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A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine
A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek ’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek ’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy.
Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalized in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different “Trek” is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9 ’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.
Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalized in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different “Trek” is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9 ’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.
346 pages, Hardcover
Published July 1, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 31, 2024
1) "Star Trek is often hailed for its prophetic dimensions, both anticipating technological 'innovation' and using allegory and optimistic visions of a utopian future to comment critically on war, racism, and capitalist inequality here and now. But Trek has almost always articulated this futurity through starships, explorers, and other images of mobility—and leaving places behind, as the late artist and critic John Berger observed, has a way of concealing consequences. DS9's stationary allegorical geography meant from the outset that it would be, as series writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe puts it, a 'show ... about consequences.' The series juxtaposes multiple clashing political, economic, and cultural perspectives embedded in a single contested place, one far from the glitz of the Enterprise or the manicured lawns of Starfleet Headquarters. It foregrounds contradictions between the Federation's comfortable core and its misunderstood and exploited Bajoran periphery, from the outside looking in. Instead of an itinerant spacecraft, this was a place where consequences would have to be, as Rodney King suggested, 'worked out.'"
2) "DS9's radical interventions also raise the question of place, and the role that local conflicts can play in global struggles against racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire. Attention to place is, perhaps understandably, dismissed in some corners of the political Left as sentimental, nostalgic, and reactionary. Place-based struggles, so the thinking goes, can never hope to defeat global systems of capitalist exploitation that are notoriously wily and adept at producing and taking advantage of differences across space. Challenging this view, the late geographer Doreen Massey argued that places are dynamic, capable of holding multiple identities and meanings, and defined through their specific material and cultural relationships to other places. Massey's work resonates with long-standing themes in many Indigenous cosmogonies. The late theologian Vine Deloria Jr., for instance, linked the priority of time over space in Western thought to the West's outsized role in environmental destruction, and to mass alienation in capitalist societies. These more complex views of place urge careful attention to context as a prerequisite for evaluating the politics of localized political struggles. They enable chapter 2 to affirm the progressive, emancipatory character of Bajoran anticolonial nationalisms and the Prophets' nod to theologies of liberation, and they enable A Different 'Trek' to evaluate the import of DS9's place-based intervention in Trek's hypermobile spatial epistemologies."
3) "Neither the script nor the novelization of 'Far Beyond the Stars' says much about Russell's time in the navy, where Black sailors faced a segregated division of labor, relegated to manual and service jobs, until 1944. But a brief exchange between Benny and Cassie in both texts in 1953 intimates that he began writing SF—'amateur stuff'—nearly fifteen years prior, in the late 1930s or early 1940s, while serving. At the beginning of Sisko's first extended vision as Russell, his interest in SF is met skeptically by a newspaper vendor (Aron Eisenberg/Nog), who prefers World War II films like From Here to Eternity. 'What's wrong with men from Mars?' Russell jocularly protests. He listens, both amused and uninterested, as the vendor gushes about Burt Lancaster's celluloid military heroics, and then silently hands the vendor a coin. Given Russell's experiences, is it not politically instructive that he would be more intrigued by 'men from Mars' than by reliving the wartime dramas of a white movie star? If not as openly seditious as draft resisters, we must take seriously Benny Russell's everyday, creative, 'amateurish' distractedness from harsh manual labor, his proneness to speculative fabulation, his susceptibility to dreams of 'otherwise possibilities,' including dreams of Black self-determination in the twenty-fourth century."
4) "More accustomed to the role of anticolonial freedom fighter than agent of a postcolonial state with which she often adamantly disagrees, Kira grows tremendously over DS9's seven years. She is often described as letting go of her anger, trauma, and Bajoran nationalism in a tidy liberal narrative of overcoming. Yet it is perhaps closer to the mark to say that Kira's politics and values don't change, but her heart does. Grounded in historical experience and insights from the Prophets, Kira remains in some sense a particularist—resolutely place based, religiously orthodox, fiercely anticolonial. But she becomes, in cultural studies scholar Ramzi Fawaz's felicitous phrase, 'a particularist with a heart for the universal,' making Bajoran experience a departure point for insight, empathy, and solidarity with a range of oppressed peoples. Kira models an alternative form of cosmopolitanism, one out of step with pretensions of liberal imperialist universality and replete with possibilities for international/interplanetary contact and comradeship."
5) "The decision to minimize Bajoran makeup requirements stems from producer Rick Berman's admiration for TNG actor Michelle Forbes, who portrayed Ensign Ro. Berman reportedly told Michael Westmore, the celebrated makeup supervisor on TNG and DS9, 'We've hired a pretty girl and I want to keep her that way. Think of something that we can take and make her look a little alien, and still get the idea shes from another planet, but she's still gorgeous.' Forbes, whose full name is Michelle Renee Forbes Guajardo, is of English, Welsh, and Mexican American descent and has dark-brown hair, light-brown eyes, and fair skin. The point here is not to scrutinize Forbes, a brilliant actor and a refreshingly thoughtful Leftist voice in Hollywood's sea of inchoate liberals. Rather, it is to note that the Bajorans as we know and see them are a product of Berman's valuation of fair-skinned beauty, of his directive to make that beauty visible.
