Category: Science Fiction

Time, Youth, and the Call of the Future

“Life is a heartbreaking, gorgeous blip in the universe. Everything matters — and nothing does. What has always been certain: time is both forever, and achingly finite. But what a shame it would be not to live every moment.”
— Captain Nahla Ake
Official promotional art for Starfleet Academy, introducing a new generation of cadets.

Time has always felt like a trick of perspective. When you’re young, it stretches out in every direction — endless, generous, full of promise. But the older you get, the more you realise how small your portion truly is. A handful of luminous years in which to decide who you are, what you stand for, and what kind of future you’re willing to help build. And what a tragedy it would be to spend any of that precious time shrinking yourself to fit someone else’s expectations.

That’s why Starfleet Academy hit me with the force of past colliding with the present. It understands something that Star Trek has pondered for decades but rarely examined: that the future is not shaped by memory, or nostalgia, or the comfortable weight of tradition. It’s shaped by young people standing at the edge of their own limited time, daring to imagine something larger than the world they inherited. It’s shaped by the moment potential becomes momentum, when cracks in old structures widen just enough for new voices to step through.

For a franchise long defined by progressive captains restrained by luddite realities, Starfleet Academy feels like the first breath of air after a long-held silence. It brings back the rawness, the vulnerability, the restless hope that once made Star Trek revolutionary. It reminds us that the coming world is not a museum piece. It’s a living thing, and it belongs to those brave enough to claim it.

A Fan’s Perspective Across Fifty Years

I’ve been in this fandom long enough to watch it reinvent itself more times than most people realise. Half a century of conventions, fanzines, late‑night arguments, improbable friendships, and the kind of communal hope that only science fiction can sustain. And yet Starfleet Academy is the first series in decades that made me feel the way I did in those early Austrek days — when we were young, untrained, and utterly convinced that imagination could build a future worth inheriting.

Back then, we weren’t archivists or organisers or “fandom elders.” We were just kids with stapled newsletters and borrowed meeting rooms, building something because nobody had told us we couldn’t. We didn’t know the rules, so we made our own. We didn’t have a roadmap, so we drew one. And somehow, through enthusiasm and stubbornness and a kind of naïve courage, it worked.

Watching Starfleet Academy, I felt that spark again: that sense of a new world cracking open at the edges. The show honours the past, yes, but it refuses to be trapped by it. It acknowledges the legacy it inherits without being beholden to it. It understands something that every long‑term fan eventually learns: the world we want does not arrive fully formed. It is shaped (sometimes gently, sometimes violently) by those brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries they were given.

And that is why this series matters. It doesn’t just remind me of where Star Trek has been. It reminds me of where it can still go.

Youth, Diversity, and Imagination

Publicity Picture (c) Paramount

Starfleet Academy isn’t simply a new entry in the franchise; it’s a generational pivot. Not a reboot, not a nostalgia project, but a deliberate reorientation toward the people who will inherit the future rather than the ones who have already shaped it. For the first time in a long while, Star Trek remembers that youth is not a demographic, it’s a force. A destabilising, hopeful, necessary force.

These cadets are not polished paragons. They are messy, frightened, idealistic, contradictory, and hungry for meaning… which is to say, they are real. They are becoming, not performing. And that alone feels revolutionary in a franchise that has often preferred its characters fully formed and morally certain.

Diversity, here, is not a casting choice or a marketing line. It is the architecture of the story. These characters carry their cultures, their traumas, their languages, their histories; not as metaphors, not as allegories, but as lived realities that shape how they move through the world. Their differences are not obstacles to be smoothed away; they are the raw material from which community is built.

And perhaps most importantly, the show finally breaks free from the gravitational pull of Earth (and of American liberalism masquerading as universalism). Its imagination is planetary, interplanetary, genuinely plural. It dares to suggest that the Federation’s centre of gravity does not have to be San Francisco, or even Earth at all. That alone feels like a quiet revolution.

“We don’t just explore space. We explore the potential of what we can become together.”
— Captain Nahla Ake

This is Trek remembering what it once promised: that the future belongs to all of us, not just the familiar few.

Each Cadet Has a Different Future

L-R: Kerrice Brooks, Romeo Carere, Karim Diané, Sandro Rosta, George Hawkins and Bella Shepard in season 1 , episode 5 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Brooke Palmer/Paramount+

Every cadet in Starfleet Academy feels like a different repretentation of humanity, not in the abstract, philosophical way Trek sometimes leans on, but in the small, intimate, deeply human ways that actually shape who we become. They aren’t symbols or archetypes or moral lessons dressed up as characters. They are young people standing at the threshold of their own lives, carrying their histories, their wounds, their hopes, and their contradictions with them. And in them, I recognise the young people I’ve taught for so many years — that bold curiosity edged with innocence, that strength threaded with vulnerability, that yearning for adulthood still softened by the last traces of youth.

Caleb is youthful rebellion in its most necessary form, not the destructive kind, but the kind born from wanting the world to make sense, from believing that justice should not be negotiable, from caring too much to stay quiet. He pushes back because he believes things can be better. He questions because he refuses to accept the lazy answers. He is messy, idealistic, stubborn, and full of heart… and honestly, that’s the kind of rebellion Trek has needed for a very long time.

SAM is Trek finally growing up about artificial intelligence. For decades, the franchise has treated AI as a problem waiting to happen: V’Ger, Nomad, the Borg, the Doctor’s legal battles, Data’s endless struggle for personhood. SAM is none of that. She is not a threat, not a metaphor, not a cautionary tale. She is a classmate, a friend, a fellow citizen. Her story isn’t about proving her humanity, it’s about living it. In SAM, Trek finally steps out of its own shadow and imagines a future where AI is part of the community rather than a danger to it.

