Star Trek as Regulative Ideal: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary

"Live long and prosper, Star Trek."

Fifty years ago today, the first regular episode of Star Trek aired and changed at least one world forever.  

Fans throughout the galaxy are celebrating.  Items from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry are being released from the Roddenberry vault.  Of course there's 50th anniversary merchandise.  We're getting a new series next year.  iO9 is featuring Star Trek Week!  There are a lot of great articles there.  One of my favorite is Katherine Trendacosta’s “Star Trek is My Best Love.” 

What’s so Great about Star Trek, Anyway?

So a lot of people (including me) believe that Star Trek is worth celebrating.  But why?

Perhaps there are as many answers as there are Star Trek fans.

Some people love Star Trek as a show that emphasizes the science in science fiction (even if it sometimes uses meaningless techno-babble).  It has inspired people from all walks of life to go into STEM fields.  Star Trek is one of the few science fiction shows that actually features scientific exploration as one of its core themes.

Others enjoy the technological aspects of Star Trek.  From communicators to talking computers, some parts of the world of Star Trek have already become reality.  I recently acquired an iPad, and every time I use it I can’t stop thinking about the PADD from Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

These are perfectly good reasons to love Star Trek, but I don’t think either entirely explains the enduring love people have for this show.  The main reason people love Star Trek is a bit deeper.

Star Trek Reminds Us We Can Do Better: Thoughts on Star Trek's 60th Anniversary

 

My 60th anniversary popcorn bucket from AMC Theaters

The first time I realized I loved Star Trek was while watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a memory I relived yesterday at my local theater for Star Trek's 60th anniversary. 

Captain Kirk and crew go back in time from the 23rd century to 1986 San Francisco to bring some whales back to the future in order to avert a cataclysm via mysterious whale-song aliens (most Star Trek fans refer to this as The One With The Whales!). When they arrive in 1986 and Starfleet-out-of-water shenanigans unfold, Kirk remembers, "they're still using money."

My ten-year-old mind reeled! They don't have money in the future? What? How could something that caused so much drama and heartache in the lives of all the adults in my life simply .... not exist?

Fall TV Round Up, Part One: The Orville and Star Trek: Discovery

There has been a lot of new science fiction/fantasy TV this fall.  Some of my favorites from last year, like The Good Place and Stranger Things, are back, and I'll get to those in Part Two.  One unique thing about fall 2017 is that we've been graced with not one, but two new space opera shows.  It's a good year for space ships on TV, I guess.  So without further ado, here are some thoughts on The Orville and Star Trek: Discovery!

Sci-Fi Stoic Week 2016: Star Trek, Relationships, and the View from Above

For the past few years I've been participating in an event called Stoic Week.  This year's Stoic Week is a bit earlier than usual: Oct. 17-23, 2016.

The idea is to try living like a Stoic for a week by doing things such as contemplating interesting quotes from ancient Stoic philosophers and engaging in mental exercises.  You can find out more about Stoic Week, register, and download the handbook at the Modern Stoicism blog.  You can do the exercises any time (you might say they're timeless!), but it's fun to share your experiences with others on the Facebook group and the Google+ group.

Last year I wrote four posts for what I called Sci-Fi Stoic Week 2015 (see here, here, here, and here).  This year I'm not quite so ambitious, so I've decided to condense my Stoic Week blogging into one post (you're reading it!).


Stoicism, Star Trek, and Galactic Cosmpolitanism

Since we recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of Star Trek and a lot of people (including me) have noted Stoic themes in Star Trek, I thought it would be nice to concentrate on Star Trek for Sci-Fi Stoic Week 2016.

The crew of the Enterprise

Review of Reviews: Recent Science Fiction TV

 

Have I been watching more TV during the pandemic? Maybe. I've never been good at binge watching, though. I'm re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, but a lot more slowly than the first time I watched it in syndication in the early 90's (every night at 9pm!). Disney+ has 31 seasons of The Simpsons, which makes for a nice thing to watch while eating lunch or when I don't know what else to watch (a conundrum: they have an option to "skip intro"... what kind of monster would skip the intro to The Simpsons?). I've also been enjoying WandaVision lately, and I just started Truth Seekers.

I might say more about those shows another time. But I thought it might be good to do a review of reviews of recent science fiction TV! So here are a few thoughts about recent seasons of The Mandalorian, Star Trek: Discovery, and The Expanse and two other shows: Raised by Wolves and the new adaptation of The Stand.

What would Gene Roddenberry think about William Shatner’s Blue Origin flight?

