🚀 Faster, Please! — The Podcast #14

➡ Reminder: I will be writing much less frequently and much shorter in November — and November only. So for this month, I have paused payment from paid subscribers. Also, I’m making all new content free without a paywall. In December, however, everything will be back to normal: typically three meaty essays and two enlightening Q&As a week, along with a pro-progress podcast like this one 👇 several times a month (including transcript). And, of course, a weekly recap over the weekends. Melior Mundus Here at Faster, Please!, I write a lot about the need for optimistic, inspiring science fiction. As I’ve put it before: It’s important that our culture create aspirational and inspirational visions of the future. Underlying the rapid advance of human progress over the past quarter-millennium has been a powerful optimism about tomorrow combined with what sociologist Elise Boulding has described as a “utopian sense of human empowerment.” We have to believe that the inevitable disruption caused by progress will be worth it — if we make the right decisions. We also need to believe that we can invent, broadly, the future we want. Right now, however, it seems we think that we’ve carelessly created a future that our kids and grandkids won’t want — a future of rising temperatures and rising inequality. And since the early 1970s, Hollywood has both reflected and encouraged that gloomy belief. But sci-fi could again be pro-progress and future-optimistic (what I call “Up Wing”). It could have plenty of dramatic tension while also showing a path toward a better, although still imperfect, world. I'll often ask my podcast or 5 Quick Questions guests/interviewees to point to an example of that kind of science fiction. And perhaps no film, book, or TV show gets held up as the standard for sci-fi more than Star Trek. To learn more about the history of the franchise and to discuss its future-optimism and cultural importance, I'm speaking with Ryan Britt. Ryan is the author of the tremendous new book Phasers on Stun! How the Making and Remaking of Star Trek Changed the World, out earlier this year. Previously, he wrote Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths. Ryan is also an editor at Fatherly and a contributing writer for Inverse; both BDG brands. In addition, he also writes regularly for Esquire, Den of Geek! and Star Trek.com. In This Episode * The Original Series and ‘60s sci-fi (1:19) * The mainstream appeal of Star Trek (5:44) * Star Trek’s future-optimism (12:06) * The essence of Trek (21:24) Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. The Original Series and ‘60s sci-fi James Pethokoukis: When originally broadcast, Star Trek did not have great ratings. Obviously it has become an institution since then. Why didn't it do better when it was first on regular television back in the ‘60s? Ryan Britt: It's a little bit of a matter of debate. One of the people that I interviewed for my book, Marc Cushman, did these deep dives into the ratings for his books, which were these very, very in-depth books called These Are The Voyages. And his contention is that if you look at it by today's standards, five or 10 million people is a lot. Now we have all these streaming services that target these niche audiences and stuff like that. It would no longer be considered a failure. But at the time, you only had three networks. You had NBC, CBS, and ABC. And Star Trek was on NBC, and it didn't compete in the way that NBC wanted it to long term. That said, it had a very strong start. And Lucille Ball who ran Desilu Studios that produced Star Trek sent a note of congratulations to Gene Rodenberry when it started, saying they were off to a great start. But the flip side of that is we forget that Star Trek introduced mainstream American television audiences to all this stuff in science fiction that they had no exposure to before. On the one hand, five, 10 million people, 20 million people, might not seem like a lot compared to today's viewership, but back then it was a huge explosion. When talking about the original series, people often will say it was really a piece of its time with a “New Frontier” spirit. You had the Cold War analogies between the Federation and the Klingons; you could even look at Captain Kirk as a John F. Kennedy kind of character. But those are really things of the early ‘60s. And granted, it's the same decade, late ‘60s. But there was a big difference between the America of 1960–62, then getting into the heart of the Vietnam era, civil rights, the late 1960s by the time the show aired. I wonder if you think that had a role, that already by that time it seemed maybe out of step with the America of that era? It's funny because science fiction in general—this is true of all science fiction, whether it's print or film—it always is oddly a little behind. Star Trek was taking this imagery that you would see on the covers of pulp science-fiction magazines from two decades prior. The way in which it kind of looks reminds you of old issues of Astounding or Amazing Stories and things like that. But its sensibilities were coming from these ‘60s writers who were part of what was called the New Wave. People like Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad. And they were people that were pushing back against those more conservative science-fiction print traditions. So you've got this collision. In the book, I talk about how the oldest person that wrote for the original Star Trek was born in like the 1900s because of the time it was made. But then the youngest person was like born in the ‘40s, David Gerrold who was writing for the original series. So I think you have a lot of collision of generational viewpoints in the original series. You have really young writers and really old writers. And Roddenberry is somewhere in between. He's in his 40s when this is all happening, and he had a big television career before that. I think that Star Trek is a lot of different generational styles and sensibilities happening at once. I think that's also true of the later shows. Like the cliche goes, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Maybe that's why it's good: because there are these different competing ideologies. But I do think that it may mean that the original series has a little bit of a muddled message sometimes for a contemporary viewer. The mainstream appeal of Star Trek I started doing kind of a rewatch not so long ago. So, of course, I started with the original pilot, which did not have William Shatner. And that original pilot was criticized by the network as too cerebral. It was a little chilly. It kind of reminded me more of late-‘60s science fiction, something like 2001, which was also kind of chilly, very cerebral. The Star Trek we know was different. They added William Shatner, they had a captain who would hit something. (I think that was one of the notes from the studio: We want there to be fistfights.) If we had stuck with that original feeling from the very first pilot episode, I wonder if that would've made a difference, if the show would have been more popular, less popular… I think there are a lot of things going on in there, and you're right about everything you just said. Roddenberry also wanted fistfights. That's the thing that people forget. Roddenberry sort of cast himself as this person who was a pacifist and didn't want a lot of conflict by the time The Next Generation happened in ‘87. But in the original series, Rodenberry came from writing westerns. He wrote Have Gun—Will Travel. He came from writing those fisticuffs. He wanted his morality tales in an action-adventure show. The way Roddenberry talked about Star Trek to the fans is not the way Roddenberry talked about Star Trek to the writers and the producers. He sold it as an action-adventure show. There is nothing in the series bible that says anything about it being a progressive, politically peace-making show. There is nothing. And many of the writers who I spoke to who are still alive, like Judy Burns who wrote “The Tholian Web.” She was l… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe