“O brave new world
That has such people in’t!”
– Shakespeare, The Tempest.
What can we learn from our dreams? We can learn about our dreamers.
In 1898, HG Wells wrote War of the Worlds, which was reportedly inspired by ‘British colonial treatment of Indigenous Tasmanians’. This allegorical exploration has been mirrored in other sci fi treatments of different peoples: Alien Nation looked at refugees; The Invaders reflected 1950s paranoia of communists; The X-Men mirrored the struggle of LGBT people to ‘come out’. Also, many sci fi movies have been presented as a western in space, where humans versus aliens explore the stereotypical racist meme of cowboys versus Indians.
In 1977, Princess Leia was a stereotype – a damsel in distress who needed rescuing. A generation later, she had morphed into a military General leading a rebellion. Leia did not evolve and mature over the years – but her storytellers and our society did. Our expectations and aspirations for women have evolved since the original Star Wars, although as a society, we still have a long way to go.
Doctor Who has recently been a woman, and next will be a Rwandan refugee émigré; other diverse characters can be found in modern Star Trek TV series. Elsewhere, the Serenity TV program married Chinese and western cultures as a foreshadowing of probably much to come in the decades ahead. The future is beckoning: infinite diversity?
Some decades ago, as an excitable young teen, I purchased what these days we would consider to be a pulp magazine from my local newsagents. It turned out to be a religious publication aiming to proselytise young people, but what attracted me was the cover photograph from a TV sci fi series and the headline asking whether sci fi would be the religion of the coming decade.
No, I thought to myself in answer to the question, sci fi was based upon science and was secular – such consolation and reassurance coming from the contemporaneously messianic prophetic figure connected to Star Trek (Gene Roddenberry, also known as The Great Bird of the Galaxy). Any irony in my mindset was later discerned after intervening decades matured my life perspective.
But it cannot be denied that sci fi taps into a very powerful impulse that also empowers religion: seeking hope and consolation from awe, wonder, and pondering our individual/collective place in the Universe. (In my own case, I lost my reverence for religion in my twenties when I realised that while sci fi looks ahead, religion too often looks backward and seeks to perpetuate archaic attitudes and moralities that humanity strives to outgrow. I like to think, however, that science and sci fi enabled me to retain my sense of awe and wonder, and my questioning impulse).
It is this same sense of veneration of our cosmos and our material, humanist potential that was captured in the recent return of the Cosmos TV series (produced in part due to the hard work of Seth MacFarlane) and then extended into his more recent sci fi series, The Orville, which recently telecast season 3 after a COVID-induced hiatus.
The wait for Season 3 was worth it.
Whereas its first two seasons struggled to balance sci fi aspirations with low-brow populist college undergraduate humour, Season Three has matured into a series beyond its inspirational sources (the original Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation TV programs) and even occasionally outstripping them with nobility and marvel.
The longer production time for Season 3, along with presumably a bigger budget, have enabled the series to expand into a noble and creative masterpiece within which each episode rivals the length and cinematography of a TV movie. Forget college undergraduate humour; this is a serious and philosophical sci fi production.
The opening episode of Season 3 takes an excursion into our modern world: our fear of developing technology and emergent sentientism, wherein the character of Isaac is bullied to the point of desparation. While this touches upon a prejudice first explored by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry who created a robot in his Questor Tapes TV pilot (he is credited as quoting the anti-robotic attitude of studio executives: “Yes, but would you want your sister to marry one?”) but it also provides arguably the weakest premise of the season, where prejudice and bullying are tolerated aboard the starship Orville with barely more than a metaphoric shrug and slap on the wrist. This opening episode also introduces the character of Charly, who is readily established as a nuanced but unlikeable character who must make her own journey through the season in order to find redemption.
Subsequent episodes explore strange new worlds both without and within. The Orville’s characters undertake journeys through metaphor and social issues that are as relevant as today’s news headlines: same sex marriage, LGBT rights, racism and prejudice, anti trans* bigotry and its ties with misogyny, war, hate and forgiveness, the morality of withholding life saving technology from deprived people, and definitions and clarifications of family. Go back and watch the first two seasons as an introduction to this optimistic season, which, retitled as The Orville: New Horizons, definitely takes us from familiar territory into new explorations of the human adventure.
The final episode (episode 10) brings Season 3 full circle, showing how race, culture and species can grow together into a form of family. This conclusion should be enough to bring human audiences (and a collective army of ten billion robots) to their feet in applause. In maturing into a serious series, the Orville points the way ahead with hope and optimism for our humanist and sentientist future. A new, better species traverses the heavens where once only trod the gods. All that and human too.
I admit that I have not been blogging so much this year – I have been distracted by a need for activism in the world around me. My desire to help create a better world is not only my human instinct kicking in, but a manifestation of my interest in sci fi.
And in my quieter moments, I have been doing voluntary work for the Australian Science Fiction Foundation, especially helping to create their new website (soon to be launched) as my latest contribution to advancing futurism and cultural innovation. This is a refreshing exploration of other worlds and other realities, far from our mundane world of COVID and war and politics and world poverty.
And no, I have not been seeking mere escapism. I do not subscribe to the cliché that science fiction is a crutch for those who cannot cope with reality. Instead, I have been using the ideals and visions within SF to replenish my optimism for the real-life future and to contribute, in lateral ways, to building a better world by (hopefully) encouraging others to look upwards and ahead. Fictional character Sarah Connor once commented that a storm is coming, and her words should inspire us to prepare for whatever that storm may be – climate catastrophe, nuclear war, pandemic, political upheaval, or whatever the future may hold.
Which of course brings up an obvious question: why science fiction?
Humans have probably been telling stories since our distant forebears leant how to communicate. Those stories reflect our cultures, our values and our circumstances.
Where Jason and his Argonauts once explored unknown vistas, we now have James Kirk and his astronauts exploring strange new worlds. Where King Arthur or Robin Hood once fought for justice against corruption and oppression, we now have Harry Potter and Leia Skywalker. Superman and the Marvel Avengers police the ethereal skies where Olympian deities or other divinities once claimed exclusive sovereignty.
In the past, we had Pythia or Merlin or Sherlock Holmes as our fictional or mythological guides for morality and rationality responding to technology and circumstance; today Spock or the Doctor or R. Daneel Olivaw serve as transHumanist and secular reworkings of our template Everyman.
Through such timeless motifs – including the use of metaphoric humans disguised as robots, superheroes, artificial intelligence, or other forms of sentient life – science fiction holds up a mirror to ourselves and teaches us what it means to be human.
Climate change and pollution are hardly new kids on the science fictional block. They have been explored for decades. Through SF films like Silent Running, I became aware of the looming threat of environmental catastrophe, while The Omega Man introduced me to the dangers of epidemics a decade before HIV/AIDS appeared on the world scene and a generation before COVID. Through the Planet of the Apes books and films, I became aware of the power of metaphor and nuance in exploring religious or philosophical themes, while 2001: A Space Odyssey taught me that the Universe’s poetry could be visual if we gaze into the cosmos.
Perhaps most powerfully, Star Trek and Thunderbirds showed me the power of people working together to explore strange new worlds and helping each other out of natural disasters.
And all of this before I hit puberty (which is testimony to the power of sci fi – as a genre that explores the future, it has special power to inspire and empower young people especially).
In the wider world, science fiction has the ability to warn us (The Handmaid’s Tale) or inspire us (Hidden Figures). I have known people whose career choices were inspired by SF: authors, teachers, human rights activists, scientists, doctors, even astronauts. And in turn, the real-life space program has helped to create the technological and scientifically literate cultures in which we live today.
More than all that, space and science fiction have already saved our planet, through NASA’s ‘Mission to Planet Earth‘ (launched in 1991) which led the world response in solving the hole in the Ozone layer.
