Soul of the Future: The Utopian Star Trek

"The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then,is to produce out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in." Northrup Frye: The Educated Imagination

 There are stories of utopias that reject the apparent present courses of civilization, particularly its developing technologies. One way or another, they suggest the future should be based on an era of humanity’s past, including its Indigenous past (though at least in some ways and in some places, still its present.) 

 There are fewer utopias now that suggest the future should be based on “the future” as we’ve understood it—that is, on the further development of civilization in its current characteristics, including more developed and new technologies.  In recent years, these have been related to the potentials of computers and AI, though apart from their prominent promoters, they seem to inform more dystopias.  These tech utopias used to be more common, though in the pre and post-World War II period, mostly sponsored by industries (including scientific institutions) that looked forward to creating the products of those technologies and that utopia. The most prominent examples were the three- dimensional utopias of the industrial age Expositions and World’s Fairs, especially the 1939 New York World’s Fair. 

But the deadly byproducts of technologies, and how some were and are used—from atomic bombs and other incredibly destructive weapons to chemical pollutions and greenhouse gases—drained the credibility and moral authority of technological utopias. So did the social and psychological damage stemming from the overcrowding, excessive noise and demands of an inhuman speed of life, and the consequences of the money economy interdependent with those technologies, especially the drastic differences between the lives of the rich few and the many surviving on much less. The pernicious relationships of class to race, and the cultural suspicion of difference in general were also part of this context. 

 How can these problems be solved in a better global society that continues its social and technological evolution along this 10,000- year path of what we know as civilization? To some extent, novels by Kim Stanley Robinson are the exemplars of this kind of utopia, especially as they attempt to be highly practical as well as visionary about the process of creating utopia (which KSR seems to define these days as civilization surviving more or less intact while avoiding a mass extinction event among the planet’s lifeforms.)

 But there is one prominent aspirational utopia that enacts “the future” on this evolutionary line, and includes –and to a great extent depends on—higher technology. And it is the utopia that more people on planet Earth know that any other in history. It is the story saga known as Star Trek. 

 In the spring of 1964, Gene Roddenberry completed a 16-page outline for a television series he called Star Trek. As a successful television writer who had just produced a TV drama series, he was equipped and positioned to try to make it happen. 

 There are many curious connections and parallels between the lives, works and ideas of Gene Roddenberry in the mid-20th century, and H.G. Wells in the late 19th. Both were born in relative poverty on the margins of the dominant and most advanced nation of their time. Both had disabling health problems as children that turned them towards avid reading, and changed their lives. 

 This reading inspired a voracious hunger for knowledge, but they both could manage only a spotty mixture of scientific and literary education. Both became self-taught professional writers who gravitated towards the most popular storytelling medium of their time. 

 They used pretty much the same method and philosophy of science fiction storytelling. They both used story as a method of exploring the future, partly by critiquing aspects of their present. They each became the best-known storytellers about the future of their era.

 

Their common concern for the future is their most obvious bond. They even shared a kind of starting point in their judgment of humanity in the present. Roddenberry many times refers to humanity as being in its adolescence. “If there is a single question to which all of Well's books are addressed,” Wells critic Frank McConnell concludes, “it might be phrased as this one: How shall Man live through his own coming of age?" So the chief concern they shared may be stated as exploring the soul of the future.

 Both Wells and Roddenberry absorbed and synthesized ideas and stories of their times as well as the past. As an author (Wells) and as a producer (Roddenberry) they had primary responsibility for shaping their stories. Both had significant help from others but to a greater degree, Roddenberry depended on collaboration, partly because of the nature of his chosen storytelling medium. The television drama series is a unique storytelling form that requires the creative participation over time of many hands. Writers build on previous stories and character developments, directors absorb the innovations of their predecessors, actors become the creative caretakers of their characters. 

