Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
What you'll discover in this article
- Star Trek, the beloved science fiction franchise, turns 60 this week.
- Beyond its influence on science and technology, through its many iterations Trek has both reflected and inspired real societal change.
- IFLScience caught up with a number of researchers who shared their takes on its continuing cultural legacy.
Space. The Final Frontier. From the very title sequence, Star Trek laid out its focus on discovering what is out there, and how we relate to the strange and the alien. As the beloved franchise marks its 60th anniversary this week, we couldn’t not look at some of the ways Star Trek has impacted – and continues to impact – society.
We have written in the past about the technology inspired by Trek that has become an everyday occurrence: tablets, flip phones, smartphones, and voice-activated systems, above all.
A decade ago, we listed what might be the next big tech breakthroughs inspired by Trek, mostly medical devices. None of them are yet commonly available. Although, we have gotten much better at studying the atmospheres of strange new worlds, and we do not need to be in orbit around them.
Science fiction is often seen as the place that inspires the next generation of scientists and engineers to bring the fantastical to life – or maybe these days, it’s the entrepreneurs edging towards building the Torment Nexus.
But Star Trek has done more than that. It has impacted and influenced society beyond science and tech.
“It’s political!!” Well, I sure hope so!
Science fiction has been, from its inception, a mirror to society with all its faults and limitations, exaggerated through the prism of fantastical worlds, technologies, and voyages. HG Wells' The War Of The Worlds is about an alien invasion, but it is also about European imperialism.
Star Trek, especially the most recent iterations both live-action and animated, have been accused of being “political”. In the post-Gamer Gate-world this has been the go-to complaint of the “critic-influencer”, more recently replaced by “woke”.
Star Trek, through the eras, has always discussed real-world problems. That’s what good sci-fi does.
Gene Roddenberry’s vision was of a humanity living in a world at peace, where there’s no money, with an international crew all collaborating for the greater good of scientific exploration.
Star Trek will always remain a capsule to show us that we can think more and feel more.
Professor Jean-Michel Berthiaume
The most beloved of the Star Trek movies – Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – is about rescuing whales that became extinct in our time due to whale hunting and pollution. These are topics that are still relevant 40 years after that movie came out!
Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) also features one of the first interracial kisses on television (often reported as the first ever), between William Shatner (Captain Kirk) and Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura). Shatner and Nichols had to fight for it, including doing bad takes of the kiss-less version of that episode.
Nichols is cited as an inspiration for women, especially Black women, who wanted to join NASA. James Doohan, who played Montgomery “Scotty” Scott in TOS, inspired people to become engineers, similarly to the Scully Effect from the X-Files. Star Trek was and is inspirational.
“We have many examples of this, notably Martin Cooper's declaration that the Star Trek communicator was a huge influence on the flip-phone. We also know the profound impact that Nichelle Nicols as Lieutenant Uhura had on society,” Professor Jean-Michel Berthiaume, from the Université du Québec à Montréal, told IFLScience.
Star Trek never shied away from the big issues of society: racism, eugenics, slavery, genocide, justice, terrorism, poverty, and even what it is like being a marginalized gender minority. All of this and more: and that’s from the old shows, let alone the new ones.
“I also believe that Star Trek as a whole has been seen as a beacon of smart and brave popular culture, which I believe is very important for us right now. In a world that does not celebrate intelligence like it used to, Star Trek will always remain a capsule to show us that we can think more and feel more, even through our televisions,” Professor Berthiaume told IFLScience.
Seeking new life and giving people hope
In a paper detailing the societal impact of the series, Kendra Vaughan discusses the far-reaching effect of the portrayal of such an optimistic vision of the future. The United Federation of Planets – the political entity that governs part of the galaxy, including Earth – strives to embody the Vulcan motto of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.”
Characters like Data and Spock didn't just influence kids into science degrees, they helped kids with ADHD and AuDHD feel seen and capable of bigger things.
