A Passion for the Future

I'm off to Seattle to chair a panel at the Star Trek 40th Anniversary celebration at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. I'm taking the trusty laptop but I don't know how much blogging I'll be doing, if any. Internet access where I'm staying sounds iffy. So here's the beginning of my anniversary piece. Peace.

It’s 40 years later, and it’s pretty much the same. When Star Trek’s first episode aired on September 8, 1966 (after Daniel Boone and before The Dean Martin Show on NBC), the country was in turmoil over a long and unpopular war characterized by deception, there were racial tensions in American cities, environmental doom and nuclear destruction were common fears, and television tried to ignore it all. With the patina of prosperity on the fast-paced present, most people either dismissed the future, or viewed it with fatalism.

With hundreds of hours of stories over the past 40 years, Star Trek became the planet’s best-known saga of the future. Its earnestness inspired both devotion and ridicule, but perhaps that was a risk worth taking. While most responses to its anniversary consist of sentimental fauning over phasers and Klingons, warp speed and holodecks, its lasting achievement lies in a vision of the future with guiding ideals and cautions for our real world future, that are as valid and needed now as they ever were. A few of these precepts might be summarized as follows:

more at Soul of Star Trek