Issue #67, September 19th, 1996

Star Trek: SF Lite
by Greg Benford

The 30th anniversary of Star Trek left me wry and sour. To be an sf fan and see the genre overrun in the public's eye by the astonishing persistence of a television series, routinely launched with little fanfare thirty years ago, calls for explanation and rumination. Who among us does not view Trek with oblique bemusement, cousins eyeing a rich relative?

Hollywood and TV have always methodically harvested ripened fruit from genre vineyards. Cowboys and detectives are easy for a broad audience to fathom, but true, hard-core science fiction seemed, well, downright eerie. Its density and strangeness had made TV's job far harder than Hollywood's scare-'em-with-science, giant-bug formula evolved in the 1950s.

Gene Roddenberry's ever-growing profit center began with a single insight, when he casually referred to Trek as "Wagon Train in space." He saw that the genre needed translation into human terms, and so evolved the fundamental strategy that opened sf.

Trek became a huge multimedia phenom by imagining a shared experience: Our Gang visits the future. The Enterprise crew had well-defined roles lead by an affable captain. William Shatner saw that humor and a calm, everyday air aboard would be crucial. Spock was Sherlock Holmes in space, the series' most original notion. The crew/family's often whimsical efforts to convert him to emotion provided an amusing leitmotif against a background blend of the mildly fantastic and reassuringly familiar. Manageable exoticism sold.

Trek taught a generation of mundanes to seek that "sci-fi experience" in this associative way, far from the deliberate dislocations and strangeness sought by genre insiders.

Never did Trek challenge genre stereotypes. By harvesting fresh ideas and themes invented in print it loomed over most conventional TV. My friends wrote some of the best scripts in the first two seasons (Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon), only to be often rewritten and finally not invited back. The series now depends on writers who seem rather proud of their ignorance of written sf. I was just starting to write sf then and their experience frightened me away from TV and movies.

Roddenberry's favorite theme was flawed gods, usually alien superbeings or warped humans, often speaking to the problems of hubris. For me, Trek's greatest sins lay in its general scientific incoherence. In the very first show, an alien "salt vampire" preferred to kill people for a few grams of salt in their bodies, rather than simply steal galley stores.

As it spawned offspring series and films, quickie technical solutions threw into question the entire physics and technology of the series. The early shows opted for the "transporter" to avoid expensive shots of rockets landing and lifting off. Thereafter the series dodged the problems of what a society looks like where everything can be quickly duplicated. Worse, plots often relied on telepathy and "mind science" for motivation and twists.

Sf studies the collision between our humanity and an indifferent universe. Many modern anxieties stem from our broadening awareness of our chilly loneliness. Trek dodged this deeper issue, inventing SF Lite, the sci-fi option. In Trek, human emotion and gut feeling is forever superior to cold logic: the galaxy is user-friendly.

The show pivoted around a desire to please everyone, with a token Russian, Asian and black woman in the crew. This apparently forgave its air of earnest moralizing, a trait we still see today in the frequent oracular pronouncements delivered ex cathedra from the Enterprise bridge. The films continued this; even in the perhaps-best, "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," the most adventurous position taken is Save The Whales.

Trek's dazzling successes inspired over a hundred novels, a gold mine for Pocket Books and many starving print sf guys. Alas, the hoped-for transference of Trek book readers to mainline sf didn't happen. Perhaps this relates to the unusual popularity of older, Golden Age writers in sf -- Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Herbert, with their time-honored approaches. Here, too, readers prefer to go to the strange future in the company of somebody they know; it's reassuring.

This suggests that whatever the medium, the way to reach this enormous audience is to find a shared, quasi-communal vehicle. Later, "Star Wars" made this strategy more explicit with an entire set of future family, its sons-and-fathers revelations played out over three films with three more in the pipeline.

I suppose it did take courage to show TV's first inter-racial kiss, to confront militarism during Vietnam on one hand and soon after to deplore counter-cultural excesses as well. Conventional liberal postures, in a liberal era. Trek did and does assume a world that works, though, surely a reassuring fresh breeze to anyone reading the newspapers.

In Trek's future everyone cheerfully wears spandex and looks great, a remarkable prospect for a nation which, over the last three decades, has seen the average adult add a pound of weight in each passing year. Could this be the secret heart of our love for the show?

Issue #67, September 19th, 1996

Return to the table of contents.

Previous article: Drawing Conclusions, by Lesley Reece.

Next article: Fanzine Countdown, by Andy Hooper.