape the world according to a private and separate imagination. Underneath literature there’s another kind of subconscious, which is social and not private, a need for forming a community around certain symbols….This is the myth-making power of the human mind, which throws up and dissolves one civilization after another.”

But if myth is a reflection, an artistic retelling of a culture’s dreams, it later functions as a kind of guide. We emulate heroes of our myths. There’s a fine example of how this works in a Star Trek novel, “Gulliver’s Fugitives” by Keith Sharee. On a world where products of the imagination are illegal because stories are not factual, a rebel group of readers and storytellers hides in caverns below the surface. But these people do more than read and memorize the old texts to preserve them, as in Ray Bradbury’s classic story, “Fahrenheit 451.” Each becomes a character, a mythic hero. Their leader is Odysseus. He takes on the characteristics of the Greek hero, and Counsellor Troi spots him going through rituals to reinforce his identity as Odysseus, though he was a minor government functionary in his previous life. (It’s title also refers to one of the mythological frameworks consciously used in Star Trek, Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” But more about that later.)

For it isn’t just Star Trek fans who emulate their heroes, who even don their costumes and speak their words. This in one way or another is how myth works in many cultures. Nor are the Star Trek fan fictions something new under the sun; ordinary Greeks told each other stories about Odysseus that Homer never wrote.

That's really what all the attention to "franchises" is eventually about, and the expectations of merchandizing and business synergy: the hope that the core story takes on a life of its own as a living mythology. As creator of "The Simpsons" and "Futurama" Matt Groening observed in an interview, "Audiences expand the mythologies of a creator's world." His first example is Star Trek.

Broadly speaking, myths are stories that help people find meaning in their day-to-day lives. It may be the arc of the story—some people believe a governing American myth is what’s called the Horatio Alger story: “Strive and Succeed.” (The H.A. stories themselves are more complicated, and more like mythic stories and fairy tales; the hero often succeeds by a fortunate encounter, with the help of a mentor, a king or a Merlin of big business.) Or it may be a figure in the story we recognize, that defines our view or relationship with, for instance, the Mother or Father, and gives a resonance, a depth it didn’t seem to have. It may simply validate what we felt but didn’t realize.

But the most familiar response is emulating the hero. It doesn’t have to be the singular or main hero, either. Lots of mythic tales are about groups of heroes, each with a special skill. There are a lot of mythic tales in various cultures that are their versions of the Fantastic Four or the crew of the Enterprise.

Mythic heroes inspire people to emulate their qualities or some aspect of their behavior in their own lives. Someone doesn’t have to dress up as Odysseus or Athena (or even in the soldier's uniform) to emulate bravery, and they don’t have to go to war or the hunt in order to be brave in their lives. Just as it’s not necessary to wear Vulcan ears to examine whether words match actions, and consequences match intentions “logically,” or to honor diversity. And no one has to wait for 24th century medicine or society to learn from watching Dr. Beverly Crusher how a woman might handle being a professional, even a doctor, while being a mother on her own.

Myth provides us with archetypal characters we can use to define ourselves as our age and roles change. You can start by identifying with Harry Potter or Herminie Granger, and later identify with Dumbledore. In Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry personified aspects of himself and the idealized self in Kirk, Spock and Bones. Later he more consciously reflected on his feelings and aspiration as a boy with Wesley Crusher, and his older self in Captain Picard, a combination Hero and Wise Old Man.

In the blizzard and excessive speed of everyday life, beset by time and emotional demands, in a culture that offers only suspicious guidance, we need to find our heroes. "One must think like a hero,” wrote May Sarton, “to behave like a merely decent human being."

a mythology of change

Star Trek As Myth of Change

Myth often expresses or supports the values of a culture. That’s somewhat true of Star Trek, but as a mythology of the future, Star Trek has a very striking feature that no Star Trek in our future should neglect: it is not afraid to offer an alternative to values and resulting behaviors that predominate in the present.

For example, Star Trek challenges our culture’s assumptions about the defining role of money. It’s become almost a truism that the most vibrant myth-making in America and perhaps the western world comes from popular culture: not just the comic book superheroes, Disney revisions of old tales, or even the temporary heroes of the TV show or movie that seems to capture the spirit of the moment. The writer Ken Kesey claimed that the mythic hero of America was Superman.

But our mythology is also at least as powerfully represented in television commercials as in the programs. One of the myths of our culture is that money and consumption are the key to happiness. Star Trek provides an important alternative to this, as we’ll explore in more detail in a later installment.

But the primary alternative vision Star Trek makes into a mythology is the nature of the future itself. Star Trek presents a view of the future that opposes the apocalyptic visions that were prevalent when it began, and may still be. I’ve used part of the following quote before, but to me it’s a perfect summing up of that aspect of Star Trek’s approach.

Mike Malotte, Commander of Starfleet (or president of the International Star Trek Fan Association), was on the phone to me last summer describing the kind of visions of the future that prevailed before Star Trek. They were “about people who weren’t on earth because they were either escaping it, it was so overpopulated and polluted that people couldn’t live on it, or it was a charred cinder because we’d screwed ourselves over. Gene’s Star Trek was really the first science fiction show of its time that showed a future where, hey! We actually learn from our mistakes, and we bettered ourselves, and we banded together and we headed out for the stars.”

We would expect our myths of the future to express difference, because in our society we expect change. But most projections into the future foresee change only in technology, and not in how it might be used differently. To see humans changing themselves, and being changed by the encounter with the immensity of space and a diversity of other intelligent beings, is a rare, valuable and essential aspect of the Star Trek mythology. There will be more precise speculations about how this was accomplished in future installments.

Myths live also because they are good stories: people want to hear them, they want to know what happens next. And there’s one kind of mythic story that our age responds to best.

the human adventure on the final frontier

Whatever Comes

Missing from most discussions, scenarios, studies, predictions and even most stories concerning the future is one essential ingredient: adventure.

The word derives from the Latin, ad venio: whatever comes. Whatever the future is, it’s coming, and going out to meet it in a spirit of adventure is very human, and very attractive.

