Utopia

Abstract

Few terms are used as often in the literature on Star Trek as “utopian.” Be it fans or scholars discussing the franchise’s attraction, or Gene Roddenberry explaining his original vision for the series, the references to utopia abound. In the introduction to his Cultural History of Star Trek, M. Keith Booker is quite paradigmatic in claiming that TOS’s main appeal lies “in the characters and their relationships— and especially in the way these relationships modeled a utopian twenty- third century in which the social problems of the twentieth century had been solved” (2018, xiv). But although— or maybe
because— Star Trek is routinely referred to as utopian, few authors care to explain what they actually mean by this. Most of the time, “utopia” is used as a catch- all phrase for any kind of future that appears to be better than the world we currently inhabit. This is problematic since “utopia” is by no means a clearly defined term. In colloquial language, it is often used to designate illusory or unattainable ideas. In academic discourse, however, different traditions exist, which, while sometimes overlapping, can differ fundamentally in their understanding of utopia. There is even disagreement about what kind of
object we mean when we talk about utopia. Is it a genre, a political or sociological concept, a philosophical stance, or an anthropological constant? In this chapter, utopia is conceptualized in a narrow sense, drawing on the characteristics and tradition of the literary genre inaugurated by Thomas More in his 1516 text, Utopia. Although almost every aspect of the genre has undergone changes in its long history, Utopia still represents the genre prototype and is therefore often used as a benchmark against which all later incarnations can be measured.