12.1.1 The Oxbridge Academical Companion To Starfleet Academy, Foreword - Chapter 1 (Introduction)

Kids These Days

Foreword

Welcome to this book, which we believe to be the first study companion to Starfleet Academy. Written by an expert in the field of interpreting both text and context, we are confident you will find this a valuable resource to accompany any and all academic courses relating to the adventures of the academy's students and faculty. We hope you find the reading of this book as stimulating and thought-provoking as we did its writing.

The preparation of every Oxbridge Academical study companion is ultimately a balancing act between digging as deep as possible into a text we love, and ensuring we provide relevant analysis at an appropriate educational level . This is perhaps especially important here, dealing as we are with a text which itself is concerned with the relationship between our passions and our educational context. It is our position, just as we believe it is Chancellor Ake's, that the two can, even must, overlap. Learning should be exciting. It should be inspiring. It should both astonish you with how deeply our universe can be understood, and amaze you that so many of reality's secrets you had it within you to unlock all along.

Learning isn't just how we understand the present. It is how we shape the future.

So let's start on that future right now.

Positionality Statement

A positionality statement is, in the author's opinion, an essential element of any critical analysis. The reader must know where the author began, so they can consider where they are coming from. True neutrality is an illusion, creative shorthand from a game packed with dragons and kobolds and carrion crawlers, none of which are actually any less real. Trek itself has considered this from time to time - just ask the Lady Azetbur1, or Ensign Tuvok2. Not even the United Federation of Planets can be considered a default position, that from which everyone else can be measured. What chance could one human being have of doing better? The assumption of "the view from nowhere" is again akin to those dungeon-haunting dragons - both fictional, and horribly dangerous.

My own positionality is as follows. I am a cis-het white male born in the UK in 1980. My interactions with Star Trek as a child came first from early eighties reruns of The Original Series, then broadcasts of the first four films (which I committed to VHS tape where I could), and then first terrestrial UK broadcast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, just two months before my eleventh birthday,. The first two episodes of Starfleet Academy were released the day I turned forty-six. I am also a lecturer in a higher education institution.

There are two immediate corollaries to this. Firstly, the comparisons I make between Starfleet Academy and pre-Kurtzman era Trek, however academically justifiable, carry with them an emotional connection which few current students are likely to share. Secondly, after decades spent as a member of various university departments, I am rather more likely than the show's intended audience (necessarily broadly defined) to sympathise with faculty over student body, whenever the two find themselves at odds.

These facts should be taken into account when critically engaging with my own critical engagement of Starfleet Academy. As we shall see, a failure to consider positionality can lead to worse things than bad analysis.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Our tour of the Academy will begin with a consideration of the show in its historical and political context, and how those overlap. We shall focus here upon what is colloquially known as "Nu Trek/NuTrek/Nu-Trek"3, but which we shall instead refer to as the Kurtzman era. This is both to avoid what can be plausibly considered a pejorative term, and to draw a clear distinction between the three "Kelvinverse" films, and the television renaissance the franchise underwent from Discovery onwards.

In this section we will explore the ways in which Starfleet Academy is in dialogue with the Kurtzman era shows that preceded it - most strongly Discovery and Strange New Worlds. This will necessarily also involve a consideration of the political moment those two shows operated within, and how that moment was engaged with (or otherwise). The implications of both movement and response are then used to deconstruct many of the early negative response to the show (some so early they predated the show's release). With this groundwork done, we shall conclude this opening section with an analysis of the way in which Starfleet Academy chooses, in full knowledge of its historical context, how to introduce itself.

1.1: Historical Context (Production)

We shall begin this section by admitting the undeniable. There is an obvious risk in attempting to be declarative about the position in history inhabited by a show just two months old. It is hard to take in the view while fighting the current.

Those currents do need charting, though. And while we still find ourselves in the year which saw Starfleet Academy debut, the history of what we are focussing on here began with a show which first reached our screens almost nine years ago.