Kendra Vaughan
The Vulcans, Spock’s people, set out this beautiful concept that diversity is the crucial aspect through which we can thrive. This has underpinned the shows through the decades and continues to inspire.
When asked about the most important impact, Vaughan had no doubts.
“The answer is HOPE,” Vaughan told IFLScience. “It gives us hope that humanity can mature to a point where greed and competition for resources won't hinder us, that we can actually be comfortable with infinite diversity in infinite combinations and reach for the stars unburdened by our own petty grievances.”
“That is always the biggest takeaway response I get from others. Simple, hope.”
In the preparation for her paper, Vaughan conducted a poll on a Facebook page called Star Trek Shitposting. She did not include the poll in her work – as she stressed, it was not designed for research purposes – but the answers revealed just how and in how many ways Star Trek has influenced people.
“What surprised me was that the influence of Trek went so far beyond technology and science. It influenced doctors, therapists, anthropologists, biologists, writers, artists (Garak's Craftiers), UI designers... characters like Data and Spock didn't just influence kids into science degrees, they helped kids with ADHD and AuDHD feel seen and capable of bigger things.”
“I was really amazed and touched by the amount of honest responses from such a large, unwieldy group,” Vaughan told us.
Picard, his palm on his face
We love to celebrate the wonders of Star Trek, but we also know that it is not perfect. It is written by humans after all – nobody gets everything right 100 percent of the time, come on!
Also, Trek can be a profoundly unserious show, whether it is having the ghost of your grandmother’s lover trapped in a candle or putting a fake horn on a dog.
The advent of the internet made sure that Star Trek was memed and memed to no end. Captain Jean-Luc Picard's facepalm became iconic, but people also noticed something peculiar. Did a particular episode of The Next Generation (TNG) predict our meme-addled world?
In the episode "Darmok", we are introduced to the Tamarians, an alien species that speak in allegories. Starfleet is equipped with a universal translator, but this fails when dealing with the Tamarian language.
Allegories are concepts that require a certain cultural knowledge. No knowledge, and the meaning is lost, just like memes. When you see something stupid on the internet, you can simply post a picture of Picard facepalming, and it already shows what you mean without specific words.
The story of "Darmok", written by Joe Menosky and Phillip LaZebnik, is not the only TNG episode focusing on language.
As Professor Berthiaume explained, the writers of the series were preoccupied a lot with technology and how we use it, and for many of them language is a crucial technology.
“I do not think that Menosky and LaZebnik are uncanny diviners, but I do believe that they wrote a piece of fiction that was brilliant enough for people to be able to use it to better understand our complex current world of communication,” Professor Berthiaume told IFLScience.
Time to have a talk with your trekkie grandma
If Trek's impact on memes feels too lateral, there is one aspect that is now associated with internet culture that Trek turned from a trend into an art form: fanfiction and slash fiction.
“For hundreds of years fans have written private stories about beloved characters, but Star Trek was the first time that these stories were collected and distributed by and for a broader fandom. As early as the late 1960s fanzines such as Spockanalia transformed fanfiction from a private pursuit into a broader community endeavor,” Paul Falzone, a media strategist, producer, and scholar, told IFLScience.
Falzone wrote a paper specifically on this topic. Fanfiction is not just a literary genre in itself; it can also be commercially lucrative after some alterations that make the written piece sound against copyright claims. Books like Fifty Shades of Gray or Game Changer (the first in the Heated Rivalry series) are examples of this phenomenon.
There is an aspect that gives Star Trek primacy: slash fiction. This is a subset of fanfiction that focuses on romantic and/or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex. Kirk and Spock, or Kirk/Spock as it was known, was the origin of the slash (/) in slash fiction.
“Likewise, Kirk/Spock or K/S is generally recognized as the first popular expression of slash fiction, first emerging in the early to mid-1970s. Was this because there was already a thriving Star Trek fanfiction community in place or is there something unique about Star Trek that invites a queer reading? That’s an interesting question,” Falzone told IFLScience.