“The oldest, most widespread stories in the world are adventure stories,” writes Paul Zweig, beginning his book The Adventurer, “about human heroes who venture into the myth-countries at the risk of their lives, and bring back tales of the world beyond men.”

Right away, the adventure story recognizes a world beyond the ordinary human world, whether it is the world of nature or a supernatural world---and in many stories, it’s both at the same time.

“Our modern disregard for adventure reveals how thoroughly domesticated is the view we have come to take of our human and cultural limits,” Zweig comments a little later. “Man, we have decided, is the laboring animal whose ability to create value depends upon his infinite capacity to buy and to sell: his time, his work, his very life.”

Part of this view, Zweig says, is to consume adventure stories as nothing more than unimportant entertainment. But the soul seeks adventure, and adventure nourishes the soul.

When adventures become personally and culturally important, when the imagination goes on that journey, they become mythic. Such adventures take us out of the ordinary, even if they are inner explorations. In terms of the future, outer space is the vast unknown that symbolizes future possibility, but it is fascinating in itself: full of untold wonders.

Adventures of the past took heroes into magical forests, across oceans to strange islands, through jungles to hidden cities, atop mountains where monsters lived, and into the underworld. Where else on earth is there to go?

“We’ve now conquered the planet so there are no empty spaces for imagination to go forth,” Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers. “One of the wonderful things I think about the adventure into space is that the narrator, the artist, the one thinking up the story, is in a field that is not covered by our own knowledge. Much of the adventure in the old stories is where they go into regions that no one’s been in before.”

Campbell, who shaped many of our current ideas about myth, may have been something of a story consultant for George Lucas and Star Wars. But when he talks about the adventure in outer space, he echoes Star Trek.

This is appropriate. Star Wars is a kind of illustrated monomyth (Campbell’s description of what hero myths of many cultures have in common). The Star Wars saga is terrific and resonant storytelling with moral application to our world and even to our future, but it does not claim to be about the human future.

While many other adventures, before and since, have used outer space as their landscape, they have not really explored that other “undiscovered country---the future.” They often place contemporary figures in space, which in the best of these stories also has resonance, meaning and application to the present, and encourages viewers to identify with the characters. They have aspects of myth. But they are not mythologies of the future.

What it means to be human...James Doohan receives his star, in the company of friends

Deep Impact

In the recent past, the word “myth” was used to denote a story that isn’t true, usually an “unscientific” superstition. But when Picasso said that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” he describes the mysterious power of imagination and story. Fiction and myth tell many truths on many levels. (And it’s now become fairly fashionable to point out instances where old stories or myths, like many American Indian stories, apparently describe actual historical events, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but in metaphorical language.)

Myth uses the language of symbol and what Carl Jung called “archetypal,” or relating to deep forms in the psyche. We respond to archetypal images instinctively—“They impress, influence, and fascinate us,” Jung writes. Archetypes ”can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time.”

When a particular mythology is truly alive in a culture, those symbols and archetypes are felt, not necessarily noticed. And even the storytellers are only partly aware of them. The unconscious may be less than conscious, yet provides us with intuitions and insights and information that usually escape consciousness. That’s where myth operates.

Yet myths are primarily stories, set in a particular time and place, with an audience usually of a particular culture. Those first audiences understand the nuances and details that often are lost on later audiences, or on people in different cultures. The stories we’re told in school are great myths may seem confusing, even nonsensical (so the way “myth” is used to mean something fantastically untrue). When there’s little to relate to, they even seem boring. We can’t figure out why they’re supposed to be so great.

But to understand how those first audiences responded to these stories, you only have to listen to fans talk about Star Trek. They know the meaning of the smallest references, the history of the characters and their relationships, what the technologies do and don’t do, and so on. The Star Trek universe is alive to them, just as the mythic worlds were alive to their first audiences.

The experience of early audiences to old myths was probably even richer, especially in traditional cultures that changed slowly, for their lives and ways likely weren’t very different from those in the story. They also probably understood the symbols and the meaning of behavior better, because those symbols and those clues to behavior were still alive.

Mythical stories are full of wonders, rich characters and breathtaking plots. Within them is comedy, tragedy, romantic love, melancholy, hilarity, villainy and nobility, earthy events, and mystery and magic.

They are about the great mysteries of life and death, the questions of will and freedom and fate in the lives of gods and humans, and the roles and stations in life in a given society. They may speak a rich language of suggestion, allusion, symbol, metaphor and ambiguity.

They can be about creation, destruction, the human virtues and, quite often, human weaknesses that lead to sorry ends. Through their explorations, both outer and inner, they are eventually about what it means to be human. This is another identifying feature of Star Trek. It seemed to be Gene Roddenberry’s chief obsession, and his insistence on specifically exploring this question in the early episodes of Star Trek and The Next Generation, set the template for the whole Star Trek saga.

It’s no wonder that Star Trek fascinates those who study mythology, as literature and as psychology. Myths speak to the soul about the soul, and about the soul of the world.

Allegory of racial prejudice and its consequences: "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield"

Where the Star Trek Myth Begins

It’s unlikely that Gene Roddenberry and the other creators of Star Trek set out to create a mythology. But they were people who wanted to say something, who wanted to live in the universe of stories, and given the requirements of our culture, who needed to make a living.

The Star Trek mythology has its own creation myth. As Gene Roddenberry told it, by early 1964 he was frustrated because the television networks wouldn’t let him openly write about contemporary issues for television series drama, specifically the series he created and produced, “The Lieutenant,” which was set in the present.

But what if he could do it through disguise? “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, Roddenberry described his realization that he could do what Swift had done as a kind of religious experience.

There were many mythologies and stories that influenced the Star Trek saga. But Gulliver’s Travels was an important one in many ways. According to Desilu executive Herb Solow, he and Roddenberry worried about how to get TV viewers to believe in the reality of this strange new universe of the future. In addition to their many efforts to create and show a plausible future, Solow suggested a narrative tactic he remembered from “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 according to Solow, he and Roddenberry talked about Swift’s book so much that for a brief moment, they were going to call this new series, “Gulliver’s Travels.” But Swift didn’t invent this kind of story, where there is a second meaning or application beyond the literal events of the tale. Allegory has a rich literary history. In medieval Europe, it was consciously used to synthesize the classical tales of Greece and Rome with Christianity, and to show connections between the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

Allegory was used in 5th century works like “Psychomachia” (meaning “Soul War”), in which the characters were personified qualities, the virtues of Hope, Chastity and Humility in battle against the vices of Pride, Wrath and Avarice. The moral dimensions beneath the literal remains a feature of many allegories, though the literal story is likely to be told through recognizable and individual characters.

