As a series of stories about the future, Star Trek presents viewers with a range of possibilities for future realities. In light of the political potential for narratives of a liberated tomorrow, unconstrained by the material facts of the present and situated after a "future" which writers are free to determine, Lincoln Geraghty asks why the popular series seems to abide by a narrow range of "exemplary narratives" which explore variations on a small variety of themes. Considering Star Trek as both science fiction and popular television, Geraghty's insightful essay should appeal more generally to scholars concerned with the utopian impulse and social imagination.

Telling Tales of the Future: Science Fiction and Star Trek's Exemplary Narratives.

Lincoln Geraghty

"Just words."
"But good words. That's where ideas begin."
--Kirk and David, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan [1982].

<1> Due to its very nature as a science fiction series set in the future one would assume that Star Trek's stories have no connection with contemporary storytelling; that its narrative is as futuristic as its ethos. However, by highlighting how Star Trek uses traditional literary methods to communicate with its audience it can be shown that only a minimum number of "exemplary narratives" are used to build and develop its ever increasing future narrative of human endeavor in space. Scholars such as Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen (1998) have examined in close detail Star Trek's mythical underpinnings, building on work by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence in The American Monomyth (1977). Daniel Bernardi (1998) has also scrutinized the representational and narrative functions of race, dissecting Star Trek's fictional history, yet, apart from its mythical and historical tradition, Star Trek's narrative structure has not been fully explored. In my analysis of Star Trek's method of telling future stories I employ the work of Hayden White and his typology of rhetorical figures of speech, which govern the way we operate language. In addition, I draw attention to Star Trek's links with other popular television shows, in particular how they use the forms of narrative construction articulated by White to perpetuate their success. By way of drawing together my analysis of Star Trek's literary structure, I emphasize how Star Trek uses traditional narratives to create twenty-fourth century stories for a twentieth and twenty-first century fanbase.

<2> If one were to take Robert Scholes' and Robert Kellogg's view that "to be a narrative no more and no less than a teller and a tale are required," then Star Trek seemingly does not represent a narrative because there is an absence of a teller (1966: 4). There are many stories played out week after week but who is telling them?

Narrative focuses our attention on to a story, a sequence of events, through the direct mediation of a "telling" which we both stare at and through, which is at once central and peripheral to the experience of the story, both absent and present in the consciousness of those being told the story (Hawthorn, 1985: vii).

In the above quote Hawthorn also points out that the "telling" focuses our attention on the story so much that it itself can become central to the experience of the story; it can become part of the story and part of the recipient of the story. It is obvious from these analyses of narrative that the narrator is important; this may be true but it does not necessarily rule out Star Trek as a narrative. For example, Star Trek's most famous line, "space, the final frontier," comes from the opening narration first used in the episode "The Corbomite Maneuver" (1966). Every episode began with Kirk speaking to the audience, "telling" them that what they were about to see was a true and correct account (or history) of the voyages of the crew aboard the Enterprise. There was a story about to be told and those immortal words were a harbinger of the wondrous tales about to unfold on screen. The tradition of the opening narration continued on The Next Generation (TNG) (1987-1994), which highlighted the importance of the "telling" aspect at the beginning of Star Trek episodes. How every episode began with this narration was, as Hawthorn suggests about narrative, both "central and peripheral to the experience of the story," and "both absent and present in the consciousness of those being told the story."

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before (quoted in Sherwin, 1999: 301 [my emphasis]).

Just as Star Wars (1977) begins with the line "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," Star Trek also uses a narrative opening to begin its stories on screen. Children have all been read stories that start "once upon a time," and knew that they were about to be told something -- with Star Trek it is no different. This was Gene Roddenberry's way of telling the audience his story, one which he had battled to get on television, so that they too could be enthused and engaged in what he believed was the most important story of all: The human story. Other television series at the time may well have tried to tell important stories, even more important than Roddenberry's, but it was the way Star Trek expressed and told them that enabled it to shine out from the rest. For David Carson, if Star Trek "dealt with racial tensions and tried to preach to the masses, the masses would not watch" (2001: 46). However, placing those issues on a science fiction drama set in the future extinguishes its didacticism and allows "a storyteller, be you a writer or director, the opportunity of telling a story that has something to say."

