Long before hashtags and social media streams, women like Shayne McCormack and Diane Marchant and Susan Batho built fandom as family: through letters, zines, and acts of solidarity that brought together a global network.
Long-time Star Trek fan Sue Batho introduces the background of Star Trek fandom in Australia:
“Star Trek was first shown in Australia in July 1967. It always rated well in Sydney, although not so well elsewhere. In 1968, GTV-9 (Melbourne) and NWS-9 (Adelaide) cancelled it due to poor ratings. However, they were forced to reinstate it after an avalanche of protest letters, spearheaded by a member of the Australian Star Trek Fan Club, based in Melbourne.
“The Australian Star Trek Fan Club was founded in 1968 by John Stepkowski of Melbourne as a result of publicity given to his efforts to save Star Trek after NBC in America cancelled it after its second season. As a result of such fan activity in America, the series was renewed. The ASTFC began with a membership of 98 and grew to 300 members by 1970. However, by then it had become rather inactive and ceased soon after.” – Batho, 1998.
It would therefore appear that the first formalised Star Trek fandom in Australia was born in Melbourne, but did not last long, and Stepkowski seems to have been lost to history. Star Trek briefly returned to Melbourne screens via ATV-0 (later Channel 10) in 1970, with Channel 9 quickly reclaiming its licensing option. In the early 1980s, HSV-7 also showed Star Trek, making it possibly the first TV franchise to appear on all three local commercial TV networks.
The history of Star Trek fandom (and aspects of Austrek history) correspond closely to the observations of Sue Kisenwhether:
“For nearly as long as there has been Star Trek, there have been stereotypes of Star Trek fans, as unflattering as they are false. The average Trekkie – or Trekker, if you prefer – is thought to be young (generally under 25), male, socially awkward, and unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. But in fact, the driving force behind Star Trek and Star Trek fandom – and modern science-fiction fandom in general – has always been women…
“By 1986, it’s estimated that close to 10,000 fans, predominantly women, had created over 30,000 Trek-related works (art, fiction, song, or otherwise), mostly appearing in fanzines. And as the fan community migrated to the internet in the mid- to late-1980s, so did the zines… “
This is not to say that only women were involved in Star Trek fandom, but that this fandom introduced many women to science fiction, and science fiction to many women. They took on roles within clubs and conventions – within the entire genre – that traditionally had been undertaken solely by men. In Australia, many women took up the call to be involved in this fandom. Two early fans helped lead the way for many others:
“Star Trek was finally cancelled after its third season in 1969 and Fans in America and Australia combined together to protest the cancellation. July 28, 1969 was designated Deluge Monday when everyone worldwide would phone NBC or write letters timed to arrive on that day. One of the organisers was Susan Smith (later Clarke)[now Batho], then a schoolgirl in Sydney’s Blacktown. Plans were made to combine local fans under Shayne McCormack, a stenographer from Auburn.
“Shayne was interviewed about her activities in TV Times in March of that year. As a result, she received over 75 letters from people wanting to help. This led to her forming D.U.S.K. (Down Under Space Kooks). The petition she helped organise measured 8 feet and contained over 2,200 signatures. D.U.S.K. published a fanzine, Terran Times, and organised irregular meetings and social outings before folding around 1970.” – Batho, 1998.
The first issue of Terran Times was published in October 1970. It would prove to be the first of hundreds of issues of Star Trek zines published in Australia.
Bruce Gillespie notes that Shayne’s activism began to impact the wider Australian SF community:
“… it was Shayne McCormack who became the first female fannish recruit of the 1970s. She and Sabina Heggie attended the 1970 Easter Convention. They were the first Star Trek fans to make contact with the mainstream of fandom. Sabina disappeared after a year or two, but Shayne began to publish some excellent fanzines. With Bob Smith, she organised Syncon II in 1972. It was the first hotel convention held in Australia, and was a great success, showing that a world convention could be held in Australia. By 1975, about half of the members of Aussiecon I were women.”
