Star Trek is post-apocalyptic visionary fiction. This is the thesis I’m boldly going with, and it runs counter to how we typically think of Trek’s distinctive brand of sci-fi positivity. “Post-apocalyptic” conjures images of the walking dead wandering through ruined cityscapes. This gritty cynicism could scarcely be further from the techno-utopia that is the United Federation of Planets; that dream of our galaxy’s future where wonders like warp drive, transporters, and replicators have birthed a post-scarcity economy in which humans (and aliens) live free from want in (relative) peace and harmony. Star Trek is famous for its confidence in the human potential for self-betterment, a spirit conveyed in its shiny and happy starships run by crews devoid of conflict. This was, in fact, such a vibe that whole post-apocalyptic sci-fi shows arose as a kind of anti-Trek antidote—most notably, Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009).1
Trek’s radical optimism about human futures, however, was one big reason I wanted to watch it with my kids. Like my father did for me, I wanted to give them a sense that another world is possible. Thus began our journey through The Next Generation and, I’m happy to report that my three kiddos are all in on this weird and cheesy show. (Even my seven-year-old is citing the prime directive!)
I felt it important that my kids be introduced to the Enterprise D and its crew (and Q) as the whole world was in “The Encounter at Farpoint,” but I’d forgotten that the pilot episode offered up a vision of a now not-so-distant future. When the omnipotent entity Q puts humanity on trial for its barbarous past, he does so by transporting Captain Picard, Lt. Commander Data, Counselor Troi, and Lt. Tasha Yar into a mid-twenty-first-century courtroom. A belligerent crowd surrounds them, shouting from the stands as though they’re fodder for gladiatorial bloodsport. Armored guards, doped with drugs and armed with machine-gun gloves, patrol the perimeter. Q enters on a floating throne as judge, jury, and executioner. He wears red-and-black robes that match the fascistic flag draped behind the Enterprise crew who stand “guilty until proven innocent.”
Data: “Historically intriguing, Captain. Very very accurate.”
Picard: “Mid twenty-first century. The Post-Atomic Horror.”
Those chilling words brought me back to the most treasured book of my sixth-grade self, which now resides in my sixth-grade kiddo’s bedroom.
Photo provided by the author.
Michael and Denise Okuda’s Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future (1996) is chock full of info and illustrations from every episode of the show. And yet, as a Trek-obsessed kid who happened to be an historian in the making, what most mesmerized me was what it had to say about my present and near future. Star Trek’s long twenty-first century began with the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s. This gave way to rampant homelessness and joblessness, culminating in the Sanctuary Cities and subsequent Bell Riots of the 2020s. Things well and truly fell apart in the 2050s during the cataclysmic third World War. Commander Riker summed up the consequences in Star Trek: First Contact (1996):
Riker: “Most of the major cities have been destroyed, very few governments left, 600
million dead.”
Now, Trekkies know this is not how the story ends. Humans achieve warp capability, facilitating first contact with an alien species (the Vulcans) and setting us on a path toward that bright future first imagined by Gene Roddenberry. But between us and utopia lies Post-Atomic Horror. Trek takes place in a postwars period, built on the ashes of hundreds of millions of incinerated ancestors. And whatever comfort we may find in our own timeline — having escaped the twentieth century without a Khan-Noonien-Singh-style Eugenics War — should be tempered by the rise of the autocrats, oligarchs, and eugenicists among us, whom Ruha Benjamin writes so incisively against in “The New Artificial Intelligentsia.”2
Rather than a naive and romantic appraisal of human nature, Star Trek represents hope against hope that our better angels might fly from the ashes of our own self-destruction like Zephram Cochrane’s inaugural warp ship, The Phoenix. Thus, I suggest we (re)read Star Trek as post-apocalyptic “visionary fiction” as adrienne maree brown and Walida Imarisha developed the term in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015): “science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds [to be distinguished] from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power.”3
Perhaps we might even consider the United Federation of Planets a cousin of what Earthseed might have become centuries after the fires and gangs and enslavers and addictions and company towns and autocracies of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). After all, “the destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.”
- Jason Kobely, “10 Ways Battlestar Galatica Changed Star Trek’s Sci-Fi Formula,” Screen Rant, November 28, 2024, https://screenrant.com/battlestar-galactica-star-trek-changes-differences-sci-fi-tv-show/#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20surest%20ways,challenge%20wasn’t%20alien%20invaders.
- Ruha Benjamin, “The New Artificial Intelligensia,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 18, 2024, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-new-artificial-intelligentsia/.
- adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, ed., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 4.