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This chapter explores the creation of Star Trek in the 1960s, tracing its history from preproduction to cancelation and through the subsequent decade, as the series evolved into both a fan phenomenon and a nascent film franchise. Arguing that both paths were facilitated by the emergence of a “blueprint culture” oriented around the creation of reference materials, the chapter suggests that franchises such as Trek are built on a “design network” allowing both fans and producers to extend the fictional storyworld infinitely yet systematically. The chapter concludes with a discussion of fan films and copyright legislation around contemporary Trek productions, suggesting the continued copresence of fannish and authorial interests in the technical dimensions of Trek’s future history.

Cult films inhabit four categories that are not mutually exclusive and may come into tension with one another. These categories depend on differing processes of cult development: world-based, auteur-based, star-based, and production-based. This chapter focuses on the first two, examining how world-based and auteur-based cults operate in relation to two exemplary science fiction (sf) texts, Blade Runner (1982) and the rebooted Star Trek (2009) franchise. What is so fascinating about auteur-based and world-based cults is that these potentials can be activated around the same series of texts — whether Star Trek or Blade Runner — and yet exist in tension with one another, as some fan audiences stress authorial vision while others emphasize the narrative universe that they love exploring, documenting, and speculating about. Cult/sf is not just a doubling of categories; cult sf really can mean different things to different (fan) readers.

Chapter Two starts from the intriguing fact that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, wrote 24 episodes of the television Western Have Gun—Will Travel. The chapter analyzes the ways Roddenberry's earlier work prepared him for creating his science fiction classic. Like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, the hero of Have Gun is a crusading liberal. As Kirk and Spock do on distant planets, Paladin brings freedom and enlightenment to backward communities in the American heartland, particularly those subject to forms of local tyranny from landowners, cattle barons, and other wealthy denizens of the frontier. The Western is usually thought of as a conservative genre, but Have Gun anticipates the progressive views of Star Trek on a wide range of issues, from racial prejudice to religious intolerance. The way Have Gun champions diversity suggests that the Western and science fiction may have more in common than is usually supposed.

This chapter explores the different depictions of sex, violence and swearing throughout the Star Trek franchise and argues that complaints about sex and violence in Star Trek, then, are nothing new; even the original Star Trek series seemed inappropriate in its day. In 1984, the BBC removed the episodes “The Empath,” “Whom Gods Destroy,” “Plato’s Stepchildren,” and “Miri” from the broadcast schedule for over ten years due to showing subjects of “madness, torture, sadism and disease.” One of the underlying reasons for this decision was that Star Trek was seen as a TV series for children, which it clearly was not. Seen in the context of the zeitgeist, the newest addition to the franchise, Star Trek: Discovery is not any more violent, gory, or even vulgar than any of the other series or feature films. Sex and violence have always been an integral part of Star Trek’s storytelling and are a vital part of showing its positive message of humanity’s future.

This chapter examines the fandom that has grown up around the Star Trek movies and television series, arguing that the entertainment industry also creates meanings that begin to function in religious ways for consumers of popular culture. Popular culture has become an independent producer of mythical narratives, a reflection of cultural themes and a producer of new ones. Though often using indirect religious themes and imagery (as in Star Wars or Harry Potter), the narratives and messages have been formally cut off from the religious traditions that have dominated Western culture over the centuries. In other words, parts of popular culture have taken their place alongside the mainstream religious traditions, ideologies, and narratives that have guided people's lives.

The main thing noticeably absent from Star Trek’s half-century anniversary was a network television series. By 2016, the primary output of the Trek franchise was a set of commercially successful feature films that had retconned a substantial portion of the early series history and consequently left later spin-off television series adrift in continuity limbo. One year later, or perhaps one year too late, three programs emerged to take up the mantle of Trek: Star Trek: Discovery (2017-), The Orville (2017-present) and the “U.S.S Callister” episode of Black Mirror (2017). This chapter investigates how these series make a claim to and justify deviations from, a familiar science fiction formula legendary for diverse themes and progressive ideologies with particular attention invocation of Gene Roddenberry’s vision for Star Trek.

