Late Star Treck by Adam Kotsko
'Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era' by Adam Kotsko
I’ll quibble with something Adam Kotsko wrote on page one of his new book, Late Star Trek. In his examination of Trekdom in the 21st century, Kotsko claims “The Next Generation” (1987-94) created the market for “space opera.” Well, I’d say Star Wars already did that a decade earlier—maybe he only means the television market? But when he adds that “The Next Generation” also created the genre’s business model, who can argue? Late Star Trek thoroughly examines the business model(s) that helped determine the rise and fall of several distinct components of the Star Trek universe.
In the present century, that universe of films, franchise series, novels and other material has grown as vast as the galaxy patrolled by the Enterprise. And the various iterations have inevitably (unsurprisingly) projected the hopes and anxieties of their moment into future fiction. “The Original Series” (1966-69), as fans have dubbed Shatner-Nimoy’s first run, mirrored the optimism of the Great Society, and “The Next Generation” swelled with “end of history” hope (hype?) as the Cold War ended. But following 9/11, the film Star Trek Nemesis (2002) and season two of “Enterprise” (2002-03) have all to do with terrorism on a planetary scale.
While taking the thematic drift into account, Kotsko doesn’t focus on “the franchise’s political or social implications nor on its status as a mirror of American society.” An academic as well as a fan, he’s interested instead on how the business strategies of networks and streamers has shaped or misshaped the collaborative labors of various creative teams that worked their own variations on an increasingly crowded field of endeavor. If the franchise was a cash cow in the eyes of producers, some were eager to milk it.
Kotsko dismisses fan boy worries over contradictory details within the sprawling Star Trek canon. After all, Virgil and Dante didn’t worry about contradicting Homer. “As someone who has studied both, there is no greater inherent depth to Odysseus than to Captain Kirk,” he insists. Of course, Kotsko adds, what’s different now is that “the natural process of artistic evolution has been preempted by commercial concerns.”
Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era is published by University of Minnesota Press.