That show, of course, is Star Trek Discovery. In fact, though, to truly understand what SFA is and what it's doing, we need to recognise Discovery is best considered as two distinct shows. The differences between Discovery's first two seasons and its latter three are extensive, going far beyond the 900-year leap forward in time. Alongside the shift in setting came a change in tone. After two year-long stories about the lengths Starfleet officers might be prepared to go to so as to avert catastrophe, the show creates an era in which the catastrophe has already happened, and the question becomes how to rebuild the Federation, not just in terms of territory, but in terms of maintaining its moral core. There was a return to the question of how one can best bring about mutual understanding and cooperation, rather than to what extent such ideas must be abandoned in a crisis.

The change in focus also marked a move away from Discovery's habit of repainting and redisplaying the artifacts of the franchise's past. The broad sweep of canon was still regularly referenced, but with a view to reinvention and reinterpretation, rather than the previous habit of trying to show as many characters and objects from The Original Series as possible (see Figure 1). This approach did not disappear, however. Rather, it was taken up and accelerated by Strange New Worlds (see Figure 2).

The ways in which Discovery and its first spin-off intersect and diverge are of relevance here. The older show's jump into the setting's future, and corresponding reduction in direct reproductions of the franchise's past, are clearly an antecedent to Starfleet Academy. On the other hand, it is Strange New Worlds which finally returns to the franchise staple of primarily episodic television. The show is not fully episodic, in the sense that randomising the order of any given season would cause obvious problems. By and large, though, those issues would stem from the scrambling of character arcs, rather than the interruption of overall stories. The season-long concerns of Discovery are nowhere in evidence, still less the ten-hour movie approach of Picard. The closer approximation to this approach would be The Next Generation or Voyager, in which two-part episodes would generally signal a major event in our heroes' lives, in ways that could expect to at least be referenced in later episodes, even if those events weren't particularly built upon.

Strange New Worlds was hailed in many places4 as the best of the Kurtzman-era live-action shows to that point, with the scaling-back of year-long arcs being commonly noted as a primary reason for that judgement (ibid). There is perhaps some irony here, given that this feted return to an older format takes place in the context of a show that seems unwilling or incapable of escaping the orbit of a series almost sixty years old. Like Discovery's early years, and for that matter Picard, Enterprise, and Voyager too, SNW starts as a show firmly focussed on the franchise's past.

The strength of this focus is fully obvious, of course, and remains so even when we look past the show's setting. Figures 1 and 2 above include pictures of seven of the ten main cast members across the show's first three seasons. Of the three not pictured, one plays a character initially defined by being descended from one TOS villain and having had her family eaten by a second, and another plays someone killed by one of those same villains before the first season ends. Only Erica Ortegas resides primarily outside of the shadow of TOS, a character the show has been criticised for underutilising5.

This focus on what has been seen before, and the inevitable resulting limitations to what new stories the show can tell, renders Strange New Worlds inescapably conservative. There is a built-in need to ensure nothing truly changes from the way we remember the past, as the third season episode "Terrarium" demonstrates to risible effect. Notably, this also seems to extend to the show's social attitudes. While Strange New Worlds is unquestionable more permissive than TOS, or really any pre-Kurtzman show, the step up in queer representation many hoped for after Discovery gave the franchise its first gay relationship has almost wholly failed to materialise. The show's use of Una Chin-Reilly’s Illyrian nature as a metaphor for the persecution of trans people can be considered a queer-friendly use of subtext, and the show features the franchise's first out trans woman actor in Jessie James Keitel ("The Serene Squall"). In terms of actual representation of queer lifestyles, however, all Strange New Worlds has offered to date is an offhand reference to dating women from Nurse Chapel. When this is compared with Discovery prominently featuring the relationships between both Stamets and Culber and Grey and Adira Tal, it does not become difficult to argue Strange New Worlds wants to turn the clock back even where there exists no narrative need.

1.2 Historical Context (Political)

It is true, naturally, that narrative is not the only consideration when making decisions in television production. Creating and maintaining at TV show requires money, and that money comes from people who expect to see that money returned, and then some. Production teams cannot simply make the art they wish to see in the world. They must consider who else is going to want to see it too.

They may also need to take into account who isn't going to want to see it at all.