Jay-Den is quiet resilience made visible. He is not coded and subtextual, not symbolic, not a “very special episode.” He simply exists: layered, confident, vulnerable, whole. He is the kind of queer representation Trek has promised for decades but only now seems ready to offer without flinching or apologising. His presence is not a statement; it is a reality.

Nahla is what happens when the Federation stops assuming Earth is the centre of everything. She does not default to human norms. She does not treat Federation values as universal truths. She brings her own cultural gravity, her own history, her own sense of what the future should look like. In doing so, she expands the moral vocabulary of the show simply by being herself.

The Doctor is written as a person, not a metaphor. Earlier Treks often used alienness as a stand‑in for race or culture, sometimes beautifully, sometimes awkwardly. But here, the Doctor is not a lesson. He is a character: funny, conflicted, curious, occasionally infuriating, and always growing. It took him eight hundred years to grow up, but he did — and that alone feels like a quiet evolution for the franchise.

And then there are the Betazoid cadets, who break Trek out of Earth’s orbit, both literally and culturally. They do not treat Earth as the moral centre of the universe. They do not orbit human assumptions. Their presence shifts the Federation’s cultural centre, and the show is stronger for it.

Together — human, alien, hybrid — they form a mosaic of futures. Not one dominant narrative. Not one “right” way to be. A constellation of possibilities, each one incomplete without the others. This is Trek finally living up to IDIC: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Not as a slogan, not as a merchandising symbol, but as a lived reality.

“We aren’t just here to learn how to fly ships. We’re here to learn how to be the people the ships were built for.”
— Caleb Mir
Karim Diané in season 1, episode 4 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Brooke Palmer/Paramount+

Worldbuilding (Offworld Included)

One of the quiet revolutions in Starfleet Academy is the way it shifts the centre of gravity away from Earth, not just geographically, but philosophically. For decades, Star Trek has treated Earth, and particularly San Francisco, as the unquestioned heart of the Federation. It was the sun around which everything else orbited. But the real world that we live in has long since outgrown the idea that one culture, one hemisphere, or one history should define the world ahead for everyone.

Starfleet Academy finally reflects that truth. It recentres the Federation away from the US‑shaped assumptions it once took for granted and towards Betazed.

In doing this, the series metaphorically opens the Federation to voices that have too often been pushed to the margins: the displaced, the colonised, the children of conflict, the ones who grew up on the fault lines of history rather than in its comfortable centres. These cadets may come from worlds shaped by famine, war, climate collapse, political upheaval, and cultural erasure, and they carry those histories with them. Not as trauma porn, not as allegory, but as lived experience that informs how they see the Federation and what they expect from it.

This is a Federation that includes refugees who know what it means to lose a home, rebels who know what it costs to fight for one, and young people who have never had the luxury of assuming the universe will bend toward justice on its own. And honestly, that feels far more truthful to the world I’ve lived in, taught in, and been activist within — than the polished utopianism of earlier Trek.

It also feels more global. Not “global” in the corporate sense, but in the sense of the Global South: voices shaped by marginalisation, resilience, community survival, and the stubborn refusal to disappear. Voices that understand tomorrow not as a promise, but as a prize to claim.

And yes, there’s even a hint of something I recognise from home: that distinctly Australian refusal to take authority too seriously. A bit of larrikin energy slips through the cracks… the raised eyebrow, the quiet rebellion, the unspoken “yeah, nah” when someone in power makes a ridiculous claim. It’s subtle, but it’s there, and it gives the show a texture Trek has never quite managed before.

“We are the bridge between the ruins of the past and the Federation of the future. Don’t let the bridge collapse.”
— Lura Thok

Coming from a world outside the traditional centres of Federation power, that line lands differently. Starfleet Academy does something Trek has needed for a long time: it imagines a Federation that is not a monument to Earth’s ideals, but a living, contested, pluralist project shaped by many histories, many cultures, and many tomorrows.

Why This Matters in 2026

We are living through a moment where the ground keeps shifting beneath our feet. Institutions that once felt immovable now wobble under the weight of political polarisation, economic precarity, and a climate crisis that no longer belongs to the future tense. Certainties we grew up with — social, cultural, even scientific — have begun to fray. And young people today are navigating all of this while trying to build lives in a world that feels increasingly unstable.

Starfleet Academy doesn’t ignore that reality. It mirrors it.

This is a series shaped by the anxieties and solidarities of a generation raised on bushfires, pandemics, refugee crises, escalating wars, and the slow unravelling of systems that were supposed to protect them. A generation that has learned — often painfully — that what comes next is not guaranteed. And yet, despite all of that, they continue to imagine one anyway. They continue to build communities across borders, identities, and histories. They continue to believe that cooperation is not naïve, but necessary.

As someone who has spent decades teaching young people, I recognise that determination. I’m reminded of one student whose parents encouraged him to look at the stars through a telescope. He would teach impromptu astronomy sessions for classmates and teachers, pointing out nebulae and planets with the quiet confidence of someone who already understood his place in the universe. When his mother died of cancer, I attended her funeral as a mark of respect. He found me afterwards and remarked that on the night she passed, he had gone outside and looked up at the stars. I have never forgotten that. I always hoped I could be even half the teacher to him that his mother had been. I’ve seen the same determination in classrooms, in youth groups, in the quiet resilience of students who have already lived through more upheaval than many adults ever will. They are not cynical. They are not apathetic. They are exhausted, yes, but they are also astonishingly brave. They know the world is on fire, and they still choose to care.

Starfleet Academy honours that courage. It doesn’t offer escapism; it offers recognition. It says: we see you, we see the world you’ve inherited, and we believe you deserve better than this. It imagines a future shaped not by fear or dominance, but by shared possibility; a future built by people who understand that survival and solidarity are intertwined.

