on Star Trek & Sci-Fi

It’s hilarious these days to watch misguided, insecure fanboys and transparent political panderers break out in rants and whines that Nu Trek – Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds – is ‘woke’. Anyone who knows Trek, old or nu, can only laugh; Trek has, of course, been utterly woke since 1966.

Woke. Shining a light on racism. War. Sexual...

“The Robinson Biography, written as it was in the mid-21st century (and thankfully published on paper, we estimate around 2080-90) notably references, and thereby confirms, a number of sources thought by many to be apocryphal: the originaldocumentaries of HAL 9000, including the two scholarly Clarke accounts, and the two visual summaries by...

When Gene Roddenberry conceived Star Trek, he imagined a future very different from what was typically put forth in science fiction - a future where humanity has overcome greed, bigotry, misogyny, materialism, conflict and war. Star Trek’s fans embraced that vision. But many consider it unattainable, if admirable, even those who wrote and...

Trek fans the world over know the following names: Nomad... M-5... Landru... V’Ger... Finnegan... and, of course, Data. Star Trek has given the science fiction universe some of its most interesting and provocative AIs and androids, and with them an insightful flow of concepts to consider as AI makes its way into the real world. Now that we’ve...

Star Trek’s Cmdr. Data... Alien’s Ash and Bishop... Skynet and the Terminator... the androids of Westworld... Ex Machina’s Eva, the Stepford Wives - and the granddaddy of them all, HAL 9000... These and other famous artificial minds are at the heart of this exploration of AI and the possibility of machine consciousness, suggesting the directions...

Review after review of Space: 1999, in the Seventies and since, has noted that its more philosophical style is distinctive, not just from Star Trek, but from most TV sci-fi. It is one of the show’s trademarks – in its first season, anyway – and made it an important entry in the genre, over and above its groundbreaking look and style.

The show...

“Star Trek was explicitly crafted by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, into a humanist manifesto; the stories Trek told were humanist parables, putting forth the core philosophies to which he was devoted: equality, reason, integrity, fairness, opportunity, community. I was soaking them up before I even really understood what they were. I didn’t...

We first became acquainted with the power of Federation democracy in “Journey to Babel” in the original series, when Kirk’s Enterprise trucked more than 100 Federation delegates to a neutral planetoid to discuss and vote on the admission of Coridan to its ranks. We saw argument, contentiousness – and a serious, violent effort to disrupt the...

Smart people love Star Trek. And smart people love thought experiments.

It seems a pretty natural thing, then, to bring the two together. Trek offers up a number of thought-provoking problems all its own, from the questions of identity emanating from the Transporter to the question of Data’s sentience; but thought experiments emanating from...

Pluribus, the new Apple TV science fiction series by Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, The X-Files), takes us into strange new psychological and philosophical territory - a landscape of quiet horror in which an alien virus takes away all of humankind’s troubles and suffering, leaving only joy, happiness, and total cooperation. Romance writer Carol...