I have previously written about the inspiration that can be found within science fiction:
I enjoy science fiction because it promises me that humanity has a future, full of dreamers, explorers and heroes. It promotes the joy of diversity – including aliens, robots, cyber citizens, sentients, men and women, [variously] queer and trans and gender non-binary humans – all living together in peace and equality.
We can do more than dream of such a world: we can help to create it. Make it so.
“The idea of leaving any species to die in its own filth when you have the ability to help them… it’s a bunch of fascist crap,”
– Robert Beltran, C│NET, 2016.
In 1939, the SS St Louis arrives in Cuba and then Miami, carrying hundreds of Jewish refugees who are fleeing the Holocaust. They are sent back to Europe, where many of them die. Just over 60 years later, in 2001, the MV Tampa arrives in Australian waters, carrying hundreds of (mainly) Afghan asylum seekers. The Australian government refuses to take them.
In 2019, a 26 year-old US missionary approaches an isolated group of indigenous people whom he is seeking to convert to Christianity, and they kill him in order to protect their culture, their privacy, and – although they may not realise it – their vulnerability to attack from microbes beyond their isolated island.
In August 2021, the US-led military forces in Afghanistan withdraw, leaving behind an inadequately trained defence force and a human rights catastrophe facing tens of millions of civilians who have been abandoned by the western nations. Critics of the US-led occupation argue that Afghanistan should be left to sort out its own problems.
Such examples – out of myriads in our recent and collective human history – demonstrate a principle that was examined in modern science fiction pop culture – within the Star Trek TV series.
To Boldly Go?
Elizabeth Welch provides a succinct summary of the principle within the Star Trek franchise:
“The Prime Directive, or Starfleet General Order 1, states that members of Starfleet are prohibited from interfering with the internal and natural development of alien civilizations. In other words, colonization of inhabited worlds is a no-go.”
Various episodes of various Star Trek series have explored the Prime Directive,often pitting Enterprise crew members against indigenous laws or customs that they consider to be barbaric or ethically unsupportable.
YouTuber Steve Shives points out the problem with this principle, even within the context of the Star Trek series: “At some point, one of the writers or producers must have noticed that pledging to uphold a non-interference principle is kind of an odd thing for people to do when their primary mission is to seek out new life and new civilisations…” (Shives, 2018b, @4:10). He also asks whether it is ethical to prevent saving a civilisation that faces extinction from a natural disaster.
All in all, the Prime Directive might seem to be an interesting intellectual exercise, except…
Falling Back to Earth
Star Trek’s Prime Directive was problematic from the start. The original series forbade the Enterprise crew from interfering with the ‘natural’ development of any indigenous world – undoubtedly as a response to US involvement in the real-life Vietnam War. The original series treated the Prime Directive with ambiguity, as Eric Greene (2006, 60) points out:
“…in the course of the series, the Prime Directive was often debated, occasionally derided, but rarely obeyed. The Prime Directive was not a directive as much as it was the Prime Question: how much power should a superpower use when dealing with other peoples?”
Exceptions to the rule of non-interference were permitted (and frequently carried out by Kirk) if deemed necessary to reset a cultural aberration back onto ‘healthy’ development or to rescue victims of injustice. One commentator summed up Kirk’s frequent violation of this policy: “The Prime Directive was instituted to protect people. When the directive gets in the way of protecting people, ignore it … People will be more important than rules.” (Marinaccio, 1994, 50.)
This was a humanitarian principle that the sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) conceded in the 1989 episode, Justice, the very first time its characters clashed with alien laws:
“There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions.”
“When has justice ever been as simple as a rulebook?”
– Picard and Riker
And yet in this episode, there was a problem with this outcome – Riker and Picard seemed to be making excuses on why their own people should be singled out for special treatment, implying that Federation citizens were entitled to human rights whereas citizens of other (or indigenous) planets were not – a form of apartheid. Here we see a fundamental change. The Prime Directive had been written into the original Star Trek series as a means to challenge the 1960s Vietnam War and thereby confront cultural imperialism that was being enacted by a superpower. Two decades later, the same Directive was reinterpreted in the era of the Gulf War (and wars in Rwanda and Bosnia and Iraq and other places, US aggression in Paraguay and Libya and Panama etc) to reinforce the entitlement of superpower citizens – the metaphoric Federation – with human rights that were denied to those living on subordinate worlds.
