> The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded for producing "the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction" with "the greatest benefit on mankind".
They should award one posthumously to Gene Roddenberry then. After all, the Federation from Star Trek is pretty much the only well-known case of an utopia that actually works in fiction writing, and the show itself is one of few examples of aspirational and inspirational writing in modern sci-fi.
The Nobel is famously not awarded posthumously. There are many examples of two or more cofounders where one is not awarded the Nobel due to having died.
>After all, the Federation from Star Trek is pretty much the only well-known case of an utopia that actually works in fiction writing, and the show itself is one of few examples of aspirational and inspirational writing in modern sci-fi.
The Federation only works as a utopia because the writers never bother to address any of the complex questions about how such a utopia would actually work, because they don't care. Star Trek's utopian ideal is mostly just window dressing.
Also, Star Trek isn't very aspirational. We can't aspire to simply evolve beyond human nature as Trek humanity has, such that every human lacks any form of greed, vice or selfishness and is perfectly happy to participate in a society which still has all of the hierarchies of capitalism, including lifetime careers, but with none of the incentives. Nor can we expect the infinite free energy and physics-defying transporters and replicators that allow Star Trek's writers to just handwave away the hard problems of scarcity and thermodynamics. The Fermi paradox tells us plainly that FTL in any form is almost certainly impossible. The Vulcans aren't going to show up in the ruins of our civilization and potty train us. That isn't something we can aspire to, that's never going to happen.
> After all, the Federation from Star Trek is pretty much the only well-known case of an utopia that actually works in fiction writing
Eh. I mean, by Voyager/DS9 it has secret police, and _literal mine slaves_ (old-model sentient holographic doctors). And it appears to be _basically_ a military dictatorship; the civil government in practice always seems to be subordinate to Starfleet. It also happily trades away inhabited territory to the Cardassians, who are essentially Space Nazis. And it has a safety culture that would make the Soviet Union blush. Really, the closer you look, the uglier it looks.
We also don’t see that much of how Federation _civilians_ live, and a lot of what we do see frankly isn’t that great.
All the negative sides you’ve described is portrayed after Gene Roddenberry died and he was famously against a lot of those concepts while he was alive. DS9 would never have been green-lit during Roddenberry’s lifetime.
> We also don’t see that much of how Federation _civilians_ live, and a lot of what we do see frankly isn’t that great.
That’s not true. The worlds that aren’t great are planets outside of federation jurisdiction. Those that are part of it are usually portrayed as utopias.
That all said, you’ve hit on a great premise for a Star Trek spin off.
Edit:
> And it appears to be _basically_ a military dictatorship; the civil government in practice always seems to be subordinate to Starfleet.
The partnership is explored in DS9 and was the exact opposite of that you’ve described.
In the DS9 episode I’m thinking of, shapeshifters (“changelings”) had taken over Star Fleet (the military) and were then trying to bypass the Federation to start a war. Basically a military coup lead by a small number of infiltrators. The remainder of the military were against the coup, which is why they were found out and the coup failed.
> In the DS9 episode I’m thinking of, shapeshifters (“changelings”) had taken over Star Fleet (the military)
It was even more interesting than that - they didn't take Starfleet over at all! They bombed a conference and sow some fear in the backchannels, and then sat back to watch as Starfleet panicked. A few well-positioned people tried to pull a military coup, for more-less the same reason the US gave up on many of its freedoms after 9/11, but unlike in real world, they were denounced by the rest of the military, the coup was stopped, and the entire two-parter served as a strong message that it's fear, not attacks from outside, that can quickly destroy the utopia.
Basically, a Star Trek take on "people willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both" - noticed on time and successfully averted.
> DS9 would never have been green-lit during Roddenberry’s lifetime.
Gene would be wrong about this, IMHO. DS9 is the series that makes the utopia seem more real, as it gives it cracks and puts pressure on them, to show how people can overcome them. It makes the Federation seem less like religion, and more like just great future overall.
Star Trek is "What if Communism but it wasn't influenced by human nature?", and totally avoided thinking about how the trillions of humans not in the military lived.
ST:TNG goes into quite a bit of on-the-ground imagining of the lives of Federation individuals and Star Fleet. Colonies, research stations, etc. Though the only earth-side I remember is Jean Luc's winery and estate or when the admiral was mind controlled by some kind of pest.
Part of the challenges of early TNG is that it tries to make the federation perfect. The writing suffers because of it because there appear to be no true internal conflicts. It’s not until Roddenberry takes a back seat in the creative process that the writing starts to get really good. Though that might also in part be the departure of Maurice Hurley as show runner.
When Paramount released the HD remaster of TNG on Blu-ray, I really enjoyed watching the lengthy (like 2 hours per season) documentary they did on the making of the show. And sadly, one thing was abundantly clear watching that documentary: TNG was good despite Roddenberry, not because of him. The writers all talk about how hard it was to write any sort of interesting story when you were forbidden from showing conflict between the main cast of characters.
> The writers all talk about how hard it was to write any sort of interesting story when you were forbidden from showing conflict between the main cast of characters.
And the show was all the better for it. Writers are lazy, too, and conflict between main characters is by far the cheapest way of creating drama, and the main way fiction differs from reality. Being strongly discouraged from using this shortcut is what gave TNG-era Star Trek another unique feature, that's almost unseen in shows and movies (sci-fi or otherwise): the main cast, and Starfleet in general, are portrayed as competent professionals who are good at their jobs and work well together. It's kind of what you'd expect from people whose dayjob is flying around on FTL-capable WMD platforms.
But yeah, Roddenberry had various peculiarities that needed pushback on. Constraints breed creativity, I guess?
Even TNG didn't always follow through with utopian ideals, because that doesn't make for compelling drama. Tasha Yar came from a failed Federation colony where society had collapsed, and spent her childhood avoiding roving rape gangs.
You don’t need to overcome all of human nature, you “just” need to overcome greed and solve scarcity. I put “just” in quotes because I recognize those are a tall order, but I don’t think you really need much else to have a Star Trek collectivist utopia.
> Star Trek is "What if Communism but it wasn't influenced by human nature
On the contrary, the very premise of Star Trek is "what if humans overcome the bad parts of their nature, and embraced the good ones". The core concept of the entire franchise, coming from Gene himself, is that humanity must be recognizably human to the audience, just better than what it is now. The Federation being fully automated communist space utopia is an extension of that.
The only really good Star Trek series I saw was DS9. It was darker, had longer story arcs, religion and fully developed characters. There was even a scene that illustrated this, where Captain Sisko was talking with an Earth politician and telling him that the problem was he lived on Earth, a paradise, and couldn't understand the war and problems those near DS9 faced.
DS9 was really good. But all the shade it threw at the underlying premise was still to reinforce it, not break it. Where any other show would take e.g. the above case of the Federation governance being out of touch with needs of their constituents near the border, and deconstruct it six ways to Sunday in most cynical of fashions, DS9 made the paradise something good, if fragile, and worth fighting for, worth aiming to have here - whether "here" is out there in lthe frontier colonies, or back today in the 21th century real-world. That's why I still say it was an aspirational show, if much darker, and worked to reinforce TNG instead of deconstructing it.
They should award one posthumously to Gene Roddenberry then. After all, the Federation from Star Trek is pretty much the only well-known case of an utopia that actually works in fiction writing, and the show itself is one of few examples of aspirational and inspirational writing in modern sci-fi.