Category: Star Trek

Dangerous Visions, Safe Stories

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.
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.”

— Frederik Pohl

Artwork by Deep AI

Fandom as a Catalyst for 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?”

— Octavia E. Butler

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 AI
Star 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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

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.

Bibliography

  • Geoff Allshorn, 2021. A Kiss is (Not) Just A Kiss, Humanist World blog, 1 August.
  • = = = = = = = = =, 2025. Forgotten Futures, Humanist World blog, 8 September.
  • Robert W. Bly, 2002. The Online Copywriter’s Handbook (features an interview with Harlan Ellison in 1979), p. 19.
  • The Comics Journal, 1980. Harlan Ellison Interview, Issue #53.
  • 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.
©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. Editorial/artistic/research assistance from Anthropic Claude AI, Copilot AI, and Deep AI.

Sexuality & Queer Futures

Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Part III

Published to commemorate the birthday of Samuel Delaney.

“The Utopian futures of Star Trek have remained determinedly heteronormative, with occasional hand-waving to mollify the fans – there are gays, but we’ve not seen them (where’s Will?); there were gays, but a plague killed them (triffic); or there were gays, but it got cured (thanks). The best we are left with is a game of Spot the Queer – a tactic borrowed from the McCarthyites – where those of us in the know decode a look, a phrase, a liking for show-tunes, into the sense that so-and-so in that program or film is secretly gay. The streets find their own uses for things, and we slash away.”

– Butler, 2009, p. 388

Speculative fiction has always promised us the future — just not to all of us. From the beginning, the genre learned how to dream big while keeping its doors firmly shut. Lucian’s lunar satire, Shelley’s stitched‑together Creature… desire was there, but only so it could be mocked, punished, or corrected. Queer longing was never the problem. The problem was the genre that insisted on disciplining it.

Lucian gave us men marrying men on the Moon, but only as a joke — a bit of cultural inversion played for laughs, not liberation. Shelley’s Creature wanted love and was punished for daring to ask. These early works didn’t open pathways; they taught speculative fiction how to bolt them shut. Queerness became something to point at, not something to inhabit.

By the time the pulp magazines arrived, the exclusions had calcified. Amazing Stories, Astounding, all those glossy futures full of straight white men conquering planets and seducing decorative women — that was the template. Queer writers hid behind initials. Women were told to use male names. Black and Indigenous futures weren’t just absent; they were unimaginable. Even as the genre evolved — Golden Age optimism, New Wave experimentation, cyberpunk rebellion — it carried its old scaffolding with it.

And it wasn’t just about who appeared on the page. Genre taught readers how they were supposed to feel. Love was straight. Bodies were binary. Intimacy was allowed only if it served the plot. Any attempt to write queer desire was dismissed as “not real science fiction,” “too political,” or “just fan fiction.” The genre became a kind of closet, and queer readers learned to survive by reading between the lines.

But silence never held completely. Queer fans slashed the canon open. Women built zines and archives. Disabled readers demanded access. Marginalized creators wrote futures that refused to be corrected. Speculative fiction became a battleground — not over what could be imagined, but over who was allowed to imagine it.

Even the Moon Wasn’t Safe

Lucian’s A True History (2nd century CE) is often called the first piece of science fiction, and it already tells us something about the genre’s instincts. It imagines men marrying men on the Moon — not as solidarity, not as possibility, but as satire. Queerness is a punchline, an inversion of Greek norms meant to amuse the reader. The Moon men aren’t subjects; they’re spectacles.

So from the very beginning, speculative fiction didn’t reach for liberation. It reached for parody. Lucian’s queerness is alien, exotic, and ridiculous — a pattern the genre would repeat for centuries. Even in its earliest form, science fiction learned to treat queer bodies as curiosities, not companions.

From lunar satire to coded survival, the genre’s relationship with queer desire began with a joke… and queer readers have been rewriting the punchline ever since.

Genre Was the Closet

Speculative fiction didn’t just forget queer desire — it trained itself to suppress it. The rules were simple: love was straight, bodies were binary, and anything outside that frame had to be alien, tragic, or villainous. If queerness showed up at all, it was only so the story could punish it.

Across the 20th century, the biggest franchises — Star Wars, Doctor Who, Babylon 5, The Twilight Zone — offered no openly queer characters. Not one. Before the 1990s, queerness was either invisible or punished for daring to be visible. Even Sulu, retroactively declared gay in Star Trek Beyond, spent decades as a character whose queerness existed only in the negative space. The genre didn’t overlook queer people. It taught itself to erase them.