It is here that we extend our consideration of the historical context beyond the Kurtzman era itself. Discovery premiered in September 2017, a year after the franchise's 50th anniversary, and ten months after Donald J Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. Trump's election both signified and accelerated the rise of American neofascism, a long-growing movement within both fundamentalist Christianity and the Republican Party, which became increasingly mainstream and emboldened as it found itself able to disguise itself as a necessary counterweight to the supposed overreaches of the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. While Trump's first administration was too chaotic and unprepared to be considered coherently fascist in itself, his second term has been far more focussed in using fascistic aesthetics and rhetoric6 to achieve fascistic goals7.

Much of what this has resulted in, across America and the world, lies outside the focus of this chapter, or this book. Where this becomes relevant for our purposes is in the institutional capture of media companies by people aligned with Trump, and the increasing degree to which people feel comfortable attacking television shows which engage in racial, ethnic and queer representation, and represent diversity as a strength. The degree to which a franchise such as Trek might find itself a target of such attacks is doubtless clear, and we shall consider that issue further in a little while. First, though, we shall discuss institutional capture.

On the 7th of July, 2024, it was announced that Paramount would merge with Skydance Media, a company owned by the Ellison family, known8 as having ties to President Donald Trump. The timeline tells us that, by the time the merger became public knowledge, the third year of Strange New Worlds had been fully filmed. Despite this, the possibility rumours had spread through Paramount before the initial announcement, together with the country's ever-rising anti-woman, anti-POC, and anti-queer animus, prompted reviewers such as Jessie Gender9 to consider Season Three of the show with an eye to how effectively it would meet its historical moment, or even how hard it would try.

The result of such an appraisal were not encouraging. Whatever the reason, Strange New Worlds Season Three appeared to be consciously aiming for apoliticality. The show’s own Prime Directive became a policy not of non-interference, but non-offence. Rather than engage with the world as it is, Strange New Worlds retreated into light-hearted fluff and continuity patches.

As Gender argues, this did not produce compelling television. It didn't even produce apolitical television, in no small part because such a thing does not and cannot exist10. Instead, with conscious political commentary avoided, the political commentary that could not be avoided was reflexive and unexamined. Over the year, we saw episodes which could be taken to imply police shootings are tragic but ultimately understandable ("Terrarium"), people who criticise benevolent imperialism are actually just projecting their own self-loathng ("What Is Starfleet?"), and – most concerningly - that one's culture is wholly biologically determined ("Four And A Half Vulcans").

Even the Vezda, an alien race placed outside human political frames by being imagined as wholly evil, are not in truth apolitical. The very concept of an ultimate evil is itself a western one, making suggestions of its universal applicability a form of cultural imperialism11. Further, we can note that the idea there exists an unreasoning, implacable enemy that can hide in plain sight, infect those we love, and must be utterly destroyed if we are to know peace, is a central tenet of fascism. Strange New Worlds’ attempts to divorce itself from the real world did not merely fail; they helped make matters worse.

This is how the Trek franchise ended 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term. Discovery had attempted a more forward-looking, hopeful approach after learning the limitations of both high-stakes melodrama and having to stay within the boundaries of what had been written before. While its response to the historical moment could be criticised for its timidity, it did spend its fourth season insisting upon the importance of talking to those we consider threatening, rather than attacking them, and gave a cameo appearance to the progressive Black politician Stacey Abrams as President of Earth, in what could be seen as a repudiation of then ex-president Trump. Whatever we may think of the political valence of these ideas, Strange New Worlds can only be considered as ultimately retreating frm them. We would argue, indeed, that they became the worst of both worlds: echoes of the past coupled with an apparent refusal to say anything new.

It is in this context that Starfleet Academy enters the picture.

1.3: Intended Audience (And Intended Non-Audience)

Our primary consideration for this subsection is as follows: who is Starfleet Academy for?

The deluge of online articles and videos criticising the show suggest that this is difficult to figure out. We shall discuss later in this section the extent to which the question can be assumed to be being asked in good faith. First, however, we shall show how simply it can be answered, at least in part: this is a show primarily aimed at younger adults.

This is demonstrated in multiple ways, large and small. Just the corresponding figure to the two above (Figure 3) makes it clear that this is a much less backward-facing show.

