Category: COVID

One Giant Leap

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour…”
– ‘Auguries of Innocence’ by William Blake.

In commemoration of the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, 21 July 2020

NASA PhotoApollo 11 Crew, Wikimedia Commons (NASA Photo)

Fifty-one years ago today, I glimpsed transcendence. On 21 July 1969 (Australia time), Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the Apollo 11 ‘Eagle’ lunar module and became the first men to walk on another world – and I was an eye witness (via television).

I was eight years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor of my school library, watching a small black-and-white television set that had been placed on a stand in the library corner. The room was full of giggling, chattering school kids, and ringed with a wall of teachers who exchanged nervous glances upon realising that the assembled throng of young schoolchildren did not have the collective attention span to fully understand or absorb the significance of what they were watching.

Momentarily annoyed at the attention deficit of my peers, I sat transfixed, and experienced the numinous. On that flickering screen, I saw our world in a pixel, saw the cosmos spread before us like the symbolic potential of the human ability to dream and flower into something greater. The small screen held infinite vistas of both the cosmos and the potential of our human ability to conquer our challenges.

Within maybe an hour or so, my teachers called off this television excursion due to the inability of many students to sit quietly – but in that hour, I glimpsed eternity.

I think that my life was never quite the same again. Even at that young age, I realised that we as a species may struggle with wars and famines and poverty and injustice, but we had proved that we could literally reach the Moon if we aimed high enough and hard enough. Our outer imperfections belie our inner nobility. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we may have our feet in the debasement of mundane life, but we can glimpse the glories of the cosmos.

Let us never forget the difference between two profound human journeys: one near the Awash River in Ethiopia, and the other in the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon. On that first journey, our possible ancestor, Lucy, likely fell and met her death just over three million years ago as she somehow tried to cross a small gully at Hadar, Ethiopia; her fossilised bones record both her existence and our long ancestral legacy. On the second journey, in 1969 – within living human memory – encultured apes demonstrated their progress in surviving and evolving, via technology and resilience, enabling them to cross vast and dangerous celestial distances and visit an alien world, thereby foreshadowing a promising potential future for a spacefaring species. In walking on the dusts of the Sea of Tranquility, humankind forever replaced the stuff of Biblical myths and legends with the assurance of science: we were capable of walking on a different kind of water.

We have not returned to the Moon since 1972, and an entire generation of humans has grown up lacking the personal excitement of watching a lunar landing. However, those old lunar missions, and the space program generally, spearheaded a scientific, aerospace and engineering revolution that has changed our world – from computers and iPhones to satellite communication and global village technology; from heart pacemakers to CAT scanners and agricultural satellite imagery. Project Apollo was replaced with NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth – and that mission continues.

But Houston, we have a problem. The heights we have reached also reveal how far we have fallen.

Last year, I visited a certain public library, and sought the assistance of a young librarian to find microfilm copies of the newspapers from July 1969 as a preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the first Moon landing. When she saw the headlines that I was seeking – ‘Man Walks On Moon’ – she glanced at me covertly and whispered conspiratorially, “Do you think we really went there?” Around that same time, in a more private forum, a personal associate conversationally suggested to me that people had never even been into space, and that any scientific evidence I could produce to rebut his claim was merely a matter of opinion. I was disappointed that both these people failed to understand the difference between an uninformed (or misinformed) opinion and one that is based upon informed evidence and/or actual expertise. But I also realised that more sinister overtones were present.

Moon hoax conspiracies are just one symptom of modern-day science denialism, ranging from vaccination to fluoridation, from Flat Earthers to ‘birthers’. This is a profoundly ironic response from a scientifically-illiterate generation that benefits from the most scientifically advanced prosperity in history. How sad that so many people enjoy keyboard access to literally the world’s vast store of knowledge, and yet remain so ignorant of one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements. How sad that their individual world-view is so impoverished that they reject the grandeur of rational scientific and human advancement. And how sad that their human connection fails to appreciate that their scientific grandparents reached the Moon without the Internet, GPS, or even the computing power of modern-day mobile phones.