In Star Trek, allegory is most obvious in the original series, when the crew encounters beings on “the planet of the week” that create moral dilemmas or reveal aspects of humanity in contrast to the beings and situations the Enterprise encounters. Sometimes the allegory’s application to contemporary issues is overt, as in the famous episode on racial prejudice, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” with Frank Gorshin as an alien whose face is half white and half black, out to kill his counterpart who he marks as evil because his face displays these colors on opposite sides. When these stories work, they are exceptionally powerful.

But most of the best Star Trek stories have an allegorical aspect, even in later series when the accumulated Star Trek universe itself became the ground of their reality. Various interpretations and applications of these “meanings” are often what Star Trek fans discuss, and argue about passionately. They, too, are essential to Star Trek’s nature, and its soul.

But allegory is not just a separate technique or a historically defined kind of story. Allegory, as C.S. Lewis noted, “belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind. It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms.” Neuroscientist and literature professor Mark Turner believes that the kind of thinking exemplified by allegory, which he calls “conceptual blending,” is basic to human thought and language.

Modern allegory has less of a one-to-one correspondence, a single image or character with a single meaning, as the 5th century allegories did. But it is another aspect that allows the reader or viewer to participate in the myth, by seizing an underlying meaning or application to contemporary concerns, and by identifying with the characters and situations, however alien they are on the surface.

Roddenberry expressed his delight that network censors didn’t see this aspect of Star Trek---but from the beginning, its fans did.

GR and associates set out to create a saga of adventure stories, and allegories within them. GR in particular was consciously trying to create a plausible but alternative vision of the future. But their first task was to successfully do this according to the story genre they were using, which was science fiction, and the story-telling form: the television drama series.

Intention is one thing, execution is another. How did they get all this to work? More on that story---on Star Trek as drama, television and science fiction---next time.

Two of our favorite carbon units

Star Trek: Story and the Soul of the Future

by William S. Kowinski

There can be little doubt that the Star Trek saga has created the most widely shared vision of the future in our time. The examples tumble around us. Its cultural influence is reflected in so many references that they pass by without much notice.

It's there in a feature film as seemingly distant from the Star Trek universe as Steven Speilberg's The Terminal, a contemporary comic drama about a man (played by Tom Hanks) trapped in the between-world of a large airline terminal, unable to return to his country yet without the proper papers to officially enter the United States outside the terminal doors. One of the characters, a young black woman who works there, turns out to be a Trekkie who goes to conventions dressed as Yeoman Rand. When another employee is about to propose to her, he flashes the Vulcan hand sign, before revealing the engagement ring.

The Trek universe has simply become part of ours. In an article on an aspect of human behavior first published in the New Yorker and included in his forthcoming book, biologist Robert Sapolsky writes, "If I were a Vulcan researching social behavior on Earth, this would seem like an irrational mess." It isn't even particularly relevant to readers that as far as we know, no planet Vulcan, or extraterrestrial intelligences called Vulcans, exist. Yet Sapolsky's meaning is clear. He is not even simply referring to an alien point of view on Terran behavior, but to a particular kind of view---one attuned to seeing things as logical or illogical. He does not have to explain Vulcan culture, or that it is Star Trek lore. He assumes that reader of the New Yorker will know.

But even more specifically, it is just about impossible to think about the future without thinking about Star Trek. In the improbably popular movie called What the Bleep Do We Know which uses quantum physics to discuss the relationship of thought and reality, one physicist more or less complains that people don't understand the significance of a certain experiment (in which the same dot of matter appears in two places at once) because they're used to Star Trek's transporters and replicators. People simply assume these things exist, or will.

Another person interviewed in "What the Bleep" refers to human beings as "carbon units," the exact terminology used in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There's even an appearance by Armin Shimerman, who played Quark on Deep Space 9, to cement the bond.

Why do so many people know the fundamentals of the Star Trek universe? Why can they easily identify Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Captain Picard and Data? Klingons, Vulcans, the Borg? Transporters, warp drive, red alert, the starship Enterprise? "Beam me up, Scotty," "Make it so," "Live long and prosper"? And for almost as many people, much more?

The most fundamental answer is they remember aspects of the Star Trek universe, and have a general impression of the Star Trek future, because they learned it from stories. For Star Trek isn't just a vision of the future, it is a set of stories. That turns out to be very, very important.

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the story universe meets the real: the space shuttle Enterprise

King Story

As far as I know, there hasn't been much new thought on how to approach the future since that flood of study and books in the 1960s and 70s I wrote about last time . But a growing appreciation has been developing of the role of stories. No longer dismissed as frivolous entertainments and childish fantasies, stories have emerged as vitally important in the most basic ways.

Storytellers always knew this. "Once philosophy was stories, religion was stories, wisdom books were stories," fictionist Ronald Sukenick wrote in the 1970s, "but now that fiction is held to be a form of lying, even by literary sophisticates, we are without persuasive wisdom, religion, or philosophy."

But soon the various roles of story were being discovered by other disciplines. Psychotherapist Robert Coles used literary stories to teach in medical school, because narrative raised issues in a particularly meaningful way, and then in his practice, because patients identified with characters and felt that someone else had felt what they felt. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum used literary stories to teach in law school, because they dramatized public issues and infused them with real human experiences and responses.

They all found that stories unlock empathy, and inspire the moral imagination. But others began to see even more basic functions for story. Neuroscientists realized that human memories are stored in stories, and soon, that all thinking involves stories. "Narrative imagining-story-is the fundamental instrument of thought," writes Mark Turner, a neuroscientist, cognitive scientist as well as a Professor of English. " Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining."