The focus is clearly on the cadets first and foremost, making this a show about being at space university, rather than teaching there. Chancellor Ake is the only member of faculty to appear in every episode of the first season, and her primary motivation is explicitly framed as trying to atone for how she has hurt one of her cadets, teenager Caleb Mir. This framing in itself is indicative of where the show expects its audience's sympathies to lie. Ake's agonising over having to break a family up, Anisha's own pain at losing much of her access to her son, and the fact a person is dead in part because of Anisha's actions, are all (at least initially) considered secondary considerations at best compared to Caleb's pain at losing his mother, despite the fact his decision to run away is what actually keeps him from seeing her at all for fifteen years. Caleb is not the only person involved here, and he uses his agency to arguably makes things worse (the episode is clever enough to show us that life at Little Blooms is far from the Dickensian nightmare model of state orphanages), but Starfleet Academy works on the principle that those watching will identify with his pain first and foremost.

There are many other indications as to who the show expects us to focus on. Immediate clues include the inclusion of Trek's most explicit sex scene to date, and the use of modern speech patterns (though with a slang time-lag of a decade or so, to allow those in their early thirties to still feel the dialogue is contemporary without encountering any terms which are too new). Further, the dramatic concerns across the season are clearly anchored in what it means to be a college student. In particular, the ways in which you are under pressure to perform to the satisfaction of whatever adults you have in your life is returned to again and again. How one balances the desires, expectations and legacies of one’s parents with living your own life is a primary character dilemma for five of our six headlining cadets, with the sixth only escaping this by their problem being how to communicate with their mother at all. A similar but not equivalent concern is the ways in which one should weigh your cultural traditions and attitudes against the new experiences and relationships college offers, a concern which features heavily in both "Vox In Excelso" and "Ko'Zeine".

We can also point to the show's use of adolescent solipsism - the almost impenetrable conviction that no-one, alive or dead, has experienced life in quite the same way, and therefore cannot know what their existence is like, or judge them for how that existence plays out, Caleb in “Kids These Days” and Tarima in “The Life Of The Stars” both express cynicism or even frustration at the idea that the faculty can understand their pain because they do not share its precise dimensions, a yell of “You don’t know what it’s like to be me!” that is barely subtextual. Moreover, both characters apply this approach to their interactions with each other, repeatedly throwing their nascent relationship off the rails as they recognise more and more parallels in their lives, only to use the narcissism of small differences to push each other away. Their similar states prompt competition rather than compassion.

It is while in possession of this weight of evidence that we return to our question about our question: why would people find it difficult to recognise who this show is for?

Let use revisit the political context into which Starfleet Academy has emerged. We must note, firstly, how much of the negative criticism aimed at the show has been produced by straight white men who are in or past middle-aged12. This is not an unusual situation for fandom, which has a widespread problem with cis-het white male "gatekeepers" claiming the right and responsibility to determine what does and does not deserve to be considered worthy of inclusion in (what they consider to be) their territory. Nor is it a purely post-Trump phenomenon for the metrics that lead to that determination to involve how many characters exhibit traits differing from those of the gatekeeper13.

With that said, though, we should recognise that differences of degree can ultimately become so large they become differences in kind. Twenty years ago, arguments that, for instance, we should not permit children to be aware of the existence of gay people, were recognisable as stemming from reactionary frustration over a war they were, in broad terms, losing (this is not to excuse such arguments). This is no longer the case. The ability to cloak attacks against inclusion as being the natural response to the "overreach" of the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, as mentioned in Section 1.2, together (ironically) with the near-total lack of meaningful consequences to powerful white men as a result of those movements, has emboldened those with a vested interest in maintaining gender and racial hierarchies.

Once this is recognised, we see the question "Who is this for?" as not an inquiry, but a statement - "We are fully aware that this is not for us". This is not to suggest a direct equivalence between opposition to the Black Lives Matter and MeToo movements with the (immediately disprovable) complaint there aren’t straight white men on television any more. The parallels, though, should be clear; a desire to reverse even a sporadic, qualified and minor relaxation of the cis-het male stranglehold on the American system and on American culture, while framing this renewed assault upon every conceivable minoritised group as an act of preservation, whether that be the idea of America or the nature of Star Trek. A straight line can be drawn from not wanting to see black women on television14 to not wanting to see one in the White House.

