Afrofuturism – Humanist Blog

Dangerous Visions, Safe Stories

Star Trek, Harlan Ellison, and the Politics of Progress

~ ~ Published on 27th May, the birthday of Harlan Ellison ~ ~
If you’ve ever wondered why Star Trek feels bold in theory but cautious in practice — especially this year — the answer begins with Harlan Ellison, a writer who never let the future off the hook.

“Before Dangerous Visions, American science fiction largely policed itself: no sex, no politics, no race, nothing that might unsettle the comfortable status quo. Writers conformed to conservative norms, producing safe, bland, predictable stories in which Campbell’s straight, white American heroes inevitably saved the day. It was this status quo that Dangerous Visions put on the endangered list…”

— Paul Kincaid, 2026, p. 21

Young Ellison fanzine art style by CoPilot AI

Harlan Ellison’s 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions was a direct challenge to science fictional conservatism, inviting writers to confront the very subjects that US science fiction had spent decades avoiding (for example, see Weil & Wolfe 2002; Wolfe 1979; James & Mendlesohn 2003).

Kincaid’s exploration of Ellison as the enfant terrible of conservative US science fiction (and Ellison’s efforts to push the genre’s boundaries) resonates beyond the literary realm. Ellison came out of the literary side of the field, the part that treated science fiction as an exploration of the world, not an escape from it. Ellison earned that reputation by dragging sex, politics, race, and taboo subjects into a genre that had spent decades pretending they didn’t exist. Sixty years ago, Ellison penned a script for Star Trek, which he fought to keep intact against rewrites he considered inferior. That struggle between literary and media science fiction endures today, shaped by Western culture wars and the ongoing saga of the Star Trek franchise.

Ellison’s push for honest and provocative storytelling extended beyond the pages of his books. He was outspoken about the limitations and failures of television as a medium. He once explained:

“I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination of knowledge that the world has ever known. It could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I’ve now come, after ten years in the business, five of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme viewpoint. I think television itself is bad.”

— Harlan Ellison (quoted in Bly, 2002)

For Ellison, this wasn’t just a complaint about television; it was a statement about the limitations of network‑era media science fiction: a form constrained by advertisers, censors, and studio caution, and therefore often resistant to the moral exploration and imaginative freedom that literature allowed. Later productions, including Babylon 5 (where Ellison served as creative consultant), would demonstrate that filmed science fiction could carry that weight once it was freed from those constraints.

Ellison’s clashes with the industry were not simply the product of a difficult personality; they were structural and publicly documented. His concept for The Starlost was rewritten and budget‑cut until he sued the producers and won, later having his Writers Guild Award withdrawn when he disowned the aired version (Weil & Wolfe 2002; WGA Award Records). His pseudonym “Cordwainer Bird” became a recurring protest against network censorship and producer interference across multiple series (Ellison 1985; The Comics Journal #53). His newspaper column The Glass Teat was cancelled after political pressure over his criticism of police brutality and the Nixon administration (Ellison 1970; Bly 2002). Even his dispute over The Terminator resulted in a settlement and a retroactive screen credit (Los Angeles Times, 1985). These were not personality clashes but evidence of an industry that feared controversy more than imagination, the very dynamic Ellison spent his career exposing.

Literary science fiction has always had the advantage of range: the room to explore ambiguity, the inner life of its characters, and the political complexity that television often smooths away. It has also been the space where the genre tests its limits first, the place where writers try out ideas, politics, and forms before they reach a wider audience. Media science fiction, for its part, has strengths literature cannot match: visual immediacy, emotional accessibility, and the ability to reach audiences far beyond the readership of even the most influential novels. Literary science fiction has always pushed the genre forward; media franchises matter because they show what happens when those ideas reach the wider culture. Good media SF doesn’t replace the literary tradition; it carries the same arguments into a different form.

While Star Trek is marketed as being utopian, progressive or “woke,” its history often mirrors Kincaid’s description: a safe, bland, predictable product geared towards straight, white middle-America. Ellison inferred that US media gave a “white bread, homogenised view of the world,” and it’s hard not to see how Star Trek was shaped by similar cultural forces.

This year marks the franchise’s sixtieth anniversary, but instead of celebration, Paramount cancelled its most controversial new Star Trek production. Starfleet Academy faced criticism for weak scripting, but the most vitriolic responses came from fans who despised its racially and sexually diverse characters. This show aimed to present a 2026 version of what Ellison might call forward-looking, if not exactly “dangerous,” visions of the future. Yet it was shut down amid the outrage of some vociferous fans, who accused it of being “too woke.”

This reflects broader trends in current US culture: a society that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion as being social evils, and increasingly views the “other” with hostility, hatred, exclusion, deportation or even concentration camps.

Star Trek’s Struggle for Progress

Despite its reputation as a family-friendly adventure, early Star Trek was shaped by some of the most interesting science fiction writers of the mid-20th century.

Frederic Brown provided the moral core for “Arena,” based on his own short story; John D. F. Black infused scripts with social consciousness; Robert Bloch brought horror into the utopian vision; and Theodore Sturgeon, arguably the most quietly radical of them all, wrote the first episode to touch upon alien sexuality. Even “Charlie X,” credited to Gene Roddenberry but heavily rewritten by Dorothy Fontana, resembles Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land in characterisation of its central figure, and in plot elements of the story.

Sturgeon’s humanism culminated in “Amok Time,” featuring an exploration of Vulcan sexuality but concluding with a moment that, whether intentionally or not, launched decades of slash fiction: Kirk and Spock sharing a moment of affectionate joy that fans immediately recognised as something more than friendship. Isaac Asimov’s insistence that Kirk and Spock be fiercely loyal further helped create a space where viewers could imagine a relationship the series itself dared not name. The franchise’s mythmaking about progress often ignores this lineage, but its earliest boundary-pushing came from writers already testing limits elsewhere.

These individual acts of courage occasionally extended beyond the writers’ room. Chekov’s presence (a Russian hero on American television at the height of the Cold War) was a quietly political gesture that the network seemed almost not to notice. Nichelle Nichols as Uhura inspired a generation of people of colour, including astronaut Mae Jemison, who cited her directly as the reason she could imagine herself in space. Decades later, DS9’s Far Beyond the Stars placed Sisko inside a 1950s America that brutalised Black writers, making racism not an alien metaphor but a direct confrontation. Each of these moments genuinely mattered. But significantly, they succeeded through individual nerve rather than institutional courage, happening almost despite the franchise’s instincts rather than because of them.

“Science Fiction is the very literature of change.”

— Frederik Pohl

Fandom as a Catalyst for Change

What the series hesitated to explore, fandom embraced wholeheartedly. Long before queer people could be visible on TV, Star Trek clubs and conventions became safe spaces for outsiders; spaces where difference was celebrated, not condemned. Australian fan Diane Marchant, a friend and mentor to me and many Australian Star Trek fans, wrote the first ever published Kirk/Spock slash story in 1974, transforming same-sex relationships from whispered, underground subversion into a fanzine culture that was available to anyone with an open mind.

But fandom has not always lived up to its own ideals. It is worth being clear: most Star Trek fans have been broadly progressive, drawn to the franchise precisely because of its inclusive vision. The toxic voices that helped sink Starfleet Academy do not represent fandom’s mainstream, but they have grown louder and more organised in the MAGA era, weaponising the language of fan entitlement to target diverse creators and diverse characters. Harassment campaigns, coordinated review-bombing, and the gleeful celebration of cancellation — these are not traditional fandom activities. They are culture war tactics wearing fan clothing. Ellison would have recognised them immediately: the same instinct that wanted Campbell’s safe, bland, predictable heroes is still with us, now armed with social media. The whole point of Dangerous Visions was to publish stories that broke the taboos that Campbell-era science fiction refused to touch. In this sense, fandom was Ellison’s Dangerous Visions in action: refusing to wait for permission, refusing to dilute the future to make it more palatable. Women, queer, trans, and non-binary fans created a fandom that was diverse, emotionally literate, and politically alive. The franchise only caught up when it could no longer ignore these visions.