<3> The opening narration has entered popular culture just like the characters of the shows: It was inevitable that it would be used on TNG but only after it had been updated. Star Trek's mission statement was modernized to suit an age that recognized women were not just there to support the men as they explored the galaxy, but were there to do the exploring themselves:

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. (quoted in Sherwin, 1999: 312 [my emphasis])

This egalitarianism was not fully validated until Kate Mulgrew became the first woman to command a starship, assuming the lead role in Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001).

<4> Examining Star Trek's knack for telling good stories might seem rather easy if one were to take Brent Spiner's explanation of its popularity at face value: "The reason Star Trek is so popular is that I honestly think [creator] Gene Roddenberry came up with what is the single greatest formula for a TV show [. . .] It never ends, because travelling the galaxy offers thousands of stories to explore" (2001: 6). This statement is partly true -- Star Trek does have a great formula which was shared by many other popular television series such as The Fugitive (1963-1967) and Quantum Leap (1989-1993) to name just two, but that does not fully explain its popularity. Spiner, who plays the character Data in TNG, is correct to some extent; the show's popularity is somewhat based on there being thousands of episodes revealing countless things about aliens and the universe. However, Star Trek has been, is, and will probably continue to be popular because it offers only a handful of basic narratives through which the audience can explore the universe, and, at the same time, explore themselves. What is more, Star Trek relies so much on the fact it uses the same stories, only slightly different each time, that if it were to change its approach and produce stories so far from the norm it would lose audience appeal and fade from popularity. We are able to see signs of this when Deep Space 9 (DS9) (1993-1999) aired while TNG was still in production. Some fans were decidedly put off by the new series being set on a space station apparently lacking Star Trek's traditional sense of exploration and voyaging adventure. It was not until a fan base of its own developed and its stories started to stray from a stationary locale that DS9 began to match TNG's successes.

<5> As I have already mentioned, Star Trek makes much use of the common cultural narratives to communicate its own form of historical discourse, and even then there are only a handful possible narratives. According to the historian Kerwin Lee Klein, "[Hayden] White followed the lead of formalist literary critics Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke, arguing that a limited number of plot forms and tropes characterized historical narratives" (1997: 53). For Frye this meant that there were four archetypal plot modes, or mythoi, that characterized Western literature. Klein (53-54) lists them as the romance, the tragedy, the comedy, and the satire. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957) Frye uses different terminology, also breaking up the mythoi into specific forms such as "scriptural play" and irony (282-293): Epos (251-262), Prose (293-268), Drama (268-270), Lyric (270-281). There were other categories, but Frye considered these four to be of paramount importance. Kenneth Burke analysed the existence of common literary genres, or modes of thought that characterized the human understanding of history, determining the four tropes that White went on to unpack in his later work (1962: 507-517). What these scholars ultimately suggest is that our understanding of the past, and therefore our understanding of ourselves, is inseparable from the manner in which we broadcast our history. This is the conclusion that White comes to in The Content of the Form (1987) and it is also mirrored in Marshall McLuhan's aphorism "The Medium is the Message" (1964: 7-21):

Narrative, far from being merely a form of discourse that can be filled with different contents, real or imaginary as the case may be, already possesses a content prior to any given actualization of it in speech or writing. (White, 1987: xi)

Following on from Frye's and Burke's analysis of literary plot forms, Klein recognizes that White reads the usage of plots as a form of historical explanation. Historians had no experience or empirical evidence of what actually happened in history so they inadvertently borrowed from the common plots and narrative forms already present in literature to help manifest a coherent discourse from their material - however this leads to the creation of politically and ideologically biased histories. This appropriation of literary methods to construct history is exactly what Star Trek does when it uses culturally significant metaphors and tropes to symbolize its own futuristic take on American history and society.

