Conventional Wisdom

I’m propping up the hotel bar, nursing a reassuringly large weissbier. Out of the corner of my eye, off to the left, I can see Mr Chekhov sitting at a table enjoying a quiet drink with a female companion. Next to me at the bar a tall Klingon bellows for bloodwine; on my other side, a gaggle of Starfleet types are engaged in a lively, earnest debate that I can’t follow.

Around me, a hundred conversations are in progress at once: mostly in German, but I can pick out notes of English, French, Italian and the occasional guttural syllables of Klingon – a goodnatured but somewhat overwhelming babel of noise. I feel like I’ve strayed into a particularly boisterous saloon on a frontier planet, or perhaps one of those Star Trek episodes in which alien delegates converge on the Enterprise for a conference.

I have to ask myself: “What am I doing here?” What, in fact, are all these people doing here?

I’m in Fulda, Germany, as it happens. This is FedCon, Europe’s largest annual gathering of Star Trek fans, now in its 15th year, and we’re all here to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a low budget TV show that bombed in the ratings and was cancelled after three uncertain years on air. [1] The series, of course, was Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry’s seminal space opera in which Captain Kirk led the crew of the USS Enterprise across the far reaches of the Galaxy to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, new civilisations – and the 4,000 or so people assembled in the Hotel Esperanto are a selection of those who have fallen under its spell: Trekkers, Trekkies, fans. They’re here to hang out, catch up on news, shop till they drop in the dealers’ hall and meet the stars (there are representatives of every Trek incarnation here).

Everyone knows the story by now: Star Trek was a show before its time – an intelligent SF series that garnered a loyal (but initially small) following that twice saved it from cancellation; a series that ran for only three years but then rose from the ashes as a syndicated phoenix, bucking the old pre-demographic Nielsen wisdom, picking up millions of viewers along the way and giving birth to television’s first, biggest and most joked about media fandom. And that fandom, in turn, eventually convinced the Paramount execs that there was gold in that there franchise; as a result, we’ve had 10 Star Trek movies, an animated show and a further four series all based on the universe that Roddenberry and his talented group of writers, directors, designers and actors first brought to our screens four decades ago.

Star Trek isn’t just a TV show, it’s a phenomenon, and a strange one at that. It has at times appeared to bear all the hallmarks of a new religion, a revelation brought down from the mountain by an increasingly guru-like Roddenberry, the ‘Great Bird of the Galaxy’ whose vision of the future became, for many, a blueprint for living in the present. And its adherents have been portrayed, in media always hungry to point the finger at any signs of sub-cultural difference, as cultists, zealots, aliens; overweight women and spotty geeks sporting ludicrous velour uniforms, lacking both friends and the social skills necessary to make them. [2]


GREETINGS FROM THE FULDA GAP
If you talk to fans old enough to have watched Star Trek back in the Sixties, they all tend to tell a similar story: The Cold War was raging, space itself had become part of the battleground and the threat of nuclear doomsday hung like a pall over everything. Post-war science fiction films had tended to present the thermonuclear-Communist threat in terms of a violent alien invasion (Earth vs the Flying Saucers; Invaders from Mars) or a stealthy subversion from within (Invasion of the Body Snatchers; I Married a Monster From Outer Space), but Star Trek promised something new. Growing out of the forward-looking rhetoric of the Kennedy era (you can imagine Captain Kirk delivering parts of JFK’s ‘new frontier’ speech or inaugural address), [3] it also offered a vision of hope – not just hope for the future but hope of a future.
It showed that, rather than destroying itself in the latter half of the 20th century, humanity was going to make it all the way to the 22nd. Star Trek was Camelot in space.

On the first night of the convention I meet a group of charming British ladies; they’re as far from the media image of Star Trek fans as you could possibly get – middle-aged, middle-class professionals with proper jobs and proper lives – but they love Star Trek and all agree that it provided them with a vision of hope during some dark times.

