cover image Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos

Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos

Jon G. Wagner, Jan Lundeen. Praeger Publishers, $38.95 (280pp) ISBN 978-0-275-96225-8

Boldly going where no TV show has gone before, the original Star Trek series spawned a galaxy of lucrative franchises and legions of adoring fans--so many that Wagner and Lundeen (they're married; he's an anthropologist, she's a nursing teacher) contend that Star Trek has become part of 20th-century American mythology. Describing myths as ""the narratives that structure [a culture's] worldview and give form and meaning to the disconnected data of everyday life,"" the authors compare 30-plus years of Trek story lines with three decades of American cultural concerns and find, to no surprise, that they inhabit parallel universes. Wagner and Lundeen excel at exploring how depictions of gender, race relations, religion, family life and political correctness have evolved throughout the varied Trek series. Certainly, women have come a long way: usually depicted as 23rd-century airheads and alien temptresses stuffed into ""tin-foil bikinis"" in the original series, a woman finally commands a starship in Star Trek: Voyager. The authors also plumb the progression of command decisions. Captain Kirk had a profound distaste for utopian societies, usually disassembling the status quo, whereas the more restrained Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation was guided by a philosophy of noninterference with the cultures encountered. It is tempting to suggest that this is all much ado about, well, a TV show, but there is little doubt that Trek creator Gene Roddenberry struck a chord with his vision of a future in which the human race--after eradicating war, greed, materialism and poverty--journeyed into space not as conquerors but, as the authors term them, ""humanist"" explorers of the final frontier. All true Trekkers should find most of this book's journey, in the words of Mr. Spock, ""fascinating."" (Dec.)