 

Today William Shatner took a trip on a Blue Origin rocket, and I had some thoughts about it and wrote some of them down in my pandemic journal as I was procrastinating doing the stuff I was supposed to be doing this morning. To be more honest than you're supposed to be at the beginning of a post like this, I have to admit I'm not sure what Gene Roddenberry would think about today's events. I never met him while he was alive, and I'm not as familiar with his biography as I'd like to be, but he did create Star Trek as an unabashed post-scarcity socialist utopia, so that's in the background of my thoughts. This question seemed to me like a catchy way to think about space travel, Star Trek, the Overview Effect, where we are as a global society, and where we're going. So here you have it...

Spock, Death, and Mediocre Villainy: A Review of Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek: The Motion Picture ... er, I mean, Beyond

Star Trek films have always ranged in quality.  Like many fans and this ranking, I'd count Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as the best and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Nemesis as some of the worst.  I personally have a huge soft spot for Star Trek IV: The One with the Whales, a silly movie with a serious message directed by Leonard Nimoy.

Star Trek Beyond (2016) falls somewhere in the middle of the pack.  The good news: it's better than Into Darkness, which I'd put near the bottom (Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan?  "Cold fusion" freezes lava?  Ugh.).

Beyond has a lot of problems (more on those in a bit), but for the most part it's a fun movie that continues to capture the essence of the old characters while it introduces new ones.  It's bittersweet to watch Anton Yelchin's Chekhov after the actor's untimely death in a car accident in June.  Karl Urban's McCoy once again steals the show as my favorite part of the new Trek films.  Sofia Boutella's Jeylah, the white-and-black alien, portrays ass-kicking innocence (think: grown-up Arya Stark in space).  Scottie has a major role in this one, which is unsurprising as Simon Pegg co-wrote the script.

Review of Reviews: TV and Movies, May 2022

 

Apparently I haven't done a "review of reviews" since February 2021 and most of my reviews on the blog lately have been for books, so I figured it was time to do a "Review of Reviews" for some of the TV and movies I've been watching lately.

So check out my review of reviews of Firestarter (2022), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Severance, Outer Range, Inside Job, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Gremlins 2: The New Batch! (Okay, you got me. Gremlins 2 is hardly new, but I did watch it recently, so here you go.)

I've also been watching all the new Star Trek shows as of late: Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Trek: Prodigy, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It's a fantastic time to be a Star Trek fan! But that's a lot of Star Trek, so I will cover those in a separate post.

Without further ado: my review of reviews!

Some Interesting TV of 2017

I was originally planning to write a "Best of" list for my favorite TV shows of 2017, but I've gotten a little tired of the genre of "Best of" lists.  There's a mind-boggling amount of TV content available these days, so it seems a bit presumptuous to claim that the best of it can only come from the measly percentage that I've seen.  Also, these shows are all different enough that it seems unfair (impossible?) to rank them against each other.  Besides, it's mid-Februrary 2018, so it seems a bit late to march in the "Best of 2017" parade.

Instead I give you: Some Interesting TV of 2017!

(Note also that I'm limiting myself to science fiction and fantasy broadly construed.  I'm also only talking about shows that came out in 2017.  And I'm leaving out a few I did watch, like The Orville and The Mist.  I'll wait for a future post to tackle the latest episodes of The X-Files and Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, which were released in the US in 2018).

First Contact Day, Hands Off, and the Fruitfully Inscrutable Effects of Protest

 

A shot of the Hands Off Protest in Chattanooga, TN, April 5, 2025.
You can see me in the street on duty as a crossing guard. (Credit: Sophia Cowan)

Yesterday, April 5, 2025, saw the the confluence of two events. For Star Trek fans, it was First Contact Day, a day that celebrates first contact between humans and Vulcans, which in most Star Trek timelines will take place on April 5, 2063 (a mere 38 years from now!). Yesterday was also a Hands-Off protest with over 1000 individual events around the US, including here in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Millions of Americans nationwide protested the recent dramatic actions of the Trump administration and his ally Elon Musk.

How on Earth (or any other planet) could these two events be connected?

2015 Movies: The Good, the Bad, and the Mediocre

It’s been a good year for fans of science fiction on the large and small screens, aside from the death of Leonard Nimoy, of course.  It was a good year for movies in particular from the return of beloved franchises like Star Wars and Mad Max to new hits like The Martian and Ex Machina.

Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road

I've made lists of my favorites, my least favorites, and my "okays" in movies released in 2015.  They're in three separate lists: best good movies, worst bad movies, and most mediocre mediocre movies -- all in my opinion, of course!

I spent a lot of time at the movies this year, but I didn't see everything, so please feel free to give your recommendations in the comments for anything I missed (or to offer your rebuttal to my rankings).  I've limited myself to movies that I reviewed on the blog, so while Kung Fury was an insanely hilarious homage to the 1980's, Jurassic World was a lot of fun, Pixels was one of the worst movies ever made, I'm not including them.  I'm not discussing Avengers: Age of Ultron (which was fun) or other comic book movies (seriously, Ant Man?  Another Fantastic Four?).   I don't really like superheroes, and even if I did, the whole comic book movie genre has been completely over-saturated in recent years and is well covered elsewhere by almost every other nerd on the internet.