And while it would be reductive to suggest the 2024 US Presidential Election was simply about Harris' gender and ethnicity, it certainly is fair to say her candidacy represented by far the most plausible option for delaying the victory of American fascism. As such, given the target audience for Starfleet Academy, and the political context we are exploring, the voting patterns by age during that election hold some relevance for us. We begin by noting that voters between 18 to 29 voted for Harris by 51% to 47%15. Those voters would now be between 19 and 31 years old, a demographic which would include almost every person in the United States either currently undertaking an undergraduate degree, or having graduated from one in the last ten years (those with experience of post-high school education broke 57% to 41% for Harris16). It's also an age range which significantly intersects with that aimed for by the CW Network17, mentioned here because their focus on programming for younger adults (specifically women aged 18 to 34) has been commonly (and often unkindly) referenced as akin t0 Starfleet Academy's own approach18.

With these observations in hand, we are now almost ready to return to our motivating question, and answer it fully. First, however, there are a few more facts to take into account. Those currently in college, or who have graduated from college within the last seven years has had to content not just with the second Trump administration, but the ever-building climate crisis and, as has been pointed out to the author19, with studying during the COVID lockdown. For those students and former students, the Burn is more than just part of Starfleet Academy's setting. It is a metaphor for living in the shadow of total societal collapse, to fear losing friends and family members at any moment to events wholly outside of your control, and to learn you somehow still have to go to school one way or another.

There's more here, though. Caleb's brush with the Federation legal system echoes our own governments' response to both global warming and COVID - to ensure the money is kept safe. Or resources, rather, given the Federation has moved past money, but it clearly isn't the post-scarcity society portrayed in TNG. The question being prioritised isn't "Who needs this food?", but "Who owns this food?". The re-election of Trump can be seen, as we've covered, as a major victory for vested interests seeking to wholly crush attempts by women and black people (along with other minoritised groups) to reduce the power of those interests. Any student paying attention would have learned that power protects power long before that. There are multiple metrics by which the lifetimes of the intended audience for Starfleet Academy have been a steady downward spiral, as catastrophe after catastrophe, both chronic and acute, has been used to shore up the power structures of the past, at the cost of their future.

For all this, though, and for all that "Kids These Days" makes it clear that Chancellor Ake, despite her morals and empathy, is complicit in maintaining those power structures, Starfleet Academy's primary message is that there is always the possibility for change. That the previous generation, compromised as they are, can help their successors make things better.

Who is this show for? It’s for the young people who have lived through two distinct collapses in what they had been told was normal, all while watching the world around them die. It's for the kids who are fully aware, in a way their seniors so often wholly fail to be, just how much is wrong with how the world works, and how desperately that needs to change.

It’s for the kids who just want to believe there’s still hope.

1.4: The Future Addressing The Present

The opening scene of “Kids These Days” tells us much about how the show positions itself. We have already summoned the spectre of the coronavirus. Note how we begin in a sealed room, with mother and son with nothing to hand but a talking bear and a view of the night sky. Trapped, alone, talking about what had to be done to ensure they could survive, gazing out into an infinite cosmos with their backs to a locked door. Hoping not to hear the footsteps of those who will tell them how their survival has broken the law.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this. Firstly, while the show may consider the big picture as the Federation accelerates its program to rebuild post-Burn (and we learn just one episode later that it will), its primary focus will be the small scale. We’ll see the interstellar scene as its reflected in the eyes of a half dozen students trying to make their way through the worlds.

Second, the Federation in general, and Starfleet, will need to prove itself anew. This is clearly true within the text; after the calamities and compromises following the Burn, we need to know the fleet can still be a force for good, and not just one more imperialist endeavour looking to carve up a newly re-accessible galaxy. More than that, though, Starfleet must also prove itself to its intended audience; those for whom Enterprise ended before elementary school did (or before it began, or before their life began).

