Category: optimism

Seeking an annual Star Trek Day that really dares to Boldly Go

Aiming for the Stars

A generation ago, SF author Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr) wrote one of the first Star Trek-related stories (and arguably, one of the earliest pieces of ‘Mary Sue‘ fan fiction) to ever be professionally published. ‘Beam Us Home‘ tells the story of someone who feels somewhat of an alien or outcast in their home world, but who finds shelter in utopian science fiction.

Although the story focuses on an individual, its collective title (‘Beam Us Home’) implies that such dreams and aspirations are universal. There are times when we all feel like we are alien, an outsider, a refugee from a hostile and uncaring world – somehow different – and science fiction can provide consolation, a community of likeminded individuals, recognition of shared identity or values, a sense of extended family, and optimistic inspiration for the future. This is why science fiction is filled with refugees: from Supergirl and Superman to Doctor Who (Burt, 2016). Star Trek has Kirk, Spock, Khan, Tasha Yar, Seven of Nine, the Maquis, and others who have been refugees at one time or another. Alien Nation features the Tenctonese; humans are refugees in Battlestar Galactica, Jericho, Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes, Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Blakes Seven – and more. The seeds of subversion are sewn into the fabric of science fiction. The words of Charlie Jane Anders should both inspire and challenge us as we look for utopia:

“When you think about the archetypal science fiction story, chances are you think of the bold explorer, setting foot on a newfound planet in the name of a secure homeworld. But possibly the most pervasive narrative in science fiction is actually the story of refugees. They flee from planetary destruction, war, or just from overcrowding and ecological crappitude. The refugee story is the flipside of the gung-ho explorer story, but it might actually be the most uniquely science fictional story of all.” (Anders, 2008).

One of the most important lessons we can learn (as an individual or as a species) when growing into maturity is to empathise with others – to share their perspective, to learn to “walk a mile in their shoes”. Human empathy teaches us not only about others, but also about ourselves.

Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who was one of the first three human beings to orbit the Moon, commented on his journey: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” Similarly, our fanciful fantasy journeys of space travel and science fiction – while enabling us to explore the cosmos in our imaginations – must also give us a ‘global’ perspective of ourselves, others, and of our shared aspirations.

Where No Man Has Gone Before

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” – Ursula Le Guin.

Women comprise one group that has been traditionally marginalised, as noted by Tricia Rose in 1994 while exploring the idea that futurism can be contextualised by our past and present:

“If we don’t value the ways in which women create, it doesn’t really matter what we do or do not invent; we could stay on the farm and women would be just as oppressed. For that reason, I don’t really see science fiction models of the future as a necessarily more oppressive space for women than I do current fictions of an idealized past.” (Rose, 1994, p. 217.)

One stereotype in science fiction and related futurism is that traditionally, the genre was dominated by men until women became visible in the genre (as creators or readers) in the 1960s (thanks to Star Trek) and the 1970s (thanks to second-wave feminism).

This ignores the reality that Margaret Cavendish wrote Blazing World in 1666; Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert wrote “Voyage de Milord Céton dans les sept planètes” (“Lord Seton’s Voyage Among the Seven Planets”) in 1765: Mary Shelley (often considered “the mother of science fiction”) wrote “Frankenstein” in 1818; and Begum Rokeya wrote the Bengali Muslim feminist utopian fantasy, “Sultana’s Dream in 1905. In more recent times, Ursula Le Guin helped establish science fiction in Australia through her work as a Guest of Honour at Aussiecon (Melbourne’s first World Science Fiction convention) in 1975; and Australian SF writer Norma Hemming – although dying at the tragically young age of 32 – left a legacy including an award (from 2010 to 2020) to honour diversity in SF.

For decades, Star Trek and other science fiction portrayed women in ways that we would recognise today as being patronising: often called “girls” instead of “women”, they wore mini skirts or other minimalist clothing and were judged for their physical attributes rather than their intellectual prowess; they were helpless and needed saving from salacious aliens; they served as background decoration or romantic conquest for heroic male astronauts. In this sense, science fiction looked not so much into the future as the past, reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes and role models. (I remember being in a group of young fans watching an episode of the Logan’s Run TV series in the late 1970s, in which the fictional character Jessica stood by helplessly while the men fought fisticuffs. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, she picked up a discarded blaster pistol and stopped the fight by taking command – and the young audience around me spontaneously cheered. Science fiction had finally caught up to women’s lib and the highest ideals of its young fandom!)

Feminist perspectives benefit mainstream science fiction because they add layers of nuance, empathy and reality to the genre. They add the life experiences and consequent wisdom of half the world’s population. They add decades of background activism as advocates of intersectionality, such as “slash” fiction (the arguably queer-friendly fan fiction* which turned Star Trek into a multi-billion dollar franchise, even though the franchise creators still wilfully ignore this audience demand even today). They avoid the male gaze and the complaints of privileged white men who bemoan that Doctor Who became a woman, that Star Trek “genocided white men” by adding some powerful women of colour, or that gender and other diversity is being reflected in the literary SF scene. Such examples demonstrate the need (and potential) within science fiction to educate and inform its audiences and practitioners about creating and building celebratory inclusion for the future.

Joanna Russ spoke of the background problem for women in 1970, and we can speculate on how much has changed in the generation since then:

“Of course, you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be wretched and so full of venom in this the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.

As my mother once said: the boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.” (Russ, 1975).

Gender inequity remains a terrible problem around the world, and science fiction is one way to recognise this and propose solutions. The genre encourages us to ponder the plight of “the other”; in learning about AIs or aliens, we can learn about ourselves. But when we realise that “the other” is also ourselves, we can begin our own journey towards reconciliation and healing. In acknowledging our weaknesses as a species, we finally find our possible strengths.

Indigenous Worlds

“Science fiction is often concerned with the ways in which cultures interact. By allowing writers to dramatize negotiations among radically differing world-views and ways of life, the genre becomes what Mary Louise Pratt calls an “art of the contact zone.” A contact zone, according to Pratt, is a space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths…. ” (Attebery, 2005, p. 385).

Science fiction might seem to be a genre that includes exploration of indigenous cultures which could be found on other planets or across the boundaries of space-time. And yet for every “Fantastic Planet” story depicting truly alien worlds or cultures, there are dozens of others featuring human invasions, colonisation and conquests of indigenous alien worlds – or engaging in wars for supremacy, most obviously in stories of first contact or interplanetary warfare, where these can metaphorically (or more literally) recall ‘slipstream’, ‘native apocalypse’, or ‘returning to ourselves’ inherent in indigenous speculative fiction.

This offers a major opportunity for science fiction (metaphoric or otherwise): to truly explore strange, new worlds, and maybe learn from them. Jeanine Leane introduces the possibilities of reading First Nations Australian science fiction as one example:

“For weird mob everywhere and everywhen, our brave and strange thinkers, feelers, lovers, warlords and healers – those who are dreaming up new ways to tell our stories and are pouring them back into the river of our collective culture for the benefit of all.” (Leane, 2022)

Another example can be seen in the work of Kalem Murray:

“Yeah, you see that tree there, that one with the fan lookin’ leaves there?”
Shane lifted the gear up again and sighed. “You mean the pandanus?”
“Yeah, pandanus. You know what that means when you see a bunch of pandanus around?”
Shane wiped the built-up sweat from his brow with his free hand and onto the hessian sack.”It means water. It meant water the first time you asked, and it meant water last weekend. You literally ask me this every time we pass these trees.” (Murray, 2022).

Such earthy naturalism, amidst a speculative fiction story featuring horror and possible loss, provides a solid grounding for the material and keeps the audience grounded in reality even as fantastical developments emerge. Populist science fiction could learn from such pragmatic perspectives.

Instead, populist SF often perpetuates the binary colonialist views of yesteryear. For example, how much might we see Han Solo and Chewbacca from Star Wars mirror earlier portrayals of The Lone Ranger and Tonto? In Star Trek, indigenous cultures suffer a similar fate as native peoples from traditional “cowboys and Indians” stories, with the indigenous tribe in the Star Trek TOS episode, The Paradise Syndrome and Chakotay from Star Trek Voyager (complete with his tokenistic indigenous Maori tattoo) being victims of the same racist stereotyping:

“… Chakotay’s culture, as portrayed in the series, provides a perfect example of the generic “Indian” culture found in early American newspapers, where many individual cultures were merged into a single “Indian” culture.” (Adare, 2005, 45).

