Substack, the final frontier....

These are the voyages that led me to start an entire blog dedicated to Star Trek

Star Trek has always been a big part of my life. One of my earliest memories is of watching The Original Series with my dad, and for much of my childhood, sitting down to watch The Next Generation on Saturday night was a treasured ritual (and a sign that chores were finally over for the day!). But it has become a bigger and bigger part of my life as I’ve gotten older. My partner’s fateful suggestion that we rewatch Next Generation led to a full rewatch of all the modern series. I began participating avidly in the Daystrom Institute Reddit forum, where I was ultimately promoted to Commander and honored with the Nanietta Bacco Citation for Social Equality. I read far too many tie-in novels and comics. I published a scholarly article comparing Star Trek canon to religious canons, which is cited surprisingly often since it is one of the few academic investigations of The Animated Series.

More recently, I wrote a book on the franchise’s attempts to reinvent itself after the end of its 90s Golden Era—from the fiasco of Enterprise and the JJ-verse up through the explosion of new streaming shows. Entitled Late Star Trek—and available for preorder from Amazon or directly from the press—its impending publication is ultimately what inspired me to start this blog. Many posts here will draw on concepts from the book and follow up on developments that I wasn’t able to address there.

But I won’t limit myself only to current productions. On the one hand, I have been doing yet another rewatch—this time trying to approximate in-universe chronological order by alternating—while doing the rowing machine, and I am just getting to the point where Next Generation and Deep Space Nine start running concurrently. Doubtless, I will have thoughts! Even more thought-provoking will be a college course I am teaching for the second half of the semester, which will primarily focus on Discovery but also provide as much background as I can squeeze into eight short weeks. Finally, I also have a deep well of material from the Daystrom Institute that I will be selectively revising and republishing here.

For the foreseeable future, all material will be free, simply because I’m doing this for fun. If you want to compensate me for my labor, please pre-order my book! Other than that, consider this blog a post-scarcity utopia!