Everything happens in the nick of time. Now, the franchise is flying warp speed ahead. Wikipedia will give you a pretty good idea of the rough roads some series and films have taken on the way to launch, and after. There is relief when a foe is sent packing, but rarely glee. Phasers are usually set to stun. Kirk would regularly say. It takes time effort and understanding … but if we work at it a miracle can happen.
Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd are comedy masters. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. And generally, it is shown best healed by light. Only, when the Enterprise or Voyager or DS9 passes each test, often with flying colors, so too, by implication, does civilization itself. Excerpted from To Boldly Go Star Trek at Fifty. The original Star Trek first aired when I was in grade school. It was, for all intents and purposes, my first exposure to science fiction.
Here was far-future space exploration presented, not as a series of brute encounters with monsters, but as a more or less plausible and coherent scenario. Here was the remarkable notion that what was new and different could be understood. Here was the basic apparatus of science fiction — first contact, time travel, interstellar travel, computer tech — presented as a given.
Here was a multiethnic workplace, also presented as a given. I would be surprised if the current generation were not sick and tired of hearing people my age go on about this aspect of the show, but it was true, and it mattered even more than you can imagine.
Here were, as needed, exciting race-against-time crises. Here was Spock. Mad love to Spock. Did it influence my own work? Maybe not so much — although I think the first science fiction story I ever tried to write contained a reference to warp drive. Did it influence me? You bet. To this day, I cannot regard Star Trek in any of its incarnations with anything other than affection and gratitude.
Some of my earliest memories are of Star Trek. I have fuzzy recollections of sitting on the couch between my parents as Jerry Goldsmith's majestic fanfare blasted out of our clunky '80s TV, eating rocky road out of the tub, too little to understand that what I was watching wasn't real. That was how I grasped that TV was something people made , that you could build spaceships and phasers and alien masks.
That was the first domino that started me down the path toward writing sci-fi. And as I grew up, Star Trek was ever-present. I was two when "Encounter at Farpoint" aired. I was sixteen when "Endgame" aired. That's new Star Trek episodes every year, regular as clockwork, from the start of childhood to adolescence.
I watched them religiously. If that's not formative, I don't know what is. Star Trek has continued to shape my life since then -- I met my wife in in a Trek -themed play-by-post RPG -- and it is hands-down the biggest creative influence on my writing. I cherish Star Trek 's hopeful vision of the future, and that's a quality I aim for in my own work albeit on a much smaller scale and different stage.
I very consciously thought about Star Trek when working on my first novel -- the things I loved, the things I didn't, the ideas I wanted to riff on and take elsewhere. My imagining of the future is more scuffed and humble than Roddenberry's post-scarcity utopia, but it is born out of that idea, no question. I wouldn't be writing optimistic space opera if I hadn't been brought up with my head full of said same. Between programs like Star Trek and watching the actual moon landings on TV, I grew up with the idea of space travel permanently embedded in my head.
Of course I wanted to be an astronaut, but as I grew older, I realized that was going to be very hard to do, especially when the military told me I could never be a fighter pilot that was about the only route open to being an astronaut then since I didn't have perfect vision.
So I downgraded my ambition slightly, but have still worked in the aerospace industry for the past 35 years. I've helped design rocket programs, aircraft engines, missiles, and even the radiator system for the International Space Station. I doubt that would have happened had I not been introduced to space and the "final frontier" so early in my life. On top of Star Trek helping to launch my day job career, it helped feed my desire to write science fiction, with a focus on space travel, as well.
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Linkedin Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Here is what they told us: Allen M. Star Trek heroes and subsequent sci-fi films' characters often do exactly that - mess everything up - but they never seem to be lasting repercussions for their actions. Nowadays, it's nothing unusual to see romance in sci-fi without the need to turn the story into a soap opera. Romance is one of the components of the story, not a single one.
Star Trek was influential and innovative in this area since it presented interspecies romance as something usual, not worth raising eyebrows over. Captain Kirk seduced his fair share of beautiful aliens but there are even better examples - such as the loving marriage between the Vulcan Sarek and his human wife Amanda.
A godlike being is a fun way how to spice a sci-fi story but not if there's too much of them. And Star Trek made the presence of all-too-powerful beings something rather common, especially in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The problem with this? For one, it can have negative connotations for people who don't believe in God. For two, godlike beings can feel like the screenwriter's crutch when they have no idea how to finish the story.
Today it's a common practice to build movie universes filled with various characters who sometimes meet and interact, whether as enemies or as friends and allies.
But when Star Trek movies first came out, it wasn't such a common practice. True, Star Wars also influenced this one but Star Trek played an even bigger role in helping to establish movie universes as something solid since it told the story of more than just one Enterprise crew. Both Captain Kirk and his crew and Captain Picard's crew got the opportunity to shine on the big screen.
This also happened in Star Trek more than once, for example in the episode where Benjamin Sisko has glimpses of another life on Earth in times long gone. The episode worked because it pointed out some painful social issues but when not used correctly, this storytelling trope can easily turn cheesy and cheap.
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