As James Satter put it:

“Forty years after his first appearance, Hikaru Sulu is heterosexual only through inference; he remains discernibly queer.”

When queerness did appear, it was coded and punished. The flamboyant villain…. the seductive alien… the emotionally unstable outsider. Queer-coded characters were never the heroes; they were the threat.

The Forever War turned homosexuality into a state mandate, framed as dystopian. Stranger in a Strange Land dismissed queerness as cultural decay. The Mule in Foundation was sexually ambiguous and emotionally deviant, his queerness folded into his psychic instability. Lost in Space gave us Dr. Smith, coded as camp to signal danger (and to hint at nastier implications about boys and predators). Doctor Who offered the Master (seductive, theatrical, unhinged) and Davros, whose obsessive fixation on the Doctor echoed the genre’s fear of queer intimacy. Star Wars gave us Palpatine’s decadent menace and Hux’s repressed fury, both queer-coded. Blake’s 7 gave us Servalan, glamorous and predatory, and Travis, whose scarred obsession with Blake read like repressed desire turned violent.

Even stories that weren’t “about” sexuality still rehearsed the same logic. In Gattaca, Vincent must masquerade as genetically “normal” to access a future denied to him. In R.U.R., robots are punished for wanting love. In Clone Wars, clones who assert individuality or intimacy are labelled defective or unstable. These weren’t accidents. They were choices. Queerness was allowed only as threat, never as truth.

And Star Trek, the franchise that promised a better future, wasn’t immune. Q’s fixation on Picard, Trelane’s camp omnipotence, the (originally) all‑male Borg collective, Kivas Fajo’s obsessive desire to possess Data… queerness was spectacle, jealousy, danger. Even HAL 9000, in 2001, is framed as a being too refined and too sensitive… a queer-coded threat in a world of men.

Genre didn’t just exclude queer people. It built a closet and called it world‑building.

The Queer of Gothos

The Enterprise enters a “star desert” (so-described, with references to dunes, mirages, and oases) and waiting in the middle of it all is Trelane, the Squire of Gothos. He lives in an opulent oasis, kidnaps crew members, collects Earth memorabilia, and performs his own private drag show of history. He plays soldier, fashion designer, judge, spoiled aristocrat. He throws tantrums when denied applause. His fixation on Kirk is unmistakably queer-coded. Later canon calls him a juvenile Q, but honestly, he didn’t need the retcon. He was already camp.

James Doohan once wrote about Roddenberry’s wartime encounter with an effeminate sheikh: a desert rescue, romantic overtures, and the delicate dance of not offending a powerful host in an otherwise hostile environment. The parallels are hard to ignore. The Squire of Gothos reads like a stylised retelling: queerness framed as spectacle, hospitality edged with threat, desire punished for wanting too much.

Trelane doesn’t just bend reality; he plays with it. He’s a child in costume, demanding admiration, desperate for connection, and punished the moment he reaches for it. And once again, the straight-coded hero escapes, while the queer-coded host is scolded, corrected, and sent to his room.

 

From villains to lovers, the path remains tainted: Riker’s intersex lover Soren, in The Outcast, is forcibly “corrected” and returned to him as a shell of herself. Willow and Tara’s kiss in Buffy is followed by Tara’s death – ditto for Talia Winters following her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fling with Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5. Captain Jack Harkness flirts across timelines, but his queerness is played for spectacle, not sincerity, and his lover dies tragically. Even Dumbledore’s love is retroactive, revealed only after the story safely ends, and never allowed to live on the page or the stage.

These weren’t accidents. They were genre norms. Queer desire was framed as unnatural, disgusting, or deviant; comprising a topic avoided in polite conversation, and within franchises seeking not to alienate conservative consumers; and erased from canon.

They Let Us Love, Then Made Us Pay

Somewhere between Wyoming and the Delta Quadrant, there was always a Brokeback Asteroid waiting for us.

The pattern is old, and it’s everywhere. A queer‑coded character reaches for love, intimacy, or selfhood — and the story punishes them for it. The straight‑coded character survives, grieves, and moves on. The queer one is erased.

You already know the classics — Soren, Lenara, Tara, Ianto, Lexa — but science fiction has been rehearsing this choreography for decades.

Star Trek kept returning to the same script

  • Petri & Elaan (TOS): Queerness coded as primness and ineffectuality.
  • Charlie X (TOS): Charlie’s needy fixation on Kirk is punished with exile.
  • Trelane (TOS): Camp omnipotence framed as threat.
  • The Lorelai Signal (TAS): Heterosexuality as biological inevitability.
  • Data & Fajo (TNG): Queer‑coded villain punished; Data walks away untouched.
  • Riker & Soren (TNG): Soren is “corrected”; Riker grieves.
  • Riker & Brenna (TNG – “Up the Long Ladder”):
    Brenna asks Riker if he likes girls. “Of course,” he says, because the script can imagine no other answer. A tiny moment that reveals everything: heterosexuality is compulsory, unquestioned, and absolute.
  • Crusher & Odan (TNG): Beverly recoils from queerness; the future snaps back to straight.
  • Jadzia & Lenara (DS9): A kiss across lifetimes, then silence.
  • Seven of Nine (Voyager): Deep intimacy with women reframed as “mentorship”; only straight romance made canon.
  • Trip & the Cogenitor (Enterprise): A third‑gender being dies; Trip is told off for trying to help.
  • Garak & Bashir (DS9): Queer‑coded longing suppressed by producers.

Doctor Who and its universe weren’t immune

  • The Master: Decades of queer‑coded obsession with the Doctor, always punished.
  • Nyssa & Tegan: Intimacy coded but never allowed to breathe.
  • Ace: Queer‑coded, punished for desire; queerness confirmed only in novels.
  • Jack & Ianto (Torchwood): Love allowed, then killed.
  • Clara & Me (Ashildr): Romantic‑coded bond teased, never textual.

Star Wars repeated the pattern

  • Asajj Ventress: Queer‑coded intensity punished with betrayal and death.
  • General Hux: Repressed, brittle, humiliated, discarded.
  • Lando (Solo): Pansexuality played as a joke; nothing allowed to be real.

Battlestar Galactica (2004)

  • Felix Gaeta: Queer, idealistic, executed by firing squad.
  • Cylon fluidity: Non‑binary‑coded bodies framed as seductive or dangerous.

The Expanse

  • Camina Drummer: Queer in the books; the show softens and sidelines her relationships.
  • Julie Mao: Desire punished; she becomes a corpse‑bride for an alien intelligence.

Fringe

  • Alt‑Astrid & Astrid: Queer‑coded tenderness never allowed to be textual.

Orphan Black

  • Cosima & Delphine: Canonical love, but Delphine is shot, resurrected, traumatised.
  • Tony: Introduced as a trans clone, then erased.

Sense8

  • Nomi & Amanita: Groundbreaking, but the show is cancelled before their story can fully unfold.

Literature’s long shadow

  • Baron Harkonnen (Dune): One of the most infamous queer‑coded villains in SF.
  • Ender’s Game: Intense boy/boy intimacy punished with isolation and violence.
  • Hyperion: Queer‑coded longing framed as tragic or morally compromised.
  • Altered Carbon: Fluid bodies treated as grotesque or disposable.

Video games, too

  • Mass Effect: Queer characters often killed, traumatised, or sidelined.
  • The Last of Us: Bill & Frank’s love framed through loss (game version).

The straight‑coded character survives.
The queer‑coded character is punished, erased, or killed.
Grief becomes a privilege reserved for heterosexuals.

These weren’t isolated incidents. They were patterns. They were genre norms. Queer desire wasn’t just punished, it was erased. And queer fans learned to mourn quietly, between the lines.

 

A Whole New World

Not everyone followed the script.

While mainstream science fiction kept rehearsing the same old punishments, a handful of writers cracked the genre open from the inside. They didn’t ask permission. They didn’t wait for the future to arrive. They built it themselves.

Theodore Sturgeon was one of the first to refuse the closet.

In 1953, The World Well Lost gave us two alien lovers fleeing persecution — a thinly veiled allegory for same‑sex love, written with tenderness instead of fear. Venus Plus X imagined a post‑binary society where gender dissolves into possibility. And in “Amok Time,” he slipped in an ambiguous final moment that launched decades of Kirk/Spock slash. Sturgeon didn’t code queerness as threat. He coded it as love.

James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) broke the genre’s gender rules by disguising herself as a man.

Her stories — Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, The Women Men Don’t See — didn’t just critique gender; they weaponised it. Tiptree’s queerness lived in the layers: the pseudonym, the bisexual desire, the ambivalence about embodiment. She cracked the boys’ club open by walking in through the front door wearing a mask.

Ursula K. Le Guin imagined ambisexual beings in The Left Hand of Darkness, but filtered them through the discomfort of a cisgender male envoy.