We live in a pandemic of misinformation, when uninformed personal opinion and science denialism are on the ascendancy. The COVID-19 epidemic demonstrates how such cultural narcissism may be potentially lethal. And yet, amidst this self-fulfilling cultural worship of mediocrity, we still have the potential to rise above our weaknesses. Oscar Wilde’s previously-alluded quote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”, reminds us that we make a conscious choice every day whether or not to rise above our personal circumstances. Internet correspondent Vatika Harlalka raises a commendable interpretation of Wilde’s words: “Those who look at the stars know that there is a world outside of their sadness and wish to make efforts to reach it.”

Human beings are capable of great things. Without alien intervention, ancient human societies built pyramids and cities. Without the alleged morality of divine intervention, slavery and racial segregation were officially abolished, and women and LGBT people have been increasingly assigned equal rights (although these tasks are not yet complete). Similarly, without human conspiratorial agency, people went to the Moon and returned safely. It is time for humankind to acknowledge its potential for greatness alongside its many weaknesses, and make conscious decisions as to which paths we will emulate and walk. Through the application of science and rationality, Tranquility may not only be a lunar location, but it may prove to be our spiritual human destination as well.

I long to see humanist, scientific and freethought publications promote the histories and legacies of the space program, and of science, and thereby inspire younger generations with the stories and glories of the human spirit and its accomplishments. We need to go tell it on the mountain and in the valleys; in text and tweet and social media, in jottings and in journals. And every time we see the Moon, we should acknowledge the majesty of belonging to a species that has actually visited its sun-baked plains, and scooped and sampled its sterile soils. What awaits us next?

When we return to the Moon, as one day we must, it will hopefully be as a more enlightened, optimistic, scientifically literate, educated, rational species. Lucy and her people could only look up at the Moon in the curiosity borne of their still-to-be-fully-realised self-potential. Maybe her distant lunar descendants will return the gaze by looking back at the Earthrise above their lunar travel pods, and ponder the thousands of generations of scientists who separate them from their wandering African ancestor. From Ethiopia to Earthrise – that’s quite a journey.

© 2020 Geoff Allshorn

Wish Upon A Starfish

“We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”
― Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

As Melbourne, Australia, enters its second COVID lockdown in four months, we must be thankful for our (currently) relatively low numbers of cases, and for our collective socioeconomic resilience. Many people in many nations do not have such safety nets.

During this world crisis, many of our normal activities have paused or stopped altogether. Our lives and world have changed – but there are more issues at stake than whether or not we have hoarded sufficient toilet paper, or intend to use our home isolation time to catch up on episodes of our favourite TV program.

As individuals, much of our human identity comes from our activities, our professions, our families or other relationships, etc. What happens when those jobs and roles get upended by a virus that makes normal life impossible? How can we remain authentic to who we are and what we uphold? How can we each make a difference? That is surely up to each of us to decide: according to our personal circumstances, opportunities and difficulties – and mostly, according to our conscience. A large part of our personal humanity surely comes from being true to ourselves and to our greater human family around us.

We should be mindful of the modern axiom, courtesy of US writer Dan Greany, that,’a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man’. Simultaneously, we should recognise that humans work best when working together.

Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash

While we must recognise that science has not fulfilled its promise as an onward march toward perfection, we must plan ahead with an optimism that is calculated, informed and measured. Nihilist existential defeatism suggests we cannot solve all the world’s problems and therefore we should not try, but we defiantly remain optimistic because we choose to be. In reality, we can make a difference in our particular little corner – wherever that may be, geographically or philosophically. Perhaps Loren Eisley‘s famous and often unattributed Starfish story can guide us, asserting that we can only ‘make a difference’ one problem at a time. We must each decide for ourselves how best to address that conundrum, and perhaps learn how to multitask.

In this era of COVID-19, some newspapers and politicians prioritize economic recovery, but Humanists understand that all human activity – including the economy – is surely a means to an end. We need to ensure that human and environmental welfare remain paramount.

Coping with the current crisis means meeting its challenges and, beyond that, asking what we can change in order to minimise such disasters in the future. This must include tackling injustice and inequity in the world – anything that exposes humanity to pandemics and other disasters, especially for those who are most vulnerable.

I do not want to see society return to ‘normal’ after this crisis is over. I want to see society improve. COVID-19 has exposed the many inequalities and injustices across our world, and has made them worse: poverty; inadequate housing, employment and income security, food security and access to safe drinking water; insufficient health care; poor world governance and environmental protections – and so much more. There are many types of poverty, including: financial, educational, intellectual, emotional, moral, social, aspirational, even poverty of equality and justice and employment and opportunity. Let’s see those politicians who currently prioritise economic recovery also address these many other broken economies that COVID-19 has highlighted.