Beyond that, Star Trek featured a scattering of planets containing indigenous cultures that were predominantly white humans (many with nose bumps), except most notably for Next Generation episode Code of Honour, which is largely proclaimed as being openly racist due to its antiquated stereotypical depictions. (Brownhill, 2019; SFDebris, n.d.).

Tied to our wider collective human memory, our future visions and dreams have the power to dismantle and replace those earlier constructions of race and repression:

“The boy without a body watched as people who had similar faces to those he once called family, used majik and tech against the very people who destroyed his country. He watched as purple-green spears flew into the bodies of those as white as the linen they wore on Sundays. He watched as they fell on the ground, ans hands springing from the earth claimed their souls. Those who weren’t like him couldn’t see those hands or hear the words that were being chanted from underneath the soil, remember us, remember us, remember us…” (Gesa-Fatafehi, 2022).

Afrofuturism

“The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? (Dery, 1994, p. 180).

The term “Afrofuturism” was coined by Dery in 1994, but the phenomenon has been present as a cultural influence since at least as far back as 1931, thanks to George Schuyler (Loughrey, 2018), an African American who futuristically satirised the contemporaneous idiom of, “Get out, get white, or get along.” Afrofuturism gestated as a movement exploring what the concepts of science or futurism mean to people living within the continent upon which the human species originated – or the diaspora who have left and settled elsewhere because of fair means or foul. From our human cousins who are mindful of their past and present, what might embody their visions of the future?

“… a cultural movement that pulls from elements of science fiction, magical realism, speculative fiction and African history. Undergirding this movement is a longing to create a more just world.” (Monáe, 2022)

Since then, AfroFuturism has expanded to encompass many forms of artistic expression:

“Afrofuturism is one of the rare aesthetics that can encompass the visual medium, fashion, the written word, and music, and tackles themes such as feminism, alienation from your people, the grotesque, water symbolism, and reclamation of one’s identity through their roots.” (Author unknown, n.d.)

Through a combination of artistic, visual and audio media, Afrofuturism can marry past and present and give birth to a challenging and inclusive vision for the future. I try to imagine what Star Trek would be like if it took its predominantly white and American vision for a futuristic utopia, and combined it with edgy and exciting African multiculturalism, using new and bold forms of audio-visual presentation to present a more inclusive and more intimate version of a futuristic utopia borne from human struggle.

“The struggles I face in Botswana are emblematic of the broader issues many activists confront. Despite these difficulties, I am driven by the belief that my voice and my art can inspire change.” – AdAstra

One modern example is the music of “Adastra”, whose stage name comes from the Latin: “ad astra: to the stars” which ties strongly with the Afrofuturist perspective of aiming for a utopian future through science-fictional or speculative creativity. The gritty realism of Adastra’s appeal for a future without war (and its consequent suffering and injustice etc) presents a vibrant and no-nonsense message, with confronting imagery of real-life war and death, but threaded together with resilience and optimism – all for a fraction of the cost of one of Hollywood’s white-washed, sanitised studio fables.

VIDEO: Why War? by Adastra (used by permission).
[content warning on video: some warfare and carnage]:

The marriage of past and future, the intertwining of present alternate universes (African and western perspectives) can highlight our sense of awe and wonder – or of our alienation:

“It had been almost a year since we came to Mars. That was what I called this place although it had another name. It was Kensington Park or Windsor Estate or something like that but I couldn’t have said (t)hat because I could never remember it.” (Kwaymullina, 2022).

The cradle of humanity, and the cradle of civilisation, has a rich heritage from which to draw inspiration for its future – and maybe for the future of us all:

“With joy filling his heart, Pale Fox danced in Mother’s Garden, and a great river of stars washed over the sky.” (Jerry, 2022, p. 475).

To Asia and Beyond

“Science fiction is the literature of dreams, and texts concerning dreams always say something about the dreamer, the dream interpreter, and the audience.” – Ken Liu, 2016.

The European origins of modern science fiction are seen to have inspired similar literature around the world – because dreams are universal. Following the publication of Jules Verne stories, the first Indian Hindi science fiction, Aaschary Vrittant [“The Strange Tale”], was written by Ambika Dutt Vyas and serialised between 1884-88 in Peeyush Pravah magazine (Patel, 2021). Japanese author Shunro Oshikawa published The Undersea Warship: A Fantastic Tale of Island Adventure, in 1900 (Nathan, 2017); China followed with Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo [“Tales of the Moon Colony”] by Huangjiang Diasou, serialised in the Xiuxiang Xiaoshuo [“Illustrated Fiction”] magazine between 1904 and 1905 (Isaacson, 2013, p. 33).