This chapter explores various accounts of what the role television is thought to play in the processes of globalisation with particular reference to the issue of ‘cultural imperialism’. It questions the manner in which the postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity and diaspora can function within postmodern narratives of globalisation to produce a generalised concept of ‘new global subjectivity’. The chapter then pursues these ideas in relation to an examination of the status of Star Trek as a ‘franchise’ owned by a giant transnational corporation, as a myth of the global and as a global myth and a metanarrative no more or less ‘imaginary’ than as given in many academic accounts. This moves through a discussion of the impact of a ‘postmodern aesthetic’ on the series Voyager and Deep Space Nine and then to an analysis of the first season of Enterprise as a nostalgic and conservative postmodern return to the style and period of Star Trek: The Original Series.

This chapter examines the Mirror Universe as a figure for Star Trek’s negotiation of its own franchise identity. It argues that the Mirror is a tool with which Trek examines its own legacy, tropes, and purpose. It is no coincidence that this dark, funhouse vision is used most extensively in Discovery and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, two shows whose premises are built on re-examination and reinvention of the franchise, and whose themes draw morally murky connections between the Trek future and our real present. These shows repurpose the dystopian Mirror as a necessary means of reflection on what it means to be Star Trek, and how the franchise negotiates its complicated past. This chapter focuses in particular on how Discovery revisits and revises the systems of power inherent to the franchise’s operation, both onscreen and in audience distribution, especially as they pertain to women, power, and normative subjectivity.

At the height of the Cold War, the original Star Trek series provided viewers with a utopian, racially inclusive, and altogether progressive alternative to the present standoff among superpowers. Yet, at the same time, it was caught within the Cold War world system. Star Trek may have interrogated U.S. policy in the Cold War, frequently posing the question what its heroic protagonists were supposed to do when given morally tenuous options, but it never questioned that the crew the show portrayed in fact was heroic and good. After the original run, Star Trek remained a narrative corollary to popular imaginaries of history. Trends, fads, and new focus points in historiography frequently cropped up in its later iterations. This chapter argues that Discovery however operates on an added meta level that is not found in any of the other editions of the franchise. It is not just political in the sense that it takes stances in its narratives and challenges viewers’ preconceptions regarding current political issues. It also pointedly reasserts Star Trek’s own role as a cultural force that can, and wants to be, part of such a discourse.

This chapter traces how television music imparts meaning from its borrowing of cinematic musical techniques, in particular, cinematic leitmotif. The televisual leitmotif, which often is derived from a program's theme music, is a special kind of musical topic that references aspects of the televisual narrative by denoting a specific character or situation in a program while also connoting traits of characters or moods of the narrative. This dual signification of a single musical idea draws from Charles Morris's conception of “ascription.” Because television programs are so ephemeral, musical meaning relies on the ability of the leitmotif to signify in several modes of signification and through extensive repetition of the leitmotif within a single episode as well as through weekly programming. To illustrate the ascriptive power of the leitmotif, the chapter provides an analysis of Gerald Fried's music to the episode “Shore Leave” from the original Star Trek series.

The Introduction compares Discovery to the earlier shows comprising the Star Trek canon and argues, against criticism raised by some scholars and fans, that the show’s darker tone in the first two seasons present an exploration of the established storyworld of the franchise. Thus, rather than betraying the utopian ideals underlying Star Trek, Discovery continues another franchise tradition: staying in touch with and commenting on its contemporary moment. In doing so, the show takes on the post-9/11 climate of war and explores the conscious effort it takes to uphold societal ideals in the face of outside and inside threats. The Introduction further comments on the nostalgia attendant on some critics’ comparisons between Discovery and other Star Trek shows and briefly reflects on the slightly more nostalgic feeling of the second season and the ways in which it avoids some of the retrofuturism other shows have been criticized for. Finally, the Introduction also summarizes the 18 essays and one interview included in this volume and their interconnections.

After 50 years of franchise history, Star Trek has finally welcomed major canon queer characters in the form of Lt. Paul Stamets and his partner, Dr. Hugh Culber, counteracting an exclusion of LGBTQ characters that has been more than jarring for a famously liberal franchise. This essay argues that Discovery successfully normalizes queerness without reducing the characters to their sexual orientation – while, however, remaining fairly homonormative. The chapter further argues that by explicit intertextual references to the original Star Trek, the series also gestures to and brings to the forefront some of the queer subtext and potential that has so long been explored by fans. It also delves into representation and “actorvism” by out gay actors Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz behind the screen to note the ways in which representation before and behind the camera often still go hand in hand.

