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...

The problem of the alien is essential to every civilization, which inescapably defines itself in terms of what it is not. In American history the alien par excellence was the Indian. As Tyrrel points out in "Star Trek as Myth" there were two categories of Indians: "The noble warrior forever outside the white man's world" and the "sly, perfidious, fallen" Indian bound to the white man's world by that very fall. Translated into the world of Star Trek we ...

Star Trek is consistent but often childish science fiction, engaging but often belabored drama. (p. 711) Star Trek never had high ratings; it did have in science fiction an intriguing format. By inventing a believable world, Star Trek provided the viewer with material for his own imagination. He could elaborate upon the sets and equipment, bandy arcane knowledge, even write his own scripts. That the format had the potential to involve the viewer beyond one hour each week is the initial basis for the phenome...

Star Trek gives us a glimpse of [the] future hurtling toward us at dizzying speed, and shows us the kind of men who will build that world, successfully cope with its challenges, and remain free of any nerve-shattering traumas from future shock. Weekly, they confront the inconceivable … and come safely to terms with it. The cure for future shock is not less technology, but more. Science fiction shows us how it is possible to use that technology to confront a universe which is not basically inimical to...

Star Trek appeals to us so much because Captain Kirk's story and Mr. Spock's story and the Enterprise's story is our story too…. The tales and people in the original seventy-nine Star Trek episodes "tell our story" because they address themselves to the common questions and hungers and experiences of life that all people of all times and places (including each of us) have ever lived through. (p. 20)

"Star Trek—The Motion Picture" isn't as funny and inventive and energetic as "Star Wars." It isn't as beautiful and imaginative and obsessive as "2001," or as scary and lowdown as "Alien" (it isn't scary at all, in fact), and it isn't as touching as "Silent Running." But outer-space is a biggish territory, and there is plenty of room in it, I think, for a medium-range, medium-boring vehicle like this one...

If you've seen Star Trek—The Motion Picture …, then you already know that whatever else it may be (or may have aspired to be), what it is basically is just the most expensive episode of the TV series ever shown. How you feel about that depends, of course, on how much the original show meant to you, rather than on any specifically cinematic standards. Is it better than other movies derived from hit TV shows? Sure—but don't forget that the competition is headed by McHale�...

[In Star Trek-The Motion Picture the] Enterprise once more flies off into the Unknown, adding a few new crew members, including a bald woman name Ilia whose entrance line—"My oath of celibacy is on record, Captain"—is surely some kind of cinematic landmark. After much backing and filling, that "alien object" [threatening the earth] is discovered to be a kind of living machine that is desperately unhappy because its life is barren of emotion. Its problem is solved wh...

Star Trek is a space version of Wagon Train. There's the crew, there's the encountered. The problems arise now from the in-group, now from the out. The future is not without its counterpart of violence in the past and present. This ranges from good old-fashioned impaling on primitive spears to ridiculous duels in which characters throw electrical charges at one another through their fingertips. The series carries the usual bag of space-fiction hard and software—lasers, telepathy, time w...

[Star Trek: The Motion Picture] generally merits praise rather than knocks

The novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture does not have the depth of [Arthur C.] Clarke's 2001: a Space Odyssey … or Robert Heinlein's s-f but it has a ready audience and captures much of the film's mood. The premise is that an alien energy force is speeding toward Earth circa 2200 leaving destruction in its wake. If readers can accept the romantic contrivance that only the Starship Enterprise is capable enough and near enough to intercept the alien cloud, the balance of ...