So, as has been a theme since I started this blog, I've recently been on a huge Star Trek thing. I'm excited about the movie coming in a few months, but I tend to think it's a setting that works best in television (frankly, the more fleshed-out a world is, the more I think a TV show - or series of novels - serves it best.)
One of the refreshing things about Star Trek is its optimism.
I was a sophomore in high school during September 11th, 2001. Now, I realize that's a date we drag out a whole lot, but I doubt many could argue that it hasn't had a profound impact on the American consciousness. When I was younger, there was a great deal of optimism about the future. The 1990s were, frankly, pretty good (even if the seeds for the subsequent decade were already being sewn.) The Cold War was over, and things were feeling very stable - the economy was in great shape, and it looked like we had a great new millennium to look forward to.
It is maybe unsurprising that Star Trek did really well in the 90s. Next Generation (which was admittedly about half 80s, half 90s) spawned two other shows, and even though DS9 went fairly dark on occasion, the overall concept of the Star Trek world is one where we find ourselves in great shape in the future. We manage to expand as explorers, yet avoided any of the sins of imperialism by adhering to strict ethical standards (The Prime Directive being the foundation of these ethics.)
Star Trek was a future you could feel good about. We'd turned the Klingons from fierce enemies into close allies (like the Russians!) and the attitude of Starfleet boiled down to: "You guys are our enemies now. Our goal is not to defeat you, but to become friends." It didn't hurt that Starfleet also happened to be an incredibly powerful force in the galaxy, so they could reach out to others without endangering humanity (usually.)
Star Trek's Federation is basically America in its most ideal state - equality achieved by elevating everyone to the top without pushing anyone down, and providing that "City on a Hill" for the rest of the galaxy but with a very, very strict "only if you want it" policy. It's a society in which cultural diversity is celebrated, and anti-intellectualism is basically non-existent.
After witnessing both the horror of our own vulnerability on 9/11, and also watching the Bush Administration's Orwellian power-grab in the aftermath, sending the nation into two big wars without clear objectives (it took waiting for a new president to define objectives and actually start to get us out) and watching as we, the "good guys," began to argue in favor of torture, many Americans felt as if the whole world had been turned upside-down on them.
And it's reflected in art. Battlestar Galactica, for instance, begins with an apocalyptic attack that was clearly drawn to resemble 9/11, and we watch as humanity struggles both with our fear of additional attacks but also our own inhumanity, released by the trauma. We've had apocalyptic scenarios in shows like Jericho or the Walking Dead, or movies like the Road, or the Book of Eli, or I Am Legend (remakes count.) We've also seen humanity as the bad guys more frequently, like in Avatar or District 9.
The reasons for this are not hard to figure out.
So the question, then, is how to bring back the optimism.
The thing about Science Fiction is that it can have a serious impact on people. I'm all for art imitating life, and by no means to I begrudge the people who made these pieces their right to tell the story they're thinking of (a lot of my writing tends to be dark as well) but I also wonder what effect a brighter take on the future would have - one that looks forward not to a post-apocalyptic wasteland or some sort of global totalitarian state, but instead sees the current problems as a phase that we are simply enduring for the time being.
I'm attracted to the notion of the reconstruction. You're probably familiar with the idea of a deconstruction, but I enjoy writing about things, so I'll give a basic breakdown.
A deconstruction takes a well-known trope or genre, and creates a version of that trope that shows all the inherent problems one tends to ignore. The deconstruction can be thought of as a counter-argument to the original piece.
For example: Let's say you have a space-adventure story. Your intrepid heroes travel to other worlds, meet with cool aliens, fight bad guys with ray guns and save the day when things go bad. The deconstruction would recognize that your space-adventurer is actually a thoughtless brute, most likely colonizing that new planet in much the way that the British colonized India, and the "bad guys" he's fighting are actually a complex people who have a perfectly good reason to fight your protagonist. The hero might win the battle, but in so doing, he causes irreparable harm to an environment that was getting along just fine without him.
The reconstruction is kind of like the rebuttal to the deconstruction. In another way, it's a kind of synthesis between the fun, original genre or trope and the valid complaints made via the deconstruction. Effectively, it rehabilitates the original piece by acknowledging its flaws, and dealing with said flaws in an intelligent way.
This can be a tricky thing to pull off, but when you do, it's magic, because it allows you to enjoy something similar to the original trope or genre without the guilt that encourages deconstructions. You've got your healthy vegetables along with your cake.
The problem with bringing optimistic visions of the future is that most of the ones we know of, even the reasoned, ethical Next-Gen-era Star Trek shows, can provoke a bit of cynicism. Arguably (and this could be a whole other article, but I don't have time for that) Next-Gen was a reconstruction of Star Trek, acknowledging the thorny issues of interfering with other cultures and the responsibilities of a fleet of explorers/diplomats (such as not getting a crew member killed once an episode.) Nowadays, however, we might consider the Federation to be way too trusting and diplomatic for their own good, and that the bleeding-heart attitude they have could get them into trouble - or, on the flip-side, that we don't believe that humans could ever become totally unified behind an enlightened philosophy because some of us are just damned warmongering assholes.
But if we're ever going to turn things around, and start seeing a future in which humanity is on the track toward a brighter future, we've got to start imagining what that brighter future would look like.
Long story short, I want a new Star Trek show.
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