In 2021, we see the real-life outcome of such a disgusting policy – the withdrawal of western military troops from Afghanistan, and the abandonment of tens of millions of human lives on the implicit justification that these lives are somehow of lesser value than those of people in western nations.
On the whole, TNG prohibited virtually all interaction between the Enterprise crew and indigenous worlds which might allow for the transfer of technology, morality or life saving necessities. Needy planets were denied technology until their civilisations collapsed (“The Last Outpost”), drug traffickers were allowed free travel (“Symbiosis”), and even planetary genocide was allowed (“Homeward”). In this allegorical future, ethnic cleansing would be dismissed as a localised problem, a Christian theocracy would be free to persecute gays, and honour killings would be permitted across the galaxy wherever women were oppressed under some interplanetary version of Sharia law. This dystopia is far removed from the humanist utopia envisaged within the original Star Trek series.
Possibly the worst offender of Prime Defectiveness can be found in the first season of the series Star Trek: Enterprise in 2002 (just after the real-life ‘War on Terror’ had commenced), where the captain and doctor debate the ethics of their eventual collusion to conduct planetary genocide (by neglect) upon a sentient species in the episode, Dear Doctor. One wonders whether the Jewish staff working within the Star Trek offices had ever heard of the Holocaust.
In 2003, under a pen name, I criticised the ethics presented in this episode:
“… Captain Archer alludes to the Prime Directive, which [in his timeline] is not yet written. He decides that until any such set of rules is in place, he will not “play God” – but then he does exactly that – plays God – by genociding a whole race. We would suggest that Archer’s humanitarian attitude for most of the episode should have led to his proclamation that until the Prime Directive was written, he would always err on the side of compassion” (Gaetano, 2003, 6).
Nearly twenty years later, I agree with Edward Clint, who in a cogent written piece, argues that the Prime Directive is an example of Star Trek’s Doctrine of Moral Laziness:
“The utopian future of Star Trek (most specifically, that of The Next Generation [TNG]) is sometimes described as an idealized liberal world… Unfortunately, TNG also encodes some of the utter failures of 20th century liberal thought. The consequences of adopting them, whether in fiction or real life, can be pretty horrifying, not to mention morally disgusting.”
Star Trek was originally born during the era of hippies, civil rights, and baby boomers at the height of their idealism. Decades later, younger generations have rebooted the franchise to be less optimistic, more nuanced and sadly much more cynical. Let’s use that nuance to correct and reboot the Prime Directive so it becomes an inspirational philosophy rather that a source of nihilism and human rights abuse. Star Trek has the power to inspire and educate; let’s make it so.
Sources:
Adrian Gaetano, 2003. ‘Review: Enterprise: Bad Science, Bad Fiction’, in Geoff Allshorn and Miriam English (eds.), Diverse Universe: Newsletter for the club ‘Spaced Out’, Melbourne: Spaced Out, #16, June, 4 – 6.
Eric Greene, 2006. ‘The prime question’, in David Gerrold & Robert J Sawyer (eds.), Boarding the Enterprise: transporters, tribbles and the Vulcan death grip in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, Dallas: BenBella Books, 57 – 86.
Dave Marinaccio, 1994. All I really needed to know I learned from watching Star Trek, London: Titan Books.
Ian Sherr, 2016. Star Trek’s Robert Beltran: The Prime Directive is ‘fascist crap’, C│NET, 7 Sept.
Steve Shives, 2018a. Did Captain Archer Actually Commit Genocide?, YouTube, 18 April.
– – – – – – -, 2018b. Why the Prime Directive Might Actually Be a Terrible Rule, YouTube, 23 May.