<6> Klein goes further in his breakdown of White's theories by recounting the four master tropes described in Metahistory (1973), White's first and most influential piece. There is a typology of rhetorical figures of speech made up of four tropes, they in turn govern the way we operate language: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (54). White based much of his work on Burke and the premise that language, and therefore history, was reliant upon only a minimum number of narrative modes of production. The larger differences between White and his predecessors are counted for by the fact that White was dealing with the nature of writing history, whereas Frye and Burke were concerned with literature. However, White's work does provide a link between the two fields thanks to his utilization of a common literary typology; again this is something that Star Trek employs to bridge the gap between telling good stories and mediating history, only its form of story-telling is primarily mediated visually. There is of course a whole literary market devoted to Star Trek, including novels, comics, encyclopaedias, technical manuals, etc. yet these take their lead from the screen. Everything that appears on film or television episode is considered authoritative within the Star Trek fictional universe. The plethora of written material produced under license by Paramount builds upon existing stories and plot narratives -- anything new written in a novel or comic is not part of the official Star Trek narrative. Therefore, old characters cannot get killed off or new characters introduced long-term in paperback.

<7> Metaphor is a trope of resemblance, replacing one object with another object that is taken to mean the same. The future America is a metaphorical representation of the present, with the Federation taking the place of the US or UN, particularly in the sixties the Klingons were the Russians, the Romulans the Chinese. On DS9 the Cardassian enslavement of the Bajorans can be seen as a metaphor for the German treatment of the Jews during World War Two. Some scholars have criticized Star Trek for slotting in ethnic minorities and alien stereotypes claiming that they are token gestures, however, such sublimation was necessary when Star Trek first aired. Gene Roddenberry had to make one thing stand for another so that he could get stories about racism or prejudice past the television censors. On a slightly different level, the various crews made up of the main characters for each Star Trek series are interpreted as being representative of American society. The crew of the original series was created to symbolize America in the 1960s -- encompassing different races and ethnic backgrounds -- even though mainstream white society at that time denied the cultural diversity that actually characterized America. Further developments to the composition of the crews signify the transformation of a pluralist American society to the multi-ethnic and multiculturally-minded society that is synonymous with the mid-to-late 1990s. On board TNG there were female doctors, a blind pilot, and children in command positions, later on DS9 we were introduced to an African-American single parent who had to command a space station, and in Voyager a female played the captain for the first time in a series. Through the allegorical representations that the separate crews offer the series -- allegory is a narrative mode based on metaphor -- Star Trek is able to act out its own social fantasies and still comment on the inequalities present in modern society.

<8> In Roland Barthes' essay "The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat," he recognizes that Jules Verne's fictional ship may be a symbol for departure, but it is also a symbol for closure. Similarly, one could equate Star Trek's consistent use of a ship on which to set its stories with the departure/closure dichotomy; and just as Verne's ships have been used to cross great distances so too have the U.S.S. Enterprise and Voyager. But as Barthes' work intimates, these ships represent not only travel but also a habitat: "All the ships in Jules Verne are perfect cubby-holes, and the vastness of their circumnavigation further increase the bliss of their closure, the perfection of their inner humanity" (1993: 66). Star Trek uses the ship as a vessel for enclosing humanity -- each crew is but a microcosm of contemporary America. It encapsulates cross-sections of society within the boundaries of a ship, or in Deep Space Nine's case, a space station, using the miniaturized representation of society as a metaphor for humanity's failures and successes.

<9> Metonymy is the trope of contiguity, part-part relationships, where a single event may provide a causal link in a chain of events. With this trope there is no determined end but rather an incomplete and continuous series of events that form an unfinished narrative. Recent Star Trek episodes have not only stood on their own as individual one-hour shows, they have also been part of larger story arcs that have typified entire series. This particular trait is best identified in DS9 where the last season was devoted to the culmination of a war that was first brought to attention at the end of the second season [1]. DS9 was created to be different from the more explorative ethos of the original Star Trek and its later offspring TNG. What characterized DS9 were the inner conflicts and social turmoil found on the space station, usually found in the different alien societies encountered in individual episodes of the earlier series. The larger story arcs concerned the religious, cultural, and political ideologies of entire empires and the personal conflicts initiated when races collided in war. But individual episodes would also be concerned with those issues on a smaller scale -- perhaps looking at certain key characters and their backgrounds -- enabling the audience to fully understand the complexities of the larger story lines and become familiar with "who's who."

