My ultimate fate was decided on the night of October 27, 1967. How do I remember that so precisely? It’s right there in Wikipedia, actually; it was the night that the Star Trek episode “Catspaw” first aired on NBC.
I was six years old, and my baby brother Dan was being born that very night. My memory is fuzzy; I believe my sister and I were home with a sitter, a neighbor lady who also went to our church. In any case, I turned on Star Trek, which I’d never seen (I was already a Lost in Space kid).
If you know the episode, you can guess what happened next. Jackson beams back up to the ship and falls over dead like a chopped-down tree – and a voice emanates from his dead body, warning Kirk away from the planet below. Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down anyway, of course, and encounter the terrifying apparition of the Three Witches from Macbeth:
Go back, they moan, Go back! Remember the curse!
Wind shall rise, And fog descend, So leave here, all, or meet your end!
Scared the living piss out of me. I bolted from the bedroom where our black-and-white TV lived, wailing, and jumped into the arms of whoever was babysitting us, shaking.
I wanted no part of that show. Lost in Space for me, thank you.
Flash-forward six years. I’m twice as old now, a pre-teen, living in north-central Indiana – old enough, at 11-going-on-12, to stay up late on the weekends. I’m in the basement, watching that same old black-and-white TV, and Part I of the first-season Trek episode “The Menagerie” comes on.
There they are again – Kirk, Spock and McCoy. And Captain Christopher Pike. And the Talosians. And Vina.
I fell in love. I’m been a die-hard Trekker from that day to this.
That particular story was a great one to really come on board with – a story of love and mercy and sacrifice. I was back the next Saturday night. And the next. And the next.
Then came the James Blish paperbacks. And Spock Must Die! And The Making of Star Trek. And David Gerrold’s The Trouble with Tribbles and The World of Star Trek. And the animated series. And its Alan Dean Foster books. And then came others like me, at school. Endless study hall drawings of space battles between the Enterprise and a Klingon D-7 cruiser. The Starfleet Technical Manual.
And I watched every episode over and over and over, as did my friends.
My parents didn’t know Trek from Lost in Space, and who could blame them? To the casual eye, they were just shows about spaceships and ray guns and scary aliens – mindless and harmless.
Except there was nothing mindless or harmless about Trek. If my parents had had the slightest clue what I was watching, it would certainly have been banned in our home.
These were stories about bigotry and racism (“The Corbomite Maneuver”, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”); stories about the Vietnam War and US military espionage (“A Private Little War”, “The Enterprise Incident”); tales of genocide and class struggle and overpopulation (“Patterns of Force”, “The Cloud Minders”, “The Mark of Gideon”).
Starfleet was a place where opportunity was unfettered; the Federation was ethnically diverse. None of the prejudices and misogynies or other dysfunctions all around me were in evidence; instead, the first officer in the very first episode I watched front-to-back was a woman; the show’s cast was multiracial (a television first); and peace, cooperation and compassion were the defaults in episode after episode.
I paid a heavy social toll for this new loyalty; in junior high school, I had bushy blond hair that fell over my neck and ears and into my eyes, and class bully Roger Smith liked to lift my hair to see if my ears were pointed. But by the time I arrived in the 10th grade at Franklin County High, there were allies aplenty, a phalanx of friends with whom that Trek bond persists to this day.
I don’t need to tell you that my guys won. At this writing, there have been 9 Trek TV series (with more to come), 13 Trek movies, more than a thousand books, and I’ve soaked up every last minute and page.
At 13 I made my own Spock costume from scratch, complete with tricorder and communicator; the Enterprise and Galileo hung from my bedroom ceiling.
In the late Seventies, my family had attended a church a mere quarter-mile from our home. At that time, Louisville WAVE-3 TV broadcast Trek reruns every Sunday morning at 11am (those who were then and there will certainly recall). I would sneak out of church, run home to watch the episode, and be back at the church before my parents were done shaking hands with people. They were never the wiser.
In 1989, I wrote a Trek novel. I’ve since written three non-fiction books about Trek.1 [Chasing the Enterprise: Achieving Star Trek’s Vision of the Human Future, The AIs and Androids of Star Trek, and Ex Astris, Scientia! From the Stars, Knowledge.]
What does this have to do with being brought up Fundamentalist?
It’s simple. In September of 1976, my Trek pals and I journeyed from Frankfort, Kentucky to Louisville, where Gene Roddenberry was speaking. I got to shake the man’s hand and get his autograph. And it was clear in the talk he gave that a certain strand of thinking, which glowed bright that night, weaved its way through everything he’d created. Trek was a reflection of Roddenberry’s own personal philosophy and vision of the human future.
It’s a future where war and hunger and inequity and injustice have been vanquished; where women and people of color enjoy their full birthright; where poverty and jealousy and racism have no quarter, where plenty and opportunity abound for all.
No, had my family and adult monitors had any clue what that show was really about, it would never have been allowed in our home.
Star Trek, in its original incarnation and every one since, is a template for humanism.
Gene Roddenberry was a humanist. Most of the show’s writers were humanists.
And at age 11, there in the basement, I was about to become one.
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