When the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to leave Earth’s orbit in 1968, commander Frank Borman found himself less struck by the Moon below than by the planet they’d left behind: “It looked so fragile from 240,000 miles… you have a hard time understanding there could be so much conflict when it looked so fragile.” His crewmate Bill Anders put it even more bluntly: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”
The sentiment hasn’t dated. In April 2026, Artemis II pilot Victor Glover, looking back at Earth from deep space, described being able to “really see the Earth as one thing” — a single, fragile whole, closer to home than the distance might suggest.
— Sources: Frank Borman, quoted in Phys.org (2016); Bill Anders, quoted by NASA (2024); Victor Glover, quoted in a CBS News interview, reported by TODAY.com (April 2026)
NASA photo
Look at almost any photograph of Earth taken from space, and you’ll notice something missing: borders. No red lines carving up continents, no fences, no flags — just a single blue-and-white sphere hanging in absolute black. For the small number of human beings who have seen that view with their own eyes rather than through a photograph, the experience has proven to be one of the most psychologically transformative available to our species. It has a name: the Overview Effect.
A Term Coined in 1987
Space philosopher Frank White gave the phenomenon its name in his 1987 book, “The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution”, describing a profound shift in perspective that many astronauts report when they see Earth in its entirety from orbit or beyond. The effect isn’t simply about scenery. It’s a cognitive and emotional reorientation — a sudden, visceral grasp of the planet as one fragile, interconnected whole, with national boundaries and political divisions revealed as human inventions rather than features of the world itself.
Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell put it memorably: seeing Earth from the Moon gave him an instant sense of global belonging, real frustration at the state of the world, and a felt need to do something about it. More recently, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli has described watching Earth’s thin blue atmospheric line from the cupola of the International Space Station and realising that every person she knows is sustained within that fragile margin — with no visible borders, no religious lines, no political boundaries at all.
What the Research Shows
This isn’t just poetic testimony; researchers have started taking the Overview Effect seriously as a measurable psychological phenomenon. Studies point to several recurring components: heightened compassion, a felt dissolution of the boundary between self and other (sometimes described as self-transcendence), a reordering of personal priorities, and a pronounced sense of awe. A 2020 study of space travellers found that many came home with a changed sense of Earth as something precious and easily damaged, and that this shift tracked with a greater likelihood of taking up environmental causes afterward.
The effect isn’t universal among astronauts. Personality factors seem to influence how strongly someone experiences it, but the broad pattern is consistent enough that researchers have begun trying to reproduce it by using virtual reality to see whether a simulated view of Earth from orbit can nudge people toward more pro-environmental behaviour. Results so far are mixed, but the very attempt says something about how much value we now place on this shift in consciousness.
The Deeper Lesson
Call it spiritual, call it cosmic perspective, call it what you like — what matters is that it’s awe grounded in something real. It doesn’t ask you to look beyond the physical world, only to see more of it at once: our actual situation as evolved, interdependent beings sharing one small planet.
It also offers a strikingly literal illustration of an idea that runs through a lot of moral philosophy: the expanding moral circle. Philosophers have long described moral progress as a gradual widening of who counts — from family, to tribe, to nation, to all of humanity, and for many of us today, onward to future generations, other species, and perhaps even minds we haven’t yet created. The Overview Effect seems to compress that entire expansion into a single glance. From orbit, the arbitrary lines that usually organise human loyalty and hostility simply vanish, and what’s left is one interdependent biosphere holding everyone we have ever loved or fought.
Carl Sagan reached for something similar without ever leaving Earth’s orbit himself, in his reflection on the “Pale Blue Dot” photograph of Earth taken from deep space — a single pixel suspended in a sunbeam, home to everyone who has ever lived. It’s one of the most quietly humanist passages in modern science writing precisely because it does what the Overview Effect does: it makes cosmic scale into an argument for kindness, rather than an argument for despair.
From Orbit to Action
The Overview Effect doesn’t always stay a private revelation. For some astronauts, it has become the founding motive for real-world projects back on Earth.
Ron Garan, a NASA astronaut who logged 178 days in space, traces his post-flight humanitarian work directly to a spacewalk during which he saw the International Space Station framed against Earth below. He went on to found the Manna Energy Foundation, which brought clean water treatment to villages in Rwanda through the world’s first UN-registered Clean Development Mechanism carbon-credit program for water treatment. He also created Fragile Oasis, a platform where a global community proposes and supports humanitarian and environmental projects — clean water, cross-cultural dialogue, solar technology — explicitly framed around the orbital perspective he brought home.
Franklin Chang Díaz, a veteran of seven shuttle missions, later founded Ad Astra Rocket Company, working on advanced plasma and hydrogen propulsion technologies. In interviews, he’s connected that work directly to the Overview Effect, describing how seeing Earth whole left him with a lasting concern about pollution and squandered clean energy.
Worth noting as a related but distinct case: the solar-powered vaccine refrigerators now used to protect medicine supplies in remote parts of the world weren’t founded by an astronaut, but by a former NASA Johnson Space Center engineer, David Bergeron, who adapted refrigeration technology developed for NASA’s Advanced Refrigeration Technology Team into a battery-free unit for vaccine storage. It’s a reminder that the space program’s humanitarian dividends flow through engineers and mission specialists as well as astronauts themselves.
Borrowing the View Without the Rocket
Most of us will never leave Earth’s atmosphere, and the researchers testing VR simulations are essentially asking a very humanist question: can we manufacture this shift in perspective without a spacecraft? Can the emotional logic of the Overview Effect — awe, interconnection, a felt sense of shared fragility — be reached by other means: through the philosophical exercise of imagining ourselves from a great distance, through science communication, through art and speculative fiction that puts readers on a lunar surface looking back at Earth?
I’d argue that’s exactly the imaginative work fiction can do — placing readers somewhere far enough from home that borders and tribal divisions become genuinely hard to see, and shared vulnerability becomes the only thing left in view. That’s not a bad description of what any good humanist story, or humanist philosophy for that matter, is trying to achieve here on the ground: a wider circle of concern, reached without ever needing to leave the Earth at all.
Chow, Denise, 2011. “Earth From Space: An Astronaut’s Quest to Protect Our ‘Fragile Oasis’.” NBC News, 22 April.
Grimm, Linda E, 2025. “The Overview Effect: Astronaut Perspectives from 25 Years in Low Earth Orbit”, Johnson Space Center, NASA, 23 November.
Jones, Meg, 2016. “Apollo Astronaut Frank Borman Remembers the View.” Phys.org, 2016.
Lau, Graham, 2024. “The Overview Effect On Earth.” “Cosmobiota”, Substack, 10 October.
Lockney, Dan, 2013. “Solar Refrigerators Store Life-Saving Vaccines.” NASA Spinoff.
Moskowitz Clara, 2011. “Goodbye, Zero G: Astronaut Ron Garan Readapts Life on Earth.” Space.com, 10 October.
Parks, Kristine, 2026. “Artemis II Astronaut Marvels at ‘Beauty of Creation’ in Easter Message from Deep Space.” Originally a CBS News interview, 5 April; reported by TODAY.com, 8 April.
Pearson, Ezzy, 2026.”Astronauts Get a Weird Feeling Looking at Earth from Space. It’s the Overview Effect, and Here’s How It Works”, BBC Sky at Night Magazine, 6 February..
Rocchio, Laura E.P., 2024. “Remembering Bill Anders.” NASA Science, 14 June.
Sagan, Carl, 1994. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, New York: Random House.
Travers, Mark, 2024. “How ‘The Overview Effect’ Can Make You Feel Alive Again — By A Psychologist.” Forbes, 24 July.
van Horen F, et. al, 2024. “Observing the earth from space: Does a virtual reality overview effect experience increase pro-environmental behaviour?”, PLoS One. 19(5), National Center for Biotechnology Information, 29 May.
van Limpt – Broers, H Anna T, et al, 2020. “Creating Ambassadors of Planet Earth: The Overview Effect in K–12 Education”, Front Psychol. 11:540996, National Center for Biotechnology Information, 7 October.
White, Frank, 1987. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (various later editions).
Young, Chris, 2023. “Former NASA Astronaut’s Space Shuttle Flights Inspired New Hydrogen Technologies”, Interesting Engineering, 3 March.
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.
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.
If this essay speaks to you, you may find these related pieces useful:
A Kiss Is (Not) Just a Kiss
The Kirk–Uhura Kiss: Myth and The Real Story.