Fandom’s international and inclusive nature also revealed how slowly the franchise evolved. It took nearly thirty years — until The Next Generation — for Star Trek to progress from Brown’s “Arena” to the more sophisticated “Darmok.” Both stories deal with communication with the “other,” but where “Arena” offers a moral duel, “Darmok” seeks to understand a culture on its own terms.

That gap mirrors the franchise’s uneasy relationship with its writers. When Roddenberry returned to launch The Next Generation, he resisted working with established science fiction authors, partly to maintain control, and possibly because he worried that they’d push the show into unfamiliar territory. That tension was exemplified by Ellison’s earlier, infamous feud over “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which became a decades-long debate about compromise and network courage.

His original script made the point sharply: a crippled, shell‑shocked war veteran dies stepping between Kirk and danger, a small act of human decency and sacrifice the aired episode reduced to a meaningless accident involving a nameless drifter. Even in 1967, the studio avoided the moral ambiguity Ellison insisted on.

This was not simply a creative dispute. It revealed something structural: literary science fiction can sustain moral ambiguity across a short story or novel, while television (dependent on audiences, advertisers, and weekly scheduling) tends to resolve rather than disturb. Ellison understood both forms well enough to know exactly what was being lost.

Ellison’s experience wasn’t unique; his later work on The Starlost TV series collapsed under studio interference, and he disowned that series before it aired. The pattern was clear: ambitious ideas were watered down, and stranger visions were diluted into formula. By 1991, Star Trek had started to live up to its ideals: empathy, patience, and an openness to change. “Darmok” marked a turning point from superficial moral tales to genuine understanding. Likewise, the Babylon 5 TV series brought Ellison in as a ‘creative consultant,’ a role that let him push the series toward sharper, more confrontational storytelling.

The Ongoing Battle for Representation

By the 1990s, fandom had grown large, global, and confident, sometimes out‑thinking the franchise itself. Like earlier science‑fiction fandoms, fans blurred the line between response and cultural appropriation, feeling a sense of custodianship over the universe. That energy lived in fanzines, fan‑run conventions, and the wider creative culture that surrounded the show. One obvious example is Spock being brought back from fictional death — like his literary predecessor, Sherlock Holmes — due to fan demand. But corporations weren’t comfortable with this.

Viacom’s 1990s crackdown on fan activities was a warning sign: stewardship isn’t ownership. The result wasn’t a blanket shutdown, but it created a chilling effect across the franchise: movies flopped, one TV series ended prematurely, and Star Trek withered for nearly twenty years. Paramount paid the price for alienating the very people who kept the universe alive.

What changed next was less about corporate hostility and more about the world shifting under fandom’s feet. As the internet replaced print, and as social habits changed — later accelerated by social media and the long tail of COVID — the old hubs of fan creativity thinned out across every corner of science‑fiction fandom. The impulse didn’t disappear; it simply moved online. Fan fiction migrated to digital platforms, podcasts replaced newsletters, and community energy dispersed into new forms. It was still the pattern Ellison warned about: institutions encouraging passive consumption while discouraging the unruly, imaginative participation that makes a culture worth having.

Two decades later, Paramount repeated the pattern more directly by imposing strict limits on fan films, shutting down some of the most ambitious grassroots visual storytelling fandom had ever created. Different decade, different medium, same anxiety: whenever fans pushed the universe forward in ways the studio couldn’t control, the corporate instinct was to pull back.

Ellison spent his career arguing that institutions fear imagination because they can’t control where it leads. Star Trek’s history proves him right.

The irony is hard to miss as Paramount responds to public outrage about so‑called “wokeism” by cancelling Starfleet Academy and announcing the end of more Trekkie TV for the foreseeable future: the same franchise that once feared fans for loving too expansively now fears those who hate too loudly. The dynamic has flipped, but the pattern is the same: a studio retreating from the very community that keeps its universe alive, and in its sixtieth anniversary year.

What makes this latest retreat even more bitter is that it may have come under political pressure rather than creative judgment, the very dynamic Ellison spent decades dissecting.

The Future of Imagination

“At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing, thinking
whoever “everyone” happens to be this year.
And what good is all this to Black people?”

— Octavia E. Butler

Butler’s challenge frames the problem sharply: a future that claims to be universal must be judged by who it includes, and who it excludes.

Star Trek’s reputation for progressivism often rests on the famous 1968 Kirk–Uhura kiss. However, this was not the first interracial kiss on television. Earlier examples existed in British, Dutch, and US TV programs, and even within Star Trek itself. The myth that it was groundbreaking persists because it flatters the franchise’s self-image as a trailblazer. In reality, the scene was heavily constrained by network anxiety; it was filmed in multiple versions to minimize the visibility of the kiss, and its framing contained layers of rape culture and racial stereotyping. Rather than a bold step forward, it was a carefully managed moment that reflected the limitations and anxieties of its time.

The real significance lies in how the show reinforced boundaries of acceptability, then later claimed to have shattered them.

And this is the real frustration: for all its rhetoric about boldly going, and for all its aspirations that gained legions of fans attracted by its potential rather than by its reality, Star Trek actually spent decades retreating from the very dangers Ellison embraced. Instead of looking ahead to the kind of boundary‑shattering work collected in Dangerous Visions, the franchise often chose the safest possible path. Janeway was written as blandly authoritative rather than genuinely transgressive; Deep Space Nine tiptoed around trans narratives that it was perfectly positioned to explore; and The Next Generation, for all its polish, carried the quiet prejudices of its era: racist caricatures, sexist framing, and a pointed refusal to acknowledge queer lives. Even Trek’s Asian characters: Sulu, and Harry Kim, were left without meaningful character development, romance, or timely promotion; while Chakotay became a token Indigenous figure encumbered with nonsensical, mystical clichés and a Māori tattoo that had nothing to do with his culture.

The franchise consistently avoided confronting cultural and racial complexities head-on. It still does today.

And the absences ran deeper still. For all its talk of universalism, Star Trek almost never engaged with the rising currents of AfricanFuturism, AsianFuturism, or Indigenous futurisms, traditions that were already reshaping the genre with visions far bolder than anything the franchise attempted. Even its rare brushes with AfroFuturism were bowdlerised into something palatable for white audiences, stripped of the political bite that defined the movement elsewhere. Trek kept promising a galaxy of cultures while constraining those cultures within their white understandings and refusing to let those cultures speak in their own voices.

In all these cases, Star Trek wasn’t attempting to portray genuine diversity so much as reproducing the straight, white, male gaze and its familiar Orientalist assumptions. The franchise kept promising a future that challenged the present, yet too often delivered stories designed not to disturb anyone’s sleep. Ellison’s anthology showed what the genre could be when it stopped flinching. Star Trek spent far too much time flinching.

Beyond the Final Frontier

While Star Trek broke some ground, many other science fiction creators have pushed progress much further. Theodore Sturgeon’s stories beyond “Amok Time” (such as More Than Human and Venus Plus X) explored complex themes of sexuality, identity, and human connection with nuance and depth. Beyond “The Trouble with Tribbles”, David Gerrold’s Blood and Fire and The Martian Child introduced diverse characters and challenged conventional narratives. Female authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Nnedi Okorafor have crafted stories centered on intersectional identities and cultures that are otherwise often marginalized in mainstream media.

Additionally, TV series like The Prisoner, Doctor Who, Lexx, Sense8, The Expanse, Black Mirror, and even The Simpsons have pushed social and technological storytelling into far bolder territory, treating marginalised people as full participants in the future and refusing to look away from uncomfortable realities. These shows carry the spirit of Ellison’s Dangerous Visions more faithfully than Star Trek, by expanding representation and challenging the norms that mainstream science fiction still hesitates to confront. Their futures leave Star Trek looking reactionary by comparison.