And that matters in 2026. It matters because we are surrounded by narratives of collapse, and we need stories that remind us collapse is not the only trajectory available. It matters because young people deserve to see themselves not as the inheritors of disaster, but as the architects of something new. It matters because hope, in times like these, is not a luxury. It is a form of resistance.

This isn’t just entertainment, it’s a cultural tsunami: a reminder that the galaxy ahead is still worth fighting for.

Screengrab from season 1, episode 2 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Paramount+

Outgrowing Past Limitations

The series honours The Next Generation … of course it does. TNG was a watershed moment, a cultural anchor, a moral compass for an entire generation. But it was also a product of its time: earnest, optimistic, and shaped by a distinctly American, middle‑class worldview that often mistook its own assumptions for universal truths. It offered diplomacy, but not always diversity. It offered clarity, but sometimes at the cost of complexity. It imagined a better world, but often through the lens of those who had already benefited from the old one.

Starfleet Academy doesn’t reject that legacy; it grows beyond it.

Where TNG presented a Federation that was confident, centralised, and morally certain, Starfleet Academy presents one that is decentralised, contested, and still learning. Where TNG often flattened cultural difference into allegory, Starfleet Academy allows cultures to speak in their own voices, not as metaphors, but as lived realities. Where TNG leaned on the calm authority of seasoned officers, Starfleet Academy leans into the raw, unfiltered honesty of youth.

And that shift matters. It matters because the world has changed. The centre of gravity — culturally, politically, demographically — has moved. The future will not be shaped by the same voices that shaped the past, and Trek finally seems willing to acknowledge that. It is no longer enough to imagine a Federation that looks like a polished extension of late‑20th‑century boomer liberalism. The Federation must be broader, messier, more plural, more global, and more honest about the histories it carries.

As someone who has watched this franchise evolve across half a century, I can say this with some authority: growth is not betrayal. Growth is the point. The Federation was never meant to be a finished utopia; it was meant to be a project: a living, breathing, imperfect attempt at building something better than what came before. Like any long-lasting project, it must be willing to revise itself.

Starfleet Academy does that revision work with a kind of quiet patience found in any good teaching moment: gentle where it needs to be, firm where it must be, and never once apologising for growing beyond what came before. It carries the optimism of earlier Trek, but without the patronising hand on the shoulder. It holds onto hope, but tempers it with the humility that comes from listening to voices long ignored. It keeps the dream alive, yes, but it finally admits that dreaming has a cost, and that the next generation will be the ones who pay it if we refuse to change.

This is Trek evolving; not away from its past, but toward its utopia.

Backlash, and Why the Criticism Misses the Point

Of course there’s backlash. There always is when something new threatens the comfort of old hierarchies. I’ve lived through enough cycles of fandom outrage to recognise the pattern: the same voices who once railed against women on the bridge, against Black captains, against queer characters (real or fictitious), against any shift that dared to widen the frame. The vocabulary changes, but the fear underneath it never does.

The complaints about Starfleet Academy — the mutterings about “wokeness,” the hand‑wringing about “politics,” the insistence that Trek has somehow lost its way — are not new. They echo the same resistance that once fought racial integration, gender equality, and queer visibility in the real world. They are the cultural equivalent of someone insisting the map is wrong because it no longer centres on their house.

And when I look at the cadets in this series, I see something deeply familiar. Over the years, the young people I’ve taught have reflected this same constellation of identities: openly queer and questioning, neurodivergent in ways the world is only just beginning to understand, living with disability, navigating migration, displacement, or intergenerational trauma, speaking in many languages, carrying many histories. They are not hypothetical. They are not symbolic. They are the real world — challenged, brilliant, resilient, and gloriously uncontained.

And they need to see themselves represented. Not as side characters, not as allegories, but as central to the story of their own lives ahead. Just as importantly, the rest of us need to see them too, in order to recognise the breadth of who they are, to understand the worlds they carry, and to accept that the future will be shaped by people who do not fit the narrow templates of the past.

It’s here that the old Starfleet motto (the one about reaching the stars through hardship) lands with new meaning. The struggle isn’t just about exploration; it’s about inclusion. It’s about who gets to pioneer what comes next, and who gets to be visible in it.

Starfleet Academy isn’t political in the partisan sense. It’s political in the human sense. It reflects the world as it is becoming, not the world some people wish it had remained. It acknowledges that the future will not be shaped by a single culture, a single worldview, or a single demographic that once assumed itself to be the default.

And that is precisely why some people find it threatening.

There’s even a touch of Australian bluntness in my reaction to it all: if your worldview can be undone by the existence of a few teenagers from different planets learning to work together, maybe the problem isn’t the show.

The backlash is not a sign of failure. It is proof that the series is doing something new and necessary. It is pushing the franchise into spaces it should have entered long ago. It is widening the frame, shifting the centre, and refusing to apologise for imagining a Federation that actually looks like the galaxy it claims to represent.

And if that unsettles a few people, well… good. Growth should unsettle us. That’s how we know it’s working. I’m reminded of my early teaching days, when I was warned about a “disruptive” teenager who supposedly couldn’t sit still or focus. In my very first lesson with his class, I slipped on a pair of reading glasses to begin the work. He stared at me, surprised, and quietly asked if I needed them. I told him yes, that sometimes they help me see things more clearly.

Without a word, he reached into his bag, took out his own glasses, and put them on. He read quietly for the rest of the lesson. Other teachers later admitted they hadn’t even known he needed them. All he’d ever needed was permission to see his world differently, and to realise that another way of being was possible.

And that’s the point. Once you’ve learned to see differently, you can’t unsee it. The same is true for the critics of Starfleet Academy. Their discomfort isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong; it’s a sign that something in their world is shifting, and they, too, will need to learn to see it differently.