Leslie Ann is 45 and works for the Welsh Assembly, and she remembers the impact of first seeing the show: “I was less than 10 when it started showing in Britain, and it was a time when there was a lot of talk about nuclear war, the Cold War, and it offered a positive view of the future. It was about the other, about the alien…”

But not, I suggest, in the same way as those old 1950s movies, where aliens just wanted to trample on us Earth-types…

“No,” chimes in Sue, a 57-year-old retired police officer, “Aliens were not to be feared.”

It wasn’t just ET who got a makeover in Star Trek; there was also a conscious attempt to address the scary sorts of alienness presented by other cultures and competing ideologies. Leslie Ann points out that it made her feel better that there was a Russian serving on the Enterprise.

Sue agrees. “It was a hopeful series. It was all nations working together. Aliens were friends. There was a time when anything alien was strange and to be feared. I remember a time when I’d cry myself to sleep at night because the Berlin Wall had been built. There was the Cuban missile crisis and we were going to go to war and the world was going to be destroyed. And Star Trek told you: no it wasn’t – we could work our problems out and we could learn to live with people who were different from ourselves.”

It’s ironic, I note, that we’re having this conversation in Fulda, once a potentially very hot spot in the Cold War, right on the border between the two old Germanies, between the democratic, Star Trek-watching West and the oppressive regimes of the Eastern Bloc. The Fulda Gap, as it came to be known, was of prime strategic importance, a direct invasion route that put the industrial centre of Frankfurt in easy reach of the Soviet forces massed beyond the Iron Curtain. The fact that, today, we’re gathered in Fulda’s appropriately named Hotel Esperanto seems to bear out at least some of the hopes that the Baby Boomers – witnesses not only to the Cold War but also to Vietnam and the Civil Rights struggle – invested in Star Trek and its message.


SETTING A COURSE FOR THE FUTURE
George Takei, the actor who played Mr Sulu in the original series, admits to some surprise at finding himself here in Fulda more than 40 years since he first took the Enterprise helm.

“The 40th anniversary? It’s something we never dreamt would be happening. Because when we were doing Star Trek as a TV show back in the 1960s, our ratings were very low and every season we were hanging on by our fingernails. So our goal was always just to survive for another season, not decades! So, to be talking to you here in Germany, in the sixth year of the 21st century about something we did back then is something totally undreamt of.”

At 68, George may be the baby of the original Star Trek family, but his irrepressible energy and theatrical flamboyance are still something of a surprise to me – he’s much more the disinhibited and sword-wielding Sulu of The Naked Time than the sober and unflappable helmsman I’d expected. He’s generous in his praise of Star Trek’s legions of fans – “Gene created the series, but this phenomenon was created by the fans” – and while I agree that Star Trek has a remarkable history of fan support, I’m still trying to puzzle out just why so many people, from all over the world, have responded to Roddenberry’s concept in its various iterations with such an appetite – and for so many years.

Takei believes it’s all down to the uniquely forward-looking, optimistic nature of Roddenberry’s vision: “It stood for a glowing, shining ideal… Star Trek talked about how we approach the future, what is ahead for human civilisation. And part of the answer that Gene gave was to have confidence in our ability to solve problems, in our ability to engage challenges, our ability to innovate, to create, to invent – that’s how we face the future. So many of these other pessimistic shows that call themselves science fiction and deal with the future, I don’t think they help us advance. You know, pessimism can’t motivate you to make any progress.”