This is already changing. As US cultural dominance wanes, the centre of gravity in science fiction is already shifting: AfricanFuturism, AsianFuturism, and Indigenous futurisms are not waiting for mainstream validation. They are building their own futures, on their own terms, with or without a starship. Dangerous Visions may become wondrous visions. If the future belongs to those who imagine it, then the next century of science fiction will not be written from Los Angeles. It will come from Lagos, Nairobi, Mumbai, Seoul, and the communities Western SF spent decades ignoring.

Nowhere was this cultural shift more visible than in the collapse of the 2026 Starfleet Academy TV series, a moment that exposed just how fragile the old US-focussed future had become. In that sense, its collapse felt less like a production failure and more like a metaphor: a Federation falling at the same moment its cultural centre of gravity was shifting elsewhere.

That global shift makes Ellison’s warning feel even more urgent. His challenge to the genre didn’t disappear; it just found better homes. Meanwhile, Star Trek was about to prove once again exactly why that challenge still mattered.

The Failure of Imagination

The Starfleet Academy debacle makes the pattern impossible to ignore. A show that finally gave queer, Black, brown, and neurodivergent youth a fair go was met with a wave of hostility so familiar it could have been lifted from the letters pages of 1967. The franchise once again flinched, choosing to appease the loudest reactionaries rather than stand by the very future it claimed to champion. In that sense, the cancellation is not an aberration but a reminder: the culture Ellison challenged is still with us, still frightened of the wrong people inheriting the future, still willing to burn down a story rather than broaden its imagination. The downfall of this culture is happening in real time as we watch.

“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke’s line is a reminder of what the genre is for, and of how often Star Trek has forgotten it. Ellison never did. The future has always belonged to those willing to imagine it without flinching, and to those who refuse to apologise for who gets to stand inside it. I have been a Star Trek fan for most of my life, so I understand precisely why its failures matter. If Star Trek wants to remain culturally relevant, it will need to avoid the fate of Edward Bellamy’s utopian future and rediscover the courage it takes to adapt to the future.

Ellison was born on 27 May 1934. He spent his life insisting that the future was not a destination but a discussion; one that required courage, honesty, and a willingness to disturb comfortable assumptions wherever they were found. Star Trek promised that discussion and too often retreated from it. Fandom carried it forward, imperfectly but persistently. The argument continues. It always will.

Bibliography

Geoff Allshorn, 2021. A Kiss is (Not) Just A Kiss, Humanist World blog, 1 August.
= = = = = = = = =, 2025. Forgotten Futures, Humanist World blog, 8 September.
Robert W. Bly, 2002. The Online Copywriter’s Handbook (features an interview with Harlan Ellison in 1979), p. 19.
The Comics Journal, 1980. Harlan Ellison Interview, Issue #53.
Harlan Ellison, 1967. “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, March 1967.
= = = = = = = = =, 1970. The Glass Teat, New York: Pyramid Books.
= = = = = = = = =, 1975. The Other Glass Teat, New York: Pyramid Books.
= = = = = = = = =, 1985. An Edge in My Voice, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Los Angeles Times, 1985. “Terminator Suit Settled”, March 1985.
Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn (eds.), 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Cambridge University Press.
Paul Kincaid, 2026. “Who is in danger?”, in Bruce Gillespie (ed.), SF Commentary, #126, April 2026, pp. 20–32. [First published, Strange Horizons, 27 January 2025.]
Marc Scott Zicree, 1982. The Twilight Zone Companion, New York: Bantam Books.
Ellen Weil & Gary K. Wolfe, 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever, Ohio State University Press.
Gary K. Wolfe, 1979. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction, Kent State University Press.
Writers Guild of America West, n.d. Award and Arbitration Records. (Documentation of Ellison’s WGA Award withdrawal and arbitration decisions.)
Zicree, Marc Scott, 1982. The Twilight Zone Companion, New York: Bantam Books.

If this essay speaks to you, you may find these related pieces useful:

A Kiss Is (Not) Just a Kiss
The Kirk–Uhura Kiss: Myth and The Real Story.

The Prime Defective
The Prime Directive: Another problem within the Star Trek franchise.

From Fic to Future
A short biography of Diane Marchant, the Australian fan who helped reshape the future of fandom.

Forgotten Futures
An examination of how utopian imagination shifted from 1888 to 1966, and why Edward Bellamy’s future vision died but Gene Roddenberry’s endured, including how women contributed to fandom.

Time, Youth, and the Call of the Future
I Have Seen the Future
Two explorations about why “Starfleet Academy” mattered.

From Queer to Eternity
How queer issues intersect with science fiction.

Race and the Colonial Imagination
An essay tracing the threads of colonial imagination in science fiction, and emerging AfroFuturism, AfricanFuturism, and other movements that explore beyond the white gaze.

From Trek to Trump
A look at sample homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, and racist objections to the “Starfleet Academy” TV series.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared. Editorial/artistic/research assistance from Anthropic Claude AI, Copilot AI, and Deep AI.

The Hero Must Be Rewritten

Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Part II

Gender and the Myth of the Universal Hero

Published to commemorate the birthday of Joanna Russ.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
— Neil Armstrong, 1969

“He was a man, and I was a woman. That’s what they told us.”
— Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer, 2018

Genre Was Never Neutral

Speculative fiction was built on a foundation of masculine myth. From the 19th century onward, writers like Verne, Wells, and Burroughs imagined futures of conquest, invention, and control. Their heroes were white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, and rational – and women were either absent or ornamental.

Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

Early science fiction: Explorers and inventors dominated their worlds. The alien was orientalised and othered. Women were sidelined.
Golden Age SF (1930s–50s): Pulp magazines glorified masculine genius. Women were assistants, lovers, or threats.
High fantasy (Tolkien, Lewis): Noble bloodlines, patriarchy, and exotic locations.
Space opera (Star Wars, Foundation): Empire in space. Male heroes and women as damsels in distress.

For me as a younger science fiction fan, one of my template heroes was Captain Kirk, who happened to be white, male, heterosexual and imperialist. The same with Commander Straker, Luke Skywalker, Doctor Who, R. Daneel Olivaw, and even Galen from Planet of the Apes. These generically universal straight white male heroes (or their analog) served to lead and guide science fiction by example. But from Tarzan to Tony Stark, from Sherlock to Spock, the so-called “universal” hero was never really universal. He was a product of Western patriarchy, designed to dominate and conquer.

Helena Tried to Give Them Souls

She Was the Genre’s First Media Emotional Ark

Helena Glory, the President’s daughter, arrives at Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.), a factory that mass-produces synthetic labourers. She comes as an emissary of the League of Humanity, pleading for the robots to be treated with dignity. She begs the scientists to give them souls, to make them more human. They laugh. They dismiss her. They marry her.

Years later, Helena burns the formula for creating robots (not out of malice, but grief). She’s horrified by their callousness, by the sterility of a world without care. When the robots revolt, she is killed: erased like the empathy she embodied.

From the beginning, women haunted the margins of speculative fiction: sometimes as authors, more often as symbols. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) gave the genre its first speculative scaffold, yet even there, women are silenced, sacrificed, or erased to propel male ambition. In colonial fantasies by Verne and Burroughs, women are romantic prizes or civilizing burdens; emblems of the empire’s moral veneer. As the genre moved into pulp fiction, women were both creators and constraints: Mary Gnaedinger edited Famous Fantastic Mysteries, while writers like Clare Winger Harris and Leslie F. Stone published under ambiguous names to slip past editorial gatekeeping. Yet on the page, female characters were often mute, decorative, or doomed: narrative decoration for masculine conquest. Even in R.U.R. (1920), where the word “robot” was born, Helena Glory’s efforts end in obliteration. These early texts excluded and obliterated women.

