Press

Review in Shindig magazine

5 stars

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the show, this second edition updates the analysis of the long-running space-faring franchise to include the recent Enterprise series and JJ Abrams’ re-imaginings of the original story via an alternate timeline.

Written in a witty and engaging style, Star Trek: The Human Frontier succeeds in analysing Star Trek‘s various cultural and critical contexts in an imaginative and rigorous way, without ever once falling into the trap of becoming opaque and impenetrable.

A good deal of ink has been spilt over the years on this series, with many writers repeating more obvious readings based around race and the cultural arrogance of the white American establishment. This writing duo, of bestselling author Duncan Barrett and his mother, the academic Michele, avoid these pitfalls, providing instead a wide-ranging approach that does not shy away from slaughtering a few of these sacred yet hackneyed cows.

Although the original concept of a ‘Wagon Train to the Stars’ is acknowledged, their core reading of the franchise revolves around the ‘Hornblower in Space’ maritime idea. This literary parallel, along with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Melville’s Moby Dick and others, acts as a jumping off point for themes such as definitions of humanity in the light of exploration, the semiotics of whiteness and colour, and the trajectory of western values. Covering a comprehensive arc of ideas, from Roddenberry’s ‘rational, humanist, utopian vision’ to more recent postmodern relativism, The Human Frontier offers a range of fascinating insights.

Greg Healey

Review at TrekkieFeminist.com

Star Trek: The Human Frontier by Michele and Duncan Barrett is a wide-ranging academic (yet not inaccessible) discussion of Star Trek. Throughout the course of four loosely-themed sections, you explore how the franchise (from TOS right through the Kelvin timeline movies) relates to nautical literature, philosophy, colonialism, cyborg theory, and more. It felt like sitting in on a Star Trek-themed literary salon, where intelligent ideas are exchanged and discussed.

Jarrah Hodge

(Full review here)

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION

‘Star Trek has been subject to a lot of scrutiny by literary and cultural critics … The bad conscience that many have about serious discussion of popular culture means that Star Trek can still be read simplistically, as a stalking-horse for denouncing the modernity of the American century. The Barretts are more subtle. A television series is a product of a variety of creators and so, inevitably, a rich complex of signs, hints and idealisms. There is no final reading of Star Trek ; just an endless journey.’

The Independent (Book of the Day)

‘There are only a handful of book length surveys of Star Trek , and this mother-and-son collaboration is a welcome contribution to those. It provides a valuable overview of the programme from its original appearance 35 years ago, tracing the ways in which successive series have reproduced and challenged the original “liberal humanist” ethos of Star Trek .’ New Formations As we stand on the threshold of the age of human cloning, the leading question asked by this engaging book – What is human? – could hardly be more timely. The Barretts offer persuasive answers in their thorough analysis of a media phenomenon that has touched virtually everyone who lives in a technologically advanced society.’

Andrew Ross, Director, American Studies Program, New York University

Star Trek: The Human Frontier goes a long way toward explaining the enduring success of “the franchise” without succumbing to naive celebration. It explores Star Trek’s strengths and fl aws, its continuities and discontinuities, its intertextualities and its contextualities. The two Barretts explore Star Trek’s ambivalent relationship to modernity, to nautical exploration (and colonial empires), humanism, and ultimately, post-modernity. Moving effortlessly from Homer to Foucault, from Orwell to Butler, they manage to give substance to many of the intuitively experienced, commonsensical assumptions about Star Trek . And they have produced a book that is a delight to read. If this is what intergenerational authorship can accomplish, we should all start writing with our kids.

Lawrence Grossberg, Morris Davis Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Certainly the most interesting, and probably the best, study of the actual Star Trek programs and films that I have seen.  It is scholarly and informative, and also very well written, quite accessible to the general reader. First, and most important, the book totally ignores the “Star Trek phenomenon,” in part perhaps as a result of the Barretts being British; to judge from most available scholarship, the “phenomenon” seems largely restricted to the US.  The book concentrates solely on the created world of Star Trek: the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and the six theatrical films, with an occasional look at a few of the many spin-off novels.  And the Barretts know the canon thoroughly; the argument includes constant and detailed references to specific episodes and scenes. In Part I, “The Starry Sea,” they demonstrate convincingly that, in spite of Roddenberry’s comment that the series was intended as “wagon train to the stars,” the whole canon has deep roots in the nautical and exploratory fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth century: Melville, Conrad, and Forester’s Hornblower novels—not only in the surface details, but in this tradition’s attitudes toward an alien realm and the notion of “British maritime supremacy, in all its aspects of colonialism, commerce, and naval victory.”  The authors are well aware of the polemical studies that admonish Star Trek for its purported racist and capitalist ethic, but their view is much more balanced.  They make a good case for The Next Generation as the best fulfillment of Roddenberry’s rationalist/modernist/western ideals. An obsession with human identity is the focus of Part II, “Humanity on Trial,” which comprises about a third of the book and which demonstrates how the developing canon’s focus on human identity turns increasingly toward “identity as human,” with characters such as Data and the Doctor, Dax, Odo, and Seven of Nine as crucial figures.  Their analysis concludes: “Although Star Trek in general is about human nature, human morality, and the nature of the human in contrast to other entities…, there are significant differences between the various series.  We argue that the modern paradigm—so well mapped out in the tropes of exploration used by maritime fiction…—is giving way to a characteristically post-modern style of representation” (their emphasis). That argument is the concern of Part III, “The Post-Modern Tack,” which demonstrates that Voyager, and especially Deep Space Nine, while retaining the value system of the earlier series, increasingly and interestingly raise questions about those values (the authors have given me for the first time a real sense of what “post-modern” can mean).  The brief conclusion reprises their introduction: “If, in the projected twenty-fourth century, humans are not limited to Earth itself, they at least remain fixed in the larger ‘home’ of our own Star Trek portion of the galaxy.  In this, although planet Earth is not displaced and decentred, the project of humanity is still very much center stage” (their emphasis). The brief bibliography includes remarkably few studies specifically of Star Trek, an excellent general index, and an index of episodes referred to that is extremely useful.

Bruce Beatie, Science Fiction Research Association Review