The Prime Defective
The Prime Directive: Another problem within the Star Trek franchise.
From Fic to Future
A short biography of Diane Marchant, the Australian fan who helped reshape the future of fandom.
Forgotten Futures
An examination of how utopian imagination shifted from 1888 to 1966, and why Edward Bellamy’s future vision died but Gene Roddenberry’s endured, including how women contributed to fandom.
Time, Youth, and the Call of the Future I Have Seen the Future
Two explorations about why “Starfleet Academy” mattered.
From Queer to Eternity
How queer issues intersect with science fiction.
Race and the Colonial Imagination
An essay tracing the threads of colonial imagination in science fiction, and emerging AfroFuturism, AfricanFuturism, and other movements that explore beyond the white gaze.
From Trek to Trump
A look at sample homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, and racist objections to the “Starfleet Academy” TV series.
NASA’s Orion spacecraft with Artemis II crewmembers NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, commander; Victor Glover, pilot; Christina Koch, mission specialist; and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, mission specialist aboard is seen as it lands in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, Friday, April 10, 2026. NASA’s Artemis II mission took Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen on a nearly 10-day journey around the Moon and back to Earth. Following a splashdown at 8:07p.m. EDT, NASA, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force teams are working to bring the crewmembers and Orion spacecraft aboard USS John P. Murtha. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
“As we surpass the furthest distance humans have ever traveled from planet Earth, we do so in honoring the extraordinary efforts and feats of our predecessors in human space exploration. We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything that we hold dear.”
Ten days out there — more than 405,000 kilometres from Earth — and then the long fall back, the capsule wrapped in red‑hot plasma and that awful radio silence where everyone just has to sit and wait. Six minutes of nothing. Families anxious. Mission Control trying not to breathe too loudly. It was the kind of moment people recognise from the climax of the Apollo 13 movie — that suspended breath while the world waits for a voice to break through the radio static. And then, almost quietly, the signal returned. Parachutes opened. Orion dropped into the Pacific off San Diego as if it had always meant to land exactly there. NASA called it a bull’s‑eye.
The crew walked across the deck of the recovery ship on their own legs. Worn out, yes, but steady. A bit knocked around, but that’s what real work looks like. They’d seen the far side of the Moon and watched a total solar eclipse from deep space. They had experienced a kind of quiet you can’t find on Earth anymore, and pondered the stillness of the cosmos.
And back here, it was school holidays — kids running feral in shopping centres, teenagers sleeping until noon, parents doing that tired half‑laugh that says I love them, but please send them back soon. People grabbing hot chips at the shopping centre or finally doing the Bunnings run they’d been putting off. Just the usual Australian chaos. And still, there was that small tug in the chest when the news came through that the crew had made it home. Not pride, exactly, and absolutely not flag‑waving. Perhaps a hint of curiosity that belongs to all of us, and not just to people in spacesuits.
And honestly, looking outward has saved us before.
It was satellites — not politicians — that spotted the ozone hole ripping open over Antarctica. Space‑based instruments proved it was real, proved it was dangerous, and forced the world to act. And because we listened, the Ozone Layer is slowly healing. One of the rare moments when humanity actually stepped back from the edge instead of tumbling over it.
That’s the quiet part of space work people forget: the things built for skyborne wonder often end up protecting the ground beneath our feet.
(April 6, 2026) – Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. A muted blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar surface. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks. Central peaks form in complex craters when the lunar surface, liquefied on impact, splashes upwards during the crater’s formation. NASA Photo.
“The Needs of the Many…”
And it’s not just wealthy countries that benefit. In many places, satellites are the only reason people in poverty can connect to the outside world at all. Whole communities that never had landlines or fibre suddenly have a way to talk to family, get weather warnings, or call for help to the outside world. A cheap mobile phone and a bit of sky — that’s the entire infrastructure. Space makes that possible. It’s uneven, imperfect, and still astonishing. It’s the closest we’ve ever come to a global village that might actually include everyone, not just the people living near the big cables.