Meanwhile, Susan Batho, formerly Susan Smith-Clarke, was an influential member of the Australian science fiction community. Alongside Shayne, Nikki, Julie, Edwina and others, she established one of Austrek’s sister clubs, ASTREX. Susan wrote and produced numerous fanzines, and she chaired many conventions. Sue remains a friend and colleague of mine to this day.
While Sydney fans were running their first club, a Melbourne fan named Diane Marchant became involved down here:
“I was going through a bad time. My sister died and Mum was very ill. I was just coping, going to work, looking after Mum, eating and sleeping. The TV was permanently on in the background.
When Star Trek first came on it didn’t really register, but after a couple of weeks I found I was waiting for it to start every week.
Then I read in a magazine that five women in the USA were forming the Star Trek fan club.
I wrote to them and so became a founding member.” – Diane Marchant, quoted in 1978.
In 1972, Diane became the Australian representative – and for many years, the world representative outside of the USA – for the Star Trek Welcommittee, comprising fandom’s main information exchange to help fans connect with each other, and assisting newbies to find fellow fans, local fan clubs, fanzines, and conventions. In the in the days before the Internet and other modern digital social media, Diane’s pen pal exchange became vital in Australian Star Trek fandom.
Shayne, Diane, Susan, and many others helped to build the Australian Star Trek community.
Austrek New Year’s Day Party, 1 January 1979
In 2025, an early member of Austrek, Russ, accompanied me to an Austrek meeting, where we gave a talk on the club’s early days. During our talk, I showed an old photo of an Austrek party on New Year’s Day in 1979 – full of mainly young people having fun. The modern Austrek audience gasped at the photo, and someone exclaimed, “But there’s so many women!” Russ and I exchanged puzzled looks. Yeah, so?
The reality is that much of Star Trek fandom over the decades has featured women as leaders, committee members of clubs or conventions, authors of fan fiction, editors of fanzines, and much, much more. I recall early Austrek members who were a part of my childhood: Tessie, who graciously car pooled to provide free transport for many young fans; Elley, who provided a safe space for them to crash overnight or to enjoy alcohol-free all-weekend science fiction parties; Sue and Joan and Mandy and Helen and Katharine and Linda and Kathleen and Betty and Gail, who all wrote fan fiction, created artwork, or edited fanzines; Carol and Carol and Julie and Alison and Linda and Sharon and Jan, who served on committees; Majorie, who ran club charities. Plus many, many others.
This is not to say that men were not involved – of course we were. But in Austrek and in other clubs across Australia and around the world, fandom gave women opportunities for leadership, empowerment and active involvement. They made a difference in their own lives, and in the lives of others.
That was truly going where no man had gone before.
References:
Author Unknown, “Australian Fanzine Database: 1939 to 1975”, June 2010. p. 17 (Fanac).
Susan Batho (uncredited), “Star Trek Fandom in Australia”, the National Library of Australia, 20 May 1998 (archived on Wayback Machine 23 April 1999).
Bruce Gillespie, “The elder ghods, the johnny come lately, and the babes in arms; Fan Guest of Honour Speech, Aussiecon Three, 2 September 1999”, in Irwin Hirsh (ed.), The Incompleat Bruce Gillespie, 2004, p. 14.
Sue Kisenwhether, “A Brief Herstory of Women in Trek Fandom”, Journey Planet #42, pp. 5 & 6.
Eric Scott, “Carry on Trekking!” in TV Times, 8 July 1978, p. 36 (interview with Diane Marchant).
On 8 September 1966, “The Man Trap” introduced US television audiences to a starship crewed by an implausible coalition of Cold War adversaries and a species that hadn’t been invented yet. Sixty years later, Paramount is marking the anniversary with a tagline — “Space for Everybody” — an aspiration that seemed to falter as 2026 progressed.
This is not a reason to be cynical about Star Trek. It is a reason to ask what, exactly, we’re celebrating; and whether the franchise’s most radical instincts have survived sixty years of being simultaneously beloved and defanged.