"Knowledge is stories," wrote Roger C. Shank, former director of Yale's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Narrative is explanation, and explanations are narratives. So in the age of science, writes William Irwin Thompson, "Science is the storytelling of our time. By telling stories about our origins, from the big bang to the African savanna, science is really telling stories about what and where we are and where we want to go from here."

But not all stories are created equal. As we know, some stories are better than others. That becomes clear when we go back to the future.

before the dream became nightmare

The American Clock and the World of Tomorrow

If there was one idea that got America through the Great Depression of the 1930s, playwright Arthur Miller suggests, it was the future. "Then and now, you have to wonder what really held it all together, and maybe it was simply the Future: the people were still not ready to give it up," a character said in Miller's play, "The American Clock," set during the Depression. "Like a God, it was always worshipped among us, and they could not yet turn their backs on it. Maybe it's that simple. Because from any objective viewpoint, I don't understand why it held."

It was in some ways the immigrant's dream of America and the future rolled into one that dominated the first third of the century (when immigration to America was at its highest), despite the terrible hardships of the 1930s. And as the 30s ended, there was the glittering promise of technology.

It was all on display in the great 1939 New York World's Fair," with its twin themes of "The World of Tomorrow" and "Dawn of a New Day." (This year's film, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is set in 1939, and borrows the look and spirit of the Fair's technology as well as its name.)

The Fair was full of wonders, from the gleaming white Trylon, the shimmering Glass Center and the bold Perisphere that exhibited the shining "Democricity" of the future. Fairgoers saw household robots and a couple of puppets from Chicago named Kukla and Ollie demonstrating a new technology called television.

Visitors reclined in chairs on a conveyor belt to glide through General Motor's "Futurama," which arrayed before them the future of 1960: happy healthy people living in throw-away houses, working in soaring white skyscrapers or clean modern factories, going home to green villages on fourteen lane freeways scientifically built for safety, with automatic radio-controlled traffic. Because of technology and efficiency, a soothing voice said, there would be little disease, and most of America would be forest again.

But almost as soon as the World of Tomorrow opened, the world of 1939 crashed into a decade of horror: nations falling to mechanized blitzkriegs, concentration camps and genocide, in a world war that brought destruction for the first time from the air: the first bombing campaigns against civilians and cities in the London Blitz, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, then the saturation bombings of German and Japanese cities, culminating in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each with one atomic bomb.

The technology of destruction advanced so quickly during the war that its feverish momentum continued afterwards, seemingly and alarmingly out of control. Hopes for the future continued, but they depended on whether humanity could survive its most devastating inventions.

So just after World War II and as the atomic arms race began with bewildering speed, H.G. Wells' study of the future was revived, but with a different emphasis than in the 1890s, or even in the dreams of the 1930s. Future study was revived to predict nightmares.

thinking the unthinkable, Kahn as Strangelove

The Wrath of Kahn

An adjunct of the Douglas Aircraft Company called Project RAND created its first future oriented study in May 1946, called "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship." But that wasn't the future that seemed most crucial.

The government and military wanted to know the future of nuclear war, for any other future depended on the answers. Everyone knew almost immediately that nuclear warfare had the potential to destroy the world's civilizations in fairly short order. But those in charge wanted better information, a more realistic idea of what might happen, in order to plan to fight and win it, or to avoid it or survive it.

So even though the independent RAND Corporation would produce a long list of reports on urban problems, health and education, its early fame and the development of its systems for studying the future came from its work on nuclear war.

The new futurism's intellectual energy came mostly from the new approach to organizing and understanding information called systems analysis, which emerged from MIT at the end of World War II. Together with game theory and information theory that developed in tandem with it, systems analysis generated conceptual tools such as cross-impact analysis, modeling and simulations that made creative use of early computers.

The key insight that encouraged the futures field to blossom was probably the idea of alternative futures, promoted by the most visible and controversial figure in the field, Herman Kahn. In assessing future risks and possibilities, Kahn assembled packages of causes and effects. There wasn't just one possible future, he argued. Change a variable here and there, alter an assumption slightly, put in a new variable you hadn't considered, and suddenly, there is a different future.

Applied to nuclear war, it figured in various ways in which the war could start and proceed, who had how many nukes where, and which side's nukes got in the air first and whose would be destroyed, and by what proportion. Those different packages of variables acting in different time sequences resulting in different outcomes---different "futures"---Kahn called "scenarios."

That word is fairly familiar to us today, as meaning a particular imagined situation. We have different "scenarios" for how the school year will go, or how to get the money for a new car. Each sequence of video game play is often an acting out of a Kahn scenario. But before Kahn, "scenario" mostly meant the story in a theatrical production, such as an opera. A scenario is a kind of story.

Basically that's what Kahn was doing: he was creating narratives resulting in alternative futures. Unfortunately, his scenarios were all horror stories. Not only were the outcomes horrible, but the terminology governing how the stories went were ghastly in their bloodless abstraction: the main characters were missiles with particular "throw-weights" dispatching "megatons" of radiating cyclones of fire, resulting in "megadeaths." The difference in the various scenarios turned out to be statistical: how many megatons resulted in how many megadeaths.

These scenarios resulted in analyses that were further abstracted into doctrines like Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD), a name that seemed all too accurate. Yet it was the basis for policy governing the future.

With all of this, plus his penchant for insane-sounding paradoxes like "the rationality of irrationality" and "thinking the unthinkable," Herman Kahn became one of the principal models for Dr. Strangelove. And the stories of the future became nothing but nightmares.

But the dreamlike stories of the future told in the 1939 World's Fair exhibits and the nightmare stories told by RAND (and picked up by the movies) had a common weakness: they had no real people in them. They had no texture, no life, no human complications or decisions, no emotions, not even simple human logic. No soul.

Wells saw the future as a storyteller

The Hearts of the Incalculable

There are several basic problems with predictions, trend-analysis, alternative scenarios of the future. Predictably, H.G. Wells caught at least one of them almost immediately, when just a few years after he invented the science of studying the future, he repudiated it.

He announced it, fittingly enough, in the book that resulted from his first visit to North America. In an extraordinary reappraisal of his "Discovery of the Future" address, he withdrew his idea that there could be an exact "science" of the future.

"Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible, but the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts and will of unique incalculable men," Wells wrote in 1908. "With them we have to deal as our ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to be not 'scientific' at all for all the greater issues, the humanly-important issues, but critical, literary, even-if you will---artistic."

But of course! The future depends on human decisions that cannot be calculated, for they come from "the hearts and will of unique incalculable" men and women (and children.)

So how can anyone realistically talk about the future at all? Calculation, and that kind of knowledge---and the kind of story that results from it--- is part of it, but not the whole. The future is found not only with the story of science, but the literary, the artistic.

A truer story of the future would seem to be like a truer story of the past: one that has people in it, that looks at how people react to situations, that includes their passions---their hates and their loves, their fears and empathy, their selfishness and altruism, their weaknesses, and their thoughts about their weaknesses, what they learn or don't learn, and the behaviors that result.

To make a truer story requires more than calculation and applying theories, as powerful as they are. It requires applying fantasy and surmise, and using the inspiration and judgment of intuition and imagination. The best stories, which are often the truest stories on as many levels of life as possible, must have soul.

So how was Wells able to predict so many things about the future, in support of his initial theory that a science of the future was possible?

"Measured against what most scholars and experts were thinking in the early years of the century," Wells expert W. Warren Wagar writes, " Wells' uncannily accurate prophesies are a disturbing reminder to the specialized intelligence of the advantages of amateurism in social analysis. With no training and only random reading, he managed to outguess the professors."

It turns out that, whether he realized it or not, it was because he was a storyteller, a literary artist. His predictions, after all, were either in stories, or followed his most imaginative storytelling phase in the 1890s, during which he wrote nearly all the stories he is remembered for today.

But such stories aren't just a matter of really good characters, realistic and exciting action and good plots. There is a way of thinking and feeling that brings more of life together---all those elements that make up a future. Stories are synthesis, not analysis. Analysis commonly breaks things down into parts, or sees one element in relation to causes and effects. Synthesis combines, creates wholes, out of which meaning emerges. The synthesis of story is complex: it may mix factual reporting, inspired surmise, projections of emotion, and so on, in a synthesis that can be taken as a literal account, as metaphor, character study, as moral lesson or fable, as playful allegory, and so on--often several levels working simultaneously. Story thinking is synthetic thinking---and a great deal of the synthesis is in the mind and heart of each reader, where the reader's experiences and ideas evoked by the story are added to its synthesis.

Wells's markedly synthetic way of thinking," writes critic Roslynn D. Haynes, "imparted to his work an extraordinary unity and a philosophical dimension... ultimately, each entity is seen, at least implicitly, in relation to every other." It is this ability to apply both thoughtful analysis and evaluative intuition, to recognize patterns and recreate some outline of everyday complexity, that produced so many insightful predictions.

"The end of all intelligent analysis," Wells maintained, "is to clear the way for synthesis." One form that synthesis takes is story, combining fact and fantasy, numbers and individual decisions, logic and emotion, history and originality, literal and metaphorical meaning, and more.

It worked for Wells. And some 70 years later, it worked for Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek.

linking body and spirit, earth and the stars...

The Soul of Story

That way of creating synthesis of feeling and thinking that is essential to good storytelling, is also very close to how a number of contemporary writers define soul.

There are many ideas of soul. Basically, "soul" refers to what makes you alive: the breath of life. To many people it means what is essential, what determines who you are. Some cultures and religions believe in an immortal essence or soul. Some cultures believe each person has two or even three different kinds of souls. Some believe the soul is inside the body; others that our individual bodies are inside one great soul.

But there is a body of thought that sees the soul in terms of an active principle, a process, a perspective, rather than a thing. There are threads of this idea in Greek philosophy, early Christian thought, in Buddhism and other systems of belief and inquiry into the human condition.

This idea of soul---which is perhaps best known from Thomas Moore's best-selling books, like Care of the Soul, or James Hillman's The Soul's Code---doesn't exclude the others, but conceives of soul as a mediator, a balancer, even a harmonizer, between the head and the heart, between the physical and the spiritual, between "the doer and the deed."

Both the usual senses of soul and this contemporary sense of soul apply to Star Trek. But two elements of this second sense apply especially to Star Trek as story. First, this sense of soul stresses complexity, balance and synthesis. "Soul logic can be recognized by the fact that it synthesizes rather than analyzes," writes Robert Sardello, in Love and the Soul.

Second, the imagination is very important in doing the work of the soul. In fact, Carl Jung sometimes suggests the soul and the imagination are one. Again, this applies to envisioning the future through story.

"The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening one's own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination an illusion," writes Thomas Moore. "It is the other way around. Fact is an illusion, because every fact is part of a story and is riddled with imagination. Imagination is real because every perception of the world around us is absolutely colored by the narrative or image-filled lens through which we perceive. We are all poets and artists as we live our daily lives, whether or not we recognize this role and whether or not we believe it."

"As long as there is a sense of soul," Sardello also writes, "there is a sense of a future."

Story of the soulful kind is essential to the soul of Star Trek. It is because Star Trek tells stories in a saga, with particular characters over time and in various situations, in a well-conceived, evolving but basically self-consistent and plausible story universe, that it is able to create a memorable vision of the future, shared by so many.

It is that synthesis in the substance of story that sparks the imagination yet provides a basis for understanding. Fans at a Trek convention can share and disagree. They can argue interpretation and meaning, but they are basically talking about the same story universe, the same future. A convention of futurists has no such story in common, nor are the individual stories they tell as realistic---because they lack comprehensive imagination, and they lack soul. They aren't as realistic because they lack fantasy.

Yet, in another way, many futurist projections are total fantasy, because they aren't grounded in human behavior. They are about technological possibility, not how people use technology, or what the technology may mean in the whole of life. They lack the essentials of a good story.

There is much more to tell about the strengths of Star Trek storytelling: why the kind of story it tells is especially apt, and its type particularly powerful. How its first incarnation as a mid-60s television show, by intent and by accident, helped give it the qualities that enabled it to create a lasting vision of the future.

All that is for next time, in the episode entitled: Star Trek: A Mythology for the Future.

