“Like Spain’s Francisco Franco, Star Trek has been fatally dead for a long time. Now and then the mortuary shoots an electric current through the corpse, and the resultant spasm releases yet another manual or quiz or convention or novel or book of fan fiction or whathaveyou, but after nearly a decade there’s little life left in the old cadaver.”

—Gil Lamont & James K. Burk DeLap’s F & SF Review (March/April 1978)

This quote reflects the reception science fiction fandom gave Star Trek fans in the mid to late seventies. They looked down on Star Trek, and chose to dismiss it. These intemperate remarks ignored growing popular interests as fan interest attained a life greater than the TV image that inspired it.

This touched common chords in many individuals. Some went through life quietly enamored with the series, unaware they shared a common bond with countless strangers until they found a Star Trek fanzine or walked into a convention.

Before Star Trek’s fitful return to the screen in the 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a backlash of anti-Star Trek sentiment raged. It began with the attitude that “those people” were “invading” otherwise sedate science fiction and comic book conventions.

I wonder how many times those critics have watched the new incarnations of Star Trek in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. How quickly passion doth ebb and flow.

EMBRACED BY THE MASSES

Critics to any new series were reacting to a TV show that had perished in 1969. They thought it should be buried. Many of these detractors read novels by dead authors or comic strips by dead artists. They pursued interests without practical purpose and with no hope of continuation by their talented creators. But Star Trek, they felt, was just a TV show in reruns.

Reruns (or reprints) can still be appreciated. H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, E. E. “Doc” Smith, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, Rod Serling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and many others, including H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, left books behind for fans to enjoy. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, yet Sherlock Holmes is appreciated by more people today than ever before. Every year, it seems, someone is inspired to take pen in hand and create an “untold” tale of London’s famous sleuth.

“New” is not an easy word. Harlan Ellison is fond of pointing out that, “Any book you have not read is a new book.”

I raised these points in a reply when the remarks that opened this article first appeared. I had hoped for a reply befitting the stature of the magazine. Instead I witnessed the death of the publication. It ended in 1978 while the “corpse” of Star Trek looks amazingly healthy these days.

SURVIVAL TRAITS

Why did Star Trek endure? Its whole proved to be greater than the sum of its parts. A special spirit struck a responsive chord in many people. It delivered something people searched for and wouldn’t find again until Star Wars appeared in 1977, namely, optimism. They both offered a future in the stars, no matter what squalor lay at our feet.

When Star Trek premiered in 1966, the dream of reaching beyond the mortal confines of our world still seemed a dream. America was plunged deep into the quagmire of Southeast Asia. The future offered little when friends and relatives came home in bodybags.

Then Star Trek brought new hope. It proclaimed that not only would there be a future, but the future worked. The starship

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