Around the world, COVID is like a world war, inflicting and aggravating those inequalities that already exist. Will we individually and collectively ignore those problems, or do something about them? Eldridge Cleaver is attributed with telling us most famously that, ‘There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.’

While pondering the calamity of COVID, we should be mindful of the words of Humanist Fred Edwords: ‘Calamities destroy the promise usually because we concentrate on what we have lost instead of letting the misfortune simply focus our pursuits in a new direction.’ Rather than bewail lost opportunities, we must find new solutions for new problems. Carl Sagan spoke of alien invasion as possibly the only common foe that could unite all of humanity (Billions and Billions, New York: Ballantine, 1997, p. 181). Our current coronavirus crisis is one opportunity to prove him wrong.

We can create hopeful, humanitarian times ahead. International Humanist Andrew Copson points out that despite occasional setbacks, the history of human society has always been towards progress and social evolution; while local Australian Humanist Murray Love points to such a future though compassionate humanist interactions: ‘Humanists understand how natural human compassion, and our own intelligent thinking, get us through the dark times, and can take our children on to a bright future.’

Let’s make it so.

© 2020 Geoff Allshorn

Honouring Refugees

“A refugee is someone who has survived and who has a tremendous will to create a future.” – Amela Koluder

For World Refugee Day, 20 June 2020

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

In January 2020, the Australian media showed us images of navy ships rescuing Australian bushfire refugees who had been forced to flee by boat. In a nation that has spent years vilifying refugees as ‘boat people’, it seems surprising that Australian media commentators failed to grasp the universality of the refugee experience.

It has been said that Australians tend to lack empathy for others who are from outside their own personal experience, whether homeless people or Syrian refugees. Our relatively affluent, comfortable existence divorces us from collective experiences of war, catastrophic natural disaster, or some other unforeseen intolerable hardship that might create large numbers of refugees. The scope of such a forced mass migration seems unimaginable to us. Yet the UNHCR reports that of the 70 million displaced people in the world today, nearly 26 million people are recognised as being refugees. Amnesty International Australia reports that the world urgently needs to create a new, global plan for refugees based on a meaningful and fair sharing of responsibilities, and that affluent nations are not doing their fair share.

How do we, as human beings, respond to the real-life plight of refugees? Our culture promotes the ideas that refugees are strangers and non-citizens within a world that so often equates human rights with citizenship. In a cross-cultural global acknowledgment of the shared humanity of strangers in our midst, even the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences declares its support of humanist principles: “The essence of humanism is recognizing oneself as another. This recognition should be extended to everyone and in particular to those who are suffering, such as refugees, both young and old.”

Education.

Life-long learning does not end when we walk our of our classrooms for the last time; indeed, the vast majority of our experiential life learning is probably just commencing at that point. As part of this learning, we need to expose ourselves to stories, cultures and lived experiences from others who are from outside our own existential bubble.

For adults, there are many books that provide a range of stories and testimonies across space and time, teaching us that the refugee experience did not start or end with World War Two. One example on this list is a shocking indictment of Australia’s own crimes against humanity regarding current refugees and asylum seekers. Children’s and adolescent literature portrays a wide variety of age-appropriate stories that make the refugee experience accessible and understandable to children of all ages.

In this relatively lucky but uninformed country, we must educate ourselves about others who are forced to flee their home countries because of their religion or non-religion, sexuality, nationality, cultural/ethnic grouping, gender or gender identity, and race. Many experience ongoing discrimination. Women and children (who comprise up to 80% of the world’s refugees) and LGBTQI refugees are among those who face heightened difficulties in their home countries, and within those refugee camps or host nations to which they might flee. How can we think of ourselves as fully human if we live in denial of such common human experiences? How can we call ourselves compassionate if we ignore this suffering? Humanism insists that personal liberty must be combined with social responsibility. 

Participation.

Given the onslaught of discriminatory messages against refugees in our mass media, and the nationalist ‘White Australia‘ tradition which still taints our religions and culture, we need to commit ourselves to starting and encouraging new conversations about migrants and refugees in our local communities.