Two Malaysian participants in a "Save Star Trek" event via startrek.com/my

Star Trek: A Passion for the Future

by William S. Kowinski

If you wanted to find the future, where would you go? To a World Future Society convention, as I did once? (There was one in Chicago just last week, which got almost no media coverage.) Or to the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference like the one last month, where high technologists plug their products (big announcements by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates mean this one gets more media) and each expert ignores the field of every other expert, producing a chaos of foamy promotion, narrow prediction, and airy generalities?

Or would you head instead for a Star Trek convention, where people of all ages, races and descriptions gather to celebrate and talk about a future of adventure, exploration, ethics, intelligence and infinite diversity?

While you would obtain useful information and insights into aspects of the future at conferences like the WFS and TED, these smorgasbords of marketers and experts dominated by whatever it is they are selling or are expert in, seem unsatisfying, and the future they portray often appears to be mostly for themselves.

Star Trek conventions feature plenty of commercialism and obsessive experts in arcane areas, but they have at least one major advantage. At these other events, people have an interest---and very often a self-interest---in the future, or their version of it. At a Star Trek convention, as in the soul of Star Trek itself, you are likely to find a passion for the future.

Why is passion for the future important? Hope is enacted in the present. If you believe the future will be better---exciting, fulfilling and compassionate---it's heartening: it helps you get through the day. But if you have a passion to make a better future, then you can contribute to that possibility by what you do and say, what you advocate and represent, in the present.

Passion is not a word you generally associate with Trekkies, and perhaps it is more obvious in the people whose job it is to project emotion and articulate thought. When you hear people like actors LeVar Burton, George Takei, Denise Crosby or Nichelle Nichols, or writers and producers like Michael Piller, Dorothy Fontana or Jeri Taylor talk about the Star Trek vision of the future, the passion comes to the surface. When they speak from the stages at convention, you can feel it in their connection to the audience. They are speaking for the audience as much as to it.

The audience, or a significant part of it, wears the uniforms or attends the conventions and watches the shows to identify themselves with statements like Nichelle Nichols'---in this case, part of an on-camera interview, but just as likely to be heard from convention stages: "Star Trek is a format for what our future could be, one of harmony and respect and progress and adventure and intelligence, and of peaceful exploration with infinite diversity in infinite combinations, is what makes this universe beautiful."

They may try to express this passion in odds ways, like building the Star Trek future around them so they can, in one way or another, live in it, rather than give themselves up to the deluded, tyrannical and extremely lame present. But some also find other ways, working through organizations with Trek affiliations, or more covertly in their professions, civic and charitable activities and other commitments.

Many of them would also agree with George Takei: "I think it is very important that the philosophy [of Star Trek] not just remain an ideal out there, but we incorporate it into our lives and act on it. Certainly that's part of the message of Star Trek."

Today, Star Trek is conspicuously alone in being a complex vision of the future known around the world. It functions as a mythology of the future that has already influenced actual events and trends, on many levels, from the fairly mundane to profound decisions individuals have made concerning their own lives and futures.

Star Trek influences many cultures and helps to define a global culture, particularly in relation to the future. The passion for the future that Star Trek evokes and helps to delineate and instill is central to its contribution and its identity. Even in the current waning of its apparent popularity, no other vision or saga---or "franchise"--- has this identity and influence.

(Text continues after photos)

H.G. Wells, anticipating the sprawling future

Remembering the Future

"Do you remember the future?" asks the subversive clone, addressing Dr. Memory, the central memory core of the Future Fair, in Firesign Theatre's comedy recording, "'>I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus."

"Yessssss," says Dr. Memory.

"Forget it!"

The future has drifted in and out of societal consciousness over the years. At the moment it seems to be largely forgotten. "Today we live entirely in the present," wrote political economist Robert Skidelsky at this century began. "For most people the past has little meaning; there is no future on the horizon except more of the present, apart from the ambiguous promises offered by science."

This apathy is often accompanied by fatalism. A survey of Americans in 1999 showed that half believed a manmade disaster would destroy civilization in the 21st century. The events of 9-11-01 and afterwards have simply darkened that mood. A poll just this year shows that while one third of residents of Japan expected World War III in their lifetimes, two-thirds of Americans did.

This blindness to the future extends to the arts. "We dwellers in the empire do not seem to want art with visionary power now---art that looks to the future," wrote Mark Edmundson.

But this wasn't always true---especially when Star Trek was being born.

A Brief History of the Future

The future has been an important concept in western civilization since at least the Old Testament era. But there are two points in history particularly important to Star Trek and its envisioning of the future.

The first is the 1890s, when the industrial revolution was maturing, an accelerating barrage of new technologies were changing daily life in Europe and America, and the philosophical ideas of progress and evolution developed from the 18th century were meeting new scientific findings in geology, astronomy, physics and biology (particularly Darwinian evolution)---culminating in newly emerging pictures of the past and present.

The center of all this activity was London, where new centers of education were created to extract and train new technical talent from the lower middle class, to serve industrial progress. But one such science student became a writer, who created a synthesis of the forces and ideas of his age, and gave them voice.

But in the process, H.G. Wells did not just invent modern science fiction. He also invented the modern approach to thinking about the future.

At the start of the twentieth century, H.G. Wells gave a lecture to the Royal Institution that was later published as The Discovery of the Future. There are two kinds of thinking applied to the future, he said. The first sees the future "as a sort of black non-existence upon which the advancing present will presently write events." This kind of mind thinks in terms of the past. The second kind of thinking "sees the world as one great workshop, and the present is no more than material for the future, for the thing that is yet destined to be." This kind of mind anticipates, and looks to the future creatively and constructively.

Wells maintained that "a systematic exploration of the future", composed of a comprehensive evaluation of insights and information from all relevant fields, can yield a "working knowledge of things in the future." Wells asserted that if this new science could ascertain the "biological, intellectual, economic consequences" of new technology and the ramifications of actions in the present, then humanity could use it to create a desirable future. In fact the existence of this knowledge itself could be a persuasive argument that humanity should think creatively and take charge of its own future.

