With a huge dose of inspiration from John Scalzi’s “The Big Idea“, I’m beginning my own series of columns from authors, artists, fans, and publishers in which I give them space to tell you in their own words why they’re so deeply involved in TrekLit. My goal is be able to have at least one of these up a month and would love to hear from you if you’d like to talk about your own TrekLit Connections.
The first is from Adam Kotsko author of the upcoming “Late Star Trek” which is due out in March of 2025. Through a completely unrelated review opportunity, I had a copy of his book on my kindle when I reached out to him to see if he would be game to help launch this fun little project.
Many years ago, somewhere around 2010, my girlfriend and I needed a new TV show to watch. We had been alternating between stuff from our childhood and things we had missed as young adults, and it was time for another entry in the first category. She suggested Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I gladly accepted.
It may seem like a small thing, but in retrospect, returning to Star Trek as an adult was a defining moment for my life. I had been a fan as a kid. Watching Next Generation on Saturday evenings was a comfortable ritual for me, soon supplemented by the early seasons of Deep Space Nine, and I even tracked down a novel or two. But I left it behind when I got to high school, alongside comic books and the other signs of nerdiness I could stand to part with. Once I got back into it again—much less with my girlfriend’s explicit invitation!—I never looked back. We watched all the modern shows and all the movies. She didn’t like The Original Series, so that became my regular viewing on nights she was out, soon to be followed by The Animated Series.
Only after I had devoured almost all of existing Trek did I make contact with fan circles, most notably the very learned and rigorous fan/scholars at The Daystrom Institute subreddit. I quickly realized that my attitude to Star Trek was very different. First and most importantly, I was a professor in the humanities, so I was used to approaching stories as stories—analyzing how they were put together, assessing how well they lived up to certain standards, comparing and contrasting them with other stories, etc., etc. By contrast, most fans at Daystrom approached the episodes as though they were news broadcasts from another universe and saw their task as developing in-universe theories. Their goal was typically either to reconcile apparent contradictions between episodes or to make connections between them that the writers obviously could never have intended. Second, where most of them had engaged with fan culture all through their viewing, I came to the discussion with my own pre-formed opinions, which often seemed contrarian. For instance, I realized that Enterprise was not a work of art, but it was not that bad—certainly not bad enough to warrant writing it out of the Prime Timeline, a favorite project of Daystromites at that time.
Thus I became the resident crank, pursuing two strange projects. I was determined to read Star Trek as literature, and I was committed to proving that Enterprise was not only fully canonical, but interesting and fine. Often I combined the two, discovering along the way that Enterprise was actually more carefully structured than previous shows. The sum total of those posts—highlights of which can be found here—almost certainly make me the world’s foremost expert on the red-headed stepchild of the Star Trek franchise. I also became one of the leading advocates of The Animated Series, which had only recently become readily available on streaming. Such was my love of the neglected corners of the franchise that, when I was invited to contribute to an academic journal issue marking the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, I chose to write about the unexpected influence of Enterprise, The Animated Series, and “Spock’s Brain” on later installments. The resulting article (sadly paywalled) remains one of the most-cited works on The Animated Series, perhaps because it’s one of the only peer-reviewed publications to discuss it at all.
This contrarian streak culminated in my forthcoming book, Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era (available for preorder directly from the press, from Bookshop.org, or from the Evil Empire). Most previous books on Star Trek put Enterprise at the end of the story, as the moment when the franchise finally crashed and burned. But I actually start my story with Enterprise, claiming that it was the first attempt to reinvent Star Trek in a changing political and economic context. From there, I cover the novelverse, the JJ Abrams films, and the various streaming shows, looking at how each installment tries to thread the needle between offering something new and staying loyal to what came before. Again and again, I find that these shows get bogged down by trying to stake out a place in the franchise—self-consciously breaking with fan expectations, indulging in excessive fan service, constantly writing stories with crazy over-the-top stakes where the entire galaxy is in the balance, or even combining two or three of those approaches into one garbled plot. And I suggest that the best recent Star Trek installments, Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, have the confidence to simply do what people want out of Star Trek rather than constantly obsessing about their relationship to canon.
Strangely, though, even writing a whole book didn’t exhaust my thoughts on Star Trek, so I started a Substack by the same title, where I’ve applied my unique literary and contrarian approach to almost all the live-action shows as well as a couple novels and comics. Iroincally, though, looking back over my posts, I realize that the show I’ve given the least attention is Enterprise! Maybe it really is possible to get something out of your system after all.
