Burbocentrism

Tom Shippey

• Beyond Uhura: ‘Star Trek’ and Other Memories by Nichelle Nichols
  Boxtree, 320 pp, £9.99, December 1995, ISBN 0 7522 0787 3
• I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy
  Century, 342 pp, £16.99, November 1995, ISBN 0 7126 7691 0
• Science Fiction Audiences: Watching ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Star Trek’ by Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch
  Routledge, 294 pp, £40.00, April 1995, ISBN 0 415 06140 7
• ‘Star Trek’: Deep Space Nine by Mark Altman, Rob Davis and Tony Pallot
  Boxtree, 64 pp, £8.99, May 1995, ISBN 0 7522 0898 5

Star Trek is a phenomenon, no doubt about it. Since 1966 we’ve had the original series, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine (now in its fourth year) and Voyager (now in its second). There were 263 hours available for viewing in 1994, with more appearing all the time, seven feature films, and over one hundred titles in the novelisation series, of which 35 have made it into the New York Times bestseller list. With judicious channel-switching you can watch Star Trek pretty well all the time on American TV, and there are no doubt people who do. You might feel like saying to such ‘Trekkers’ – as, famously and unforgivably, Bill Shatner, the original Captain Kirk, did – ‘get a life.’ But it’s a good rule not to argue with success, at least until you understand what’s causing it, and anything which sparks such enthusiasm and active devotion among passive TV viewers can’t be all bad.