<10> What is important to bear in mind when looking at DS9 is that it is metonymic because some of its story arcs were not finalized and completed when the last episode, "What You Leave Behind," was aired in 1999. The war may have ended but many plot lines remained unfinished and the audience was left wondering what would happen to some of their favourite characters. For example, Captain Benjamin Sisko left the station to pursue his destiny as religious Emissary to the people of Bajor. Originally he was very wary of assuming this important religious role and throughout the seven years DS9 aired, the very secular character was shown to be at odds with his religious duties. In the last episode Sisko decides to continue as Emissary and live with the Wormhole Prophets that all Bajorans looked to for spiritual guidance; they would teach him how to lead his new-found people to salvation. In undertaking this spiritual quest in a non-corporeal universe, Sisko left his son Jake and pregnant wife Kasidy on board the station wondering whether he would ever return -- it also left the fans wondering if he would ever return to the screen. This was a first for Star Trek because both previous series captains, Kirk and Picard, remained in Starfleet and their characters continued as they had left off: Kirk appeared in several movies and Picard is slowly doing the same. It is because DS9 was designed as something slightly different from the franchise norm that Sisko's character was written with less confidence and determination for the future. Sisko's metonymic exploration of spirituality reflects how DS9 viewed America's unfinished journey towards a totally free and democratic nation at the beginning of a new century. The audience was unsure of what would happen to him just as Americans are unsure of what will happen to them entering the second millennium as the world's only financially and culturally dominant superpower. It also highlighted the postmodern tack that Star Trek had taken with DS9, searching for a new definition of life and the reaffirmation of humanity at the center of its stories (see Barrett and Barrett, 2001: 137-141).

<11> Synecdoche is the trope of integration, whereby the whole of a subject can be symbolized by a small part because it has some of the inherent qualities found in the bigger picture. In Star Trek it is possible to see synecdoche quite easily, each episode on its own is a small example of the overall humanistic message that the franchise tries to relay to America. The feature films also provide a snapshot of what lies beneath Star Trek's science fiction veneer, only transposed onto the big screen they tend to concentrate on one issue and form the action and plot around it. However, taken as a whole, the Star Trek feature films from The Motion Picture (1979) to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) represent a completed story - one that concerns the famous crew from the original series. On another level it could be argued that the original series never really ends, with Spock appearing on TNG, Kirk in Generations, and all the crossovers in the novels, as well as the prefiguring in the new series Enterprise (2001-present), certain Star Trek characters and plots may disappear for a while but they can never be really overlooked. A simple time-travel or alternative timeline story could bring a forgotten character or plot point back into the current narrative. Nevertheless, the use of synecdoche in Star Trek's narrative suggests the whole "thing" described is a totality -- a system.

<12> The big screen saga started in 1979 with Kirk as an admiral tired of not being in command of the Enterprise. In 1982, with The Wrath of Khan, Kirk has regained the captain's chair only to lose his closest friend Spock when the crew encounters an adversary first seen in "Space Seed" (1967). As a sequel to Spock's death, both The Search for Spock (1984) and The Voyage Home (1986) portrayed Kirk and his crew disobeying orders and attempting to rescue Spock after they find out he is not dead. Then, as fugitives, they try to return home to 23rd century Earth after saving two humpback whales from the 20th century. In what was touted as Star Trek's last film with the original crew, The Final Frontier (1989) shows Kirk, McCoy, and Spock close to retirement asking questions about life and mortality. Yet, when Spock's half brother Sybok commandeers the Enterprise to seek God, the three friends, along with Chekov, Uhura, Sulu, and Scotty come to an understanding that there is a lot left in life yet to come. Following on from this new-found zeal, Star Trek VI in 1991 sees Kirk and the Enterprise on their last mission before retiring trying to save the fragile peace between the Klingons and the Federation. For most of the characters it is the last time fans can see them on screen, but the story brings a closure to the epic voyages that had started 25 years earlier. The six films resurrect, continue, and conclude the story of the Enterprise through the use of a synecdochic narrative. As an appendix, Kirk dies in Star Trek Generations (1994) drawing the curtain on a famous and most popular Star Trek era.

<13> In Star Trek: Voyager there have been a number of episodes where contemporary newsworthy topics, such as capital punishment in "Repentance" (2001), genetic engineering in "Lineage" (2001), and organized healthcare in "Critical Care" (2000), have provided a suitable allegorical basis for stories [2]. This concern for current affairs is not a new plot device for Star Trek, but it does tend to characterize Voyager's ethos more than for past series. DS9 finished its run in 1999 and since Voyager was left as the stand alone series on the relatively new UPN network it took the lead in addressing issues important to Americans at that time, not least because 2000 was an election year where those above issues proved to be important battlegrounds for the presidential candidates. It could be said that the new series Enterprise does not rely so much on the sort of contemporary issue stories that characterized Voyager's final two seasons, returning instead to a more simplistic adventure format reminiscent of the original series. However, in Voyager's entirety the aforementioned episodes contribute to the series' concentration on humanity and the individual's search for the meaning of life.