Maria: The Robot Was a Woman

In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), the first cinematic robot wasn’t a neutral machine, it was a woman. The Maschinenmensch, built in the image of Maria, wasn’t designed to liberate. She was built to deceive, seduce, and incite chaos.

She was created by Rotwang, not as a marvel of science, but as a monument to his lost love, Hel. In that act, the genre revealed its blueprint: women being subservient to the whims and fantasies of men. The robot wasn’t just futuristic, it was patriarchal fantasy presented in chrome.

And yet, she endures. Her silhouette haunts pop culture, from C-3PO to Beyoncé. She reminds us that speculative fiction didn’t begin with liberation — it began with discrimination.

Masculinist Literature

Science fiction, in particular, has long been a stage for masculine melodrama. From lost-world adventures to interstellar warfare, the genre has often glorified the warrior archetype. As Ezekiel Crago puts it, SF’s morality is saturated with “military masculinity”, a form of manhood that justifies violence through the illusion of protection. The “helpful hero” becomes a vessel for power.

To understand how women are written in speculative fiction, we have to start with how masculinity is constructed. The genre doesn’t just exclude women, it defines them in contrast to male protagonists. They’re presented as emotional devices, moral challenges, or damsels in distress. Feminist SF has pushed back for decades, but the genre remains stubbornly resistant.

The Hero as Vessel of Mastery

Let’s talk about the classics: Aragorn, Paul Atreides, Luke Skywalker, Hari Seldon, and their ilk. They were role models for young white boys, and reflected what NASA would later classify as being “the right stuff” for astronauts: male, white, heterosexual, and culturally all-American.

Aragorn: Inherits kingship through bloodline and prophecy. Éowyn’s grief is sidelined.
Paul Atreides: Becomes a messiah. Women vanish in his vision.
Luke Skywalker: Cosmic destiny, paternal revelation, heroic aspirations.
Hari Seldon: Intellectual superiority. Women reduced to background decoration.

These narratives entertained and instructed. The hero wasn’t just a character. He was a role model for male emotional distance and a testimony to testosterone. Hasta La Vista, Baby!

The Treatment of Female Characters

In speculative fiction, women are rarely protagonists. More often, they’re decoration, used to provide background context for the male hero, or to soften his testosterone. They’re props.

Altaira and the Gaslight

I recall chatting to a younger SF fan about an old movie (Forbidden Planet), which I had always considered positively, but I was about to learn something. This younger guy viewed this movie as being awful, which surprised me because it is often invoked as a classic. When I asked him why, his reply was startling but made me think:

“That scene when the captain scolds Altaira for wearing a short skirt in front of a spaceship full of men who haven’t seen a woman for a year. Talk about gaslighting and rape culture!”

Maybe the Creature from the Id was wider than just a movie concept.

Narrative Roles Assigned to Women

The Love Interest: A prize or temptation. Think Leia, Arwen, Chani.
The Healer or Mother: Emotional tokenism. Often unnamed or undeveloped as a character, often sacrificed. Think Edith Keeler, Beverley Crusher, Deanna Troi, and Miramanee (Star Trek)
The Symbolic Martyr: Forgotten, or sanctified. Think Maria in Metropolis and Furiosa in Mad Max.
The Exceptional Woman: Allowed agency only by rejecting femininity or becoming “one of the boys.” Think Buffy Summers, Dana Scully, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Susan Calvin.

These clichés teach readers or viewers to see women as secondary, symbolic, or expendable. As Brian Attebery puts it, science fiction doesn’t just reflect gender norms, it teaches them. It animates machines and aliens with power, while presenting women as relatively inert, decorative, or dead.

Case Studies in Erasure

Éowyn (The Lord of the Rings): Slays the Witch-King, then vanishes into domesticity.
Chani (Dune): Warrior and guide, reduced to womb and warning.
Leia Organa (Star Wars): Rebel leader, strategist, and survivor—yet always framed through restraint and lineage.
Susan Calvin (Asimov’s Robot series): Brilliant roboticist, emotionally flattened and mocked for her intellect.
Dr Elizabeth Dehner (Star Trek pilot): Brilliant scientist, emotionally flattened and mocked as a ‘walking freezer unit’.

These women are allowed power only when it serves the hero’s arc. Their stories are shaped by the emotional logic of a genre that mistrusts vulnerability and disciplines care out of its protagonists and its readers.

The Frigid Prototype

Dr. Susan Calvin, robopsychologist in Asimov’s I, Robot, is often described as cold, emotionless, and robotic. Shmoop notes that she’s referred to as a “frosty girl” with “cold enthusiasm,” her face and voice repeatedly described as cold—like the metal bodies of the robots she studies.

Calvin is more than just a scientist, she’s a genre prototype. She embodies the masculinist ideal of intellect stripped of emotion, a woman who “protected herself against a world she disliked by a masklike expression and a hypertrophy of intellect.” Her competence is unquestioned, but her humanity is flattened. She’s allowed power only by rejecting personality complexity.

Even Asimov admitted she was “much more like the popular conception of a robot than were any of my positronic creations.” Calvin’s legacy is profound: she’s the frigid woman scientist who must become machine to be taken seriously. And yet, she endures: brilliant, unyielding, and emotionally dead.

Damsels, Temptresses, and Designed for Rescue

Speculative fiction has long relied on women as visual and figures to be rescued, desired, or punished. These characters aren’t protagonists. They’re genre tropes, designed to elevate male heroism while suppressing female agency.

From Geisha to General

Princess Leia’s Story Arc Was Evolution

She began as a captured princess, framed through defiance but rescued by men.

She was silenced in a gold bikini, her body part of the conquest and subjugation.

She became a general: grieving, commanding, mentoring, surviving.

It took a lifetime for women’s liberation to arrive in a galaxy far, far away.

Designed for Rescue

Jane Porter (Tarzan): Repeatedly rescued, framed through romantic submission.
Aouda (Around the World in Eighty Days): Intelligent, gracious, but offered as romantic reward.
Maria (Metropolis): Saintly human and seductive robot, her humanity mechanised and weaponized.
Weena (The Time Machine): Passive and childlike.
Nova (Planet of the Apes): Mute, idealized, emotionally dependent.

Framed Through Beauty and Silence

Vina (Star Trek: “The Cage”): Reconstructed for beauty, her trauma made decorative.
Janice Rand (Star Trek: TOS): Professional, yet subordinated, her arc vanishes without closure.
Altaira Morbius (Forbidden Planet): Beautiful, naïve, emotionally reactive, transferred from father to suitor.
Dr. Ruth Adams (This Island Earth): A scientist, but emotionally subordinated, reduced to companion and witness.

Desire as Punishment

Marla McGivers (Star Trek: “Space Seed”): Betrays her crew for Khan’s love, her professionalism and autonomy forgotten.
Princess Aura (Flash Gordon): Sensual and rebellious, her quest for love made dangerous.
Barbarella:Her personality is contextualised through erotic spectacle.

Competence Undermined

Carol Marcus (Star Trek II): Brilliant scientist, but her arc is framed through romantic history and maternal sacrifice.
Maureen Robinson (original Lost In Space TV series): Qualified scientist who spends her time baking space cookies, washing the space laundry, and worrying about her children.
Tanya Adams (The Giant Claw): A mathematician, but her intellect is sidelined by romantic quests and repeated rescue.
Lois Lane (Superman): A brilliant journalist, yet frequently endangered and emotionally tethered to Superman’s arc.

These women aren’t just underwritten, they’re minimised. Their emotional power, sacrifice, and desire are used to fortify male heroism, not to explore their own arcs. They’re written to be seen, not to see.

Jessica Runs

I recall the opening episode of Logan’s Run: Jessica stands to one side, looking helpless while the men fight in fisticuffs. Just as the villain is about to defeat Logan, he is disarmed by a shot from Jessica, who has turned from damsel in distress to become a self-empowered runner!

