This week, we’re digging into the classic Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” to see what we can learn about reading stories metaphorically.
Overview
This week, we’re going to watch the classic Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” If you’d like to preview it, you can find the full Star Trek series on Netflix. Note: there are many different Star Trek series, but the episode we’ll be watching is from The Original Series.
Day 1
We’ll watch the full Star Trek episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
Day 2
I’ll briefly talk a little bit about Star Trek and its legacy in English-speaking cultures. Then I’ll refresh your memory about the concept of a “reading” of a “text” and introduce one more idea: “The Death of the Author.” (Some of you will know this, and some of you won’t.”
In small groups, we’ll discuss some questions about ways we can “read” the episode we viewed.
I will also discuss your Midterm Exam Writing Assignment, along with the criteria I will be using to judge it.
Handout
Here’s a copy of this week’s handout.
Journaling
For your Journal this week, I want you to write about race and science fiction.
Specifically: The Star Trek universe is supposed to be a post-national, post-scarcity utopia. People supposedly enjoy equality on Earth and in other human societies… yet somehow the Starship Enterprise never seems to have more than one Black person, one Asian person, one Russian, and so on—at least when it comes to important positions in the crew.
In other words, the original Star Trek imagines a utopia, but also imagines its utopia’s power structures and institutions are just as white-dominated as the 1960s America in which the series was created, in the 1960s.
Similarly, in terms of sex and gender, the women in the original Star Trek series tend to dress in fashions that look old-fashioned even in 2024: many wear miniskirt uniforms and non-Starfleet women wear even more revealing clothing. This changed with later Star Trek series, of course—which eventully included several important female captains as well—but for the original series, the attire of female characters is difficult not to notice.
The strange thing is that in terms of race and sex, Star Trek was quite progressive for its time. Having any nonwhite crew was unusual, and in fact when Nichelle Nichols was considering quitting her job playing Lieutenant Uhura, no less a figure than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. urged her to remain on the show because of the “importance” of seeing a Black woman in that role. Similarly, imagining a starfleet in which women and men worked together was a radical idea compared to the navy ship culture on which the series’ Starfleet was based.
What do you think about these issues? Do you think it is inevitable that even progressive SF for its time will look dated when it comes to issues like race and gender? Do you think SF has a limited “shelf-life” when it comes to compelling predictions of social change? Or do you think that SF has gotten better at handling such topics?