<14> Klein and White deem irony the hardest to pinpoint due to its intrinsic ability to negate the meanings of the other three tropes. Irony seeks to bend the rules and has a tendency to make a mockery of the complexities of language. Out of this trope comes a criticism of the other three, especially metaphor, because it broadens the horizons of language to include scepticism, satire, and cynicism (Klein, 1997: 54). Star Trek's irony comes in the form of its more comedic episodes, wherein the familiar characters and their recognizable traits are slightly out of tune with what the audience has come to expect. Also irony becomes apparent in episodes where the crew and/or storyline pays homage to the original series, both recognising the historical narrative created by Star Trek, and appeasing fans' desires for metanarrative.

<15> The joining together of two or more of the series can work in two opposite ways. Firstly it could be of a benefit to the fictional reality that Star Trek has created as it legitimizes the narrative universe in which the series are set. If different characters appear on other series it indicates that both series in question are contemporary to each other, both series represent a larger fantasy in which the audience can further engage. This trait is not unique to Star Trek and can be found in comic book superhero narratives. Richard Reynolds defines the super-ness of superheroes such as Batman, who incidentally does not possess gifted superpowers like other comic book characters such as Spider-Man or The Hulk, in terms of their interaction with the Superman crowd (1992: 37-38). Therefore, the integrity of the characters depends upon the existence of a "universe" in which all the characters owned by a particular company inhabit the same fictional world. In Star Trek's case, the larger stories that have the Federation on the brink of destruction are made more urgent for the audience because other members of other crews become involved; the threat is not restricted to just one series.

<16> On the other hand, character integration can undermine the fictional reality created because it admits to the audience that the characters are not real. For example, if a favourite character is advertised to appear on another Star Trek series then some might cynically say that it is only to boost the ratings. This happened when Michael Dorn was hired to play his popular TNG character Worf on DS9 from Season Four onwards. Some critics implied that it was not a move to improve stories but a move to improve the viewer ratings that were lagging behind competition such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-1999) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2000). However, bringing Worf aboard DS9 allowed existing characters more scope for interesting storylines. For example, Dax married Worf introducing a newly married couple dimension to the already familial atmosphere of the station. Dorn, as another African American actor, also expanded the multicultural focus of the DS9 crew. Crossover episodes and the use of existing characters are hard things to judge and sometimes fail to attract good press, but some of the most successful episodes have contained crossover plots to which fans have responded well; Worf on DS9 is one such example. What these stories are doing is called "retconning," an "abbreviated term for the act of retroactively adjusting continuity," and "is a long-established staple in the world of comics, where characters' origins are forever being raked over, fleshed out and sometimes adjusted for perceived 'newer' audiences" (Jones 2002: 19). In other words, Star Trek is using retcons (an insertion into the fictional narrative chronology) as a means to construct the future history that both fascinates and compels the more serious fans. Crossing over characters between series legitimates and strengthens their individual narratives and links them all within the same fictional reality of Federation space.

<17> In 1996 Star Trek celebrated its 30th anniversary and both DS9 and Voyager aired special commemorative episodes in honor of this. In "Trials and Tribble-ations" the crew of DS9 has to go back in history to save the life of Captain Kirk. They do this by becoming members of the famous Enterprise crew first seen in the 1960s. The producers managed to integrate the actors into the story "The Trouble with Tribbles" (1967) by splicing their film with the original and recreating many of the older sets. This gave the audience the chance to see what the modern characters looked like against the 1960s version of the Star Trek universe. The new plot centred on the original whereby Kirk and his crew square up to the Klingons at the same time Tribbles (small furry animals) infest the ship. A plot to blow up the ship by using a bomb disguised as a Tribble is undertaken by a Klingon posing as a human, only in the DS9 episode the future version of the bomber tries to influence history by helping himself in the past. Sisko and his crew become members of Kirk's crew in order to prevent the bomb going off and save Kirk's timeline from changing. Not only did the episode recognize the popularity of the original "The Trouble with Tribbles" but it also highlighted how much the audience appreciated a comedic embellishment of a previously aired episode. Star Trek's own history was used as a basis for a plot, taking advantage of its popularity and treating itself with a little humor. The 1996 episode had recognized the cultural impact that the original 1967 episode had made and used that to tell a new story. At the same time that this negated the previous narrative, it also emphasized the culturally significant place Star Trek still holds in American society.