When Wells was speaking, the automobile was still a few years in the future, but to illustrate his point, he not only predicted it but more impressively, forecast much of what happened in the subsequent half century because of it. He foresaw a future of big fast cars, long-distance buses and fat trucks on wide superhighways, and prefabricated suburban communities of middle class homes filled with labor-saving appliances. He saw these suburbs expanding while cities shrink, and the sprawl in the U.S. spreading unbounded from Boston to Washington, D.C.

He predicted electric ranges and dishwashing detergent, the replacement of printed books with something like disks or video cassettes, and the presence in every home of an electrically connected box that would present the news-though in carefully censored versions. He was wrong about what these boxes would be called, but perhaps more accurate. He called them "Babble Machines."

He made even more impressive predictions later on, and also had some major misses. '>Anticipations became Wells' first best seller (it was more popular at first than any of his now famous science fiction novels), but having essentially created the modern future studies field, he almost immediately backed away from it. A few years later he decided that there could be no exact science of anticipating the future, and we will return to reasons when they become relevant in a later episode. (There's more on parallels and legacies linking Wells and Roddenberry, elsewhere on this blog.)

But by the turn of the century the future had been discovered, though Wells' insights would largely lie fallow for more than fifty years. The spectre of atomic warfare made a science of forecasting the future seem more crucial, but this area of inquiry quickly expanded to an interest not just in specific prediction but in the entire idea of the future.

This was the second important point in history: the 1960s.

John Glenn, his wife in red, and JFK in front of the U.S. space capsule

Idealists Without Illusions

This time the action centered in North America. The enormous productive capacity created there for World War II, untouched by the war's violence, promised an era of expansion and affluence, especially in view of new technologies, some developed before and after the war and many spawned by the war. Like the 1890s in England, the postwar U.S. needed more educated technicians and managers, research scientists and experts in newly emerging fields. Ex-soldiers went to college at government expense, and the Baby Boom meant education would continue to expand.

In this period of rapid change and growing affluence, a strain of idealism tempered by hard experience created what was dubbed "the New Breed" within what is now sentimentally called "The Greatest Generation." This was the generation of World War II veterans like Gene Roddenberry and many others who would contribute to creating Star Trek. But in the early 1960s, it was most clearly identified as the generation of President John F. Kennedy, who described himself as an "idealist without illusions."

With his theme of the New Frontier, his visionary views on the space program, Civil Rights and world peace, and his accent on youth, Kennedy was clearly oriented towards the future. (There's more concerning Kennedy and connections to Roddenberry and the early 60s development of Star Trek elsewhere on this blog, at "the Star Trek 60s Pt. 1.")

At the same time, there was an explosion of studies, books and articles by physical and social scientists in many fields, as well as the first scholars and freelance intellects (like Arthur C. Clarke) who specialized in the future. Though they often came at the subject from a particular discipline, they typically were trying to synthesize a big picture view of the future, as Wells had advised. Partly because they had an advocate in the White House and felt that the future was an idea whose time had come, they were mostly optimistic.

In his 1969 book, The Search for a Usable Future, Martin E. Marty put it this way: "Knowing that audacity was called for and inspired by the confidence that man was prevailing, they pictured a realm of possibility to which our culture was tending. The technological and humane orders were converging to create a world wherein conflict may remain but in which it would be productive of good. There men would learn to embrace the works of their hands, to affirm the human city. The fundamental human model for this was the cool, worldly, problem-solving, practical man. Man in control. He was now orbiting the world, probing the depths of the sea. Aided by all the disciplines, he could foresee problems and program his way through or past them. This was to be a society of affluence, abundance, leisure, and meaningful human relations."

Even with the obvious hubris, it's not hard to see a lot of Star Trek in that description.

Buckminster Fuller: Utopia or Oblivion

Utopia or Oblivion

But that brief era ended with Kennedy's assassination (just weeks before Gene Roddenberry completed his first Star Trek proposal), the widening Vietnam War, and the societal turmoil of the second half of the 1960s. The apparent irrationality of Vietnam, the oppressions and angry analyses of them made by and on behalf of racial minorities, Third World populations, students, women and others, plus the continuing nuclear arms race and the first burst of information and alarm concerning environmental issues (both current degradations and dire future prospects), fossil fuel depletion and overpopulation in the near future, all combined to short circuit Utopian optimism and replace it with apocalyptic despair.

Yet interest in the future continued and even accelerated throughout the decade, and well into the 1970s. There were doomsday warnings but also new possibilities for human potential---The '>Population Bomb jostling Castaneda's '>The Teachings of Don Juan on the best-seller list. But most particularly there were new approaches to synthesizing visions of a better future, and the explosive development of a new field of future studies.

The future was part of the public discourse. There were books in paperback like Arthur C. Clarke's'> Profiles of the Future (which Roddenberry read and admired), John McHale's '>The Future of the Future, Robert Theobald's '>Futures Conditional, culminating in the best-seller '>Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, plus works on ecology, media, geopolitics and so on, all with a futures orientation, by people like '>Marshall McLuhan, '>Margaret Mead, '>Gregory Bateson and '>Paul Shepard, among others.

But perhaps the quintessential figure of this period was the thinker who had been at it the longest: '>Buckminster Fuller, who had invented the geodesic dome, and was now in the 60s and 70s providing deep analysis and generative concepts that would remain important for decades, such as "spaceship earth" and his "anticipatory design science."

Fuller also raised the stakes for considering the future. In almost the first words of his Inaugural Address, President Kennedy had stated the central premise of the early 1960s futurists, that of the suddenly real possibilities of utopia or apocalypse: "The world is very different now," Kennedy said. " For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life."

But in a single phrase, Buckminster Fuller re-stated this as a stark either/or. Because of the speed and weight of destructive forces which could only be quelled by a comprehensive solution making the future better for everybody, Fuller concluded that the only choice humankind has for the future is "Utopia or Oblivion."

Scene from "Romeo and Juliet: The Last Battlefield," courtesy "Trekkies 2"

The Trek Rebellion

It was this concern for the future, both the fears and despair over apocalyptic war or ecocastrophe, and the idealism and frenzy to use the tools of science and the insights of the arts to make a better future, that helped to revive Star Trek in the 1970s, just as it had united "freaks" and "geeks" in watching the series in the 60s.