What we learn here, at the birth of this series, is that Starfleet Academy recognises the need to meet this new political moment. As we've covered, this is something it took years for Discovery to even partially follow through on, whilst Strange New Worlds ultimately chose not to do even that.

We believe that we should expect more from Trek. The nature of television at the time prevented The Orignal Series from having any kind of coherent political throughline, but we can easily locate multiple episodes in which the show expressed '60s America's discomfort about the difference between what the Second World War had allowed it to believe about itself, and what the Vietnam War suggested it actually was. It is from this tension that the Klingons were born: militaristic and othered invaders, whose antithetical politics and warlike ways were presented alternately as either mirrors of American prejudice, or just as the reason "we" needed to "fight them over there". TNG, meanwhile, offered a horrified reaction to the rank, vicious insanity of Reagan’s vision for the US and the world. From this was born the Ferengi; a fundamentally ridiculous race of money-grubbing misogynists, who were nevertheless extremely dangerous, particularly when underestimated.

Starfleet Academy takes a not wholly dissimilar approach to early TNG in this regard - perhaps not surprising, given the ways in which we can consider Damon Tarr as a deliberate dig at Donald Trump20. The Venari Ral begin as a comparatively small-scale threat compared to the Klingons or the Ferengi (never mind the Borg, or the Dominion). They’re effectively just a bunch of space-pirates punching above their weight due to some impressive, and presumably stolen, toys. The threat they offer here isn’t to the Federation, it’s to the USS Athena. Even then, they come as thieves, not killers. Whether Braka would actually have let the crew and cadets go after stripping out the warp core is an interesting question, particularly given what we learn of him later, but it’s not actually provably false that Ake could have capitulated, and all the fleet would have lost was a single warp core.

Which is to say, whatever Nus Braka and the Venari Ral are, they’re not a direct metaphor for neo-fascism, at least initially. There are some echoes, yes, insofar as Braka simultaneously revels in his cruelty and insists he’s being forced into it by the actions of others (a recurring theme in all three of his appearances this season), and given the fact that fascists are all fundamentally thieves and chancers. We might also consider (and will in later chapters) the extent to which we can see the ascension of the Venari Ral over the first season as a comment on how fascists seize power. In "Kids These Days", though, the focus is not on who this historical moment's enemy is, but the ground me must rally on in order to defeat them. As the USS Athena reaches Earth, and our cadets get their first glimpse of their campus, and potentially Earth itself, we’re treated to Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of the John Phillips-penned "If You're Going To San Francisco".

As others have noted21, there are a number of reasons why this choice has weight. The original song was released between the first two seasons of The Original Series, placing it in the intersection of the summer of love, and the birth of the franchise. And yet the version used very pointedly isn’t McKenzie’s. Instead, we get Wainwright’s much more recent interpretation. This matters not just because the show is showing us it is fully aware of its heritage, but that it recognises the need to engage with that heritage, rather than attempt to recreate it. The specifics of how to do this will matter, obviously. Choosing Wainwright’s version is inspired, not just because Starfleet Academy is clearly interested in genuine queer inclusion (we do not wish to reduce Wainwright to his sexuality, but nor do we wish to dismiss it), but because Wainwright has restructured the song, taking what was originally one man’s hopes for the city into a choir of voices calling for the future to begin.

And what is that future?

Hope lies in the new generation refusing to accept the way the previous generation saw the world. In them moving to shape the future. Starfleet Academy doesn’t have to show us what fascism might look like in the 32nd century to tell us how to beat it right now. It’s people coming together and deciding things are going to be different. The artefacts of the past – up to and including the academy, and (as we see in “Beta Test”) the seat of the Federation Government itself – are not to be ignored, but they’re also not to be venerated beyond their relevance to us today. Statis isn’t just undesirable in theory, it actually invariably leads to regression in practice.

Whether they are ready for it or not, these young people are going to shape the future. They're going to have to learn to do it together.