And the more people connect across those old economic and geographic divides, the harder it becomes for anyone in affluent nations to pretend they don’t see what’s happening elsewhere. Peter Singer has been arguing this for decades — that it shouldn’t matter whether someone lives next door or on the other side of the world; if you can help, you should. And now space‑driven technology is making that idea feel less like philosophy and more like daily life. Once you’ve heard someone’s voice or seen their messages arrive on the same apps your friends use, distance stops feeling like an excuse. And once you’re connected, it’s harder to dodge the responsibility that comes with it. It nudges people in wealthy countries toward a new kind of loving their neighbours — not in a religious or sentimental way, just being human. Space didn’t set out to create that moral obligation, but it’s doing it anyway, one impulse signal at a time.
Carl Sagan warned that knowledge locked away is a tragedy. Artemis shows the opposite — that when knowledge leaves the lab and the launchpad, it can reshape lives in places that will never see a rocket. It’s a long way from the outback dishes that still listen for whispers from deep space, but the principle’s the same — knowledge only matters when it reaches the people on the ground.
It might even be the only real example of a trickle‑down effect that’s ever actually worked: space technology built for the few quietly improving life for the many. You can see it clearly in parts of rural Africa, for example, where the same deep‑space communications tech that keeps Orion talking to Earth is what lets whole communities run their businesses, or network beyond the village, on a cheap phone with nothing but sky for infrastructure. In Gaza, satellite‑based mapping tools — built from the imaging and navigation systems refined for lunar missions — help aid workers find safe routes when the roads on the ground don’t exist anymore. And across India and Southeast Asia, farmers check satellite‑fed crop and weather data, descended from Artemis‑era sensors, to decide when to plant or irrigate. Space might aim for the Moon, but its benefits keep falling back to Earth in the places that are used to being last in line.
(April 4, 2026) – NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman peers out of one of the Orion spacecraft’s main cabin windows, looking back at Earth, as the crew travels towards the Moon. (NASA Photo)
The Overview Effect
Even the astronauts talk about this shift, which in the 1980s was labelled by author Frank White as the Overview Effect. Frank Borman from Apollo 8 said they went all the way to the Moon and ended up discovering Earth instead, and Bill Anders said the most important thing they found out there was us — that seeing Earth rise over the lunar horizon “changed him forever.” And the Artemis II crew have echoed the same thing in their own way. Reid Wiseman spoke about glimpsing Earth’s atmosphere from deep space. Victor Glover said the view of Earth “changes you,” because you suddenly see that, “We’ve gotta get through this together.” Christina Koch noted that although we are compelled to explore, “ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other” and Jeremy Hansen said the mission reminded him that “we all share this one planet”. Different missions, different decades, same revelation: you go out there, and what strikes you most is Earth.
Philosophically, the Overview Effect feels like something we should have learned long ago. It could change us culturally and socially more than many of the stories we’ve told ourselves for aeons. A space age perspective may help us to become more of a global village than ever before. And we all know that it takes a village…
NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window on April 2, 2026, after completing the translunar injection burn. Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman
Technologically, every mission still spills into everyday life: refining cleaner energy systems, building materials that don’t buckle in the heat, and medical imaging that actually works in regional hospitals. And people can feel confident that if communications work smoothly between Houston and the Far Side of the Moon, then our mobiles should work between Melbourne and Koolgardie. All the things that matter in a place like Australia, where distance is practically its own weather system.
Space doesn’t solve everything, but it gives us a better place to begin than we had before. It hands us new tools, new knowledge, and new ways of seeing ourselves. And sometimes — when the evidence is clear and the world chooses to listen — it doesn’t just help us cope; it pulls us back from danger entirely. We’ve seen that once already, and there’s no reason it can’t happen again.
The four astronauts ventured around the Moon on Artemis II, the first crewed mission on NASA’s path to establishing a long-term presence at the Moon for science and exploration through Artemis. The 10-day flight helped confirm systems and hardware needed for early human lunar exploration missions. NASA Photo
Artemis II didn’t just loop around the Moon. It reminded us that humans can still do difficult things together, even in a world that feels increasingly fragmented and conflicted. And the things we learn out there don’t stay out there, they come home with the crew, merged into the technologies and quiet improvements that shape our everyday life. The space program has changed our world in ways most people barely notice — a sturdier roof here, a better phone network there — and its most profound contributions may still be waiting for us, just beyond the horizon of what we can currently imagine.