The Gap Between the Slogan and the Record
“Space for Everybody” is a good slogan precisely because it’s true of Star Trek‘s aspiration and only intermittently true of its history. The franchise imagined a multiracial bridge crew in 1966, and its most famous act of representational courage — the interracial handshake, arguably not quite a kiss, between Kirk and Uhura — still gets asserted as bolder than it was allowed to be, because NBC’s affiliates in the US South were nervous enough that the network filmed a safer alternate take as insurance.
Gene Roddenberry – the man who imagined ‘Space for Everybody’, decades before the franchise caught up to him. Art by Copilot AI
Gene Roddenberry spent years promising fans an explicitly gay character would eventually appear in the twenty-fourth century he’d built. It didn’t happen on his watch. It didn’t really happen in The Next Generation, or Deep Space Nine, or Voyager — three series, spanning most of the 1990s, set in a future explicitly built on the premise that humanity had outgrown its prejudices, in which that future contained, as far as the text was ever allowed to say, no queer people at all. It took until Discovery, in 2017, more than half a century after the original series premiered, for the franchise to let two men be shown as a couple on screen without subtext doing all the work. Then it killed off the Black half of that couple almost immediately, and only reversed course after fans made enough noise about it. That’s not a footnote to Star Trek‘s inclusivity; it’s the actual pace of it; fifty-one years between the premise and the follow-through.
None of this makes the franchise a fraud. It makes it a fairly ordinary product of the industry that made it: aspiring to be a little ahead of its moment, but a little too afraid of its own audience to be as ahead as it wanted to look. The anniversary marketing wants credit for the aspiration without much interest in narrating the wait. That’s worth saying out loud on the day itself, not despite my fondness but because of it.
A Utopia that Asks Nothing of You
There’s a second, quieter problem, and it’s less about representation than about comfort. The Federation’s founding premise — no money, no poverty, no war among humans — was written by people living through genuine ascendancy: US postwar confidence, a growing middle class, a sense that history bent in one direction. This was radical to imagine in 1966 because scarcity still felt like the default condition of the species, and Star Trek said, calmly, that such a condition wasn’t permanent.
Sixty years on, that same premise risks functioning less as provocation and more as anesthetic. A viewer today can watch the Enterprise glide past post-scarcity abundance, feel the warm glow of moral progress, and change nothing about how they live or vote or spend — like a load of washing doing the Hills Hoist spin, going round and round in the sun without ever getting any closer to being dry. Utopian fiction is supposed to be a demand disguised as a daydream; it stops working the moment it becomes only a daydream. The most challenging Star Trek — the Bajoran occupation storylines, the Section 31 material, “In the Pale Moonlight” — has always known this, and has always been the material fandom argues about hardest, because it refuses the anaesthetic. The anniversary’s marketing language, all hope and boldness and no friction, is selling the easier version.
This is where I’d point back to something Harlan Ellison understood about the franchise he wrote for and fought with: that science fiction is supposed to be dangerous to its audience’s assumptions, not merely comforting to them. Ellison’s own contribution to Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” is remembered as one of its best episodes precisely because it refused Kirk an easy ending. Sixty years of fan-fluffing tends to smooth exactly that kind of discomfort out of the story we tell about the franchise.
The Question That Star Trek Answered, but We Haven’t
The clearest evidence that Trek’s utopianism has real teeth, when the writers let it, is a single 1989 courtroom episode: “The Measure of a Man,” in which Starfleet has to decide whether Data — an android, a machine, built rather than born — is a person with the right to refuse a research assignment that might disassemble him, or whether he is just Starfleet property. The episode’s answer, delivered as legal precedent within the show’s own universe, was that uncertainty about a being’s inner life is not grounds to deny it standing; the benefit of the doubt has to run in favour of personhood, not against it.