I was sitting in a room with other teenagers, and we all cheered as Jessica discovered Women’s Lib. It wasn’t just a plot twist, it was a the birth of a new era. In that moment, speculative fiction cracked open, and we saw possibility sprint across the screen.

Point and Counterpoint: Wonder Woman

Diana isn’t rescued; she rescues the genre from itself. In a landscape dominated by male heroes, Wonder Woman emerges as a revelation.

Lasso: Compels honesty, not obedience.
Bracelets: Deflect violence, not invite it.
Mission: Peace over conquest.

She doesn’t conquer the other; she connects across difference. Where Paul Atreides erases Fremen women, Wonder Woman represents the silenced. Where Luke Skywalker inherits destiny through bloodline, she chooses empathy. She is not a masculinist hero reassigned as a woman. She is her own character.

Transitional Figures

Not all feminist characters arrive fully formed. Some characters inhabit the gap between old tropes and new ideas.

Ann Veronica (H.G. Wells): Defies patriarchy, seeks autonomy, yet returns to domesticity.
Jessica (Logan’s Run TV): Begins as companion, evolves co-architect of resistance.
Servalan (Blake’s 7): Glamorous and manipulative, yet politically dominant.
Elizabeth Dehner (Star Trek): Gains power, refuses domination, and then dies to stop Mitchell’s descent.
Nyota Uhura (Star Trek): Cultural bridge and communications officer. Like her character, her full name was not invented for decades.
Zira (Planet of the Apes): Empathetic and maternal scientist who dies in self-sacrifice.
Sarah Jane Smith (Doctor Who): Investigative journalist turned protagonist. She challenges the Doctor, leads her own spin-off.
Sparta (Venus Prime): Genetically enhanced, memory-erased—reclaims identity, solves mysteries, framed through posthuman spectacle.

These women signal that the genre is beginning to crack open.

Ripley Wasn’t Supposed to Survive

Ripley was originally written as a man. In early drafts of Alien (1979), the character was a standard-issue male officer. But director Ridley Scott, with a nudge from studio head Alan Ladd Jr., flipped the script: “Why can’t Ripley be a woman?”

Scott later explained the logic: a woman would be the last person audiences expected to survive. That subversion—casting Sigourney Weaver as the by-the-book officer who outlives them all—wasn’t just a twist. It was a genre detonation.

Ripley didn’t just survive. She returned, again and again, across sequels and decades, evolving from reluctant survivor to maternal protector to existential warrior. She became the spine of the franchise—and a new archetype for speculative fiction.

Feminist Interventions: Ripley and Sarah Connor

If Wonder Woman reframes heroism through care and individualism, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor represent a darker evolution. They are the female equivalents of violent male heroes such as the Terminator, Judge Dredd, Batman, Wolverine, or Lobo. As such, they epitomise the idea that “might makes right” and their character development needs further nuance if they are to be seen as fully fleshed out, positive role models. While they represent the idea that women are just as physically capable as men towards forms of assertive behaviour, they also represent a transition phase between the “damsels in distress” of the past and more healthy representations in the future.

Towards Intersectionality and Speculative Care

Speculative fiction doesn’t just imagine futures. It helps to create them.

Russ Drew the Map

Joanna Russ exposed the architecture of genre in speculative fiction. In her essay “What Can a Heroine Do? or, Why Women Can’t Write”, Russ mapped the literary traps that constrain female protagonists: the ornamental roles, the emotional baggage, the narrative erasure. She showed how women are written to serve, not to act.

Russ argued that the problem isn’t just representation, it’s structure. The genre’s expectations discipline women into silence, sacrifice, or spectacle. “The heroine cannot act,” she wrote, “because the plot does not permit it.”

Her work teaches us that rewriting the hero means rewriting the blueprint. Russ didn’t just ask what a heroine could do. She demanded that we build stories where she can.

Reading List

Attebery, Brian. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake
Busse, Kristina. Framing Fan Fiction
Butler, Octavia. Kindred, Parable of the Sower
Cherryh, C.J. Foreigner series
Crago, Ezekiel. “The Helpful Hero: Military Masculinity in Science Fiction”
Drapeau-Bisson, Marie-Lise. “Feminist Readings of Genre Disruption”
Fellman, Isaac. The Breath of the Sun
Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto
Lemberg, R.B. The Four Profound Weaves, The Unbalancing
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”
Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women’s Writing
Shmoop Editorial Team. “Susan Calvin in I, Robot Character Analysis.”
Studocu Editorial Team. “Feminist Analysis of Joanna Russ: A Study of Female Agency.” Studocu.
Tiptree Jr., James (Alice Sheldon). Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Vint, Sherryl. Bodies of Tomorrow
Yang, Neon. The Tensorate Series

Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Speculative Fiction and the Colonial Imagination

A four-part journey through how speculative fiction echoed empire, rewrites resistance, and reclaims futurity.

Part One: Race and the Colonial Imagination
Published: 2 January 2026
Read Part One
From Lucian to Le Guin, speculative fiction’s imperial DNA is exposed: how imagined futures rehearsed conquest, racial hierarchy, and colonial logic.

Part Two: The Hero Must Be Rewritten
Published: 22 February 2026
Read Part Two
Gender and the myth of the universal hero. This chapter rewrites masculinist genre scaffolding, tracing how speculative fiction disciplines emotion, care, and female agency.

Part Three: Sexuality & Queer Futures
Published: 1 April 2026
Read Part Three
A queer reading of Star Trek and speculative canon. This chapter critiques heteronormative erasure, celebrates queer fandom’s legacy, and imagines futures beyond genre discipline.

Part Four: We Occupy the Future
Published: 5 April 2026
Read Part Four
Published on the anniversaries of the 504 Sit-In and Medibank Blockade, this chapter confronts techno-fix fantasies and reimagines futures where disabled bodies are not corrected or cured, but centred, celebrated, and architecturally included.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with editorial and layout assistance from Copilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

Forgotten Futures

This essay is published in celebration of Star Trek Day (8 September) the anniversary of the original series’ premiere in 1966. It honours the visionary legacy of humanist Gene Roddenberry and the enduring dream of a better future for all humanity.

“With a tear for the dark past…”
“…turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward.”
— Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887

“It isn’t all over…”
“…everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning.”
— Gene Roddenberry, on Star Trek’s vision

In 1888, Edward Bellamy published a novel that sold over a million copies, inspired a political movement, and imagined a future without poverty or greed. Looking Backward: 2000–1887 was more than fiction. It was a blueprint for a better world. Bellamy’s vision of a cooperative, egalitarian society captured the imagination of a generation grappling with the chaos of industrial capitalism.

Set in the year 2000, Looking Backward follows Julian West, a 19th-century man who awakens in a future Boston transformed by nationalized industry, universal employment, and economic equality. In Bellamy’s utopia, citizens receive equal credit from the state, labour is honoured, and poverty has been eradicated. The novel presents a society governed by reason, solidarity, and shared prosperity; a future where competition has given way to cooperation, and justice is built into the very structure of daily life.

Nearly a century later, Gene Roddenberry picked up the torch. His creation, Star Trek, launched in 1966, offered a similarly hopeful vision: a future where humanity had transcended its divisions, embraced peace, and explored the stars not for conquest, but for understanding. Roddenberry’s Federation was Bellamy’s Boston in orbit; an evolved society built on shared purpose, moral clarity, and technological abundance.

Today, few remember Bellamy’s name… and Roddenberry’s legacy could learn lessons from why.

Before we confront the threats facing utopian storytelling today, it’s worth asking: what kind of thinker was Edward Bellamy or Gene Roddenberry?

From Human to Humanist

Was Edward Bellamy a Humanist?

Although Edward Bellamy lived before the modern humanist movement, his utopian vision in Looking Backward resonates deeply with humanist principles: reason, compassion, and social justice. He imagined a society where cooperation replaced competition, and civic dignity was prioritized over profit — ideals rooted in Enlightenment thinking.