De Witt Kilgore, in “The Best is Yet to Come”: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Reform Afrofuturism,” dissects Star Trek’s projection of an endless white future by directly challenging the intent of Star Trek’s racial politics with its practice of reinstating customary racial traditions. Kilgore argues that the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars” allows the series to confront African American history as a root of the Federation’s utopian future as a reform afrofuturism.

This chapter argues that in contrast to older iterations of the franchise, Star Trek: Discovery is not only centred on Michael Burnham, First Officer and later mutineer/science specialist, and thus departs from the usual focus on a starship Captain as lead character, it also introduces a wider variety of female characters – human and Klingon – who are instrumental in resolving the first and second season’s central conflicts. Thus, Discovery, through including of so many different and fully-fledged female characters not only continues in the franchise’s liberal tradition, it also explores new ways in which female characters can be represented in televised (American) science fiction series. This paper will argue that the show’s female characters push against and sometimes transcend generic tropes that have limited characters like TNG’s Deanna Troi and Dr. Beverly Crusher, picking up on and contributing to contemporary debates about gender and gender identity.

The Preface outlines the ways in which this volume’s essays on questions of race and racialization, sexuality and the politics of gender identification, and the new storytelling possibilities of television in the post-network era place Discovery in its larger Star Trek canon, show how it engages the history of this canon and reinvents the series through the new critical perspectives of twenty-first century cultural politics.

Until Star Trek: Discovery aired in September 2017 on CBS: All Access, all previous Star Trek series typically conformed to the prevalent narrative formats of their historical periods, i.e. most episodes were self-contained. When the series format was violated, e.g. in the two-part episode “The Menagerie” (Star Trek, 1966), this most often resulted not from a desire for narrative innovation, but from budgetary constraints, or to generate cliff-hangers at the end of a season. With Star Trek moving to CBS, and particularly its All Access platform, this traditional format – in parallel to other adaptations for streaming services – changed significantly: Discovery was created as a post-network serial, instead of a series. This chapter aims to investigate how this move from series to serial influenced not only the narrative structure, but particularly the world-building strategies and possibilities inherent in Discovery. As this becomes especially prominent when comparing the story world of the Mirror Universe, a fictional universe which has haunted the Star Trek characters since the franchise’s earliest instalment, this chapter focuses on episodes set in this dimension.

In the canon, Star Trek: Discovery seamlessly joins the rank of its predecessors in questioning power and monoglossia. In the “fanon,” contemporary fan writers have done the same and continue the tradition of political fan fictions in Star Trek, as this chapter aims to show. While there certainly are many escapist stories with little, if any, political relevance, a significant part of the stories actively engages in contemporary debates and movements surrounding ethics and science, war trauma, and LGBTQ representation. To prove its claim, the chapter begins with a brief overview over the relevance of socio-political discourses in Star Trek Discovery. These discourses are then compared to political criticism and discussion in Discovery fan fiction. To make this viable, the chapter will analyse a sample of fan fictions published on the two main platforms fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.com. Ultimately, this chapter shows that the importance of socio-political debates is just as relevant in the Discovery “fanon” as in the Discovery canon. Certainly, Star Trek’s degree of political involvement has always been part of the franchise’s allure and Star Trek: Discovery continues this tradition well into the 21st century – and takes its fans with it to boldly discuss what many fans have discussed before.

This chapter will discuss how Discovery either reproduces, criticizes, or subverts established U.S. representations of diplomacy. The results will provide some leads on whether Discovery lives up to Star Trek’s progressive worldview. Revisiting Iver B. Neumann’s argument, this chapter argues that Discovery’s pilot episode can be viewed as a critical reflection on how the difference between idealist (“We come in peace”) and realist (a “Vulcan Hello”) approaches to diplomacy become blurred from the inverted perspective of the (Klingon) Other. However, over the further course of the season, Discovery loses its reflexive perspective on the ambiguity of diplomacy and settles for demonstrative idealism. The chapter discusses whether Discovery in its adaptation of a demonstrative ‘idealism’ subverts U.S. representations of diplomacy in the light of paradigmatic shifts after 9/11, or whether it reproduces the ambiguity of ‘realist’/’idealist’ representations, ultimately legitimizing the use of force for supposed higher ends.