Exploring Strange, New Worlds

Starfleet Academy is the first Trek series to imagine a utopia that is not anchored in American cultural dominance, but shaped by a genuinely global — even interplanetary — imagination. It is youthful, diverse, emotionally resonant, and unafraid to challenge the structures it inherits. Perhaps this explains some of the backlash from those clinging to imagined halcyon pasts rather than embracing a global future.

“Ad astra per aspera — through struggle, the stars.”
— Captain Nahla Ake

It’s impossible not to feel the sting of déjà vu. Starfleet Academy, cancelled after its second season, ostensibly because of ratings — just like the original Star Trek once was. We know how that story ended. What was dismissed and cut short became the foundation of a cultural phenomenon that reshaped science fiction and inspired generations. And imagine if Star Trek: The Next Generation had been cancelled after Season 2. The world would have missed out on a series that grew and evolved into a franchise-leading storyline.

After fifty years in this fandom, I recognise that same fragile, luminous potential here. Starfleet Academy has returned youth, courage, and optimism back to the franchise. To end it now is to extinguish something still growing, still becoming.

And we can’t ignore the courage of the creators who dared to make this series. They stepped into the unknown with the same spirit that has always defined Star Trek — the willingness to explore strange new worlds, to take risks, to imagine boldly even when the path ahead was uncertain. They echoed the courage of Gene Roddenberry and Lucille Ball in creating the original series, and changing the world ahead.

“The life of the village against the life of the stars. We are the village. We have tiny moments that get swallowed by big ones, and the only thing we know for sure is that one day, we will all be gone. We know but… we keep going. Maybe that’s what makes it matter.”
— Tarima Sadal

This is why this cancellation cannot be allowed to proceed. Stories like this — stories about youth, courage, diversity, imagination, and the stubborn hope that we can be better together — are the stories that keep the village alive while we reach for the stars. Cutting them short isn’t just a programming or financial decision; it’s a failure of imagination; an act of corporate cowardice; a betrayal of the futurism that Star Trek promotes.

This cancellation should be withdrawn. Not as a favour to protesting fans, but because the future deserves this story. Starfleet Academy should not be finished; it needs to boldly go where no TV show has gone before. If Star Trek has taught us anything over the last six decades, it’s that the future is something we build — and protect — together.

And that’s exactly why this cancellation must be reversed. We do not abandon the future simply because the present lacks courage. The stars are still waiting, and so are the cadets who were meant to reach them.

Note: Paramount promotional images used under fair dealing for review purposes.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with editorial assistance by CoPilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

I Have Seen the Future

Starfleet Academy:
“Ad astra per aspera” or “to the stars through difficulties.”

Photo by Womanizer WOW Tech on Unsplash

The future of our world — and particularly the Western world — feels increasingly precarious. Political divisions deepen, international conflicts unsettle long‑held assumptions about global stability, and social cohesion strains under the weight of competing identities and fears. It’s a moment defined by uncertainty, where headlines seem to offer little more than reminders of how fragile peace and unity can be. And yet, in the midst of this turbulence, I found an unexpected source of clarity: a single, understated episode of a Hollywood television series that dared to imagine a gentler, wiser, more cooperative humanity. That quiet vision of what we might become stood in stark contrast to the chaos of our present, and it has inspired me.

At its core, that quiet television moment resonated because it echoed something deeply humanistic — the belief that people, when given the chance, can grow toward empathy, cooperation, and understanding. Humanism has always asked us to imagine a world shaped not by fear or dominance, but by shared dignity and curiosity. Our arts and culture have traditionally been the vessels for that imagination: they challenge us, inspire us, and remind us of the better angels of our nature. Whether through literature, film, music, or the stories we tell around kitchen tables, culture has the power to lift our gaze beyond the immediate turmoil and invite us to picture a future where humanity chooses wisdom over conflict. That Hollywood TV episode did exactly that, offering a fragile but compelling glimpse of who we might yet become.

A World Pulled Toward Conflict and Colonialism

When we step back from the ideals that humanism and culture invite us to imagine, we’re confronted with a world that often seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Wars and regional conflicts continue to unsettle entire populations, reminding us how quickly fear can override cooperation. Even within nations long considered stable, political unrest has become a defining feature of public life. Nowhere is this more visible than in the United States, where deep ideological divides have reshaped communities and strained the social fabric. Some movements promote a worldview that elevates one nation, one identity, or one interpretation of history above all others — a mindset that wrongly suggests superiority rather than shared humanity. This posture, rooted in certainty and exclusion, stands in stark contrast to the betterment of all.

The United States has long projected two contradictory images into the world: a nation deeply entangled in global conflicts, and a nation that simultaneously imagines itself as a beacon of progress and possibility. Few cultural works embody this tension more clearly than the US franchise, Star Trek. Born in the midst of the Cold War and shaped by American anxieties and aspirations, the franchise offered a vision of a future defined by exploration, diplomacy, and scientific curiosity. Yet even this optimism carries the imprint of the culture that created it. The utopianism of Star Trek is often filtered through a distinctly American lens — one that has historically reflected its own limitations, from orientalist tropes to racial and gender imbalances among its central characters.

Even its attempts at inclusivity sometimes reflected the limits of its cultural vantage point. Characters presented as “diverse” were often African‑American or Asian‑American rather than people rooted in their own distinct cultures and histories, meaning that representation was still filtered through a US lens. This mattered because it subtly reinforced the idea that American identity was the default from which all other identities were interpreted. In doing so, the franchise unintentionally flattened global perspectives, offering diversity without fully embracing the richness of the world beyond its borders.

