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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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 traces how creativity has developed within the history of the media franchise by moving past world-building to conceptualize the franchise in terms of world-sharing among workers and communities. It examines the creative strategies used to construct the shared worlds, the practices by which shared creative use has been managed, and how media workers have conceived their own creative labors and production identities in relation to these shared structures. World-sharing calls for a consideration of the claims and discourses of franchise authorship in terms of social relations. In assessing these issues, the chapter looks at the creative management of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, two science fiction franchises that have engaged in world-sharing across multiple industrial contexts.

This chapter appraises Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as a critical intervention into science fiction’s history. Employs theories of adaptation in literature, film, and television to contextualize a novelization of Deep Space Nine by black author Steven Barnes. Highlights the primary texts’ treatment of black masculinity and historical consciousness.

This chapter shifts the focus from superhero comics to the medium of television, and specifically the kinds of long-form, continuity-rich dramas (such as Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) that draw heavily upon the narrative traditions of both comic books and soap operas. It also briefly explores how some film franchises, such as Star Wars and Saw, have adopted the retcon technique, as well.

Chapter 5 begins by discussing philosophical treatments of time travel paradoxes and the tendency of both philosophers and fiction writers, in some cases surprisingly, to opt for the conservation or restoration of narrative and logical order rather than for its subversion. In cinematic time travel stories, however, logical consistency is a far less dominating factor than the immediately palpable viewpoints implied by narrative szujhets, which may or may not respect the ultimate coherency of the fabulas they reference. In the episodes of the Star Trek franchise analyzed in the chapter, various protagonists evolve a meta-universal perspective—termed a “viewpoint-over-histories”—upon both factual and counterfactual events. Such a perspective is both a proxy for the reader/viewer's own “hyperspacetime” position, and tends increasingly to merge with that reader/viewer's position as narratives progress toward closure. The chapter argues that the restoration of narrative order and consistency in time travel paradox stories, especially within visual media, results at least as much from generic, industrial, and even political pressures as from commitments to either logical or physical consistency.

This chapter treats the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, portraying Uhura in the 1960s’ TV series Star Trek and later recruiting women and people of color as astronauts as spokesperson for NASA, as a case study in the work of producing speculative fiction’s utopian vision of race relations and gender equality. Employs critical approaches drawn from 20th century black literary criticism, performance studies, black feminism, feminist film studies, and feminist science fiction.

Since media representation of diplomacy is as close as most people get to the real thing, the media is crucial in understanding how diplomacy is understood by society. While news programmes are important in this regard, so is popular culture. This chapter is an in-depth reading of how Star Trek has discussed diplomacy through forty years. Star Trek's representations of diplomacy do a very good job of capturing some key diplomatic dilemmas, particularly in relations between great and small powers.

Computer games are a postmodern counterculture, disagreeing in significant ways with traditional religious norms and beliefs. Thus, religious conservatives in the United States express misgivings and even opposition to them, reflected in political action. Leaders in the Republican Party have urged an end to support for research on games, many of them also advocating an end to government support for all social science. This hostility reflects the culture wars currently in progress, and therefore can be used to illuminate the cultural issues raised by the games. Senator Tom Coburn, in particular, has led an effort to block research funding, and in so doing identified a number of games and research topics that define the field. The side in the culture war he opposes is well illustrated by two Star Trek games, The Fallen and Star Trek Online, which express secular humanism and criticisms of religion.

This chapter explores the ways in which Google, Apple, and other corporations have turned the development of cultural algorithms into epistemological quests for both self-knowledge and universal knowledge. This effort to construct a new framework for reality has its roots in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, a keystone of the European Enlightenment. Apple’s intelligent assistant Siri, Spike Jonze’s film Her, and Google’s ambition to realize the Star Trek computer serve as exemplars for the algorithmic pursuit of knowledge. These quests are both romantic and rational, seeking a transcendent state of knowing, a state that can be reached only with mechanisms that ultimately eclipse the human. Through their ambitions to develop algorithms that can “answer, converse, and anticipate” with ever-greater intimacy, the technology titans shaping our algorithmic future are constructing a new epistemological framework of what is knowable and desirable: an intellectual hierarchy of needs that will ultimately map out not only the public sphere of information but the interior space of human identity.

This chapter explores how issues of race are played out in science fiction films. It also deals with the differences and similarities between the representations of racial issues between Euro-American films and American-produced films. Star Trek and Planet of the Apes presented audiences with a future/present world in which racial difference equalled inequality, violent discord, division and conflict. The authentic/inauthentic opposition in science fiction films is then addressed. The black protagonists in Strange Days and Virtuosity act as a kind of reminder of what the white community appears to have lost or, perhaps, never had. ‘Oriental’ characters also appear in a number of Hollywood films. A variety of responses by a European film industry to Hollywood science fiction is noted and there are also clear similarities between these otherwise diverse films. An interview with Joe Morton is presented, which deals with racial issues in science fiction films.

This concluding chapter presents the ideal of truly human enhancement as a positive vision of the future of our species. I propose that it embodies an especially attractive conception of where we might collectively be headed and our future relationship with technology. It uses the example of the (mostly) very human crewmembers of the Starship Enterprise in the TV series Star Trek as a counterpoint to the posthuman transhumanist visions of the future of our species.

“Experiment and Experience” covers Joanna’s first years as a reviewer for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, under the editorship of Judith Merril, and her first post as a university teacher at Cornell, and discusses modernism in sf, Joanna’s role as interpreter of the British “New Worlds” writers and the American New Wave and her response to the protest movements and cultural revolutions of the 1960s (in the psychedelic “Modernist novel by a Star Trek fan”) And Chaos Died. Essays and stories (1968-1971) examined include the important “The Wearing Out of Genre Materials,” and autobiographical short fictions that foreshadow The Female Man and illuminate And Chaos Died.