Thinking locally may mean delivering education campaigns, undertaking practical activism, literally rolling up our sleeves and getting involved in the lives of our neighbours; and local community outreach, including grassroots upgrading of community services. It is far better to build bridges than walls – particularly because such benevolence is often reciprocated.

Dina Nayeri suggests that we have a moral obligation to create a welcoming society: “It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks.” We would benefit from exploring what this means. Welcoming involves more than simply saying hello, and safety encompasses more than simply supplying a physical environment.

Innovation.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 is the title of both a safe-sex campaign and an artistic response to lockdown – and more. In a broader context, these words also suggest a humanist response to pandemic. Love can turn strangers into family. What does it really mean – to borrow a religious phrase – to love our neighbour? As human beings and humanitarians who claim to uphold common humanity, we need to remember that during the time of COVID-19, refugees face particular hardship. Any reasoned conversations about economic or social recovery after the pandemic must include recognition of, and solutions for, the problems faced by our human family in refugee populations and among others outside our geographic location. Human rights and human compassion do not start or end at a national border.

And yet Australia seems torn by competing ideologies. While our Parliament hypocritically proclaims that racism and discriminatory immigration policies are anathema, it continues to practice policies that arbitrarily detain and neglect refugees and asylum seekers. Nor is Australia alone in such hypocrisy. Following World War Two, the modern world community established the United Nations and its humanist precepts, typified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Decades later, such inspiration and optimism have failed to come to full fruition. Denial of equal access to justice and the world’s resources has not only impoverished the poor but has ultimately adversely affected all of us. umair haque explains the ultimate cost of our collective world choice to not adequately help others:

“…the world still hasn’t built global systems. Not a single one. We still don’t have a Human Healthcare System — and so of course pandemics erupt. We still don’t have a Worldwide Basic Income — and so of course the poor have to cause a mass extinction just to subsist. We still don’t have a Global Education Agency — and so of course authoritarianism and fascism spread like wildfire. We still don’t even have a Worldwide Climate Agency, Fund, Bank, or Mission — and so of course the rivers, oceans, and skies go on being charred…”

Such profound failure need not discourage us from the task. Oxfam reports that inequality is not inevitable – it is a political choice. We must create political will for change. Just as modern movements such as #MeToo and Climate Change protests and #BlackLivesMatter show that change can begin with grassroots activism, we need to call for a Universal Basic Income for all people, universal health coverage, universal food security, and other aims to ensure universal health, welfare and social prosperity.

Our ability to dream for a better, noble world offers redemption for ourselves, our human society, and for our planet. We should adopt such ideals as those within the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, and make these our philosophy and aspiration. Gandhi’s words challenge us today: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” Changing the world begins with changing ourselves. We can embrace the old adage ‘The Personal Is Political‘ and embrace our role as agents of change.

World Refugee Day contains a subversive message: to change the world, we must accept the refugee as a role model: their courage, resilience and determination to hope for a better future against seemingly overwhelming odds. We must cast off all philosophies, attitudes and actions which ignore and exacerbate the sufferings of others. For too long, humanity has squandered its resources, its good will, and its potential. A better world requires the active involvement of better citizens, and that is who we must become. That is surely the ultimate form of humanism.

© 2020 Geoff Allshorn

Television: Dreams or Destiny?

TWELVE TV SCIENCE FICTION EPISODES WORTH WATCHING
WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!

Apollo 11 lunar footprint (NASA photo)

Science fiction on television is a combination of fabulist, prophet and harbinger, all coming together to tell of the human condition in the face of unknown futures. What can we learn about who we are or who we may become? The following special episodes testify to their times and cultures, and are presented here in chronological order, according to their original transmission dates. Watch them and enjoy!

1. The Sky Is Falling (from ‘Lost In Space’ *original series*)
Teleplay by Barney Slater and Herman Groves, CBS, 1966.

Although it is remembered largely for its embarrassingly campy episodes, this series occasionally presented a great story. One example is The Sky Is Falling, which contrasts discrimination and fear versus friendship and interdependence, and evokes To Kill A Mockingbird through its use of children’s perspectives. From its opening words – in which Dr Smith bewails the sparsity of rescue from their barren planet, and then reacts with fear and intolerance when possible rescue actually does arrive – the episode explores the rise of xenophobia borne from difference, ignorance and poor inter-cultural communication; elements which, tragically, could be taken from today’s news headlines.