Subsequent Asian science fiction has been complicated with layers of Sinofuturism, Orientalism, and colonial/postcolonial ruminations (Briel, 2023). Vouloumanos asks why the western response to Sinofuturism is a racist perspective:

“Why does Asian-ness always lend itself to being the futuristic “other” for Western audiences in science-fiction visions of the future?” (Vouloumanos, 2019).

While Star Trek and other western science fiction entraps and stereotypes Asian characters as “convenient plot devices”, the local Asian response is much more complex. Chinese science fiction (kexue xiaoshuo) has evolved into Techno-Orientalism, an intersection of technology and race (see Ho, 2017). More widely, Xia Jia suggests that science fiction plugs into the “Chinese Dream” and it could be argued that this is much the same way as Hollywood SF taps into the “American Dream”:

“Chinese Dream” here refers to the revival of the Chinese nation in the modern era, a prerequisite for realizing which was reconstructing the Chinese people’s dream. In other words, the Chinese had to wake up from their old, 5000-year dream of being an ancient civilization and start to dream of becoming a democratic, independent, prosperous modern nation state. As a result, the first works of science fiction in Chinese were seen, in the words of the famous writer Lu Xun, as literary tools for “improving thinking and assisting culture.” On the one hand, these early works, as myths of science, enlightenment, and development based on imitating “the West”/“the world”/“modernity,” attempted to bridge the gap between reality and dream. But on the other hand, the limitations of their historical context endowed them with deeply Chinese characteristics that only emphasized the depth of the chasm between dream and reality.” (Xia, 2014)

The overall genre, from “The Three Body Problem” to anime, plugs into a variety of vibrant and varied material that ultimately spans our entire global village from the culturally troubled Middle Eastern nations to the “ciencia ficción” bookshelves of the Latin American subcontinent. Our culturally western, white and winsome genre lacks the depth of the full human experience.

“In reading Western science fiction, Chinese readers discover the fears and hopes of Man, the modern Prometheus, for his destiny, which is also his own creation. Perhaps Western readers can also read Chinese science fiction and experience an alternative Chinese modernity and be inspired to imagine an alternative future.” (Xia, 2016)

Hollywood Futurism: Pride and Prejudice

The current series Strange New Worlds is one of the better Star Trek franchise products underway at present. It revisits some original Star Trek characters and episodes in a way that is respectful of the original material but fresh and modern. Old characters like Kirk, Spock, Uhura and Chapel are rebooted to suit twenty-first century audiences. New characters like Ortega and Aspen provide tantalising hints about modern understandings of diverse gender and sexuality. We even see one crossover episode with another Star Trek series (Lower Decks) which references animation as perhaps a stepping stone to link with the universe of anime.

Strange New Worlds promotes the ideals of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who postulated that the human adventure is just beginning and that we should make it so by celebrating the Vulcan concept of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations). New viewers are invited to explore familiar but strange new worlds, and the positive philosophies that such visits inspire.

Yet it has not always been so. Star Trek has traditionally been militaristic, patriarchal and colonialist – its Federation serving as a metaphoric American empire across the galaxy, populating worlds with white culture. While much of Star Trek is posited as being progressive and forward-looking, we can see that much of its reality is the opposite. While it has been suggested that, “Star Trek is not just any utopia. It is a specific American utopia…” (Geraghty, 2008, 19), it is worth asking whose America is being represented in this fictional portrayal of a futuristic world. Its birth as a space age version of a western TV series (“Wagon Train to the Stars”) meant that conceptually, logistically and practically, it was overloaded with baggage from past times and past insularities. Even its glimpses of Africans (Uhura and M’Benga) and Asians (Sulu and Kim and Keiko O’Brien) were in the context of Americanised cultural traditions, wherein most people outside of the straight, white male stereotype were treated as second-class characters, often denied promotion, character development, or even first names.

Disability and sexuality also received very little (usually patronising) attention and were presented from the perspective of a straight, white, ableist male culture portraying lazy or stereotypical caricatures.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

“The past is written. But the future is left for us to write and we have powerful tools… Openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity.”
– Jean-Luc Picard, ‘Broken Pieces’, Star Trek: Picard, 2020.