Perhaps he’s right – while the classics of dystopian SF may have given us a good idea of what we want to avoid as a species, their pessimism has also trickled down into a hundred glib imitations in films, television and videogames the world over. For Takei, Star Trek grew out of a social and cultural moment in the 1960s when it was crucial to take a stand for the future: “Gene used science fiction as a metaphor for contemporary issues – like the Civil Rights movement. We had racial warfare going on at the time,
urban riots, in the 60s; we had the Vietnam War that was tearing the country apart; we had the hippie movement, which was culturally revolutionary; two great powers threatening nuclear annihilation – all that we talked about, but in a science fiction context. It’s the people who see the future with optimism that help move society forward.” [4]

Takei’s own fund of optimism appears inexhaustible, and he has certainly taken Star Trek’s style of liberal-humanist progressivism and run with it over the years, giving a good deal of energy to civil rights causes, and has used his status as one of the few widely recognised Asian-American personalities to draw attention to issues affecting that community. Recently, too, he came out very publicly as a gay man in response to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s vetoing of the state’s same-sex marriage bill. Takei set off on a nationwide speaking tour – called, of course, ‘Equality Trek’ – on behalf of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign, “the biggest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy group”.

Takei certainly seems to be a living testament to the efficacy of cosmic optimism and belief in humanity – and this is a man who spent his earliest years growing up behind barbed wire in a US internment camp for Japanese Americans during WWII. While he’s acutely conscious of threats to the Star Trek vision of ‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination’ in the current political climate, George remains obstinately committed to “debate and democracy, free speech, open discussion and the espousal of ideas, even those you disagree with”. It occurs to me that if we must have someone called George in the White House, then Mr Takei would be the perfect choice.


SCIENCE FACTIONS
The women from Britain have stuck with Star Trek for 40 years for many reasons (not the least of which, it turns out, is totty; Carol, the 50-year-old veterinary surgeon admits to having “a complete crush on Captain Kirk when I was 13”; for Sue, it was Mr Spock. ST’s most recent television incarnation, Enterprise, has kept them more than happy – when Connor Trinneer, one of the shows stars, joins us at our table their eyes flash with a predatory gleam and I become temporarily invisible).

The series’s portrayal of science, they tell me, was one reason for its appeal. Sue was already a long-term SF fan, initially attracted to the show because it was the first “proper science fiction” programme shown in Britain: “It showed space travel, it took it seriously… and although none of the science really worked, it had its own internal logic and it stuck to its own rules.”

Gene Roddenberry’s hiring of ‘real’ science fiction writers for the original series, as well as his cultivation of the likes of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, were testimony to his desire to give his creation some genuine SF credentials and scientific depth. While this meant that, in its early days, the fledgling franchise gained respect from the established SF community, more important still were the links the programme forged with the world of real science.

Carol and Sue certainly aren’t alone in their attraction to the science of Star Trek; a lot of the people I meet at FedCon are involved in scientific or technical activities – like 30-year-old biotechnology student Uli (dressed in a fetching ‘Mirror Universe’ mini-dress), 38-year-old IT consultant Arne, the very model of an upright Starfleet officer, or Wulfgang, a 43-year-old technical author who finds himself drawn to the technology of the ST universe “because it works! This is what I like as an engineer – I hit the button and it works!”

There has been a long, and possibly unique, relationship between the world of Star Trek and that of ‘real’ science. If Roddenberry’s original vision of a techno-scientific utopia drew on the challenges of the space race, Star Trek in turn has proved a powerful inspiration to new generations of scientists. George Takei believes that Star Trek’s optimism about the positive contribution science can make to the perfection of human nature has been vital: “It takes visionaries like Gene Roddenberry to set the goals for the scientists, the technicians, the inventors, the innovators. Then, when the goals have been set by the imagineers, then the others work to make that reality – to make cell-phones happen, to make space-stations happen, and hopefully,” says a travel-weary Takei, “to make the transporter happen!” [5]

Certainly, scientists have taken to Star Trek as to no other TV show; a browse through NASA’s various websites reveals just how many people working on the future of space exploration have been directly inspired by watching the original series in their youth and The Next Generation as adults. The ultimate seal of scientific approval for the show was probably the appearance of Stephen Hawking in an episode of TNG. [6]

