Like many people my age, for me the 7.20 Tuesday evening slot on BBC1 was all about science fiction back in the seventies. Blakes 7 seemed to be on constant rotation with Star Trek for a few years. I’ve always been a big reader and pretty quickly I was finding what passed for sci-fi in the children’s section of the library.
Frankly, there wasn’t very much, and I drifted off into what would today be called Fantasy novels. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea and Alan Garner’s books. When I came across Arthur C Clarke’s Islands in The Sky, I progressed to the adult Sci-Fi shelves pretty quickly.
At that point, some names I had seen on Star Trek credits, Jerome Bixby, and Theodore Sturgeon amongst others popped up in front of me, and I was away. Harlan Ellison didn’t make much impression on me as “City on the Edge of Forever” went way over the head of a 10- or 11-year-old. The animated series had appeared by now and I was delighted to find a link to an author I had just found, Larry Niven.
The episode “The Slaver Weapon“, introduced the Kzinti from Niven’s Known Space stories which were just brilliant. And I got to be 10 all over again when they were referenced in Picard forty plus years later. Various comics had Star Trek stories in them, I was given, and quickly discarded, some of the Gold Key comics, and so Star Trek drifted away for me much as it did for everyone else, I imagine.
Star Wars was the first big event film that I went to see and of course I was quite taken with it, and the next two films. In between those of course was Star Trek the Motion Picture which never really did it for me, still doesn’t in fact. Wrath of Khan on the other hand was the edge of the seat stuff at the cinema as was Search for Spock. For some reason, despite being an avid sci-fi reader I never picked up any Star Trek books.
There was a book, comic and all things geek shop called Forever People in Bristol which was where I shopped but I don’t recall seeing anything related to Trek there at all. By the time the early nineties rolled around, it was the 8 pm Monday slot that was the home of new Trek, with reruns of earlier TNG series twice a day so I caught up quickly, and even sat through the first two seasons multiple times, despite them being in my view as dire as TV can get.
One of the things that were a constant with an interest in Trek, and also with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which I have followed since the very start, probably more obsessively even than Trek, is the sense of community that goes with it. In the school playground, there was always a dissection of the previous night’s TV.
The same after a trip to the Cinema, and later on watching videos or getting together to watch the first episodes of shows like Deep Space Nine. Being Star Trek fans, we love a good whinge, and Voyager always gave us something to complain about. And that is the point I think of following a show like Star Trek, the shared experiences.
All this got much easier in the age of the internet. I’ll give you two guesses about what my first search was when we finally got online. That’s right Hitchhiker’s, with Star Trek close behind, and I found… Newsgroups. And suddenly I was lapping up information, discovering the stories behind the stories and watching the original series with new eyes when Sky TV started showing it again. And the sense of community and belonging has built from thee.
With Facebook groups replacing newsgroups, podcasts inviting listener interaction, and all the other Social Media outlets that allow us to connect we are now, from that point of view at least, living in the world of Star Trek with instant communications across distances.
In other respects, we seem as far away from the galaxy envisioned by Roddenberry as ever. While more recent series have taken his original utopian view and darkened it, the one thing that hasn’t changed is the fundamental nature of the Federation as a supportive, nourishing place to live.
The basic message that everyone should be given the opportunity to live to their full potential without needing to focus on the basic necessity of survival is one that we should aspire to. It was interesting to look at the way the Pandemic has brought out the best in many people and compare that to some of Roddenberry’s ideals.
For me, while I fully accept that at least some of the ideals that originally drove Star Trek are a little naïve, at least at this point in history, I think that as points to take inspiration for our lives they can be more than worth considering. What I have taken from Trek, a love of good books and well-made TV and films, as well as finding a community in the Trek world has enriched my life immeasurably and led me to the point where I get to share my love of it with others on these pages…
What more could you ask for?…
