Top 10 Revisions to the Star Trek Universe that Would be Fine by Me

By | November 19, 2008
7 Comments

There is no small amount of fear among the Star Trek faithful that the latest entry in the film series, due out in a few months, is going to present significant changes in the backstories of some of our beloved characters. Of course, the continuity between the various TV series and the movies (and even within each) has never been as pristine as the faithful would like. Still, things like having Kirk and Spock be roughly the same age and attending Star Fleet Academy together, if that is indeed what’s going on, is a pretty big change — bigger than any that have come before.

Some have been upset by the new trailer. Not me. I think it looks pretty cool. Perhaps it suggests that there are massive changes in store for the Trek continuity, but director JJ Abrams at least assures us that Chekov will still pronounce his V’s as W’s, even though Russians don’t really do that.

Now that is some serious respect for tradition.

Of course, Star Trek fans have the right to be a little nervous about turning their baby over to this particular sitter. First Alias and then Lost have shown a tendency on the part of the unquestionably brilliant Mr. Abrams to apparently just sort of make stuff up as he goes along. And anyone who has heard about his script for a Superman reboot a few years back — in which Krypton is never destroyed, Jor El is a martial arts expert, and Lex Luthor is a CIA agent (and, no, I’m not kidding) — has reason to be anxious.

We can only hope that Abrams got most of that kind of nonsense out of his system in writing that script, and that any broad and sweeping changes he has made to the Star Trek universe won’t immediately strike us as overwhelmingly and unforgivably stupid. Besides, let’s get with the program, folks. They make big changes when they make movies about historical figures. Showtime has been retconning the life of Henry VIII like crazy on the The Tudors, and HBO did the same thing with Caesar, Mark Antony, and Augustus a few years back on Rome. So in that spirit, let’s do a little creative destruction of our own. There must be a little dross amongst all that glitters in the Star trek treasure chest. If we could make a few changes to Star Trek as we know it, what would they be?

Here are 10 thoughts on the subject.

  • rob

    SF is dying. 50 years ago future technology was exciting. Now we live in that future and any kind of technology is possible within a few decades. We know that. Cures for anything, anti aging, protection, free energy, mass space exploration, etc. Exponential progress which will bring huge paradigm shifts. The world is already changing from day to day.

    Star Trek doesn’t resemble the future, it resembles the past. Writers should focus on that. Retro SF. There is no technological progress in the Star Trek world. Most of the technology used is already obsolete.

    Real SF now would involve nanoclay, interconnected brains, the impact this and an ever involving universe have on personalities, mind/meme wars over what is correct and what is not, decay of economic structures, disappearing of privacy, power etc.

  • Stephen Gordon

    Here here!

    George Dvorsky has a similar disdain of the Prime Directive.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    Rob:

    Sci-fi is growing more difficult as we get closer to the Singularity, but even post-Singularity I suspect that the SF impulse will still be with us.

    How? SF authors will build virtual worlds for us to explore. It will be possible to live Star Trek, Star Wars, or even Lord of the Rings.

    And to some extent Star Trek is a past-future, but faster-than-light travel, transporters, and alien races keep it interesting enough for now.

    I just hope they don’t screw Star Trek up too bad.

  • Mark

    What they need to do is make it more Iain M Banks or P F Hamilton. A film or TV series about agents of Special Circumstances would be radically new.

  • mdk

    I grew up watching ToS with my dad. I don’t think the tech they used was EVER that insane to consider, it was all just ‘future gun’ or ‘future walkie talkie’ and really the transporter was ‘how to ignore travel time between the space-automobile and the planetary location’.

    Real SF, my Aunt Fanny, it’s a Western, and between the actor’s chemistry and the frontier sensibility, that’s where these movies seem to succeed or fail.

    Also, whales.

  • rjschwarz

    I like the Andorians and find them fare more intersting than the generic ridge faced folk that apeared all the time. Having said that I would like to see some real odd aliens that took some time to think up like some of the ones in the Star Wars movies.

  • http://nextbigfuture.com Brian Wang

    Technology can completely pass fictional stories and those stories can still be popular and relevant. HG Wells, Jules Verne still get re-used

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction#Verne_and_Wells

    Science fiction of the early 1900′s and before almost always did not come close to addressing the changing technology of the time. We have already crossed over the 1980′s and 2008 timeframe that some Trek stories referenced. WW3 and the Eugenics wars being the big thing and we are going to cross over the time of Zephram Cochrane and Trek will likely still be viable and stories will have to change. In the comics Iron Man was originally started in the Korean War. (then Vietnam, then Iraq etc… Boy what if the US had not had significant wars in reality or stopped having wars to update to….. OK so Iron Man is probably safe updating to the latest US War.)

    I believe in theory Star Trek the old series/shows will start coming into the public domain in 51 years. Unless Disney can extend it further (now 95 years for work started in 1976). At that point fan fiction could become official. Will Star Trek copyright expire before the 23rd century ? We just need to write some new fiction universes with properly updated tech projections.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:(C)_Term_by_Tom_Bell.gif

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

    There have been various leaks on the internet, wired etc… about this Trek reboot.

    Spoiler space …

    Do not proceed to avoid Spoilers

    They will be an attempt to change Kirk’s life in order to change the future universe. That would mean at least Khan Noonian would still be around. But it does mean that from the time of baby Kirk onwards all bets are off and we are not locked into the fate of next gen, DS9, Voyager etc… It re-establishes dramatic tension, because we don’t know. But Star Trek is a multiverse so anything can happen and the old universes or something like them are still there and available to be accessed with a transporter accident or intentionally. How could classic spock/Nimoy give this new universe advice and a sendoff without the old one kind of being around.

    Tech and visuals and laptops get updated because that has just happened many times anyway. No need to explain. Computer tech gets updated and even the effects of old shows have been revamped after the fact.

    Chekov speaks like a 23rd century Russian.