Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Tom McLean's avatar

Star Trek needs to go forward, not backward. I still don't understand why they haven't yet done Star Trek: The Third Generation. Go forward another 100 years, create a new crew for a new Enterprise, and you can do anything you like with the universe without having to pretend it fits into a 60-year-old timeline.

Expand full comment
Chris Bateman's avatar

Great essay, Will. I don't know if it's Star Trek that's broken so much as sci-fi in general. I have this sense that the Cyberpunk authors books in the 1980s ("the Movement") was in a very real sense the 'end' of science fiction as a creative form, after which it degenerated into just another big bucket for genre fiction to churn.

It seems to me that philosophical problems in how we relate to the sciences have left science fiction rudderless, simultaneously 'tech fantasy' and 'social futurism', governed more by political and economic fantasies than by exploring questions about life, the universe, and everything.

Great science fiction - including Star Trek - was always philosophical, because it was about exploring 'the final frontiers' in more than one sense. This has started to come apart just as philosophy has come apart... maybe these are two aspects of the same problem.

All the best,

Chris.

Expand full comment
3 more comments...

No posts