Television

Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe

Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe

Lincoln Geraghty

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 1845112652

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This book is a welcome and original contribution to the world of 'Star Trek.'  The book not only sets 'Star Trek' in dialogue with ideas and stories of utopia, community, self-improvement, that are central to American culture and history, but goes further to examine the complex ways in which these are taken up and used by 'ordinary' fans, who engage with 'Star Trek' in complex and significant ways.  Lincoln Geraghty explores, for example, 'Star Trek's multiple histories and how 'Star Trek' and the American Jeremiad, one of the nation's foundational texts, refer back to the past to prophesy a better future.  He reveals how fans define the series as a blueprint for the solution of such social problems in America as racism and war and shows how they have used the series to cope with personal trauma and such characters as Data and Seven of Nine in moments of personal transformation.  This is all in all a revelatory and original book on 'Star Trek' as both TV and cinema.   

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extinguishes its ‘preachiness’ and allows ‘a storyteller, be you a writer or director, the opportunity of telling a story that has something to say’.4 To a large degree, this statement is a valid one, but we should be aware of how much other forms of television programming such as comedy or animation can relate to and comment on politically charged issues without being too obvious or lacking in sincerity. The opening narration has entered popular imagination just like the characters of the shows,

extinguishes its ‘preachiness’ and allows ‘a storyteller, be you a writer or director, the opportunity of telling a story that has something to say’.4 To a large degree, this statement is a valid one, but we should be aware of how much other forms of television programming such as comedy or animation can relate to and comment on politically charged issues without being too obvious or lacking in sincerity. The opening narration has entered popular imagination just like the characters of the shows,

important in the context of this chapter and my overall argument: Cawelti defines its success as being ‘tied to individual fulfilment and social progress rather than to wealth or status. This tradition also showed a greater concern for the social implications of individual mobility.’6 So, rather than looking out for oneself, this version of the self-made man was concerned with his success in relation to the community as a whole; personal change being linked to community progress. It is this

‘fanfic for the old paper “zines”’ and then began to write scripts in an attempt to get them made into real episodes. Eventually one of her stories was made into the TNG episode ‘Sub Rosa’ (1994) and another inspired the Voyager episode ‘Distant Origin’ (1997). She found that, as well as getting support from the show, the producers helped her enormously in trying to write and submit ideas to the studio: ‘They gave a lot of self-confidence and allowed a lifelong scifi fan and Trekker to make her

nine) contains the top three prizewinners of a Star Trek short story contest held every year. See Dean Wesley Smith, John J. Ordover and Paula M. Block (eds.), Star Trek Strange New Worlds Volume I (New York, NY: Pocket Books, 1998). 5. Mandy Coe, ‘Bred to Boldly Go’, in Valerie Laws (ed.), Star Trek The Poems (Manchester: Iron Press, 2000), 9. 6. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 75; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of

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