Star Trek even inscribed this process in the title sequence Enterprise, where we see ‘real’ film images of the progression from powered to supersonic and eventually to space flight – culminating, of course, in the Enterprise itself. The uniforms and mission patches worn by the crew had clearly been designed with a 22nd-century NASA in mind. [7]

What is more striking, though, about the conjoined histories of Star Trek and American space science is the way the series has been ‘written into’ NASA’s own public discourse, from the roll-out of the first Space Shuttle Enterprise in the presence of the original series cast (and to the strains of Alexander Courage’s Star Trek theme music) and the naming of NASA mission control and on-board computers ‘Scotty’ and ‘Spock’, to the space agency’s employment of Nichelle Nichols (Lt Uhura) to help recruit female and ethnically diverse astronauts. Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, publicly acknowledged Lt Uhura as the direct inspiration for her career (and always began her shuttle mission shifts with the phrase “Hailing frequencies open.”).

In the history and conceptualisation of space exploration, as academic Constance Penley has noted, it’s rather as if “Star Trek is the theory and NASA the practice”. [8] The practice – of course – since the high-water mark of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, has been more a series of disappointments, and, indeed, disasters, than the kind of giant step for mankind that we’d been promised (for womankind, it’s even worse; Penley takes NASA to task for its inability to properly imagine women in the context of outer space). But NASA’s use of Star Trek makes a lot of sense in a world where popular science fiction has largely given in to regressive dystopian fantasy; Star Trek has remained a culturally viable utopian scenario in which science and technology – far from being the bad guys – offer humanity the keys to its future. As journalist Jeff Greenwald has argued, the series could even be seen as standing in for, in the public imagination, the space programme itself, offering redemption for its failed promises and broken dreams as well as “a mandate to press onward with research and development, walking the razor’s edge until the balance of human consciousness shifts”. [9]


CAMP KLINGON
Star Trek embraced the future of space exploration as a way of critiquing – and escaping from – the politics of the Cold War. But while it imagined a world where such politics no longer figured on Earth, it couldn’t quite escape them. Even if, at least on the USS Enterprise, the Russians were now represented by the non-threatening, teen-friendly (and initially mop-topped) Mr Chekhov, and ET by the coolly logical, diversity-loving Mr Spock, life in outer space wasn’t all peace and love. For a start, there were the Klingons, Asiatic-styled alien baddies introduced in 1967’s Errand of Mercy as obvious stand-ins for the Communist menace, and later showing up in grim Vietnam allegories like A Private Little War. [10]

Gene Roddenberry often asserted that it was Trek’s space opera trappings that allowed him and his witers to explore such off-limit topics as war in Vietnam and race riots at home, arguing that network execs couldn’t see what was under their noses as long as it was dressed in alien clothes. [11] The Klingons, though, outgrew their early status as coded Cold War villains (particularly after the space age glasnost of the 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) and became the far more textured and interesting alien race featured in TNG and beyond. From villains they morphed into the scions of a complex, honour-bound culture with its own customs, traditions and art forms (Klingon opera anyone?), even their own language.

Klingons may not be the all-round bad-guys they once were, but they still have a heavy-metal grunginess and a biker swagger. There are plenty of them to be seen at FedCon. When I spot a particularly burly specimen holding an evil-looking dagger to a woman’s throat while her husband takes photos, I decide to pluck up my courage and speak to him. He’s a fearsome looking fellow – all brow ridges, sharpened teeth and bushy eyebrows – but despite this, and the pungent alcohol fumes wafting off him, he turns out to be an obliging chap, and invites me back to the Klingon encampment to meet his comrades.

“What’s your name?” I ask him as we make our way through the crowds.

“Klingon or German?”

I opt for Klingon, but can’t make head or tail of the string of guttural syllables he spits at me. Somewhat sheepishly he admits that he screwed it up – too much bloodwine – but that it translates as something like “the aggressive one, son of Dekell, of the House of Daakh”.

“And your German one?” I enquire, looking for the easy option.

“Sebastian.”