Raised in a religious household, Bellamy’s philosophy evolved into what Arthur E. Morgan called a “religion of solidarity”: a secular ethic grounded in empathy and collective responsibility. His blueprint featured universal employment, equal resource distribution, and respect for labour — all hallmarks of humanist ethics.

In many ways, Bellamy was a proto-humanist: an early voice calling for a society built on justice, reason, and shared humanity. His legacy continues to inspire those who believe a better world is achievable through moral imagination and collective effort.

Was Gene Roddenberry a Humanist?

Yes — formally, proudly, and profoundly. Gene Roddenberry was not merely aligned with humanist ideals; he was publicly recognized as a humanist and used Star Trek as a vehicle to express those values. His vision of the future was secular, ethical, and radically optimistic — a moral blueprint for humanity’s potential. Humanists UK

Belief in human progress: Roddenberry envisioned a society where exploration replaced conquest, and knowledge was pursued for the betterment of all. His optimism reflected a belief in humanity’s capacity to evolve through empathy, science, and cooperation. Screen Rant

Secular ethics: A lifelong atheist, Roddenberry rejected supernaturalism and embraced a moral framework rooted in dignity, justice, and rational inquiry. His characters were ethical agents, navigating complex dilemmas with integrity and courage. We’re History

Focus on equality and dignity: The Federation abolished poverty, prejudice, and currency. Starfleet officers served not for profit, but for principle (embodying humanist ideals of pluralism, peace, and shared responsibility). CBR

Roddenberry’s humanism remains a living tradition. Yet today, both his and Bellamy’s visions face mounting threats from political extremism and religious fundamentalism, to corporate censorship and cultural decline. In a post-truth world where science is contested and empathy dismissed, their utopias remind us that the human adventure is not guaranteed; it must be defended.

Philosophical Parallels: Two Utopias, One Dream

Though separated by nearly a century, Edward Bellamy and Gene Roddenberry imagined futures where humanity had outgrown its divisions. Both rejected the zero-sum logic of capitalism and envisioned peace not as the absence of war, but the presence of justice.

Bellamy’s utopia was economic: a society where money was obsolete, work was honoured, and citizens received equal credit from the state. His future was built on solidarity and civic dignity.

Roddenberry’s vision was moral and technological. In Star Trek, replicators eliminated scarcity, and exploration replaced conquest. The Federation had no currency, no poverty, and no prejudice. Starfleet officers were philosopher-engineers, guided by ethics and curiosity.

Roddenberry extended Bellamy’s dream beyond humanity. His Federation embraced sentientism: dignity for all self-aware beings, from Vulcans to androids. This shift anticipated today’s debates on AI rights, animal ethics, and planetary stewardship. His utopia wasn’t just post-scarcity; it was post-anthropocentric.

Both men believed that, given the right conditions, humanity could evolve into something noble. Their futures weren’t just fantasies… they were moral blueprints.

“Starfleet was founded to seek out new life — well, there it sits! Waiting.”
— Captain Jean-Luc Picard, The Measure of a Man (TNG, Season 2)

Both men’s visions rejected the zero-sum logic of capitalism. Both imagined peace not as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice. And both believed that humanity, given the right conditions, could evolve into something noble.

Why Bellamy Faded

Despite his enormous influence in the late 19th century, Bellamy’s legacy dimmed over time. His utopia, once a rallying cry for reformers, became a relic.

Static vision: Looking Backward presented a finished society — perfect, harmonious, and unchanging. Over time, this began to feel sterile and implausible.
Political baggage: Bellamy’s Nationalist Clubs promoted democratic socialism, which later became controversial and misunderstood.
Literary shifts: As dystopias rose in popularity, Bellamy’s earnest optimism felt out of step with the darker tone of modern fiction.

From Clubs to Culture

Bellamy’s Nationalist Clubs were more than political experiments. They were early rehearsals of utopia. These grassroots groups built community around shared ideals, much like fandoms today. Their meetings, publications, and mutual aid efforts foreshadowed the participatory culture that Star Trek fans would later embody.

Roddenberry didn’t just inherit Bellamy’s blueprint; he reengineered it. Where Bellamy’s followers organized politically, Trek fans organized culturally. The Federation became more than fiction; it became a metaphor for participatory hope.

Why Roddenberry Endures

Roddenberry’s utopia didn’t arrive fully formed. It evolved. That adaptability is key to its lasting appeal. Star Trek unfolded over decades, across series and films. Each generation reinterpreted the Federation’s ideals through new characters, challenges, and cultural lenses. It absorbed real-world issues (civil rights, gender equality, environmentalism) and reflected them back through allegory. It wasn’t static; it was affective.

Bellamy’s vision was locked in print; a frozen ideal. The modern world ultimately left him behind. Roddenberry’s dream endured because it was ironically sustained by the very capitalism he sought to critique. For commercial reasons, the franchise evolved to stay relevant: it took three decades to assign captaincy to African-American and female leads, and five decades to acknowledge LGBT+ existence. Progress didn’t move at warp speed, but it moved.

Roddenberry didn’t just imagine a better potential future: he set in motion a living dream: one that continues to adapt, provoke, and inspire.

Relevance Today

In an age of climate crisis, automation, and rising inequality, Bellamy’s dream may be less naïve than it once seemed. Universal basic income, cooperative economics, and post-scarcity technologies are no longer science fiction; they are policy debates.

Roddenberry’s Federation continues to inspire. But perhaps it’s time to revisit Bellamy… not as a relic, but as a reminder. His vision of economic justice, civic dignity, and peaceful progress still speaks to our deepest hopes. If Roddenberry gave us the stars, Bellamy gave us the ground beneath them: a vision of Earth as it could be, if we dared to dream again.

“Humanity has the stars in its future…”
“…and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.”
— Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov: A Memoir

From Cultural Vanguard to Cultural Crossroads

For much of the 20th century, the United States shaped the global imagination. Through Hollywood, pop music, and television, it exported ideals of freedom, innovation, and moral debate. Star Trek was one of its beacons — a utopia imagined in its own image, inviting the world to dream along.

Even the name “America,” claimed solely by the United States, reflects a linguistic imperialism that erases the rest of the continent. This rhetorical dominance parallels the Federation’s own framing: a utopia imagined in the image of U.S. exceptionalism. Just as Starfleet’s command structure echoes military hierarchy, the Federation’s cultural ethos often mirrors American liberalism more than universal pluralism.

But that dominance is fading. Audiences now turn to stories from South Korea, India, Turkey, and beyond. Bollywood, Nollywood, Wellywood, and other industries offer narratives rooted in their own values and struggles. The promise of globalization has faltered, and US media often feels disconnected.

Meanwhile, political extremism and corporate censorship threaten the integrity of US storytelling. Sanitized scripts and cancelled voices signal a retreat from bold imagination. Star Trek always suffered from the tension to “boldly go” into social issue stories without offending sponsors or studio executives, and even today there are culture wars about whether the program should be woke or weak. Is it a commercial “starship” enterprise, or a mythic “Starship Enterprise”?

Utopia Under Siege: Star Trek, Censorship, and the Cultural Decline

The sky is darkening. The utopian dream, once nurtured by visionaries like Roddenberry, now faces mounting threats.

Recent events suggest that the utopian dream, once nurtured by visionaries like Roddenberry, is now under threat. The reported cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert by CBS, following Colbert’s criticism of Donald Trump and Paramount’s corporate dealings, is more than a media controversy. It’s a warning sign. When political pressure intersects with corporate interests, even satire becomes dangerous.

This isn’t just about one voice being silenced. It’s about the erosion of the cultural spaces where dissent, imagination, and moral clarity once thrived. If Hollywood (the engine behind Star Trek) begins to mirror the authoritarianism it once critiqued, then the Federation itself may be at risk.

