David Gerrold on Star Trek and Social Justice
David Gerrold, the writer of “The Trouble with Tribbles,” posted a response on Facebook to an article that’s been making the rounds, complaining about how the “SJW Glittery Hoo Ha crowd” is DESTROYING science fiction. Said article references Star Trek: The Original Series as an inspiration for engineers and other “real” SF fans.
Here’s an excerpt from Gerrold’s response:
I was there. I know what Gene Roddenberry envisioned. He went on at length about it in almost every meeting. He wasn’t about technology, he was about envisioning a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out. Gene Roddenberry was one of the great Social Justice Warriors. You don’t get to claim him or his show as a shield of virtue for a cause he would have disdained.”
“Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice. “The Cloud Minders,” “A Taste Of Armageddon,” “Errand Of Mercy,” “The Apple,” “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” and so many more. We did stories that were about exploring the universe not just because we could build starships, but because we wanted to know who was out there, what was our place in the universe, and what could we learn from the other races out there?”
“Star Trek was about social justice from day one.
The full post is on Facebook, and is very much worth reading.
Muccamukk
February 20, 2015 @ 12:21 pm
I miss Trek being about social justice. It wasn’t always pretty, and it didn’t always work, but they were trying.
I don’t especially mind the bouncy action movies they’re doing these days. They’re fun (and kinda sexist and racist), but then I go back and watch the old shows (often kinda sexist and racist!), and miss space ships on my tv, and people trying to make a better galaxy.
Becca Stareyes
February 20, 2015 @ 1:53 pm
I remember talking about this with friends that Trek ultimately had a really optimistic take on the future, which was nice for a really popular SF property. Humanity would keep trying to be more moral than we are, and we’d be making progress. Perhaps not perfectly*, but it would be the kind of future that would be a nice place to live for most of us and one that is progressive. (Not necessarily in the 21st century political sense, but in the sense that we should look to the future and make improvements, rather than cling to what we have now, or attempt to return to a golden-age past.)
* And with a lot of accidentally-bigoted implications because the writers grew up in a society steeped in various isms and it is hard to totally correct for one’s background even as one aspires to be better.
Muccamukk
February 20, 2015 @ 2:43 pm
Trek ultimately had a really optimistic take on the future
Right. Yes. It was explicitly done because of that. Like GR was looking at all those scary evil alien movies, and post-nuclear winter stories about the future being horrible, and wanted to write something where the future was hopeful and humanity survived and moved forward, and we did it together as a species, not just white dudes form America (though the whole “Wagon train to the stars” thing was a rather unfortunate phrase in retrospect).
Deep Space Nine rightly turned some of that on its head, and dealt with a lot of the imperial implications that hadn’t been thought through in the ’60s or even the ’80s and early ’90s, but it was still about people surviving and trying to do better.
Laura Resnick
February 21, 2015 @ 12:46 am
As I said somewhere else recently about that peculiar blog post praising Star Trek as a show that didn’t bother with all this silly social justice stuff…. … I read a book a few years ago about the creation and making of ST:TOS in which it’s clear in chapter after chapter quoting Roddenberry, his correspondence, and his close associates that his vision of the future centered on social justice and portraying that vision in Star Trek was -so- crucial to him that he regularly fought the network over it. Sometimes he won (x. writing an alien, an Asian man, and an African-American woman as part of the command team of a starship) and sometimes he lost (ex. the Enterprise’s first-officer was female in the original pilot, but this was one of the things that had to change for the series to get greenlighted). Writing as accurately as they could about futuristic science was also very important to Roddenberry, and there were many examples in the book of how hard they worked on that. But his passion and vision for the show were clearly in portraying a more socially just future for humanity.
Wish I could remember the title of the book–but given how many books there are about the creation of STAR TREK, I assume similar or identical source material about how the creators of ST presented it to the network and what they valued, fought over, or pushed for in their show is available in a number of books.
Bonelady
February 21, 2015 @ 10:06 am
Vox Day, at least (I don’t know about Correa (sp?), loves dichotomies. Us vs them. Blue vs. Pink SF, etc. And he wants Social Justice Warrior to be a bad thing, because he does want social injustice – he wants women to lose the vote. He wants blacks to be considered inferior to whites. He wants all people who are not of British/Northern European descent who have been citizens for three generations or less to be expelled from the US. (Think I’m making this up? Read his blog for the last 2 years as I have done. He’s said all of this, and more.) He considers LGBT people to be abominations and says that God hates them. If you are not a straight, white, Christian male, he considers you to be trash. So it is no surprise that he reposted Lehman’s little essay. Whether he will comment on Gerrold’s essay, I don’t know. He tends to ignore things he cannot easily deride. We’ll see. I am very happy that Gerrold answered Lehman. Maybe one of the “blue SF” crowd will read this and think about it. I read both “blue SF” and “Pink SF”. I don’t care what artificial distinctions are made – I read SF and have done so since I was 6 or 7 (I don’t recall if it was Zipzip or Comet the space cat who got me started). I read anything that interests me, which includes Heinlein, Drake, Norton, Asimov, Bradbury and other classics as well as the “new” stuff. Why people think it necessary to divide SF into 2 camps, I have no idea and I do not like it. So I ignore the camps and continue what has worked for over 50 years – reading what interests me.
Jim C. Hines
February 21, 2015 @ 10:55 am
I didn’t realize Day had reposted the article. I don’t pay much attention to him these days.
“So I ignore the camps and continue what has worked for over 50 years – reading what interests me.”
Sounds like a good approach to me! 🙂
Random Michelle
February 21, 2015 @ 9:58 pm
I’m kinda shocked that anyone who is even a casual fan wouldn’t have known about Roddenberry’s equality and social justice interests.
IIRC, they had to keep toning him down, because he wanted to push all the boundaries (women in positions of power–a woman of color in a position of power, interracial smooching, all that stuff).
I won’t say I’m a fan of ST: TOS, because I’m not; but I come from a family of Trekkies and love ST:DS9 more than I have words to describe.
I think that Roddenberry’s idea of the future was unrealistic, but considering what of his vision has come true, I’d be pleased to be proven further wrong.
Except for the bits about boinking all the aliens. That I can do without.
Sally
February 23, 2015 @ 9:48 pm
Boinking all the aliens is “miscegenation” writ large. So Kirk was actually being actively not-racist. 😉 Sexist and lookist, sure, but TOS Kirk didn’t care what color skin a woman had or what planet she was from — he’d boink her. (Much like Gene)
And it was Shatner who made sure that the only usable take of Kirk kissing Uhura was the one where you could tell they actually did kiss on the lips and everything. Some TV stations in the South didn’t show that episode, but nobody remembers or cares about them and thanks to syndication, everyone’s seen it.
A few people think since Roddenberry was a straight white man who’d previously had the very manly (gender and racially segregated) jobs of military combat pilot and police officer, naturally he must not have been in favor of social justice. We call these people “didn’t they see that one about the guys who were half black and half white on opposite sides? How much more obvious could it be?” And Majel got to be the voice of all the computers in Starfleet.
There was no way at all in the 1960’s that Trek could have tackled any gay topics. But even though he wasn’t out publicly back then, everyone on Trek knew Takei was gay, and so what?
Christopher Brent
March 18, 2015 @ 7:25 pm
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=267673
David Gerrold is certainly a cranky old hypocrite who can simultaneously criticize other writers while taking a dump on the fanbase for doing the same thing.
Jim C. Hines
March 18, 2015 @ 7:58 pm
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with that link, but Gerrold isn’t the one coming off as cranky here…