Since 1945, the United States has engaged in roughly a dozen major wars and more than a hundred military conflicts, a pattern that underscores how deeply its identity has been shaped by both idealism and interventionism. Likewise, the fictitious Starfleet has struggled to balance its militarism with its potential for peace, complete with a Prime Directive that is intended to prevent militarism and imperialism, but instead often ignores human rights abuse.

This is why recognising these limitations is so important. When a narrative claims universality while quietly centring one nation’s worldview, it shapes how audiences imagine the future — and who they imagine within it. Stories that unintentionally reproduce narrow cultural assumptions risk shrinking the possibilities of tomorrow to the boundaries of today. By acknowledging where these narratives fall short, we open space for futures that are genuinely global, genuinely inclusive, and genuinely reflective of the full spectrum of human experience.

The Future Arrives

This is why the moment in “Starfleet Academy” (episode 2: “Beta Test”) feels so striking. In the Betazoid resolution — where the Federation agrees to shift its institutional focus away from Earth and toward Betazed — the franchise quietly steps beyond its long‑standing US‑centric, Eurocentric, and Northern‑Hemisphere framing. It was still a flawed representation (the Betazoid world is still white, US-cultured, and patriarchal) but the symbolism of this handover is deep and meaningful. In a single gesture, the story acknowledges that the future of humanity cannot be anchored in one nation, one culture, or one hemisphere. It implicitly, symbolically opens the door to the global Southern Hemisphere, to Africa, Asia, South America, and the Pacific, to perspectives and identities that have historically been peripheral in the Star Trek universe.

In this episode, something shifts. Instead of exporting a narrow American self‑image as the destiny of the world, Star Trek tentatively gestures toward a broader, more pluralistic future — one that finally begins to imagine humanity as a genuinely global project.

I have noted the intensity of criticism directed at this latest iteration of Star Trek — complaints that the franchise has become “too diverse,” “too inclusive,” or “too political,” as though expanding the range of human experience on screen somehow threatens the legitimacy of those who once saw themselves as the default. These reactions echo a broader cultural anxiety: a fear among some groups that equality is only acceptable when it preserves their own centrality. Movements that resist diversity often frame themselves as defending tradition, but history shows that such positions rarely endure. Those who once defended slavery, racial segregation, or rigid gender hierarchies also believed they were protecting a natural order. Over time, those beliefs were rejected, not because change was easy, but because the moral arc of society gradually widened to include more people, more voices, and more truths.

In that sense, the backlash against inclusive storytelling feels less like a meaningful cultural stance and more like the fading echo of a worldview struggling to keep its footing. History is filled with beliefs that once seemed immovable — from segregation or heterosexism to rigid gender hierarchies — yet each eventually receded as society grew beyond them. The resistance to diversity will follow the same trajectory. These old perspectives persist for a time, but they gradually lose their force as the world expands around them, becoming relics of an era too narrow for the century ahead.

The youth of today — much like the cadets in Starfleet Academy — are growing up in a world where diversity is not a threat but a fact, and where cooperation across cultures is not an aspiration but a necessity. The Betazoid resolution in episode 2 captures this shift beautifully: a symbolic move away from a single cultural centre toward a future shaped by many voices. It is a reminder that the next generation is already imagining a world more expansive than the one they inherited, and that their vision, not the fears of those clinging to old hierarchies, will shape the future.

A Generation Ready to Imagine Something Larger

When this episode showed their arrival at San Francisco – to the tune of Scott Mackenzie’s old hippie classic “San Francisco” – I feared that the episode would once again reflect US-centric notions of liberalism and humanity. The episode concluded with an inspiring transcendence: the old hippie notion of inter-generational change was brought about by the youth of Starfleet and Betazed working together.

This shift matters because it brings us back to the heart of humanism: the belief that humanity’s future is not predetermined by the fears of the present, but shaped by our capacity to grow beyond them. When Starfleet Academy dares to move its symbolic center away from Earth — and by extension away from the cultural dominance that has defined so much of Western storytelling — it gestures toward a future in which no single nation or worldview claims ownership of humanity’s destiny. That is a profoundly humanistic act. It suggests that progress is not the property of one culture, but the shared work of many.

And this is where the generational parallel becomes impossible to ignore. The young characters in the series, like the young people in our world, are not burdened by the same anxieties that fuel backlash against diversity. They are growing up in a globalised environment where difference is normal, where collaboration across cultures is expected, and where identity is understood as expansive rather than fixed. Their instinct is not to retreat into hierarchy but to reach outward. The Betazoid resolution captures this beautifully: a moment where the future is no longer imagined through the narrow lens of a single hemisphere, but through the collective imagination of many worlds. It mirrors the way today’s youth are already redefining what community, equality, and belonging mean.

This is why the criticisms of newer Star Trek — the complaints about “wokeness” or the discomfort with diverse characters — feel increasingly out of step with the world that is emerging. Such reactions echo older systems of exclusion that once seemed immovable but ultimately collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Just as societies eventually rejected slavery, segregation, and rigid gender hierarchies, so too will the resistance to inclusion fade. These worldviews persist for a time, but they do not endure. They cannot. They are too small for the world we are becoming.

What endures instead is the quiet, steady expansion of the human story. The recognition that no single culture, nation, or ideology can speak for all of us. The understanding that the future will be shaped not by those who cling to old hierarchies, but by those who imagine something larger. In this sense, the hopeful moment in Starfleet Academy is more than a narrative choice — it is a cultural signal. It reflects a world where young people are already building connections across borders, already challenging inherited assumptions, already envisioning futures that are more inclusive, more global, and more humane than anything that came before.

I look forward to a future for the franchise that draws from the full richness of humanity rather than a narrow cultural lens. This would be Star Trek at its finest — finally living out its own ideal of “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations” in both story and spirit. Even more than that, I look forward to the real world that such a future implies: a world where our shared imagination is shaped by many voices, many perspectives, and many voices working together to build something larger than any one of us.