Roddenberry’s universe was built on ethical courage. It challenged racism, war, and tyranny. It imagined a future where truth mattered and justice prevailed. But if the institutions behind Star Trek now prioritize profit over principle, what remains of that vision?

The decline of US cultural leadership isn’t measured in box office numbers. It’s measured in the stories we no longer dare to tell, the questions we no longer ask, and the ideals we no longer defend. Star Trek emerged from a nation steeped in contradiction: a self-declared champion of human rights, yet shaped by war, empire, and inequality. Starfleet, for all its utopian rhetoric, was modelled on military command — a structure that both enabled ethical exploration and mirrored the hierarchies it claimed to transcend. Within that tension, the franchise once dared to imagine better: a Federation built not on conquest, but on cooperation, pluralism, and moral clarity.

Today, that cultural and moral imagination is under siege. The rise of political and religious fundamentalism — exclusionary in tone, authoritarian in practice — has narrowed the cultural bandwidth for dissent, empathy, and ethical inquiry. The Trump movement didn’t invent this erosion, but they accelerated it: openly denying science and winding back human rights, normalizing cruelty and abuse, banning books and people they deem undesirable, cancelling history and stories they oppose, undermining truth and difference of opinion, denying diversity and empathy, and recasting pluralism as a threat. If Star Trek loses its edge, as part of a larger erosion of culture and human freedoms, we lose more than a franchise. We lose a tradition of storytelling that once challenged power from within, offered refuge to the marginalized, and insisted that a better future was possible, even when history said otherwise. The retreat from that vision signals not just creative fatigue, but a deeper cultural surrender.

“For small creatures such as we…”
“…the vastness is bearable only through love.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Where to From Here?

The decline of US cultural dominance doesn’t mean the end of utopian dreaming; it means the dream must evolve. Let global voices reinterpret the Federation. Let Nairobi, Seoul, or São Paulo imagine new futures. Defend artistic freedom. Reclaim moral imagination. Roddenberry’s vision was never a monument; it was a movement. And movements must adapt, resist, and renew.

Beyond the Federation: Utopia, Culture, and the Global Imagination

Star Trek’s Federation reached for the stars, but its roots were planted in Bellamy’s soil — a dream of justice before warp drives. For decades, U.S. culture dominated the global imagination, exporting ideals of freedom and exploration. But that dominance came with blind spots: a monocultural lens that often flattened diverse traditions into a singular mythology.

Today, a renaissance of global storytelling is reshaping what utopia can mean. From Korean dramas and Africanfuturism to Indigenous speculative fiction and Islamic futurism, new voices are expanding the dream. These visions bring fresh textures (spiritual, communal, ecological) that challenge and enrich the legacy of Roddenberry and Bellamy.

A truly universal utopia won’t be built from one culture’s imagination alone. It must be a mosaic: plural, evolving, and rooted in shared humanity. If Bellamy gave us justice and Roddenberry gave us wonder, perhaps the next utopia will give us balance between cultures, between Earth and stars, between past and future.

“To learn which questions are unanswerable…”
“…and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Today, we are witnessing a renaissance of global storytelling. From Korean dramas and Chinese myth-based video games to Indigenous speculative fiction and Africanfuturism, new voices are reshaping what utopia can mean. These visions bring fresh textures — spiritual, communal, ecological — that challenge, enrich and supersede the US dream.

What began as a singular vision must now become a mosaic: plural, evolving, and rooted in shared humanity.

A truly universal utopia will not be built from one culture’s imagination alone. It will be a mosaic: plural, evolving, and rooted in shared humanity. If Bellamy gave us justice and Roddenberry gave us wonder, perhaps the next utopia will give us balance — between cultures, between Earth and stars, between past and future.

Despite their utopian ideals, both Bellamy and Roddenberry reflected the gender norms of their time. Bellamy’s vision granted women economic equality but confined them to roles deemed suitable for their “disqualifications,” with domesticity idealized over independence. Roddenberry, especially in The Original Series, often portrayed women through a lens of sexualization and subordination, despite later efforts to evolve. Their futures imagined justice, but left gender equity unfinished. As we dream forward, we must ensure that tomorrow’s utopias do not inherit yesterday’s exclusions. Bellamy source, Roddenberry source

Women and Fandom: The Heart of the Trek Legacy

“I have always said that Star Trek introduced science fiction to women… and women to science fiction.”
— Geoff Allshorn

Star Trek didn’t just imagine a better future; it invited people to help build it. Despite their trivialisation and objectification in the program, women became central from the beginning. In 1966, Nichelle Nichols’ Lt. Uhura broke television barriers. She wasn’t a sidekick, she was a linguist, a bridge officer, and a symbol of dignity. Her presence inspired generations, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who urged her to stay, calling her “part of history.”

Since then, Trek has introduced powerful women like Janeway, Kira, Seven of Nine, and Burnham — leaders who challenged norms and expanded the franchise’s moral imagination. Behind the camera, women shaped Trek as writers, producers, and critics. Nana Visitor’s A Woman’s Trek chronicles this evolution, showing how the series mirrored — and sometimes led — shifts in women’s roles.

Women fans have done more than watch — they’ve rebuilt the culture around Trek. From zines to fanfic, conventions to campaigns, they’ve reimagined identity, justice, and belonging. Their engagement is co-authorship. They didn’t just keep the dream alive. They made it real.

Contrary to stereotypes, surveys show that Trek fans are as likely to be women as men. They’ve defended the franchise’s inclusive ideals, challenged its blind spots, and created entire subcultures around its values. As Professor Daryl G. Frazetti notes, Star Trek functions as a secular myth, and women have been among its most powerful mythmakers.

In many ways, women and fandom are the Federation’s real architects. They’ve kept the dream alive, not just on screen, but in the world. The next utopia must rise from the margins: from the voices long excluded from the cultural blueprint.

Diane Marchant with her mother Jessie at Trekcon 1 (Australia’s first Star Trek convention) on 15 July 1978. (Photo by Helena Binns)

Fandom itself has long been a space where women thrive. Contrary to stereotypes, surveys show that Star Trek fans are as likely to be women as men, and they span every age, background, and identity. StarTrek.com’s fandom study confirms this. Women fans have written fan fiction, organized conventions, and defended the franchise’s inclusive ideals when corporate interests faltered.

Costume parade at Trekcon 1, 15 July 1978. Women comprise a significant proportion of the participants.(Photo from my collection)

Women have not only shaped the stories of Star Trek. They’ve reshaped the meaning of fandom itself. From early zine culture to modern fan fiction, women have long used Trek as a canvas for reimagining identity, justice, and belonging. This participation has often challenged the franchise’s own boundaries, pushing it toward greater inclusivity. Yet it also raises questions about cultural appropriation: when fans reinterpret Trek through feminist, queer, or decolonial lenses, are they expanding the myth, or appropriating it from corporate control? The relationship between fans and franchise is symbiotic, but not always equal. Women fans have campaigned to save cancelled series, demanded better representation, and created entire subcultures around Trek’s ideals. Their engagement is not passive consumption; it’s active co-authorship. As Professor Daryl G. Frazetti notes in his study of fandom, Star Trek functions as a secular myth, and women have been among its most powerful mythmakers.

In many ways, women and fandom are the Federation’s real architects. They’ve kept the dream alive — not just on screen, but in the world. The next utopia must rise from the margins: from the voices long excluded from the cultural blueprint.

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle…”
“…because we do not live single-issue lives.”
— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)

Pluralist Futures: Global, Intersectional, and Ethical

Speculative fiction has long mirrored society — but often through a narrow lens. Today, that mirror is cracking open. Indigenous futurism reclaims ancestral memory and land sovereignty. Queer utopias celebrate chosen families and radical love. Africanfuturism, Islamic futurism, and Pacific Islander storytelling bring spiritual, communal, and ecological textures to the dream.