Amidst all this error, there was a spark of idealism. The original Star Trek always strove to be anti-racist, even if it was unable to understand and express racial equality beyond tokenistic white colonialist perspectives; nevertheless, its aspirations for equality and infinite diversity have enabled the franchise to attract a diverse fan base and survive. Star Trek has recently been rebooted, with characters including strong women of colour and a married gay male couple. We see similar evolution in the Star Wars franchise, where Princess Leia transformed from a helpless damsel in distress (in the 1970s) to a mature army general leading a rebellion (in the 2010s), and a young woman (Rey) take the mantle from Luke Skywalker. Meanwhile, modern audiences are flocking to a Marvel Cinematic Universe that has begun to explore Afrofuturism and other forms of diversity; and in Doctor Who, we see a white man transform into a woman and then into a gay Rwandan. Perhaps soon we will see further expressions of such diversity, epitomised in the writing of Ghanaian author Ivana Akotowaa Ofori:

“One of the TARDIS features the Worm adopted was the outer-appearance camouflage. In the Worm’s case, to readapt to its Ghanaian environs, it took on the shape of a dull brown shipping container – the kind that corner stores operate out of…

“She’s speaking Dagbanli, a language I recognise by its sound, but neither speak nor understand. Not that it matters, this close to the Worm; automatic, telepathic translation is yet another TARDIS thing it picked up.” (Ofori, 2022, pp. 428 & 430).

The world of literary science fiction today is likewise filled with diverse people – especially women – in a field that used to be seen as the predominant purview of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and other white men writing space opera. Science fiction – a glimpse of possible futures – is no longer tied to the “space westerns with ray guns” mentality; it now explores ideas and speculations ranging from anime to cyberpunk and AI and beyond. Cultural acclimatisation across human societies must surely follow.

Our dreams will not remain white bread; they will become as diverse as are our audiences and aspirations. In this sense, I look forward to a Chinese version of Star Trek, where aboard the starship Tiananmen Square, Captain Wang speaks to her crew in her mother tongue, and I am required, as a western audience member, to read subtitles and learn of new words, concepts, cultures and truly alien adventures outside of my personal life experience. With such steps, we will soon glimpse worlds and wonders as daring and diverse as human cultures and creations will allow; and where our dreams lead, reality may follow. We may begin to become the genuinely united world that is often alluded to within utopian science fiction and other visions of the future; a global village that is genuinely global; a federation of minds and cultures; an empire of disparity and dissidence. Within the next generation of dreamers, there will be fewer distinctions and binaries such as male or female, queer or straight, Israeli or Palestinian, western or Asian or African; the only ‘race’ that will matter will be the human race. Nigerian speculative fiction author Dare Segun Falowo points the way by presenting old perspectives through new eyes:

“In search of origin and motherworld, followed by the freed ori of Biscuit, the Offspring left behind the humans who took over in elevating their spirits beyond any dreams of gods. Guardians held on to nurturers, fathers held on to fathers, mothers to mothers and caregivers to the wise, as their Offspring took off for a forgotten home, shooting up into the eternal blue of Milk’s skies, leaving nothing behind but vapour trails.” (Falowo, 2022, p. 495).

From Alien Nation to Unification:

Science Fiction is a genre that looks ahead, pondering alternatives, and asking “what if?” It is the terrain of the explorer and adventurer; the literature of the outsider and the refugee; constructed in the language of the dissident and curious. Postulating possible futures is a way that we can explore what may lie ahead, and perhaps learn what future possibilities we actually want to forge and create. The ‘final frontier’ is time, not space, and Star Trek – postulated as boldly going into strange new worlds – remains constrained by its commercial and cultural limitations. Ahead, the future beckons; let’s explore myriad futures together, unshackling ourselves from the chains of traditional mindset and culture. Let’s boldly go into a future that is welcoming and inclusive of the whole human family.

“We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams.” ― Arthur O’Shaughnessy

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(*The issue of LGBT+ civil rights in science fiction, including Star Trek, has previously been discussed here (exploring the history of SF as a wider genre) and here (exploring fandom versus canon), and will be explored further in a subsequent blog.

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©2024 Geoff Allshorn