And perhaps that is the real lesson: even in a time of conflict, division, and uncertainty, the seeds of a broader, more generous future are already being planted. The youth of today — like the cadets of tomorrow — are not waiting for permission to imagine a better world. They are already doing it, quietly and confidently, in ways that transcend the boundaries of the past. In that small moment when the youth of Starfleet stood alongside the youth of Betazed, I realised I had seen the future — the same future that emerges whenever young Israelis and Palestinians reach for understanding, when young Russians and Ukrainians dream of rebuilding instead of destroying, when the children of Yemen or Sudan or Congo imagine peace in place of war. Not in the stars alone, but in the courage of a new generation willing to imagine differently.

I have seen the future.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

Earthlight

Apollo 11 lunar footprint (NASA photo)

Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the first liquid-fueled rocket launch.

I walk the grey dust where their footprints remain,
Pressed into silence, preserved without rain.
The shadows lie long in this airless light,
Yet something familiar steadies me tonight.

Apollo came first with a single nation’s pride,
A Roman name carried on a Cold War tide.
Its courage was real, but its vision was small,
A triumph for some, not a future for all.

Artemis rises with a broader aim,
Not conquest, not rivalry, not glory or fame.
A mission shaped by many voices and views,
A future imagined by all we include.

And we follow the dreamers who gazed from below,
Who saw in that lantern a place we might go.
They pictured its valleys, imagined its plains,
Gave substance to longing that language constrains.

From poets who whispered of journeys untold,
To thinkers who mapped it in silver and gold,
To children who pointed and claimed it as ours,
Their visions still rise with the dust of these hours.

We walk in the footsteps of those who first dreamed flight,
From watchers of tides to keepers of ancient night.
From minds who traced how the planets would roam,
To builders of engines that carried us from home.

The ones who saw futures in fire and flight,
Their courage and craft shape our path through this light.
Their questions became the foundations we use,
A legacy guiding the journey we choose.

The Earth hangs distant, a fragile sphere,
A reminder of everything we hold dear.
Borders vanish when seen from this place,
Revealing one planet, one human race.

We walk by knowledge that time cannot sever,
By lessons learned from Apollo’s endeavour.
Their boldness lit the path we now choose,
A path where no one is asked to lose.

This dust recalls the stories we share,
From Africa’s first watchers of the night air,
Reading the heavens in patterns of fire and stone,
Long before empires claimed the sky as their own.

Here too, we adapt, we endure, we belong,
Sometimes in silence, sometimes in song.
A chorus of humans beneath a stark sun,
Continuing a journey the first steps begun.

Let shadows drift freely across the old regolith;
Earthlight will guide us far better than myth.
Its glow is a promise no darkness can shun:
That we shape our tomorrow by standing as one.

Author’s Note: this poem is companion to A Distant Sun.

This blog ©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with some editorial and artistic assistance from Deep AI and CoPilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

To Boldly Go

“These are the voyages of our ‘starship’ enterprise. Its ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no-one has gone before!”

Creating A Future History

Art by CoPilot AI

Decades later, the church building is still there, but the adjoining church hall, where Austrek held its first public meetings – forty-nine years ago today – has long since been demolished and replaced with shop fronts. The infrastructure may change, but its echo endures. In this busy street in a northern suburb of Melbourne, traces remain of past times, when a sanctuary for those seeking shelter in the past also offered shelter for those seeking consolation in the future. Of the six main public spaces where Austrek has met over the last five decades, four of them have been church halls, demonstrating the intersection between community spaces and collective belonging.

The World That Was

You may be old enough to remember a world before the digital age, when connection meant conversation, not clicks. This was a world without the Internet, mobile phones or streaming services. No instant communication or digital information. If you wanted social media, you went out and met others in real life. Instead of googling, you read a book, or headed to the library to consult encyclopaedias.

For news, you relied on the evening TV news bulletin or picked up a newspaper, knowing that the headlines were already at least a day old. I recall the Apollo 13 Moon mission, when the front page of a Melbourne newspaper was overprinted with a daily 3am “Stop Press” notice in red ink – an otherwise unthinkable notion for something as inviolate and sacrosanct as a newspaper. These were our closest to instant communication and worldly wisdom: many Star Trek fans collected scrap books full of news clippings like they were collecting holy relics.

These were the times before streaming and YouTube, before DVDs and videocassettes – even before modern marketing made copyright issues ubiquitous and inviolate. Fans of TV programs took recordings of their favourite programs on audio cassettes, for their own personal use, and replayed them endlessly until they were word perfect on the script. They photographed their favourite shows off the TV screen. Decades before mobile phones and their inbuilt cameras, photography was more of an effort and an art. Commercial photos and souvenirs were largely unavailable.

Fandom Begins with Persistence

Photos required patience: you bought a roll of film, used a camera, then handed the film over to the local pharmacy, waiting a week for your memories to be developed and printed.

In my tweens during the early 1970s, my rapt attendance at a local movie theatre to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey while university-aged couples necked, led to my attending the theatre one weekend with my pocket camera and some rolls of film so I could take photos of the spaceships. After snap-snap-snapping during the movie, I took my rolls of film to my local pharmacy and impatiently waited the obligatory week for my photos to return. I was disappointed to find that – due to the darkness within the theatre – none of my photos had come out. The pharmacist felt sorry for me and gave me a free roll of film.

Kodak Pocket Instamatic and flash cubes

“Two rolls of film, one bruised ego, and a carry bag of flash cubes — proof that fandom begins with persistence.”