Roddenberry imagined technology as liberation. But today’s tools — algorithms, drones, biometric surveillance — often serve power, not people. Utopia must now grapple with this duality: can we build tools that dignify, not dominate?

These aren’t just representational wins. They’re philosophical revolutions. The next utopia must be a mosaic — plural, evolving, and rooted in shared humanity. If Bellamy gave us justice and Roddenberry gave us wonder, perhaps the next utopia will give us balance.

Fandom as Resistance: Keeping the Flame Alive

Star Trek fandom has always been more than cosplay and convention. It’s been a crucible of dissent. Fans have demanded representation, challenged militarism, and reimagined canon through zines, fanfic, and activism. Their engagement is not passive consumption — it’s co-authorship.

As studios sanitize scripts and silence dissent, fans keep the flame alive. Roddenberry’s utopia survives not because of Hollywood, but because of the people who refuse to let it die. The next Federation won’t be built by corporations — it will be imagined by communities who dream forward, together.

A Final Reflection: The Gesture of Utopia

Utopia isn’t a genre; it’s a choice. A refusal to accept the world as it is. Bellamy and Roddenberry dared to dream beyond their time. Today, we must do the same.

Let the next Federation rise from Nairobi, Seoul, or São Paulo. Let it speak in many tongues, walk many paths, and honour many ancestors. Let it be messy, plural, and alive.

Because the future of utopia is not “American.” It is human. And humanity, at its best, dreams forward… together.

“We are part of this universe…”
“…we are in this universe, but more importantly, the universe is in us.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Sources & Citations

This bibliography reflects a deliberate blend of primary texts, scholarly commentary, and cultural sources, each chosen to honour the intellectual lineage and activist spirit of speculative fiction. Citations are presented not merely as academic obligation, but as a gesture of respect: to the thinkers, creators, and communities whose visions shaped this work.

Sources span traditional scholarship, fan studies, and multimedia platforms, acknowledging that utopian discourse lives both in books and in fandom. Where possible, I cite original publication dates and creators to preserve historical context. I include Wikipedia and fan sites selectively, not as authorities, but as cultural artefacts that reflect participatory knowledge-making.

Isaac Asimov, 1994. I, Asimov: A memoir, Doubleday.

Edward Bellamy, 1888. Looking Backward: 2000–1887, Ticknor and Company.

Gregory Claeys, 2010. The Origins of Dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell, Oxford Academic.

Martin Gardner, 1983. Bellamy’s Utopia Revisited, New Criterion.

Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ace Books.

Antonia Lipsett, 2019. “Roddenberry’s ethics and the Federation”, We’re History.

Audre Lorde, 1984. Sister outsider: Essays and speeches, Crossing Press.

Diane Marchant & Helena Binns, 1978. Trekcon 1 photograph, Fanlore.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia, n.d. Edward Bellamy.

Gene Roddenberry et al, 1966–present. Star Trek [TV series and films], Paramount/CBS.

Carl Sagan, 1980. Cosmos. Random House.

Screen Rant, 2024. Roddenberry’s Vision of Progress.

Leslie Marmon Silko, 1977. Ceremony, Viking.

StarTrek.com., 2024. Star Trek fandom study.

Sam Tyrie, 2020. “Bellamy’s Nationalism and the Politics of Utopia”, Jacobin.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2014. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, National Geographic.

Nana Visitor, 2025). A Woman’s Trek. Titan Books. (Memory Alpha listing)

Wikipedia contributors, n.d. Looking Backward. Wikipedia.

Wikipedia contributors, n.d. Nationalist Clubs. Wikipedia.

Women at Warp, 2023. Feminist analysis of Star Trek [Podcast].

Fanthropology 101, 2022. Star Trek as secular myth.

CBR, 2023. “Star Trek’s economy explained“.

JRank, n.d. Dystopia.

Author’s Note

This essay is both a tribute and a challenge. As a lifelong humanist and fan, I’ve always seen speculative fiction not just as entertainment, but as ethical rehearsal: a way to imagine justice, dignity, and shared humanity. Bellamy and Roddenberry gave us blueprints. Fandom gave us tools. The future will be built by those who dare to dream forward, together.

My thanks to the communities who keep these dreams alive in zines, in classrooms, in convention halls, and in quiet acts of courage. And to readers: may you find in these pages not just nostalgia, but possibility.

Fanthropology 101: Dreaming and Doing in the Real World

A four-part journey through how fandom helps us imagine better futures, and build them.

Part One: Forgotten Futures
How two dreamers imagined a better world, and gave us tools to build it
Published: 8 September 2025
Read Part One
Edward Bellamy and Gene Roddenberry didn’t just write stories, they sketched blueprints for justice, dignity, and shared humanity. Their utopias still shape how fans rehearse better futures.

Part Two: Dream It Forward
Why fandom isn’t just fun, it’s how we practice empathy
Published: 4 October 2025
Read Part Two
From Arthurian quests to Star Trek conventions, this chapter shows how fandom helps us rehearse courage, community, and care, turning stories into solidarity, and imagination into action.

Part Three: Fandom’s Humanitarian Legacy
How fans built real-world networks of care, long before hashtags and headlines
Published: 25 November 2025
Read Part Three
Ficathons, charity drives, and survivor support groups…this essay documents how fandom became a lifeline for many, offering help where institutions failed.

Part Four: From Fic to Future
Fan fiction isn’t just storytelling, it’s ethical and pragmatic life guidance
Published: 31 December 2025
Read Part Four
Honouring Diane Marchant and the legacy of fan creators, this chapter explores how fandom helps us rewrite injustice, rehearse empathy, and build continuity across generations.

©2025 Geoff Allshorn with editorial assistance from Copilot AI, used to refine structure, clarify citations, and enhance motif logic. All conceptual framing and final edits are my own. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

Mapping Southern Hemisphere Fandom

Mapping Southern Hemisphere Fandom: A Global Archive of Resistance and Reclamation

Originally published concurrently on Fanlore, this expanded version offers insight into the research process, editorial choices, and the urgent need to center fandoms shaped by colonial legacies, linguistic resistance, and infrastructural precarity.

Why This Archive Matters

Reframing fandom: Southern Hemisphere fandoms challenge the dominance of North American and European narratives in speculative fiction.
Intersectional documentation: The archive centers queer, Indigenous, disabled, and minority fans often erased from global discourse.
Political and cultural resistance: These fandoms are shaped by apartheid, censorship, colonialism, and linguistic imperialism—and respond with innovation and resilience.

Behind the Scenes: Research & Editorial Notes

Source verification: Zine listings, club histories, and anthologies were cross-checked against archival scans, oral histories, and regional bibliographies.
Editorial framing: The inclusion of Northern Hemisphere Asia reflects structural parallels and shared marginalization in global SF discourse.
Methodology: Ethical storytelling, collaborative drafting, and citation rigor were prioritized throughout.

Highlights from the Fanlore Entry

South Africa: SFFSA operated under apartheid, publishing PROBE and hosting the Nova competition to elevate local voices.
Jalada Africa: Their Translation Series disrupts English-language hegemony by publishing speculative fiction in African languages.
Latin America: Fandoms blend magical realism, futurismo, and political critique through collectives like Revista Axxón.
Timor-Leste: Films like Beatriz’s War exemplify hybrid media and oral storytelling traditions.

Future Directions

Expand documentation into Central Asia, Pacific microstates, and Indigenous futurisms.
Include oral traditions, radio fandoms, and community theatre as valid fannish forms.
Build collaborative networks with regional creators, scholars, and fans.

Call to Action

If you have links, zines, club histories, or fandom stories from underrepresented regions, I invite you to share them. This archive is a living document—one that grows through collective memory and shared resistance.

Contact: Leave a comment below or reach out via Fanlore or social media. Let’s build this together.

Read the full Fanlore entry: Southern Hemisphere Fandom

Archival copy here