Card knows his stuff and his evaluation of the series is spot on. What he fails to account for, though, is why the damn thing inspired such devotion in so many fans. As Card points out hard core SF faans were for the most part not attracted to Star Trek [they called it "Sci Fi" or "Skiffy"]. But it it did strike a cord in the minds of young people, not just in the Sixties, but also in the following two decades. Card explains it this way.
There was good SF back in those days, but it wasn't on TV; only in books. Card writes:
Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by.
Now we finally have first-rate science fiction film and television that are every bit as good as anything going on in print....
Screen sci-fi has finally caught up with written science fiction. We're in college now. High school is over. There's just no need for "Star Trek" anymore.I think it goes beyond that. Not all Trekkers were unsophisticated, unintelligent, or illiterate, as Card seems to imply. Nor were they, as the Toronto police recently suggested, sexual deviates [here]. Witness hyperliterate superdads Jonah Goldberg and James Lileks. No, there was something about the series, its stereotypical plots and characters, and its vision of the future, that appealed to young people and that remains in their memories.
I wish they would explain it. In that long ago world I was a SF fan, one of the literary ones, for whom Trek held few charms. Perhaps I was a bit too old for the series. It never made much impact on me, nor did its successors. Still I'd like to know just what it was I didn't get. Why did such obviously third rate stuff gain such a following?
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