Kevin S. Decker

Star Trek is a series and overall franchise that I have heard of but never got the opportunity to get into. Here is my situation with this. When I was a child, I was more of a Star Wars(SW) kid, since it was easier to understand and had a lower barrier of entry. Allow me to explain. When I was a child, the prequel movies had not come out yet, so there were only three SW movies. Now that I am older, I regret not getting into ST, but at the same time, I don’t know where to begin. Do I start with The Original Series with Captain Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and so on? Do I begin with The Next Generation series with Captain Picard, Data, Q, and all of them? There are three other mainline series as well, with Voyager, Deep Space 9, and Enterprise. Now I know Enterprise is a prequel to the original series, but I also heard it wasn’t as good. I also don’t perceive myself as having the time to watch that many shows. Don’t even get me started on the movies. In any case, that is my position on ST.

This book is a fusion of philosophy and popular culture, taking the themes from a series, in this case, it is Star Trek, and applying philosophy to the stories. ST is a fertile field of study for this as I am now being made aware. All of the series have their Captains and some way to push the envelope and make discussions happen. With the Original Series, if I remember correctly, some executives chided Gene Roddenberry because they didn’t think a woman would be able to become an officer on a futuristic space ship. A lot of the episodes were open-ended in the sense that there wasn’t a clearly correct answer. It deals with moral quandaries that go deeper than good and evil; there are shades of gray. This can be explored really well since Science Fiction allows for a large cast of human-like characters that have different philosophies and ideals. Take the Borg for instance. The reason why they are perceived as evil is that they take away the autonomy of an individual. They are a cyborg entity that exists to assimilate all life and technology on the road to perfection. This allows for some good episodes.

In any case, the book is really good and introduced me to a number of things through Star Trek. The book has 31 essays divided among five main sections. The sections are organized according to a theme. There isn’t really much else to say about it.… (más)

This book seems to be set up to introduce fans of Star Trek to the ideas of various philosophers. Since I usually find philosophy dull and meaningless, especially when you get down to individual philosophers, I didn't find much in this book attractive. There was one interesting essay on Deep Space Nine and problems of people getting along with irreconcilable differences. Unfortunately the philosopher highlighted in the essay, Jean-Francois Lyotard, doesn't really seem to propose any solution to this very real and pressing problem, so I wasn't any more informed on the subject than I was before reading the essay. But if you think simply liberal tolerance will do the trick, this essay might prove enlightening.… (más)