 Even if confined to the two Star Trek series that Roddenberry produced (the 1960s original Star Trek and the late 1980s to early 1990s Star Trek: The Next Generation), the Star Trek saga developed over hundreds of storytelling hours. Moreover, due to the feedback mechanisms it pioneered (including the science fiction community and fans), additional layers of participation developed. So Star Trek may be the first collaborative utopian tale. 

 While Roddenberry had the additional menu of science fiction pulp magazines and Saturday afternoon movie matinees in his story diet, he and Wells shared some forms and authors. They both read the cartoons and comics of their times (more advanced in Roddenberry’s childhood, as the adventure comic books developed out of the daily comic strips), the boy’s periodicals and books, adventures such as Robinson Crusoe and Huck Finn, as well as non-fiction accounts of faraway places, exotic creatures and voyages of exploration. In particular, they both developed an affinity for Jonathan Swift in particular, and took Gulliver’s Travels as a guide when each turned to science fiction.

 "My early, profound and lifelong admiration for Swift, appears again and again in this collection,” Wells wrote in a preface to a collection of his science fiction novels, “and it is particularly evident in a predisposition to make the stories reflect upon contemporary political and social discussions."

 “I thought with science fiction I might do what Jonathan Swift did when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels,” Roddenberry told an interviewer. “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.”

 In Swift, each also found a connection to more ancient folk and mythological stories; Swift’s Lilliputians, for example, 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. 

 This was a key observation 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.

 To these can be added the aliens with an array of unexplainable powers from strange new worlds in Star Trek (plus an actual Greek god.) Such figures reach deep into the cultural unconscious, applied in new ways appropriate to new generations.

 Moreover, they provide a perspective—a way to view humanity and its societies as if 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 the utopian tale.

 But there were also important contemporary influences that Roddenberry shared with his close collaborators. Many were veterans of World War II, some of them (like Roddenberry) combat veterans. Their careers coincided with the presidency of the former Allied Supreme Commander (General Dwight D. Eisenhower) and particularly that of a former Navy lieutenant who commanded a PT boat in the Pacific, John F. Kennedy.

 It probably is not a complete coincidence that Roddenbery wrote his Star Trek series proposal just four months after President Kennedy’s assassination. “Tragedy is amputation,” wrote Norman Mailer in his essay “After Kennedy’s Death”. “So many of the nerves of one’s memory run back to the limb which is no longer there.” Many of the prominent themes of Star Trek can be traced back to the Kennedy campaign and presidency.

 At this remove perhaps, the memory of JFK’s presidency has been reduced to a two-word soundbite (“Ask not...”) and the cliche of a womanizing “cold warrior.” At the time however many heard him as the eloquent voice of a new vision for the future, aspects of which could be classified as utopian. He urged a fresh perspective and necessary change for a better future.

 In the summer of 1960, Kennedy came to the Democratic convention that nominated him in Los Angeles, which was guarded by members of the Los Angeles police that had been Roddenberry’s colleagues when he was in the department, moving up from patrolman to a writer for the Chief. His father and brother were still on patrol.  

Roddenberry would have recognized the Kennedy name: when Navy Lt. John F. Kennedy’s PT boat was destroyed and he and his crew were lost at sea in the Pacific, bomber pilot Roddenberry, based nearby, was slated to search for them, though damage to his plane prevented it.

 Roddenberry was a hereditary Democrat, and Kennedy was the first of his generation to aspire to the presidency. For all these reasons he likely paid attention to Kennedy’s nomination acceptance speech envisioning a New Frontier:

 "I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West….Their motto was not 'Every man for himself,' but 'All for the common cause.'"

 "…we stand today on the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats…" 

 This New Frontier, he said, is “not a set of promises. It is a set of challenges."

” …Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus."

 “My call is to the young at heart, regardless of age, to the stout in spirit, regardless of party.”

 "…I believe the times demand invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking each of you to be new pioneers on that new frontier."

 Kennedy not only described one crucial characteristic of a utopian future in that speech; he argued its necessity.  “The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”  This was but one step short of the Buckminster Fuller choice of Utopia or Oblivion. The future was necessarily one or the other.