Undeterred, I returned the following weekend with my camera, more rolls of film, and a carry bag full of flash cubes — determined to photograph the wondrous spaceships. This time, my attempts at photography – flashes and all – caused consternation, likely misunderstandings, and mayhem in the theatre. After surviving being nearly strangled by local university-aged boys in the audience (their girlfriends told them to “leave the boy alone”), I finished my photos and once again (rather smugly this time) presented my films to the pharmacy, waiting another agonising week — only to find that these photos had also not come out. I explained what had happened to the pharmacist, and this time he sternly told me off.

Sadly, I gave up any further attempts to photograph these filmic images — only to joyously find later that the Space Age Bookshop in Melbourne was selling slides of these exact same fictional spaceships. My amateur and failed attempts to deepen my connection with my interest in things science fictional were finally starting to be anticipated and met by rudimentary professional marketing enterprises.

Josh Withers on Unsplash

Phones of that era were firmly fixed on walls or situated on shelves. Wireless phones only existed in SF programs. Most homes had a single handset connected by wires, and long-distance calls meant booking ahead through an operator. If you were out and about, you found a TARDIS-shaped phone booth on a street corner and dialled home.

Phone booths were great places to shelter from the harsh weather as you made private calls to friends that you dared not make at home (on the family phone in the living room). They were also great places for Clark Kent to change into his Superman underwear – and those phone directories! In the days before modern privacy laws, these phone books comprised hundreds of pages containing the names, addresses and phone numbers of many thousands of people; I knew fans who had fun skimming through the directory pages to find the names of their favourite fictional characters – not to ring them, of course, but just because it was fun to see fictitious names in print in the “real” world.

This was the world a generation ago: awed by the space age and watching men walking on the Moon, but still stuck in an era before space age technology had trickled down to the everyday. It would take another twenty years before the Internet or mobile phones started making public appearances, another decade after that before home computers brought the Internet into our homes, and another two decades again before AI became commonplace.

Television in those days was a box in your living room, connected to small rabbit-ears antennae that sat on top of your TV set, or connected via wires to an antenna on your roof. Reception was limited to a handful of local TV stations that were accessible via your antenna; and if you wanted to watch a TV program, you were totally reliant upon the whims of the programmers at those local TV stations. In the days before streaming or DVDs or videotapes, when your favourite TV show was taken off the air, you had no guarantee that you would ever see it again. (And if you wanted to see a movie, go to a movie theatre).

And then, as if someone flipped a switch, the future began to arrive… not all at once, but in colour.

Future Echoes

On 1 March 1975, Australia officially turned on colour television – although colour test transmissions had commenced some months beforehand, hinting at a rainbow of multicoloured diversity in our formerly monotone black-and-white TV services. In those early days of colour TV, the colour palette was turned up high, so everything appeared almost fluorescent. This was especially breathtaking, for example, when seeing that cricket matches were played on the MCG grass field that was blindingly green.

It was not a smooth transition. The National Library of Australia notes:

“The [television] sets cost more than $1,000, the equivalent of approximately $8,800 in today’s money. The many who could not afford to upgrade their sets continued to watch in black and white.”

As a result of colour TV, local stations pulled many old programs out of their archives and repeated them – now in living colour. Star Trek was one of these programs, airing in a G-rated (suitable for children) timeslot for about three months on Saturday afternoons.. maybe fifteen episodes. For nerdy SF-starved teens, it was wondrous.

I remember sitting around the dining table for our family’s traditional Saturday evening dinner, and at my pleading they allowed me to have the television turned on so I could watch while we ate. Upon hearing the opening narration: “Space: The Final Frontier…” my father laughed and commented that space was the infinite frontier. Having been suitably chastened for the gall to watch television during family tea-time, I was allowed to watch the rest of the episode without critical commentary, although I was compelled to ignore my mother and sisters rolling their eyes in patronising amusement. Within my 14 year-old brain, I felt the thrill of space-age adventure mixed with deference to a nostalgic program that dated from the Apollo space era. I was hooked. Over subsequent weeks, in between the TV episodes on Saturday afternoons, I turned to reading Star Trek books, especially when the series was withdrawn from that timeslot, and later appeared in erratic late night “graveyard shift” timeslots.

This was an era when Australian Star Trek viewers were totally dependent upon the whims of Channel 9 programmers – who took the show on and off, often late at night. I even recall late night viewing of one episode, “Amok Time”, containing a scene in which Kirk and Spock face off against each other, ready to fight to the death. Snip! A Channel 9 film editor suddenly cuts out the subsequent five minutes of action – and Kirk went from standing courageously to lying apparently dead in front of Spock. As I sat there stupefied and puzzled, the reason for this edit suddenly became clear: the scene was ended quickly, in order to make way for another five minutes of advertising Saba and Franco Cozzo furniture.

Fans became frantic for more Star Trek, a hunger which Channel 9 seemed reluctant to satiate, despite our phone calls, letters and petitions (I recall being told by one Channel Nine Programming Manager that they had enough problems in their workplace without having to worry about giving fans what they wanted). Into this vacuum stepped a local film theatre manager.

A portion of a Ritz theatre flyer, with the bottom half of the page advertising the first Star Trek Marathon on 27 November 1976

Bob Johnston was a local film enthusiast who had collected many films and ran a small theatre – the Ritz – in a hired theatrette in Errol Street, North Melbourne (his Sydney operations were likewise run out of ANZAC House). Out of curiosity, he threw a couple Star Trek episodes into a theatre night, and the audience response was so positive that he decided to run a Star Trek Marathon featuring Star Trek episodes running “from dusk ’til dawn”, and for the first time ever, he had to open the theatrette balcony in order to accommodate the audience. Naturally, this meant that the Marathons became a regular feature in both his Melbourne and Sydney theatres.