Sebastian turns out to be a 28-year-old who is studying to be an elementary school English teacher. As we arrive at the Klingon laager – an impressive, nomadic-looking structure pitched in the middle of the convention’s huge dealer hall – he introduces me to his wife. Melanie is a kindergarten mistress – though you’d never think it to look at her – and they were married just a few weeks back in a Klingon ceremony. They make a lovely couple.

“How long have you been a Klingon?” I ask him.

“Since 1998,” he tells me proudly, swaying a bit. “I met a bunch of people when I was in a really bad mood and very pissed. I went into the disco and made my way through the masses, and I bumped into some Klingons – female anatomy students – well, you know what I mean!”

I think I know what he means.

“I smiled when I saw their Klingon uniforms and Klingon faces, and they were pushing me against the wall. And I was thinking: “She’s not just looking Klingon, she’s acting Klingon!” And I was smiling all over my face. And that’s how I made first contact with what is now my society, which is called Khemorex Klinzai – ‘the
Klingon Spirit that Grows’.

Khemorex Klinzai has members across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland (and Scotland, where the society was founded, apparently). They have a couple of large gatherings – or ‘Qetlop’ – each year, the highlights of the Klingon social calendar, attracting between 80 to 150 people, who head off to the woods for a weekend of “getting together, dressing up, partying, doing some ceremonies, marriages, bringing people into your clan and so on.” And then there are the smaller regional meetings – “the ship meetings and squadron meetings” – and the conventions. “Just look for the loudest sound, the most annoying smell, and you’ll find the Klingons,” proclaims my host.

But why would you want to be the loudest, smelliest people at the party? Why would you want to be a Klingon?

“This is a good question. We just have parties, without offending anyone. We are just us. We are dressing up and acting, but that allows us at the same time to be ourselves and to open ourselves. It’s a big, huge family. At first, it started with just the Trek/Klingon thing, but then we grew together, into a really, really close family – and now it’s just real tight friendship, sharing problems, getting someone on their feet if they’re stumbling, being there for each other. It’s a secondary family, an alternative family… at first it was a fandom thing, but it’s developed into a family thing. And that’s why I stay so involved and put all my emotions and energy into it.”

Klingons are a subculture within a subculture – not so much the dark side of the Star Trek fan universe (there doesn’t seem to be one), just its down and dirty one. I get a sense that this kind of acting out or play might be good for all of us – it must be refreshing to cast off inhibitions and repressions, to drink bloodwine and party all night, to look like anything but a trainee teacher…

And as far as Sebastian is concerned, Germany needs to learn how to party more; it needs Klingons!

FROM FANDOM TO FAMILY
After a couple of days at FedCon it seems to me that fans – and especially Trek fans, who have formed the template through which other fandoms have subsequently been viewed by outsiders – are a badly misunderstood bunch.

OK, some of them sure dress funny (although the Starfleet uniforms quickly began to look as normal as business suits), but they are for the most part a fair cross-section of society at large.

What sets them apart – and makes them a target for ridicule – is the unworthy object of their interest. While it’s pretty acceptable to devote a large proportion of one’s time to listening to the Ring Cycle, rereading Shakespeare’s plays or gawping at Tracy Emin’s soiled knickers, having a passion for television sci-fi merely reveals the fan to be the dupe of the debased mass culture represented by the products of capitalism (rather than those of an imagined artistic autonomy somehow free from the constraints and contexts of all cultural production). Even literary science fiction fans have tended to look down their noses at those fandoms – like Star Trek’s – which grew out of media science fiction, seeing them as little more than infantilised versions of the ‘real thing’ that anyone with half a brain would grow out of before discovering ‘proper’ written ‘SF’. To quote the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”. In other words, all that such judgements reveal is the endless play of what Bourdieu termed ‘distinction’, a cultural economy that generally seeks to maintain the dominant hierarchies by excluding those who express ‘barbarous’ tastes and enthusiasms. [12] Star Trek fans, though, have created their own cultural economy, well outside of the gaze of such arbiters of the mainstream as academic journals or newspaper arts sections, in which the products of mass culture are re-appropriated, reworked and re-circulated: as fan fiction, videos and films, as message board discussions on the Internet, as role-playing and dressing up, and as that most bizarre form of cultural activity, slash, a form of female literary erotica in which Kirk/Spock (hence the ‘slash’) or other characters are imagined in all sorts of lively sexual relationships. [13]