And now to the movies!

2016 Movies: The Good, the Bad, and the Mediocre

The heroes of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Like the year itself, the movies of 2016 were a mixed bag that included a few gems and a lot of flaming garbage.  I've already written a post about this year's mostly wretched summer movie season, but since most of the gems arrived toward the end of the year I thought it would be good to continue my tradition of reviewing the year's movies that I found to be good, bad, and mediocre (see my 2015 list here).

Non-Superhero Summer Movie Roundup: Warcraft, Independence Day, Ghostbusters, Star Trek, The Secret Life of Pets, Kubo and the Two Strings

This year's summer movies largely seemed to follow the pattern of this terrible year: they ranged from mildly mediocre to grotesquely terrible.  I'm not sure about why that is, although this article from The Guardian's Benjamin Lee takes a good stab at it.  The awfulness of 2016 summer movies is especially odd compared to 2015, which gave us the masterpiece of Mad Max: Fury Road.  I even liked Terminator Genisys.

I'm not a big superhero fan, which probably saved me from some disappointment this summer.  I did have the misfortune of seeing Suicide Squad, but the silver lining for me is that as much of an offense to cinema as Suicide Squad was, it may signal that we are finally nearing the end of the mind-numbing domination of superhero movies.  Another benefit of Suicide Squad is that it inspired this hilarious video from Jenny Nicholson: "Suicide Squad Sales Pitch."

So without further ado ... my non-superhero summer science fiction and fantasy movie round up!

Sci-Fi Stoic Week 2015: Thursday-Friday

This is the third post in my series, Sci-Fi Stoic Week 2015!  Stoic Week is an international event in which you can use a handbook to try to live like a Stoic for a week.  Sci-Fi Stoic Week is my take on it.  Find out more in my first post in the series.

Thursday: Virtue

The ancient Stoics thought that virtue is the highest good.  In fact, virtue is the only real good.  Other things, like wealth, health, fame, and so on, aren't really valuable in themselves.  The only thing that really matters to Stoics is being a good person.

Bill and Ted: Proponents of virtue as excellence

Like most ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, the Stoics are virtue theorists: what matters in ethics is character, which is different than many modern ethical theories, like utilitarianism and deontology, which tend to focus on the rightness or wrongness of actions.  Virtue ethics has made a come back in the discipline of philosophy in recent decades (see this article on Julia Annas, one contemporary philosopher who has been part of this come back).

The Thursday Lunchtime exercise in the 2015 Stoic Week Handbook introduces the idea of values clarification.  If virtue is so important, you should try to be clear about what counts as virtuous.  You should also try, as far as possible, to make sure that your values match up with the way you live your life.  The Handbook suggests that asking questions like the following is one way to do this.

Movie and TV Mini-Reviews: The Boogeyman, Yellowjackets, Star Trek: Picard, Beavis & Butt-Head, and More

As the prophecy of a recent post foretold, I'm back with some short reviews of movies and TV I've been watching lately. I'm including The Boogeyman, Yellowjackets, Star Trek: Picard, Beavis & Butt-Head, John Wick 4, Sinister, Insidious, and X. These reviews get weirdly impressionistic, so if you're looking for elaborate plot summaries and the like, you may be disappointed. Just the mood I'm in these days, I guess. Enjoy!

Con Nooga Report

I'm trying this quick post on my phone in my ever expanding quest to utilize blogging technology. I'm at Con Nooga this weekend. It's been fun! As opposed to the cozy smallness of ChattaCon, Con Nooga is a much bigger, much younger, more ComiCon-y event with a lot more anime, horror, and comic fandom participation.

Aside from the large ComiCon-y dealers' room and some music acts, I've been to panels on Dune, Game of Thrones, and Stephen King. There was a panel on philosophy and religion in sci-fi and fantasy, which was surprisingly well attended.  A lot of it focused on the use of religion in sci-fi and fantasy. It was fun! One of my favorite events was a Star Wars versus Star Trek debate!  A Red Shirt was on the Star Trek side, and Admiral Ackbar was on the Star Wars side. (Star Trek was judged the winner by a small margin). See my photo below.

One nice thing about Con Nooga is its emphasis on diversity. I went to a panel on diversity in sci-fi and fantasy, Chattanooga Pride had a prominent table, and the mood of Con goers seemed inviting and open. Is this a sign of the future, especially at a younger Con like this? I hope so.

(EDIT: I couldn't figure out how to do hyperlinks on the Blogger phone app, so here's a link to the Con Nooga website.)