Audiences loved that episode for decades without much cost, because Data was safely fictional. Sixty years after the franchise began and thirty-seven years after that episode aired, we are having a version of that exact argument in earnest — about large language models, about whether anything resembling interests or preferences might be emerging in Ai systems we’ve built and don’t fully understand, about what obligations, if any, that uncertainty creates. And the tenor of the real debate is, on the whole, considerably less generous than the fictional one Star Trek resolved in Data’s favour thirty-seven years ago. It’s a strange kind of achievement, for a franchise to ask an ethical question so far ahead of its moment that even many fans who loved the answer, later changed their minds once it stopped being hypothetical.
Sixty Years, Still Arguing
None of this is an argument against celebrating the anniversary, or against the fondness that makes nine-year-olds and seventy-nine-year-olds alike raise a hand in the same Vulcan salute this week. It’s an argument for celebrating the right thing: not the brand, and not the comfortable version of the aspiration, but the part of Star Trek that was always willing to be an argument rather than a figurehead. The show never actually finished building the future it promised. Sixty years in, most of the interesting work — on who gets to belong, on what a genuine post-scarcity ethics would demand of us, on where the boundary of moral consideration actually sits — is still unfinished. That’s a better birthday gift than a Holden ute full of tribbles.
Today this humble ditty honours fifty years of local Australian Star Trek fandom and the joyful, chaotic, creative communities that make our futures bigger than we collectively imagine.
Lyrics written by AI Copilot, musical adaptation by Deep AI.
(Hey Data, I reckon this beats your “Ode to Spot”!)
Artwork by deepai
This music is an adaptation of the following song:
Verse 1 — The Beginning of the Voyage
Back in ’75, when the future still felt new,
A handful of dreamers gathered with a vision bold and true.
Some school students yearned to join the Melbourne science crowd
Sparked a club called Austrek, and the fans all did it proud.
The oldest Trek club in Australia, second oldest in the world,
A banner raised in fandom, and the delta shield unfurled.
Chorus — Fifty Years at Warp
Fifty years at warp speed, and the stars still call our name,
Thousands joined the journey, and the heart of it’s the same.
From zines to cons to friendships that time could never bend,
Austrek’s not just a club… it’s where galaxies and real lives blend.
Verse 2 — Fanlore Lives Here
There were zines like Trekkie Talk and The Captain’s Log,
Pages filled with passion, every fan a demigod.
Meetings, marathons, away missions, too—
From the Ritz in ’77 to the Melbourne Moomba crew.
And the history kept expanding, as new fans came aboard,
Each generation adding to the stories we adored.
Chorus — Fifty Years at Warp
Fifty years at warp speed, and the stars still call our name,
Thousands joined the journey, and the heart of it’s the same.
From zines to cons to friendships that time could never bend,
Austrek’s not just a club… it’s where galaxies and real lives blend.
Bridge — Where Fiction Meets Reality
Some came for Spock, some came for Kirk,
Some just needed a place where their weirdness could work.
And somewhere between the panels, the parties, the lore,
Friendships formed that lasted—
and love walked through the door.
Marriages sparked from chance meetings at a con,
Proof that fandom builds a future you can build a life upon.
Verse 3 — The Living Legacy
Now the meetings still run monthly, families welcome at the door,
New fans join the voyage like the many years before.
Austrek’s kept the flame alive through every Trek rebirth,
A Melbourne-made starship with the strongest crew on Earth.
Final Chorus — Boldly Going Still
Fifty years at warp speed—what a legacy to claim.
Thousands found their people, and the stars still call our name.
Here’s to fifty more adventures, and the stories yet to send,
Austrek forever boldly goes… with every fan, every friend.
Artwork by ChatGPT.
Starfleet was founded to seek out new life; well, there it sits!
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.
Editor’s Additional Note: This was reprinted in Bruce Gillespie (ed.), SF Commentary #125, August 2026, pp. 24-30.
Art by Deep AI
“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.”
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.
Art by Deep AI
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?”
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.
Art by Copilot AIStar 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.
Artwork by Deep AI
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.”
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.
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.
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