Accordingly, much of “Kids These Days” is given over to suggesting that they can do just that, perhaps despite themselves. In some ways, the premiere is simply structured according to the conventions regarding how to begin this kind of show. Our heroes meet, have various clashes, but band together against a common threat just in time, in a manner that allows every one of them to contribute in a way appropriate to their character. That summary though undersells how carefully the show works to ensure every stage of the process by which the Venari Ral are beaten back requires at least two people working together. Hacking into the programmable matter, saving first Lura Thok and then Darem, getting into Engineering to deal with Braka; it’s not just teamwork overall, it’s a fractal pattern of cooperation. The most interesting of these collaborations are perhaps the brief exchanges between Caleb and Darem – they already can’t stand each other, but don’t hesitate to work together to fight the greater threat. This isn’t just about cooperation, it’s about solidarity.

And note that this flurry of partnerships include both Ake and the Doctor (Lura will get her chance later), two characters who represent not just the previous generation, but the knowledge and experience of hundreds of years. Again, the past is not to be cast aside (one of the many grim ironies of fascism being the way it worships a wholly fake image of history, while entirely ignoring what history has actually taught us), but it must be in dialogue with the present to retain relevance. This is a fascinating but wholly appropriate inversion of the way this is normally considered – here it is the faculty which must prove its abilities and worth to the students, not the other way round.

This, then, is how Starfleet Academy wants us to see its story. A tale of how the new generation offers hope, and offers change. That the point at which we can start making a difference arrives earlier than a lot of people would like you to believe, and likely before you're prepared to believe it yourself. Working toward the future at the precise time the present seems the realest it ever has is hard. It’s exhausting. You’re just trying to keep afloat not flunking classes and figuring out what you want your love life to look like and why it so stubbornly refuses to comply, and now you have to come up with “a new explanation” for how the world should work, and how to get from here to there?

Who is this show for? It’s for the people who know how much is broken, know it’s up to them to fix it, and have to start on that process before they have the slightest idea about how to do it.

This book will chart the ways in which they do just that. Perhaps, in some tiny way, it will offer a suggestions as to how you might do it too.

Notes

1. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

2. Star Trek Voyager, "Flashback"

3. Origin of phrase unknown, but see e.g. UrbanDictionary for a definition. 4. TrekMovie.com has collected several snippets of positive reviews for Strange New Worlds here. 5. See e.g. these articles at Kneel Before Blog, the Subspace Chatter stack, and Redshirts Always Die.

6. See e.g. Ur-fascism, by Umberto Eco.

7. See e.g. Fascism: What It Is And How To Fight It, by Leon Trotsky.

8. Forbes details here Ellison's rhetorical and financial support for Trump allies insisting the 2020 election was "stolen".

9. Star Trek Strange New Worlds is a centrist fantasy. 10. Sophia Cai, Why Aren't Can't Be Apolitical.

11. Dr Maciej Matuszewski, personal conversation.

12. No links will be provided, for obvious reasons. Those wishing to confirm this contention are invited to search "Starfleet Academy" on Youtube.

13. Bethany Black, herself no stranger to the gatekeeping phenomenon as the first out trans actor to feature in Doctor Who, discusses here the horror over the show's so-called "gay agenda" that occupied the minds of so many fans of the show during the mid-to-late '00s.

14. There are no shortage of examples of spurious, even risible complaints about the specifics of black female characters one might reference here. The most obvious one with regard to Starfleet Academy specifically is the chorus of supposed confusion as to how a genetically engineered species to be wholly male might have been genetically re-engineered to include females over the course of eight centuries.

15. As reported at circle.tufts.edu

16.a Pew Research Center, "Wide Divide Between Voters With and Without College Degrees Continues to be a Major Factor in Trump-era Elections" , 2025

17. The Hollywood Reporter, "'90210' Upfront And Center For CW", 2008. 18. As before, no traffic will be directed towards those complaining.

19. Alasdair Stuart, Bluesky exchange

20. Ric Crossman, Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations, "Make Ferenginar Great Again"

21. Ric Crossman, Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations, "Starfleet Academy Review: Kids These Days"

Ordering                                                                    

1. Emissary 

2. Encounter At Farpoint 

3. Kids These Days

4. Second Contact

5. The Vulcan Hello

6. Lost And Found

7. Strange New Worlds

8. Broken Bow

9. Beyond The Farthest Star

10. Remembrance

11. Caretaker 

12. The Man Trap