 So in that speech launching his campaign, Kennedy asked his fellow citizens to join him in “a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” 

 He repeated his utopian call in his Inaugural Address, and repeated the choice: “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

 Hardly more than two tumultuous years later, on successive days, Kennedy proposed the first nuclear test ban treaty that broke the ice of the Cold War and led to a series of such international treaties, and the Civil Rights and voting rights proposals that would become law after his death.

 Kennedy began two programs with a particular impact on Star Trek: the Peace Corps, and the first forays into what would soon be called the Final Frontier, with the space program and the Apollo mission to the moon.

 And then, just after inspecting the latest rocketry in Texas, he was shot and killed, and that particular vision disappeared.  But it was not forgotten.  It had already changed many Americans, particularly the young.

 A couple of years later, the idea that Roddenberry and his first collaborators, Robert Justman, Herb Solow and others, worked to develop was not just a new TV series, but a new kind of series. There was nothing like it on network television, at least not anymore.

 Along with westerns, space adventures had been a staple of early television in the 1950s, until they drifted from what was becoming prime time to Saturday mornings, and then disappeared.

 By the late 1950s and early 60s, television evenings were dominated by what at the time were called “adult westerns,” which attempted to develop western-based stories with more realistic plots, and characters with adult problems and relationships, within the strictures of network prime time. Gene Roddenberry had written particularly for one: “Have Gun, Will Travel.”

 But westerns began to fade in the ratings and networks were looking for the next big thing. So the Star Trek pitch became: if the popular western genre could go “adult,” why not adult space adventures? After the success of science fiction anthologies like The Twilight Zone, how about an hour-long prime time science fiction drama series with continuing characters, which they tagged as a “Wagon Train to the Stars.”

 Eventually, for whatever sensible, ridiculous and mysterious reasons these things happened, Star Trek got a deal to go into production. 

 Gene Roddenberry’s greatest skill (according to writer David Gerrold) was his ability to select brilliant collaborators, inspire them with his Star Trek vision and his faith in them, and then to maintain a team with a belief in that vision and a creative stake in their common project. Others (including Roddenberry himself) basically agreed.

 But Roddenberry made the final judgments, and he set the rules. They included basic rules of science fiction storytelling that H.G. Wells had enumerated decades before, in a preface to his collected science fiction novels in 1934. Such stories typically introduce fantastic elements, like a time machine or space aliens, which Wells called “the magic trick.” According to Wells, the trick has to at least sound as if it has a scientific basis, through “an ingenuous use of scientific patter,” but it must also be “explained in commonplace terms.”

 But for readers (or the audience) to suspend disbelief, the trick should be surrounded by familiar reality. You must “domesticate the impossible hypothesis,” as Wells wrote. It’s also best to introduce these elements one at a time, and once its function is demonstrated, it should not change arbitrarily. “Nothing remains interesting when anything may happen.”

 Above all, the trick must be surrounded by believable people. “Then it becomes human,” Wells wrote. “’How would you feel and what might not happen to you’ is the typical question if for instance...you became invisible?” The intent is “to keep everything human and real...the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired.”

 Wells could conjure worlds with words, which had its limitations but also its advantages. Roddenberry and his collaborators in televison had the opportunity but also the overriding problem of actually physicalizing the future, and making it at least temporarily believable. They had to build the 22nd century aboard a starship. 

 This was especially crucial because such a future was a very hard sell in the mid-1960s. Anything to do with rocket ships, futuristic gadgets or the future itself was considered fantasy, and kids’ stuff. It didn’t matter that the Old West as portrayed in westerns was itself fantasy—it was at least recognizable.

 In this physical design and beyond it, Roddenberry employed the principles of plausibility and consistency. Even if Star Trek technology was beyond present scientific capability or even known science, it had to seem like it was possible, and the technology had to appear plausible. Once established, that technology—as well as other continuing elements—had to remain consistent over time. The phasers and the transporter (developed as a device to get characters down to planets without expensive shots of the ship landing) had to work the same way on every show. 

