About Stardate 7600

Life in the far future year of 2003, the year Star Trek turns 37 and Steve Roby turns 40: there are at least two new Star Trek books every month. There's been new Star Trek on TV regularly since 1987. There have been ten movies. Every day fans use small computers on their desks to communicate with other Star Trek fans around the world... and sometimes with people who work on Star Trek, or write the books. Many fans use their computers to create websites, stores of information and opinion on Star Trek that other fans can and sometimes do read. Those computers can also be used to play computer games that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the simple video games of 1976. As for watching Star Trek... hundreds of episodes are available on tape, on disc, on TV at almost any hour of the day, or (for the unscrupulous fan) as downloadable movie files.

In 2003, a Star Trek fan can keep himself or herself entertained indefinitely by doing nothing but Star Trek activities: playing computer or role playing games, reading books, chatting with fellow fans online, downloading and reading fan fiction, and actually watching Star Trek sometimes, too. Sometimes it starts to feel like there's too much Star Trek. There are times, when another soundtrack CD or DVD box set or computer game strategy guide appears in the stores (or is listed for sale online), that being a Star Trek fan in 2003 can start to feel like a job or a duty more than something fun and entertaining.

Not that my 13-year-old self in 1976 would have believed that.

My father was in the Canadian Air Force. When I first saw Star Trek and read my first Star Trek comic and my first Star Trek book we lived in Ottawa. In 1972 we moved to North Bay, and there I got well and truly hooked on Star Trek. In 1974 we moved from a military neighborhood located off the base to the base. In 1975 we moved halfway across the country to Edmonton and stayed there for five years. Each time we moved from one city to another, one of the first things to do was check the local listings to see when the Star Trek reruns were on TV. And when I started meeting the neighborhood kids and making new friends, one of the first things to do was find out who liked Star Trek. Which was pretty much everybody. It gave us all something in common, even though we'd all bounced around the country (and for some kids the world) and there were new kids present and familiar faces gone every year when school started again.

When I was 13, I think pretty much every guy I knew had at least one Star Trek model or poster, and usually at least a few of the books and maybe a couple comics. The girl across the street liked Star Trek, too, and read some of the books. Another friend's older sister had the Gene Roddenberry: Inside Star Trek LP. I bought my copy from her because the stores were sold out.

Most of us were interested in other SF movies and TV series, though Star Trek was the benchmark. Lots of us watched Space: 1999 but didn't think it was quite up to Star Trek's standard. Of course, if an unenlightened relative happened to notice you were watching Space: 1999, they'd probably mutter "that kid is always watching that Star Track stuff" as they walked by. There were always some people who just didn't get it. Meanwhile, we kept watching the same Star Trek episodes over and over, practically memorizing them, wondering if the rumored new movie would ever actually happen, wondering when (or if) we'd get another actual new Star Trek novel.

Then in 1977 the world changed. Star Wars changed movies. Star Wars changed science fiction. It quickly became the number one science fiction phenomenon that everyone knew, shoving Star Trek out of the spotlight. It helped Star Trek, to be sure, convincing Paramount to make Star Trek - The Motion Picture and its sequels. And the success of those movies made Star Trek: The Next Generation possible, and the unprecedented success of that series made all the following shows possible. But Star Wars, I think it's safe to say, has the higher profile even now. For one thing, its huge success made it more mainstream than Star Trek, which had, after all, been cancelled because of poor ratings. For another, it's a much simpler thing to grasp: a fairy tale in space told in only a few movies. Star Trek, on the other hand, now means something like seven hundred episodes and movies in five distinct series. That's a much greater commitment.

Maybe Star Trek as a whole looks different to me now because I'm 40, not 13, but that can't be the whole truth. The world has changed. There's a lot more of everything now. More Star Trek, more alternatives to Star Trek. More cynicism about the people running Star Trek now. More factionalism in Star Trek fandom. There are people who call themselves Star Trek fans who can't bring themselves to watch or read about the original Star Trek, the Star Trek that started it all, the Star Trek that Enterprise, in its own stumbling and fumbling way, has obviously modeled itself on, for at least its first two seasons. Other fans remain loyal to the original series only and loudly proclaim that the others just don't count as real Star Trek. Still others (and I'm guilty of this myself) like some series and not others. I don't personally think that Voyager and Enterprise compare at all well to the original Star Trek, The Next Generation, or Deep Space Nine. The premises are fine but the writing just has not been good enough, in my opinion. That's why I read the Voyager and Enterprise novels. Occasionally the novelists see the promise inherent in those shows than the TV writers do.

So it's easy to look back on the 1970s as a time when we were all in it together. If you were a Star Trek fan, you were a Star Trek fan. You might not care about models, or blueprints, or comics, but you watched the same episodes.

Why look at 1976? First, a single year is easier to work with than an entire decade. Second, for some reason, a lot happened in 1976 (the Inside Star Trek album, The New Voyages, the first new novel since 1970, and pop culture tributes from Saturday Night Live and Mad magazine). Third, in 1976 people I knew wrote off to Star Trek Enterprises and the Star Trek Welcommittee and later gave me the publications they received. (Thanks to Ian Vinden and... damn, was it David or Tony Vernon? Would you guys have believed back then I'd still have them all these years later?) 1976 was Star Trek's tenth anniversary. It was the year before Star Wars.

And I was at the formative age of 13. I was still a good Catholic boy but I'd already started and ended a brief fascination with weird and paranormal stuff (Erich von Daniken, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, etc). The skeptical mindset I developed after reading a lot of that stuff was later applied to my Catholicism with similar results. I'd come to the conclusion that science fiction, including Star Trek, was more rewarding than supposedly nonfiction books about ancient astronauts and UFOs because at least the science fiction writers tried to create a willing suspension of disbelief instead of demanding that I take things on faith. So here I am now with a very different worldview from the one I had in my earliest days as a Star Trek fan. The old worldview is gone but Star Trek remains.

I created this page to remind older fans and show younger fans what it was like back then.

Christopher Lasch, in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (as quoted on bartleby.com), wrote:

We need to distinguish between nostalgia and the reassuring memory of happy times, which serves to link the present to the past and to provide a sense of continuity. The emotional appeal of happy memories does not depend on disparagement of the present, the hallmark of the nostalgic attitude. Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable. Nostalgic representations of the past evoke a time irretrievably lost and for that reason timeless and unchanging. Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection. Memory too may idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer.

Lasch wasn't writing about anything as ultimately trivial as Star Trek fandom, of course. But I'd like to think of this page more as reassuring memory than nostalgia. Being a Star Trek fan is in many ways better now than it's ever been. What I hope this little site does is remind anyone who needs a reminder that we all got into this because it's fun. And it still should be.

Keep exploring the world of Stardate 7600!