It is unsurprising that when the presence of LGBTQ+ characters in modern Trek is brought up by online trolls, many fans point out that there’s a chance that the trolls’ grandmothers might have been writing erotic stories about Kirk and Spock five decades ago.
An inspiration and a lens for the present
Beyond visibility, beyond hopefulness, beyond memes and fanfiction, Trek has been seen as a way not just to imagine a better world but to understand the world we live in.
In a paper on the very subject, Büşra Yılmaz and Branislav Radeljić look at how the fictionalized political entities of Star Trek, from the Federation to the Klingon and Romulan Empires, can be used to understand international relations.
“Star Trek is useful because it transforms abstract political concepts into concrete, recognizable situations. We have argued that the [Trek] universe resembles a multipolar international system, where different political entities pursue competing interests while also attempting to cooperate through diplomacy and institutions,” Professor Radeljić, of the University of Belgrade, told IFLScience.
Trek would not be the first or the last fictional universe to be seen as an interesting example of how to govern. Similar points were raised for the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series and its portrayal of politics during a time of permanent crisis.
But Trek’s longevity and widespread appeal across the globe suggest that it already might have helped when it comes to international relations.
“Star Trek has presented audiences with ideas about diplomacy, international governance, and peaceful conflict resolution for decades. Because the series has reached a large global audience, it may have influenced how some viewers imagine international cooperation and humanity’s relationship with ‘the Other’,” Professor Radeljić told IFLScience.
“We also emphasise that the franchise reflects the political circumstances in which it was produced, particularly the Cold War, meaning that Star Trek both reflected international politics and encouraged audiences to think about alternatives.”
Hope in hopeless times
While TOS mostly focused on threats that could be solved quickly, from TNG onwards Trek became bolder in questioning the very principle that underpins the series and its very hopefulness. Can humans truly live in peace in a diverse society? Can that democracy survive major threats from the outside as well as from the inside?
I do think Trek still has something hopeful to say, even when its characters confront the “greater good” and make morally compromised choices.
Professor Jamie Carson
In an essay published last month, Joshua Baldwin and Jamie Carson use Trek to discuss the concept of a crisis in democracy and the extraordinary measures taken to preserve democracy, all through a Star Trek lens.
In particular, they focus on the concept of Section 31, a shadowy organization within the fictional universe that is allowed to break the rules.
“The most useful parallel is not a simple one-to-one comparison between a Trek institution and a real-world agency; rather, it is the recurring logic that ordinary procedures are too slow, too constrained, or too vulnerable to meet an existential threat,” Professor Carson, from the University of Georgia, told IFLScience.
“Episodes such as Deep Space Nine’s 'Homefront' and 'Paradise Lost' are especially striking in this respect. A real fear of infiltration becomes the basis for emergency authority, militarized security, and ultimately an attempted coup. The episode shows how difficult it becomes to restore constitutional limits once suspicion itself is treated as proof that normal oversight cannot be trusted.”
“Likewise, 'The Pegasus' [a TNG episode] and the Section 31 stories ask whether a society can remain faithful to its principles if it preserves them by routinely acting outside them.”
Trek has plenty of bleak episodes, where the odds are too great and it seems no plot device will save the day. Carson and Baldwin argue that seeing the characters reject those exceptional measures as the new normal is a message of hope, and Section 31 and its operations beyond the rules are seen as a failure.
“I do think Trek still has something hopeful to say, even when its characters confront the 'greater good' and make morally compromised choices,” Professor Carson added.
“Its hope is not naïve: 'In the Pale Moonlight', for example, never lets Sisko’s actions become uncomplicatedly heroic. But Trek insists that moral discomfort matters. Sisko’s unease, Picard’s refusal to keep concealing the Pegasus experiment, and Bashir’s repeated refusal to join Section 31 all preserve the distinction between a tragic choice and a normal institutional practice.”
We do not know what the next 60 years will bring; but fans will hope that whether it is philosophical dilemmas, ethical quandaries, or slash fiction subjects, Star Trek will continue to go where no one has gone before.
1