I must confess to having fallen out of touch with Trek sometime during the TNG phase. I haven’t had a TV sicne, so I don’t encounter things like new iterations of the show by chance, and nobody’s recommended any of the newer series to me.

But damn, now I almost wanna bring myself up to date with it and pitch a series by some species in an outlying fringe that bands together with other species to wage an all-out war on the Federation, Consider Phlebas style. And you know, I’m not even all that into TV SF, but that idea…

Who knows, maybe it’s been done before.

Julia,

Wow! That’s an interesting data point! Doesn’t surprise me, though — I mean people who were all entrenched in anti-black sentiment being all interested in Japanese culture. There were some very interesting (ie. weird and repugnant but still fascinating) whackjob theories floating around back in the day about Koreans being one of the lost tribes of Israel, and so on, as detailed in part of Scott Burgeson’s excellent book Korea Bug. I can’t help but imagine similar notions were in circulation regarding Japan, especially among populations eager to find a link, no matter how absurd or fabricated, that “legitimated” those paler-skinned Asians they encountered.

Instructive is the case of one Issaschar Jacox Roberts, Southerner and evangelist to China who considered the Taiping Rebels of mid-19th century China to be Christians because they called themselves such, and even after discovering their leader fancied himself Jesus’ younger brother, sent down by God to oust the (foreign) Qing Dynasty from national power and found a new China under the (vaguely pseudo-Christian) Taiping religion, he persisted in trying to “Christianize” the rebel leader, poor persistent fellow that he was. Many Western powers were initially interested in supporting the Taiping until they figured out that Taiping religion bore little real resemblance to the Christianity they knew.

(All of that is wonderfully discussed in this book, one of my favorites in the world!)

And the racism towards black people in that family was to a degree I found very repugnant once I found out about it. One of the brothers was the superintendent of schools for Prince Edward County until 1965.

(I failed in my first attempt to find a good narrative account of the situation, but if someone asks, I can try to find something better than just the Wikipedia article. But I don’t know if it adds much of anything to the subject at hand.)

When you create a fictional “society” without cash and that is dedicated to peace and exploration, you lose some very good engines for dramatic conflict.

Depends how you handle it. Iain M. Banks, a Scottish SF author, does brilliant things with it. How?

Well, he writes books, so existential crises and so on are possible themes — especially since, in his take on things, all this is possible because humans ceded things like administration and what we now think of as “government” to vast AIs much smarter than us. (Who basically keep the [essentially] human members of the Culture around because they’re amusing wee pets.)

But he also has all kinds of alien species who are deeply against the peace/exploration/prosperity goals of The Culture (as this utopian metasociety calls itself), and the human/machine synthesis that makes The Culture run. So then you have nasty, vicious, horrid little border wars at the fringes of “civilized” space.

Great book to start with is Consider Phlebas which incidentally tells the story from the POV of a non-Culture member fighting against the gleeful utopian heretics. This is pretty much the best space opera I’ve ever read. (Which reminds me… must read more Banks.)

I think Trek would do well to learn from, and even respectfully rip off, Banks, especially in “Consider Phlebas” mode. It’d synergize the newfound American fear of hostile fanatical outsiders, and to some degree even depicting the Federation as seen from the outside would be a fascinating exercise… and, I think, enrich what’s become a pretty bland outfit.

Star Trek needs a big, prolonged war with some force they can feel good about pulling no punches against, and which isn’t just tired Cold War typology (like how I get the sense the Borg=communism warmed over.)

Makes sense. And again, the “Prime Directive” seems to be a safeguard in giving limits (and thus justifications) to eventual military action.

It doesn’t surprise me that Asians were in white schools during segregation — though I also imagine Asians would have been less common in the South than in the Northern urban centers anyway. (Could be wrong, who knows?) Damn, that’s something I’d love to read more about. Wish I could slow time down a few hours a day and read a million books.

As for romance between Asian women and white men, apparently at the height of segregation in the south, Asians did in fact go to the same schools as white students. Unfortunately, I don’t know much more than that – it was just a little aside I read in a magazine column years ago.

So it’t not: “Sulu: Master Navigator”? (Ha, sorry, old joke.)

Hey, good clarification. Still, even if they class it as military SF, it has a presence in their popular culture. By comparison, it’s almost completely off the radar in Korea, just as Michael discusses in the post I linked above. (If you don’t feel like hunting, the post is here.) It reminds me of how “The Twilight Zone” is called 환상특급 (“Hwansang Teukgeup”, ie. “Fantasy Express” or “Illusion Express”) in Korea. I’m sure that has some effect on reception of the program, but I’m not sure whether it helped or hindered the spread of the ideas in the show. I’d be very curious to trace occurrences of the Korean use of words like, say “telepathy,” which is a loan-word from English. Which suggests an English-language, and very likely a pop-cultural, source.

I want to add that, even if Trek is primarily marketed and received as naval/military SF — which I think is also a component of its popularity in the west too, by the way — there are all kinds of ideas seeded into it that I have a hard time imagining get completely ignored by Japanese audiences. Some of the multiculturalism in Trek was “snuck” in because America, too, wasn’t really comfortable with things like someone like Uhura and someone like Kirk kissing onscreen.

(Though apparently kisses between Asian women and white men were a-okay, and predate the Uhura/Kirk kiss as well! Man, I need to get access to a decent database! I’m thinking I’ll need to make a trip into Seoul and visit Yonsei University, so I can trawl the humanities fulltext databases there. (The access I have at my workplace is, well, a little less than I’d like, but outside of the exam period, they let anyone go into the Yonsei library as long as you leave an ID at the front door.)

I really don’t know much more than that, but I suspect my Japanese friend (and others in the audience) who was tuning into it occasionally liked it for the same reason I did, and on occasion still do – the element of “nautical adventure”. Growing up, there weren’t a lot of contemporary films (Firefox and Top Gun notwithstanding) about naval battles or fighter pilots, but Star Wars and Star Trek did help fill that void.

Roger Ebert said TWOK was occasionally like Captain Horatio Hornblower in space. Harve Bennet was on to something he deliberately decided to amp up the paramilitary character of Star Fleet – TWOK is arguably the best film of the franchise. Star Trek is most interesting when they ditch the prime directive and emphasize the sort of elements you find in a film like Master and Commander.