<18> For Thomas M. Disch (1998) the ability to poke fun at oneself was something that science fiction was not capable of; it took itself far too seriously and suffered as a result. In The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, Disch criticized television science fiction as being rather over used and clichéd, the "sense of wonder" was no longer present. However, Star Trek was different, not because of its liberated approach to a multi-ethnic crew, but rather due to the aesthetic quality of the series -- specifically the colorful pyjamas the actors wore as uniforms. The uniform "taught that conformity will be the order of the day in the future even more than in the present" and that all we had to aspire to was working in an office (the Enterprise) "disguised as the future" (101). This cock-eyed view of Star Trek's impact not only makes a mockery of the series but also disregards the serious attempt at change that Roddenberry tried to make with it. By concentrating on its visual look, Disch was trying to point out that too much austerity and gloominess prevented science fiction series, including Star Trek, from having fun with what could be an exciting and adventure filled format. However, Star Trek is much more than a visual series, hence the vast amount of fan literature and the success of printed word material. Stories and art with a high sexual content produced by fans have been referred to by Constance Penley in NASA/TREK (1997: 2-3) as slash fiction; by this she means that fans and amateur writers have "ingeniously subverted and rewritten Star Trek to make it answerable to their own sexual and social desires." In some cases, particularly with the characters of Kirk and Spock, writers (mostly women) have "recognised that there was an erotic homosexual subtext there, or at least one that could easily be made to be there" (101-102) [author's emphasis]. The fact that such themes and issues have been read into Star Trek and written about in such numbers suggests that it provides an ironic framework open to extrapolation, interpretation, and poetic license; it had something for everybody and everybody had something to say about it. They just said it in many different ways.

<19> Even taking into account the views of Disch, one can see Star Trek has tried to have a laugh with itself, especially after having celebrated thirty-five years at the pinnacle of television science fiction. In "Trials and Tribble-ations" Odo pokes fun at the odd looking older version Klingons lacking the visible forehead ridges synonymous with the more modern Klingon look. Klingons from the 1960s were painted with shoe polish and wore long thin moustaches to make them look alien; the budget could not stretch to anything more imaginative. Today Star Trek has updated the look so as to make Klingons more menacing, but this discrepancy drew attention to the fact that they were originally ridgeless. Worf hides his ridges and explains the discrepancy between old and new looks by saying it is something that Klingons do not like to discuss with others. The audience could laugh at this because Star Trek chose to recognize the visual difference between the old and new series and decided to explain it in a humorous and ironic fashion rather than devise a pseudo-scientific explanation which probably would not have lived up to many fans' expectations.

<20> Voyager's birthday episode, "Flashback" (1996), also used a previous Star Trek story. On this occasion it was based on the feature film The Undiscovered Country and was specifically concerned with the popular original series character Sulu. In this episode the audience discovers that Voyager's Tuvok was originally a member of Sulu's crew, therefore linking him with the famous original series and timeline. Both Janeway and Tuvok have to confront his forgotten past by assuming positions on what fans recognize as the USS Excelsior seen in the popular sixth movie whilst not changing the past. Both special episodes represent a reverence for the Star Trek phenomenon that resembles what Audre Lorde would call "poetry as illumination"; a way of forming the ideas by which we live in order to pursue our magic and fulfil our dreams: "It is through this that we give name to those ideas which are -- until the poem -- nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt" (1984: 36). Through this reverential recognition of past episodes, the audience is further absorbed into the fictional reality of the Star Trek universe, believing more and more that "it represents a future we would like to make real" (Gerrold, 1996: 228).