Fandoms change, and while the DIY æsthetic of Seventies Trek fandom [14] may have given way to a more controlled and commercialised environment (one in which the old school female fan/activists are joined by ‘fanboys’ more interested in completing their set of action figures), there’s a strong sense here at FedCon of a genuine community.

I’ve spent the weekend asking an awful lot of people why they are here; many tell me that Star Trek itself isn’t, any longer, the most important thing – what matters, in the end, is the extended family that grew out of it.

Frank is a 38-year-old teacher who has been coming to FedCon since the beginning. I ask him why he thinks all these people have travelled to Fulda. It’s a big question, and he doesn’t have an answer. “If there are 3,000 people here,” he tells me, “then you have 3,000 reasons…”

For him, though, the answer is a simple one: it’s a home from home, full of friends who, in some cases, he’ll only see at these annual gatherings of the clan. Yes, they might talk about Star Trek, but more often than not they’ll discuss the real-life changes that another year has brought to them. Star Trek has merely brought them together “because of the appeal of some very general, universal ideas. Everybody can identify with some aspect of the show – it brings us together here as a family”. Which is a word I’ve heard a lot this weekend – even on the lips of a Klingon.

FedCon – with its diverse mix of people of all ages, races and sexualities – is a bit like Roddenberry’s idealised future come to life. “We are here,” says Frank, “because, in our hearts, we are all friends.”

GET A LIFE!
It’s late on Sunday evening, and things are winding down. I stand outside the Hotel Esperanto, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the night sky.

I get chatting with an unassuming young man called Jorrit. He’s a service technician for an industrial door system (I can’t help wondering whether they make that gentle whooshing sound like the ones on the Enterprise) and this is his first convention.

“Why do you like Star Trek?” I ask him.

“I don’t know,” he replies hesitantly. “I grew up with it. I like spaceships.”

So, I deduce – a classic geek of a kind I’ve hardly encountered all weekend.

But, then, he rolls up the sleeve and reveals a Klingon symbol tattooed on his forearm.

“There is more… in space. I don’t know. I can’t describe it.” He’s struggling with his English, trying to communicate something, perhaps the answer I’ve been seeking for the past three days.

He points to the tattoo: “I got it because I believe that there’s more out there…”

And that, I suspect is why 4,000 people have converged on the Hotel Esperanto, why Star Trek survives even without a new series on air – that the possibility of transcendence – of the Earth, of our own human divisiveness, perhaps of humanity itself – is always a real one. It’s the same feeling, I suppose, that drives people to climb Everest, search for Bigfoot, join a monastery, design a spacecraft… or create Star Trek.

We look up at the stars together in silence.

On the way back to London, I ponder the final irony of my trip to FedCon. I’d expected, I suppose, the worst; that the media images of the Star Trek fan – dull-witted consumer, obsessive freak, Johnny-no-mates – would turn out to be accurate. Instead, I found a large gathering of incredibly diverse, friendly, smart people, only some of whom dressed strangely.

William Shatner once told his fans to “Get a life!” in a famous and very funny Saturday Night Live sketch that cemented the image of the fanboy geek in our culture. George Takei had been delighted to discover I was English, and from London no less. But when it emerges that I don’t exactly get out much and the London stage these days is largely a mystery to me, George is appalled. For years, he has travelled over every few months to take in the latest plays; once, he even landed the role of Aladdin’s Genie in British panto!

With a theatrical flourish he tells me: “You must learn to live life!”