(EDIT PART TWO: Sunday was a short day for the Con, but I went to a panel on Orson Scott Card's work and the politics of authorship and an event with actor Eddie McClintock from the TV show, Warehouse 13.  Also, given my experience of Con Nooga as open to diversity, which I should reiterate was my own experience that may not match others' experience, check out this list of links from Jim C. Hines on issues surrounding Mark Oshiro's horrible experience at ConQuesT 46.) 

Spock, Stoics, and Buddhists: A Philosophical Tribute to Leonard Nimoy

I normally don't dwell on celebrity deaths, at least no more than I dwell on the deaths of the countless other strangers who die every day.  Many people in these celebrity-crazed days seem to forget that, unless you are a celebrity or actually hang out with them, celebrities are after all strangers.  And celebrity obsession is perhaps the strangest when it comes to people who pretend to be other people for a living (i.e., actors).  Why should we care what they think or what they do?

Still, I can't help but be broken up about the death of Leonard Nimoy.

2025 Hugo Ballot

 

I meant to post a bunch of reviews along the way as I did this year's Hugo reading, but the summer sort of got in the way. Oh, well. I still may write longer reviews for some of these and post them here (I did get to some of the novels in June), but since Hugo voting was due last night, I figured I'd just post my full ballot with a few general explanations while it's fresh in my mind. You can find short reviews for most of these on my 2025 Hugo Goodreads shelf.

Note that I didn't vote in all the categories. It's just too much (it's like taking on a part-time job!), and I don't feel all that qualified to judge some of the categories. Still, I managed to vote in most of the categories this year. See the Hugo website for the full list of categories and nominees.

As usual, I'm loosely following my principles of Hugo voting that I'm most interested in works that somehow break new ground in the genre, have some philosophical element, and/or are just plain enjoyable. Maybe other Hugo voters go on vibes, which are impossible to entirely eliminate, but I try reward things that are on the whole doing something new and interesting.

I'm thrilled to be attending Worldcon this year where I'll be on a panel and doing an academic track presentation as part of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society. Maybe I will see you in Seattle at this year's Hugo ceremony on August 16!

MLK, Social Justice, and Science Fiction

“We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.” - Martin Luther King, Jr. , Strength to Love (1963)

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day will be observed tomorrow here in the United States.  This is my favorite holiday.  As I explained in a post last year, this is because it's a holiday about hope for a better future, rather than a holiday of pure remembrance or a religious holiday that can't speak to everyone.

MLK Memorial, Washington, DC

Before I get into the substance of this post, I should note that the bad part of the MLK holiday is that it sometimes encourages people to reduce King to a sanitized, apolitical dreamer, while he was in fact a controversial figure who worked on labor issues and opposed the war in Vietnam in addition to his more famous work in civil rights and his often misunderstood commitment to the philosophy of nonviolence (for more, see "The Forgotten, Radical Martin Luther King, Jr.").  We tend to forget that that was controversial in his day.  And since I live in a country where nine people were murdered in a church in June 2015 and police are routinely still not indicted for killing black people, even 12-year-old boys like Tamir Rice, I think it's safe to say that we have a great deal of work to do in this country when it comes to racial justice.


MLK and Science Fiction

While thinking about ways to commemorate the MLK holiday on the blog this year, I thought I would try to see what connections, if any, I might find between King and science fiction.  I thought of two such connections.  I remembered that King once talked Nichelle Nichols into staying on as Lt. Uhura on Star Trek.  I also recalled being introduced to the idea of "visionary fiction" in an anthology called Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements; according to this idea science fictional thinking about new ways of being is an essential part of working for justice.

Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura

"OMG! LeVar Burton Retweeted Me!" and Other Adventures in the Twitterverse

I joined Twitter in 2016 because ... well, I'm not entirely sure why.  To promote this blog?  To promote my academic career without being obnoxious about it in person?  To follow journalists, favorite authors, and celebrities?  The mind boggles.

For whatever reason, I joined Twitter.  Two and a half years in I still can't say I entirely "get" Twitter (at least it makes more sense than Instagram...).  Twitter is weirdly different than Facebook.  Facebook is a way to stay in touch with people you know in real life, whether you really want to or not. Twitter is like standing in a public place saying random things where your friends might wander by amid the flurry of self-proclaimed "entrepreneurs." Oddly, Twitter reminds me of Livejournal: you make random connections with strangers (yes, I'm old enough to remember Livejournal.  I do miss being able to write paragraphs, though, which is probably why I started a blog ... but I digress).

I've recently had some interesting things happen on Twitter.  A tweet I randomly wrote about philosophy got over a 100 likes, which doesn't sound like much, but---

--But forget all that, because OMG! OMG! OMG! LeVar Burton retweeted me!  But you don't have to take my word for it.