<21> Reverential recognition does not just occur in the episodes, there have been countless comedy sketches, TV shows, and films that have made a joke out of Star Trek and also paid it homage. Saturday Night Live (1975-present) has satirized Star Trek, even going as far as having William Shatner (Captain Kirk) take part in a sketch famously telling freakish fans to "Get a Life!" The Simpsons has also mocked Star Trek by showing the old crew as geriatrics aboard the Enterprise in Star Trek IX: So Very Tired, when Sulu says "Sir, there are Klingons on the starboard bow," Kirk replies "Again with the Klingons!" Practically every episode of the cartoon Futurama (1999-present) (created by The Simpsons' Matt Groening) has visual and thematic links to the classic series, no doubt partly due to the fact it is set in the future and Star Trek is notorious for promoting its own version of the future. Given that its central character, Fry, is transplanted from 20th century New York to the 31st, he brings these historic cultural references forward with him to the future where they are ironically laughed at by his friends because they represent a future that is archaic compared to their advanced timeline. In the episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" (2002) Fry determines to retrieve Star Trek episode tapes that were banished to a forbidden planet: "The world needs Star Trek to give people hope for the future," Fry declares. Leela replies "But it's set 800 years in the past!" The film The Cable Guy (1996) -- a dark satire on the power of television -- pays tribute to the famous scene from "Amok Time" (1967), when Spock challenges Kirk to a death match. It does this by placing the characters played by Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick in a similar situation with the same music and weapons used in the original. Even Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway) has taken part in a comedy sketch with the cast from Frasier (1993-present) as her crew on board Voyager for the television special Star Trek: Thirty Years and Beyond (1996). What these examples suggest is that whether Star Trek is mocked or idealized people have been affected by it and use its phenomenal appeal to express their own desires and highlight Star Trek's idiosyncrasies in a humorous and comical way.

<22> In my analysis I have explained the four fundamental narrative modes of production that make Star Trek the cultural phenomenon it is today and shown through example how Star Trek, in all its forms, represents a form of historical discourse. Star Trek uses these methods of storytelling because society requires a mode of expression that can accommodate different possibilities. People need a means through which they can exercise their complex and composite imagination; my own rendering of Hayden White's investigation of the exemplary narrative shows how Star Trek provides the means because it illustrates and facilitates various alternative plots and outcomes. Star Trek's stories require a basic literary formula in order for its massive audience to fully comprehend the fantastic images and predictions that it makes about their possible future reality. As Janet H. Murray states in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace:

Alternate versions of reality are now part of the way we think, part of the way we experience the world. To be alive in the twentieth century is to be aware of the alternative possible selves, of alternative possible worlds, and of the limitless intersecting stories of the actual world. (1997: 38)

With Star Trek, exemplary narratives work because it has a fictional future history that serves as a basis for many of its episodes; there is already a narrative framework in place for multiple plots to expand upon and characters to harmonize with. Or, as the opening quote by Captain Kirk from The Wrath of Khan makes clear, "good words" are "where ideas begin." For fans Star Trek's "alternate versions of reality" are part of the way they experience their own world and, as a result, part of how they identify themselves and want to imagine the future. As ever, science fiction succeeds in extrapolating ideas about the future by using contemporary methods of storytelling very much grounded in literary tradition. Rather than being a twenty-fourth century tale about the future, Star Trek can, and may well always, be considered a story about contemporary society and how we deal with our own past and present.

Notes

[1] The last nine episodes of DS9 in 1999 concerned the final developments of the "Dominion War," they also signalled the farewell to the major characters. This meant that all nine had to adequately finish off story lines that had been going on for a number of years; there was no time for introducing new plots or characters. [^]

[2] In the episode "Repentance" the crew encounter a prison ship returning to its home world. The convicts are being transported to their death, returning home to be executed. This causes problems for those on board Voyager who do not agree with such a harsh form of punishment. In "Lineage" lieutenants Torres and Paris get the chance to see their baby in the mother's womb. Torres, who is half Klingon, sees that the baby will be born with the distinctive head ridges and so decides to have the Doctor change its DNA to be born without. Torres' own childhood experiences dictate how she wants her child to be born. "Critical Care" sees the Doctor having to administer treatment to an alien race infected with a curable disease; however, the cure is only available to the rich upper class who can afford the drug. The Doctor takes it upon himself to treat all those infected, even those who have not been designated as worthy.[^]

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