Years later, she admitted the limits of that lens — and revised her own worldbuilding in Four Ways to Forgiveness and beyond. Le Guin didn’t just build worlds; she returned to them, corrected them, and made them more honest.

Samuel R. Delany tore the scaffolding down entirely.

In Trouble on Triton and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, he wrote queer protagonists who were messy, desiring, political, and gloriously uncorrected. Delany didn’t treat queerness as metaphor. He treated it as story structure.

Octavia Butler reimagined intimacy itself.

Her protagonists — often Black, female, fluid, and impossible to categorise — refused the genre’s binaries. In Imago and Fledgling, love isn’t punished. It’s transformed.

Joanna Russ didn’t ask for inclusion. She demanded rebellion.

The Female Man didn’t politely critique masculinist genre logic — it shredded it. Russ wrote with rage, wit, and queer defiance. Her protagonists weren’t palatable. They were revolutionary.

And then, in the early 1990s, television began to crack.

Quantum Leap played with gender fluidity through body‑hopping narratives, offering glimpses of queerness without naming it… except for one episode about a young gay man and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which terrified sponsors and delivered the show’s highest ratings.

Alien Nation used alien‑human dynamics to interrogate race, sexuality, and assimilation. Its queer‑coded subplots didn’t ask for permission; they challenged the genre’s comfort zones. Is it any wonder that this series was quickly cancelled?

They weren’t just stories. They were cracks in the wall. They showed the future didn’t have to inherit the old punishments. They suggested that queerness wasn’t a threat to the genre; it was the thing keeping it alive.

“Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be — a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us — have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”
— Samuel R. Delany

They Rewired the Genre

They didn’t just imagine futures. They rewired the genre.

While speculative fiction punished queer visibility, fans rewired the genre from below. Slash fandom didn’t just interpret canon; it rebuilt it. Zines weren’t footnotes. They were blueprints. Queer fanfic didn’t ask permission. It bulldozed its way into public spaces.

Queer women, disabled fans, and trans archivists built participatory infrastructure: archives, fan campaigns, slash repositories, and mutual aid networks that refused correction. They didn’t wait for canon to catch up. They built futures in the margins.

Fanlore, AO3, and countless zines became sites of reclamation. These weren’t just fan responses. They were editorial acts of justice. They documented what genre erased. They remembered what canon punished. They built scaffolding where speculative fiction collapsed.

They didn’t escape the closet; they rewired it. Fandom rewrote the coordinates. We occupy the future.

References:

Andrew M Butler, in Rob Latham et. al., 2009. “SFS Symposium: Sexuality in Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, Science Fiction and Sexuality (November), pp. 385-403. JSTOR, accessed 26 September 2025.

James Doohan & Peter David, 1996. Beam me up, Scotty: Star Trek’s “Scotty” – in his own words, Pocket Books, p. 162.

Michael Green, 2013. “Screenwriting Representation: Teaching Approaches to Writing Queer Characters”, Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 65, No. 1-2 (Spring/Summer), pp. 30-42. JSTOR, accessed 26 September 2025.

James Satter. 2006. “The Hidden Homosexual: Reexamining ‘Star Trek’’s Sulu.” Science Fiction Studies, Greencastle: SF-TH Inc, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 379–82. JSTOR, accessed 16 May 2023.

Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Speculative Fiction and the Colonial Imagination

A four-part journey through how speculative fiction echoed empire, rewrites resistance, and reclaims futurity.

Part One: Race and the Colonial Imagination
Published: 2 January 2026
Read Part One
From Lucian to Le Guin, speculative fiction’s imperial DNA is exposed: how imagined futures rehearsed conquest, racial hierarchy, and colonial logic.

Part Two: The Hero Must Be Rewritten
Published: 22 February 2026
Read Part Two
Gender and the myth of the universal hero. This chapter rewrites masculinist genre scaffolding, tracing how speculative fiction disciplines emotion, care, and female agency.

Part Three: Sexuality & Queer Futures
Published: 1 April 2026
Read Part Three
A queer reading of Star Trek and speculative canon. This chapter critiques heteronormative erasure, celebrates queer fandom’s legacy, and imagines futures beyond genre discipline.

Part Four: We Occupy the Future
Published: 5 April 2026
Read Part Four
Published on the anniversaries of the 504 Sit-In and Medibank Blockade, this chapter confronts techno-fix fantasies and reimagines futures where disabled bodies are not corrected or cured, but centred, celebrated, and architecturally included.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with 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.

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.