I have a great story about this blog post. The same day I started work on it, I began de-cluttering at home, organizing the piles of books my family tends to amass. As I picked up an old paperback Star Trek novel, bought used, a newspaper clipping fell out. The headline read “Roddenberry Fills Heroic Void.” The article discussed a talk given in Jesse Auditorium by Gene Roddenberry, creator of the Star Trek television series. I could find no mention of the date or even the name of the newspaper, but with a bit of sleuthing through the library’s collection of University of Missouri yearbooks, I confirmed the event happened on February 17, 1976.
Among quotes from the talk, this one stood out: “Roddenberry predicted giant and efficient telecommunications systems will be available within 12 years that will make TV look primitive.” He was off by only three years, as the World Wide Web went public in 1991. Quite a visionary. His mid-sixties TV series featured communications devices that looked a lot like cell phones, information storage devices that looked a lot like iPads and a starship crew that looked a lot like the entire human race had learned to work together cooperatively.
When “Star Trek” debuted in 1966 (September 6 in Canada and September 8 in the U.S.), the sight of a multi-ethnic, mixed-gender group of people working together as equals represented a giant leap forward in popular entertainment and society. Decades later, the population of devoted Trekkies continues to grow.
Just in time for the show’s 50th anniversary, DBRL has acquired DVD sets of nearly every “Star Trek” series, including the animated one, to fulfill your binge-watching needs. We also have a large selection of Star Trek novels, music CDs of the movie soundtracks and, for those who use Hoopla, Star Trek comics.
A handful of nonfiction books about the Trek universe have been published in the last couple of years:
“Star Trek, the Official Guide to Our Universe” explores “the true science behind the starship voyages.” Author Andrew Fazekas, an astronomy educator, provides fascinating facts about the celestial phenomena encountered on the screen.
“The Star Trek Book” by Paul Ruditis provides generously illustrated short, encyclopedia-type entries describing characters, planets, technology and alien races encountered in the series.
In “The Fifty Year Mission” Edward Gross and Mark Altman have compiled two volumes worth of quotes from people involved in Star Trek on all aspects of the enterprise. (See what I did there?) The result is a historical overview of the entire franchise from a variety of perspectives.
With the new series “Star Trek: Discovery” set to launch in 2017, we’re not to the end yet. When asked about the enduring appeal of his creation, Roddenberry once said, “The human race is a remarkable creature, one with great potential, and I hope that ‘Star Trek’ has helped to show us what we can be if we believe in ourselves and our abilities.”
