Exploring Star Trek: Voyager: Critical Essays

by Robert L Lively (Editor)

In 1995, Star Trek: Voyager brought a new dynamic to Star Trek's familiar, starship oriented, show. Lost 70,000 light-years in space, Voyager and its crew faced an uncertain and changeable future, echoing anxieties felt in the United States at the time. These fifteen essays explore the context, characters, and themes of Star Trek: Voyager, as they relate to the culture and zeitgeist of the 1990s. Essays on gender show how the series both challenges and reinforces typical SF stereotypes through the characters of Captain Janeway, Kes and Seven of Nine, while essays on identity examine the show's intersections with disability studies, race and multiracial identities, family dynamics, and emerging AI and humanity. Using the epic journey of Homer's Odyssey as a starting point for the series, and ending with an examination of the impacts of inception at the birth of the internet age, this book shows the many ways in which Voyager negotiated different perspectives for what the future of the galaxy and the USA could be.

Genres: Star Trek

238 pages, Paperback

Published March 12, 2020

Reviews

[Alison Lilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most essay collections of this kind, this book is somewhat hit-or-miss -- but overall, well-worth reading. Some chapters are truly excellent; some take up intriguing questions or topics only to suffer from mediocre writing and/or a lack of clear, careful analysis; and a few chapters... are just rather bad.

At its best, though, this book offers a nuanced analysis of the Star Trek: Voyager series in its historical and cultural context that not only challenges readers to think about the television show in new ways but grapples with meta-textual questions about the show's relationship to social and political issues in the 1990s and their ramifications to the present day. Many of the essays pay particular attention to issues of feminism, intersectionality, racism, and multi-racial and multi-cultural identity, topics that the show itself deliberately confronted again and again, with varying degrees of success.

For fans of the show, this book is a challenging but fascinating read. (And for "anti-fans," there's even the requisite Two Minutes Hate on "Threshold," the worst Star Trek episode ever.)

[Liv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cons: Horrible proofreading, questionable episode citations in some chapters ("Muse" is in season 6, not 4), convenient elision of DS9 when situating Voyager in the context of the franchise, and no queer content (listen, I did not come here to read essays in praise of J/7, because god knows I do not ship J/7...but more than a footnote's worth of queer acknowledgement would have been nice) (not to mention I wanted deeper engagement with the ways B'Elanna breaks & enforces gender role expectations)

Pros: S t e l l a r critique of the problematic treatment of Seven's character, some magnificent skewering of Janeway's more questionable behaviors, incredible application of disability theory, and overall just such a pleasure to read (genuine critical engagement with Trek? hell yes)