I have been working on rectifying one of the gaps in my Star Trek viewing. Until Strange New Worlds did its Lower Decks crossover episode, I hadn’t watched any of that animated series. I am thus one of very few people for whom Lower Decks is a bit like Clone Wars is for Star Wars ..read more

The recording of my talk about Google searches, Chat-GPT, and the computers on Star Trek is now available. I will share it at the end of this post. Let me here illustrate the key point. OpenAI has emphasized from the outset what Chat-GPT is. It emulates human speech patterns. It does this remarkably well. They ..read more

I have failed to blog about Picard but having watched the first few episodes of the new prequel series Strange New Worlds, I feel the need to get back to blogging about Star Trek. I have said before that Captain Christopher Pike as he was portrayed on Star Trek: Discovery quickly became my new favorite ..read more

A great quote from an article by Usha Alexander about the near-utopian vision of Star Trek and the importance of imagining alternatives to capitalism if we are to make real-world progress. The world of Star Trek appeals so widely, I think, because it presents us with something colorfully short of a utopia, a flawed human ..read more

Call for Proposals: Edited volume on Star Trek and Star Wars deadline for submissions: August 2, 2021 full name / name of organization: Emily Strand and Amy H. Sturgis for Vernon Press contact email: drahsturgis@gmail.com Call for Abstracts Edited volume on Star Trek and Star Wars Edited by Emily Strand, MA and Amy H. Sturgis, PhD Vernon Press ..read more

Present: Parallel Universes, Loving the Alien in Our Midst, and Robots in Church We have already been in the present in our discussion, and indeed we never really leave it. Science fiction may be usefully compared to prophecy, but prophecy isn’t really about prediction with accuracy. The point of invoking a vision of the future ..read more

I am helping to circulate an interesting call for papers, which will be of interest to those who study both science fiction and ethics. Conference: Camps, (In)Justice, and Solidarity in the Americas Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps January 28-31, 2022, University of Graz, Austria https://camps2022.com/call-for-papers/ While the 20th anniversary ..read more

I’ve been rewatching the original series of Star Trek and as always have been taking notes on points I might return to in blog posts or other contexts, in particular things related to religion. My memories of the episode “A Piece of the Action” were largely the existence of a society patterned on Chicago’s mob ..read more

There is a famous story about how Martin Luther King persuaded Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek. One of the things he said was that if she left, they’d likely replace her character Lt. Uhura with a blonde white woman. It turns out that one comic book series did that anyway. I ought to ..read more

Star Trek fans will get the Kobayashi Maru reference immediately. Starfleet Academy prepared its cadets for no-win situations, which they will inevitably face as captains of starships, by using a simulation of a situation with no good options. Capt. Kirk became the first to successfully rescue the other ship that had drifted into the neutral ..read more