NOTES
1 Actually, as the SF mediaverse spews forth ever more product, the punters at these events become ever more varied, splintering into ever more interest groups; now, it’s not just Vulcans and Klingons one bumps into but Star Wars nuts, rebooted Battlestar Galactica fans and dwellers in the Buffyverse. Perhaps that’s just as it should be, but when I witness a squad of Lucas’s robotic white Stormtroopers marching through the hotel lobby I find myself appalled; “They look like a bunch of Nazis!” I remark loudly and definitely inappropriately to my companion, who glares at me. We head for the bar.

2 Fandoms, like everything else, are subject to historical change, and so are the discourses around them. While positive media accounts – stressing the prevalence of MIT students, NASA engineers and liberal humanists – have also appeared in recent years, the ‘fan’ label is still loaded with negative connotations. See John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Dr Who and Star Trek, Routledge, 1995.

3 “Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.”
Now imagine William Shatner saying it.

4 In the great tradition of left-driven cultural/media studies approaches to TV and cinema (in other words, argue that whatever the text would seem to be doing, the exact opposite is the case; for instance, slasher films are enabling for women), Star Trek has had its liberal-humanist agenda deconstructed and critiqued in a zillion academic papers demonstrating that it is, in fact, a colonial text that can’t really deal with the specters of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ that it raises. On balance, it’s hard not to come down on the side of the progressive model of Star Trek articulated by the fans – although acknowledging that its texts are indeed as riven with contradiction as any others – rather than the endless deconstructions circulating exclusively within the groves of academe and bearing such tempting titles as “Phenomenology of Communication and Culture: Michel Foucault’s Thematics in The Televised Popular Discourse of Star Trek”, “Star Trek as Cultural Text: Proprietary Audiences, Interpretive Grammars, and the Myth of the Resisting Reader”, “Dating Data: Miscegenation in Star Trek: The Next Generation” and, best of all, “General Chang as Homoerotic Enablement in Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country”.

5 See the recent documentary How William Shatner Changed the World for numerous illustrations of this ‘goalpost’ effect whereby inventors and Silicon Valley types attempt to realise the technologies they saw in Star Trek.

6 Hawking’s support for the show – which he saw as helping people engage with science – contrasted with that of Carl Sagan, who saw it as yet another example of spurious pop culture ensnaring the vulnerable and gullible. In this case, as so often when dealing with science’s relation to wider culture, Sagan was just plain wrong. FT readers will probably remember the ire he later focused on The X-Files.

7 As I was writing this, I came across the news that the new NASA mission logos for Project Orion – a major attempt to reinvigorate the space programme – have been designed by none other than Star Trek technical consultant and scenic artist Mike Okuda.

8 Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America, Verso, 1997, p.19.

9 Jeff Greenwald, Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth, Penguin, 1998, p.26.

10 For an overview of how ST engaged with Vietnam – and expressed Americans’ changing view of the conflict – see H Bruce Franklin, “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol 21, Part 1, March 1994 (archived online at www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/62/franklin62art.htm).

11 Star Trek has always been essentially about contemporary human problems (hence the parallel worlds of which the original series was so inordinately fond), whether large scale historical paroxysms like the Cold War/Vietnam in the original series and the post 9/11 world in Enterprise, social issues like race and gender, or more generalised questions about what it means to be human. Trouble With Tribbles writer David Gerrold puts it this way: “Star Trek was not about space. It wasn’t about Kirk and Spock. It wasn’t even about Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. No. It was about us. It was about our dreams. It is this simple: Space is not the final frontier. The final frontier is the human soul. Space is where we will meet the challenge.” David Gerrold, The World of Star Trek, Virgin Books, 1996, p ix.

12 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Routledge, London, 1984.

13 See Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Routledge, 1992; Tulloch and Jenkins, op. cit.; and Penley, op. cit.

14 Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston, Star Trek Lives! (Bantam, 1975) provides a useful account of first generation Trek fandom.