My teenager friends and I were already running an amateur student science club, the Melbourne Amateur Science Club (MASC), and we excitedly attended this first Star Trek Marathon. We even took some photocopied flyers advertising Austrek (a subsection of MASC), and these were snapped up by Marathon audience members and caused us to be overwhelmed with immediate sign-ups for new memberships (an annual membership initially costing $1, although postage costs for our newsletter forced us to quickly increase that to $2.50). We quickly concluded that we did not have the resources to run both our school children’s science club and the fledgling Austrek (which in one night had received more enthusiastic memberships than MASC had received in its years of operation), so we closed down MASC and dedicated our limited teenage time and efforts to Austrek. That first Star Trek Marathon on 27 November 1976 was retrospectively assigned as being the date of our club’s public launch. We even met a lovely young lady, a school teacher named Diane, who encouraged us to run our new club.

Science fiction fans have traditionally been voracious readers, and local fans were no exception. Concurrent to the aforementioned media activities, we had previously sought Star Trek-related material via a scarce number of books. British author James Blish had novelised the Star Trek episodes, and US author Alan Dean Foster had done the same for the Star Trek animated series. Beyond that, such books were rare. We started watching Star Trek on TV, fell in love with its magic, and scoured bookshops for more.

There were two books that particularly made a difference in the early club. Star Trek Lives! introduced us to the concept of fan clubs and fandom. We learned that there were others like us: keen and enthusiastic for Star Trek and space age excitement; running fan clubs and conventions; writing fan fiction and publishing fanzines. This book had probably helped inspire us to start Austrek as a sub-section of our humble little schoolkids science club, MASC, and begin to consider expanding that subsection into something more (the Star Trek Marathons helped that option take off like a rocket).

The second book to impact our lives was I Am Not Spock, an autobiographical account by actor Leonard Nimoy. He complained that any time anyone wrote a letter and addressed the envelope to “Mr Spock, Hollywood, California”, the Post Office delivered it to him. Encouraged by this, we did something that I would now recommend that nobody ever do: we wrote to him using that very method. Dozens of us signed a letter asking if we could officially start a Star Trek fan club, and we posted it with teenaged-sized bravery, wondering if we would ever get a reply. To our surprise, we did – but not from the man himself.

It turns out that there was an organisation called the Star Trek Welcommittee (STW) – a Star Trek volunteer-based information exchange network, based in the USA. In the days before the digital communications, they wrote a snail mail reply to us, recommending that we contact a mysterious “D. Marchant” who lived in Melbourne (but in far-away Mordialloc, a southern suburb – too far for us to visit in the days before we were old enough to own or drive our own cars). With some fear and trembling, I dialled my home phone’s rotary dial and called this mysterious “D. Marchant”. To my astonishment, my new friend – Diane from the Star Trek Marathons – answered the phone. It turned out that she was the world STW representative for every country outside the USA.

Diane mentored, encouraged and assisted us with everything from contacting local fans, to posting out our first real newsletter (she donated the stamps for us to afford the postage costs). It was full-steam ahead.

A portion of page 1 of the first Captain’s Log

The following months were a mix of frantic and exciting, especially balancing schoolwork and homework against building Austrek infrastructure. We published our first Austrek newsletter, titled Trekkie Talk, and then changed the name after Diane gently explained how the word “trekkie” was seen as a negative by many Star Trek fans at that time; leading to the newsletter being relaunched as The Captain’s Log.

Our first public meeting took place in the abovementioned church hall in Fairfield on 27 February 1977. The pastor was annoyed when I asked for a receipt for the hall hire cost: the princely sum of five dollars. He hand-wrote a receipt, making sure to exaggerate the receipt number as #1 (the 1 being preceded by a ridiculous number of zeroes) as his gentle protest.

The meeting was attended by Diane and her mother Jessie, by many of the teenage club members, and a mix of new members who had joined since the first Marathon. One teenage boy dressed as Darth Vader, managing to go to the milk bar next to the church and trying to buy a Star Wars icy pole, getting flustered, and tripping over the Twisties stand. But our youth and enthusiasm were infectious: our club sped ahead into new activities over the coming months, not being held back by wisdom or caution. We had never tried anything before, and we had no idea what was possible or impossible, so we generally went ahead and did it anyway. Any time we had an idea, we anticipated the later Star Trek mantra of Make It So, and we did. Our human adventure was just beginning.

Early Austrek logo

Austrek has organised many activities: including club meetings, car rallies, birthday parties, weddings, Christmas events, weekend events at private homes, New Year’s Day events, trivial pursuit nights, camps, fan fiction, fanzines, newsletters, collating parties, conventions, fan films, art displays, costume competitions,’courts martial’ and ‘ambassadors’ banquets’ and other cosplay events, formal debates, letter campaigns to help NASA or medical causes, charities, banquets, movie nights, sold out theatre bookings for virtually every Star Trek movie premiere, museum displays, filk songs, radio programs, Moomba floats, media interviews, medical and personal interventions, picnics to Hanging Rock, merchandise including T-shirts and cups and stickers and playing cards and lanyards, contributions to books and magazines, assisting the start of many other SF media clubs, assisting fan authors and fan artists to become professionals, providing a welcoming sanctuary for many people facing issues of diversity, isolation and difference, introducing women to science fiction and science fiction to women… the sky was our limit. Whether creative activities borne of need in the early days to find more Star Trek inspiration amidst the cultural desert; or more recent consumerist activities to accommodate the wide range of franchise material now available, the club has learnt and adapted to suit changing commercial and copyright and cultural interests.

As for me, I will never forget the many people who have told me (over the last five decades) how Austrek literally saved their lives by providing supportive social networks.

We may not have changed the world overnight, but we have changed it one life at a time. After half a century, our journey – our legacy – continues.

And the rest is history.

“Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. Well, there it sits.”
– Picard, Measure of A Man, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This blog ©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with some editorial and layout assistance from CoPilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.