In the daunting arena of space exploration, there is a tendency to wonder where the path that humankind is taking will lead us. Does the future hold the promise of fantastic new technologies that will be used peacefully for the benefit of humankind? Or...

A worldwide science-fiction pop culture triumph, Star Trek has become a veritable empire of movies, television shows, novels, comic books, fanzines, clubs, conventions, board games, video games, and memorabilia. Star Trek began as a television series...

Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment series and media franchise. The Star Trek fictional universe created by Gene Roddenberry is the setting of six television series including the original 1966 Star Trek, in addition to ten feature...

A piece of outer space named for George Takei is in kind of a rough neighborhood for somebody who steers a starship: an asteroid belt.An asteroid between Mars and Jupiter has been renamed 7307 Takei in honor of the actor, best known for his role...

The cremated remains of actor James Doohan, who portrayed engineer "Scotty" on "Star Trek," and of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper soared into suborbital space Saturday aboard a rocket.It was the first successful launch from Spaceport America, a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern New...

"Star Trek: Legacy" boldly goes where no video game has gone before by including the actual voices of all five Star Fleet captains over the years _ James T. Kirk to Jonathan Archer.Too bad all that talent wasn't put to better use. Awkward controls and...

"Star Trek: Legacy" boldly goes where no video game has gone before by including the actual voices of all five Star Fleet captains over the years _ James T. Kirk to Jonathan Archer.Too bad all that talent wasn't put to better use. Awkward controls and...

In the following essay, Selley focuses on the relationship between Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock in the television, film, and literary series Star Trek, identifying it in the tradition of mythic male friendship initiated in American literature by Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.

Star Trek neatly fulfils all of the requirements for a good TV series: a broad-based format allowing a wide variety of stories, an interesting hero, an unusual set of situations and confrontations, and the requirement of decisive and positive action from a protagonist whose job and training is to do just that. Plus, Star Trek has … one added virtue …—it is a genre unto itself. And that makes it unique. (pp. 17-18)

In Star Trek, Roddenberry made a universe where known must be brought into contact with the unknown, where drama is played out on the borderline between self-definition and self-annihilation. The great enterprise at stake is dramatizing our own encounters with the unknown and hence with the alien within ourselves, as well as the alien beyond. It is an evolutionary process like life. Also, as in life, this process of encountering the unknown involves us with both the familiarity of the past and the foreignne...