2. View of a Dead Planet (from ‘Moonbase 3’)
Written by Arden Winch, BBC, 1973.

Moonbase 3 was short-lived series that deserved a much longer run due to its ‘hard science’ depiction of lunar colonisation in the near future. This episode explores the frightening scenario of watching a suspected planetary extinction event on Earth, as viewed from a cosmic (lunar) perspective. The Moonbase staff must come to terms with their increasingly helpless horror, and try to balance both personal and national politics even while larger events appear to be unfolding in the sky above them. Viewers experience a compelling perspective of humanity’s fragility and cosmic insignificance in a Universe that has suddenly become breathtakingly claustrophobic and lonely. The story’s only weakness is its heavy reliance upon exposition from a stereotypically eccentric scientist.

3. The Legacy (from ‘Planet of the Apes’)
Written by Robert Hamner, CBS, 1974.

This series contains poignant allegory about the rise and fall of empires, and the horrifying fragility of civilisation. The Legacy asks viewers to ponder the value of scientific knowledge, and the profound impact upon our world should such knowledge be lost. Watching scenes of the physical destruction of computers – technology which has become ubiquitous in our modern daily lives – was difficult to watch even when first telecast in 1974. Other episodes explore the potential loss of medicine, science, and civilised society. All this while watching Roddy McDowall wearing an ape mask.

4. Voyager’s Return (from ‘Space: 1999’)
Screenplay by Johnny Byrne, ITC Entertainment, 1975.

The first season of this series is possibly most fondly remembered because of its interstellar vistas which portrayed the universe in stunning grandeur; however its scripts displayed erratic science and faltering character development, and an over-reliance upon a supernatural deux ex machina to untangle some stories from their own convolutions. Voyager’s Return rises above such problems, telling a tale in which scientist Ernst Queller and the staff of Moonbase Alpha are forced – individually and collectively – to face the ethics of their technology. This is a refreshing mix of humanity and hubris.

5. Man Out of Time (from ‘Logan’s Run’)
Written by Noah Ward, CBS, 1977.

Following on from the moral challenge posed within the Space:1999 episode mentioned immediately above, this episode from another series also explores humanist/scientific ethics. In this case, Logan, Jessica and Rem meet scientist David Eakins, who has time-travelled from the past and into their post-apocalyptic world. His heavy countenance represents the burden of a man who – having learnt of future events – intends to travel back to his own time and avert nuclear war, even though this may possibly cause his new friends to disappear from an altered timeline. With this ethical dilemma, Eakins becomes an ‘Everyman’ figure who must determine how to balance his considerations for those around him against the greater needs of humanity. Such ethical questions are vital at every level of science and society. If every episode of this short-lived series been this good, Logan’s Run would likely have been in production for many years.

6. Starscape (from ‘Starman’)
Written by James Henerson & James Hirsch, ABC, 1987.

A sequel to the original Starman film, this series – featuring the return of its title character to mentor his half-human teenaged son – was short-lived. Its downfall was the formulaic nature of its scripts: father and son as fugitives who face a weekly adventure and avoid capture before moving onto their next adventure. The penultimate two-part episode, Starscape, effectively ended the series on a poignant if ironic note of sorrow, loss and unfulfilled expectations. Starman follows the flawed human template: his compassion is revealed to be jointly his potential salvation and downfall. These characters are – like us all – aliens in a hostile world, seeking identity, belonging and meaning. Despite such melancholy, the episode Starscape hints at the optimism to be found by those who look up… at a starscape.

7. Three to Tango (from ‘Alien Nation’)
Written by Diane Frolov & Andrew Schneider, Fox, 1989.

The arrival of millions of Tenctonese (alien) refugees allows for the creation of a new minority group to serve as an allegorical underclass, in a series that often explored racism, sexism, anti-refugee bigotry, gender roles, and homophobia. In this episode, one Tenctonese friend of the main characters turns out to be a Binnaum, effectively a third gender required for Tenctonese reproduction. He is invited to assist the main characters in conceiving a child. Thus the episode explores polyamory, bisexuality, intersexuality, non-binary gender roles, and the subversion of heterosexism. (This was the episode which had my teenage students – I was a school teacher at the time – arrive at school the next day, excited and eager to talk about ‘how aliens have babies’). Naturally, the Fox Network had to cancel the series shortly thereafter.

8. Darmok (from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’)
Teleplay by Joe Menonsky, Story by Philip LaZebnik & Joe Menonsky, 1991.

A series which strove to shape its own unique self-identity as a sequel to the classic Star Trek series from the 1960s (which will likely receive its own separate blog article soon), this late 1980s-early 1990s incarnation struggled to balance futuristic aspirations with disappointingly reactionary conservatism. Within this cultural fruit salad, there were some stand-out episodes, and Darmok is one of the finer stories. Superficially reminiscent of Arena (an episode of the original Star Trek series, with similarities to the Frederic Brown story of the same name), Darmok instead explores cultural difference and perceptions of individual and collective self-identity. Metaphor and allegory abound, and the Epic of Gilgamesh was probably introduced to fifty million viewers, as was the life-changing mantra: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

9. Running for Honour (from ‘Quantum Leap’)
Written by Bobby Duncan, NBC, 1992.

A cross between the earlier Time Tunnel (1960s) and the later Sliders (1990s), Quantum Leap features a scientist jumping from one time period to another within the bodies of individuals who are already living inside those particular time periods. The series tackled racial and gender issues, suicidal ideation, injustice, and changing social attitudes. Running for Honour delivers a story of a closeted gay man living in the homophobic 1960s. Possibly the most controversial episode of the series, it was also reportedly the episode to gain the highest viewer numbers. Somewhat quaint by today’s social mores, it was arguably a brave exploration of homophobia in both the 1960s (when it was set) and the 1990s (when it was created). Forget Star Trek, this episode really did boldly go where no American mainstream science fiction TV series had gone before.

10. The Original Wives’ Club (from ‘From the Earth to the Moon’)
Written by Karen Janszen and Tom Hanks and Erik Bork, HBO, 1998.

Viewers seeking uplifting TV should watch this real-life science-fictionalised biographical series and revel in its inspiration. What makes this particular episode significant is that it examines a rarely explored topic in media SF: the effect of science, technology and culture upon the lives of the women who have traditionally been denied public recognition. From enduring trite 1960s fashion shows and female gender stereotyping, through to facing the astonishing solitary devastation of widowhood, these women are shown to have courage and resilience equal to that of their Apollo-era astronaut husbands; however only the men get the glory. In the intervening decades, movies like Contact and Hidden Figures also provide strong ‘inspired by real life’ female role models.

11. Vincent and the Doctor (from ‘Doctor Who’)
Written by Richard Curtis, BBC, 2010.

Vincent and the Doctor is a worthy representation of TV SF at its best: science fictional technology (time travel) being used to explore a very human experience within a clever tapestry of real-life art. The Doctor and his companion confront a variation of the traditional time travel ‘grandfather’ paradox, and experience possibly the most emotional of any Doctor Who story in its fifty-plus year franchise. The use of the monster-of the-week format, to metaphorically explore the darkness of a lonely human soul, is a brilliant inversion of the series’ own sometimes-shallow monster formula. All the characters display frailties and a desire to learn from their experiences; the tragedy is that they each fail in their own way. The only desirable addition might have been for the Doctor to comment wistfully on more recently-evolved responses to mental illness; kudos nevertheless for daring to confront a challenging social problem.

12. Pride (from ‘Outland’)
Written by John Richards, ABC TV, 2012.

While more famous deep space franchises pointedly ignored the existence of LGBT people – or at best, reluctantly acknowledged their implicit existence through the use of problematic allegories – the six-episode TV series Outland was out and proud. It focussed on a club of LGBT science fiction fans and, in a strange case of art imitating life, it was produced in Melbourne, which was the one place in Australia that did (at that time) actually have an LGBT SF club (started by myself and friends in 1999). The final episode, Pride, resolves a number of story threads and delivers a satisfying climax at a fictional Pride March. “Beta, go!”

What do you think?
Have I left out any particularly significant episodes from other series? Please let me know! I am keen to possibly write a follow-up article to this one; a study that is not so predisposed towards US culture.

© 2020 Geoff Allshorn