 This was one of Roddenberry’s most effective insights. Star Trek technologies themselves came from everywhere—everything from Captain Future novels and Buck Rogers serials in the 1940s to 1950s’ Forbidden Planet and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. But they also came from technologies actually in early stages of development (like the bio-beds) or therorized by the experts Roddenberry consulted, as well as science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke. Other non-tech elements of that future also had earlier science fiction precedent—for instance, the code of the Space Patrol in Robert Heinlein’s story of that title for adolescent readers.

 What Roddenberry did was orchestrate these technologies and elements, embed them in an evolving culture, and adhere to the principles of plausibility and consistency. They created a comprehensible world as the basis for storytelling. 

As a prime time television series in the mid-1960s, Star Trek also had to present believable characters with explicable motivations and others, however exotic (or alien) they might otherwise be. That became the job of the writing and the continuing cast of actors, who—partly because writers and directors were responsible only for individual episodes—became the caretakers of their characters.

 Additionally, most of the main Star Trek cast had training and experience in theatre, and were active in ensuring that stories made dramatic sense. As producer, Roddenberry supervised the writing (and re-wrote scripts), urging series writers to adhere to the principles of drama (he particularly reccommended Lajos Egri’s classic text, The Art of Dramatic Writing.) 

 These stated and implied rules that guided an evolving story universe as episodes followed one another—the whole idea of a story universe or mythology unique to that saga—may now seem too common to be worthy of comment. Indeed, today’s cornucopia of science fiction, fantasy and superhero universes that dominate theatrical film and television—with their related books, games, etc.—are all based on these principles. There certainly were earlier examples, but not in a dramatic science fiction prime time television series. Roddenberry and his co-creators had to reinvent that particular wheel, fight for it and insist upon it.

 One result of these two elements—a plausible and consistent physical reality plus believable human behavior—was the grounding of a utopian vision. Though that vision was only outlined or partially dramatized (and it grew through individual stories), it transcended the abstractions of theories, ideologies and static pictures or statements. And even more than a three-dimensional utopia, it was a utopia in action—a utopia being created and dramatically tested, story after story. 

 

What began in September 1966 was a vision elaborated over time—the three seasons of the original series plus seven seasons of The Next Generation, and the 10 movies and other series’ episodes created with Roddenberry’s participation, or overseen by collaborators he’d hired and tutored, who adhered to his essential vision. Together they created a utopian saga for our time, and millions of viewers around the world saw it. Many became devoted to it.

 For what Star Trek did, in the eyes of many of its creators as well as its fans, was not simply create a story universe. First of all, it enacted hope. The spectre of the Bomb, the Vietnam war and all the civil disturbances of the 1960s, plus growing concern over pollution and other environment destruction, made it an apocalyptic time. Star Trek proposed that, after all, humanity could survive, and get better.

 Then over time, Star Trek did more--it modeled a future, including the kind of people who could exist in that future. That’s what made it utopian. It suggested and dramatized elements of a better future.

 The evolving mythological future of Star Trek involved humankind after a global war and subsequent societal breakdowns and reversions, all taking place—quite pointedly now-- in the mid 21st century. The discovery of warp drive and contact with alien civilizations unified the planet Earth and led to a transformation that ended poverty, disease and injustice. Humanity sent out stellar explorers, but this time with a code of ethics that respected all civilizations and all forms of life. Starfleet was a hybrid of the Navy, the scientific vessels of Jacques Cousteau and others, and the Peace Corps.

 This utopia modeled a future based not only on technology or systems of governance, but on institutional and personal behavior. This above all made it different.

 It may well be argued that this Star Trek future depends on technologies that are probably impossible, in a universe that is very unlikely. But the elements of this future need not be limited to the one portrayed in this technological fairy tale. They can be characteristics of the soul of another better future.

 What are those characteristics? What is this vision? Next time: The Final Frontier.