Although this context is seldom if ever presented in histories of Star Trek, it was in fact important to the times. Buckminster Fuller was a well-known figure on U.S. college campuses, and important schools like MIT hosted organizations dedicated to exploring and enacting Fuller's visions. (It was at MIT in fact that I heard and met Buckminster Fuller in the early 1970s.)

There were more than a thousand futures studies courses in North American universities, as well as futurist doctoral programs and futures studies in high schools. More than 200 futurist organizations were headquartered in Washington alone. Gene Roddenberry was invited to speak to many of these groups, and no one who was thinking and writing about current or future topics could have missed what was going on, and what was being written and said.

Everyone was aware of the apocalyptic mood, whether from books and media reports about them and their dire projections, or the movies that tended to focus on catastrophe, partly because it is more easily dramatized, and moving pictures in particular find it easier to evoke a visceral response to horrors, fighting and explosions. In print as well, earth's self-destruction had become such a staple of science fiction stories that it was often just assumed as the background to the story's premise.

But despair is not the favorite condition of healthy humans, especially the young. Hope now became an act of rebellion. The concern for contemporary social issues, of war and social justice and poverty in the midst of overabundance, were considered problems necessary to solve not only for the good of the present, but for the possibilities of the future.

The belief that the future was something that individuals and society needed to think about, and desperately needed to consider when designing present actions---that our conceptual tools had to be applied to making a better future---was a passion for the future that was reflected in the frenzy for Star Trek.

This became even more true as the culture began to forget about the future. Though specific concerns continued, for ecological issues and the nuclear arms race in the 80s, and so on, the future as a subject, as a holistic idea, faded away.

But the problems have not faded (though we might define them differently), and Buckminster Fuller's stark choice still confronts us. . We will have to make things better or we will perish, and quite possibly take much of the life on the planet with us. Star Trek, especially the original series and TNG, constitutes one of the last surviving expressions of the ideals without illusions that keep the passion for the future alive.

(There has, however, been a recent interest in the study of utopias, reflecting perhaps the understanding that utopias don't define themselves as perfect or unchanging. Star Trek never denied the problems or the apocalyptic possibilities, and its future was far from perfect.)

Star Trek succeeded where many of the futurist visions of this period failed, and continue to fail, because of other elements that were part of its process and its expression, as well as its essence. That brings us back to the difference between the World Future Society and the Star Trek conventions. For a key to Star Trek's visions of the future are two other crucial elements: story and soul.

Both are explored next time, right here.

TrekCheck: Another Possibility for Trek XI

A couple of additional rumors surfaced last week, again of dubious credibility. One quoted Brent Spiner as saying he’s ready to come back as Data for the new movie, the same week as Brent Spiner was quoted as saying he’s too old to play Data anymore. (The second was a more credibly sourced quote, though Spiner has been known to be on both sides of playing/not playing Data again within a brief span of time. The first quote also misused the term "maiden voyage" in a way that Spiner probably wouldn't.)

Designated writer Erik Jendresen was also quoted---though it sounded like an old quote—talking about a time frame of 80 years before Kirk. But something else he said suggested a possibility. He mentioned that he’d like this movie to get the audience to “feel something.” The context led me to think he could mean the kind of feelings inspired by death.

This---and maybe the new Harry Potter--led me to think about how Star Trek has handled the subject of death, especially heroic death for a cause. Fans didn’t react with great outpouring of feeling to the heroic death of Data in “Nemesis.” They seemed to have mixed feelings concerning Kirk’s death in “Generations” and Trip Tucker in the “These Are the Voyages” final episode of Enterprise, with one of the more prominent emotions being anger at the manner of their respective demises. Most fans found the death of Spock in Star Trek II to be emotionally moving, which ironically had something to do with bringing him back to life in the next movie.

Tasha Yar's death in TNG was unique, in that its effects were dramatized over many years, and that its point initially was that her death was "meaningless," that is, the more or less random death that could come to anyone serving on the Enterprise in the course of doing their duty and engaged in the dangerous mission of confronting the unknown.

But Trek XI has a different and so far unique opportunity, if it indeed becomes a unique movie: if it is a time period in which no other Trek stories were set, with new characters, and no old ones.

The filmmakers have the possibility of creating a set of characters---the crew of a starship, for example---that the audience comes to care about during the course of the movie. They can be placed in jeopardy in a very meaningful situation, perhaps one that no humans have faced before. What they decide to do, and why (and since it’s Star Trek, with emphasis on the why), will influence the future history of the Trek universe. The gravity of what they do would be emphasized if this time, the crew doesn't escape at the last second, but they do sacrifice their lives.

If we in the audience can be led to see---and to feel---the reasons and the importance of their heroic action, it becomes possible to create a powerful and emotional effect when these characters sacrifice their lives. But the key would be the reason: it’s not enough to repeat the usual war movie motivations, however realistic they might be: that they die for each other, or their action is motivated by payback for loss of comrades. It has to be an action and a reason unique to the Star Trek universe.

It could even involve treachery, betrayal or cowardice by comrades (although that couldn’t be the main or only reason for the heroic deaths. See J.K. Rowling for the right way to do it.) The point is that an entirely new cast means everything could be up for grabs.

I hesitate to suggest this possibility, because it is very risky: it can easily be done badly. There is the particular risk of pushing the same buttons, making it a warrior sacrifice, which would please those who want to see Star Trek become World War II (or, more likely, the Napoleonic wars) in space. Given how conventional this has become, especially in science fiction, there is no reason for people to pay money to see it again, and would divide Star Trek fans even further.

Still, the ultimate sacrifice is something that could not be done cleanly with major Trek characters the audience had come to know over many stories. It would mean that at least some of these characters would not be available for future films or TV, although subsidiary characters in this film could become major characters later on. It is a unique opportunity, something that Trek has never done. (Perhaps the Enterprise C crew in the TNG episode, "Yesterday's Enterprise" comes closest.) It would take a lot of thought, a lot of artistry, and a lot of nerve to do it. I'm not at all sure it's the best idea, or even a good idea. But these circumstances make it possible.