Casting white actors in the roles of colonized peoples is by no means a problem unique to the Bajorans, DS9, or Star Trek. The whitewashing of anticolonial allegory is a defining crisis of mainstream American SF. International studies scholar Robert A. Saunders remarks that such a habit 'inverts the genuine threat that Euro-American imperialism has posed to the non-white people of the world.' Anthropologist John G. Russell argues that such racial camouflage in SF is a cynical move that protects writers and studios from both critiques of appropriation and right-wing reaction while cashing in on the palatability of whiteness with global audiences."
6) "Some critics see in the Dominion and its galaxy-ordering mission a purely racist social formation, devoid of any profit motive or other economic imperative. Yet as Gonzalez astutely observes, the Dominion's racism and its extractive economic logics are intimately intertwined. The very first mention of the Dominion comes in 'Rules of Acquisition,' which follows Ferengi attempts to expand 'synthehol' booze sales into the Gamma Quadrant. When Quark presses a trading partner for details about this mysterious 'Dominion,' she grows circumspect, counseling, 'Let's just say if you want to do business in the Gamma Quadrant, you have to do business with the Dominion.' When Bajor later signs a nonaggression pact with the Dominion to prevent a redux of the Cardassian Occupation, the Dominion isolates the planet from all external trade. And the Dominion war machine relies heavily on intensive resource extraction, notably for mineral ingredients for Ketracel-White, which directly informs its territorial interests. Even the Founders' gelatinous default state—their shape-shifting abilities—allegorizes not only the phantasmatic mobility of whiteness but that of capital as well."
7) "But if Odo is queer, he remains a queer of a particular, privileged sort. He is indeed alienated, cast out from home, the only one of his kind on the station—and yet the community from which he hails is one of extreme wealth and power, one whose persecutory anxieties authorize an ideology of race and class supremacy. What could it mean, then, for privileged queers like Odo to fail, or refuse, to reproduce the cultural and political logics of his 'own people'—especially if those logics are oppressive and cruel?"
8) "'Bar Association,' then, is a wonderful exception to Hassler-Forest's observation that Star Trek rarely fleshes out the democratizing implications of its postcapitalist premise. Ironically, refusing to follow Trek rules and simply banish money enabled DS9 to critique capitalism, in the twenty-fourth century and in the twentieth. Shimerman has praised the episode for addressing class contradictions that mainstream television often elides: 'People think of this as a comic episode. And it is, of course. But in truth, it's really about union-management problems. The irony of it is that I play management in the episode. So I thought that to make Rom have a reasonably hard job as a union organizer, I would have to be tough about it, to show the struggle to the audience. Although you don't see it on TV very often, this is something that goes on in America all the time.' Rather than some distant future in which technology smoothly outsources so-called 'repetitive, energy-intensive, low-skill, high-output labor' to machines, 'Bar Association' critically reflects the rise of a service economy in the United States, returning us to the contradictions of our own world and the struggles to transform it."
9) "What is rightly hated in Trump, like what is hated in the Ferengi, in truth implicates a system that is bipartisan, to say the least. The very founding of the United States—a plantation economy fueled by kidnapped and coerced African labor and built on stolen Indigenous lands and the genocide of Indigenous peoples—would seem to embody the 52nd Rule of Acquisition, itself a political theology of accumulation by dispossession: 'Never ask when you can take.' Likewise, the rise of a permanent military-industrial complex in the United States after World War II—a thoroughly bipartisan affair that has also militarized U.S. police departments—exemplifies the 35th Rule: 'War is good for business.' Faced with contemporary economic and public health crises, both major parties rush to take care of corporate donors and neglect the multiracial poor and working classes, heeding the 162nd Rule: 'Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.' These contradictions cannot be pinned on Trump, nor even on the Republican Party, alone. To suggest as much is to fetishize both Trump and the Ferengi, rather than heed the occasion for thoroughgoing critical reflection and more transformative political commitment that both offer."
10) "If there is a heroic, suffering O'Brien, then, perhaps it is the indispensable Professor Keiko Ishikawa O'Brien, first and foremost. As an engineer, Miles might keep the lights on at DS9, but it is Keiko who, consigned to the position of trailing spouse, champions efforts to collectivize social reproduction on the station, founding and defending the station school and welcoming Kira into her extended family as a brave experiment in collective kinship. Keiko produces scholarship on local botany in collaboration with Bajoran colleagues who are rebuilding agricultural and scientific infrastructure in the wake of the devastating Cardassian Occupation. She does all of this while raising her own children, pushing her husband to be a better person, and abiding the stress of routine threats to her husband's safety as a condition of his work. We only get glimpses of station life from Keiko O'Brien's perspective occasionally. But taking Keiko's geographies seriously challenges fantasies of a future that has automated away the 'low-skilled' work of social reproduction or 'innovated' away the political problems that surround racialized and gendered divisions of labor.
Keiko's frustrations also offer a cautionary tale, suggesting that if the privatized, neoliberal family values of the 1990s remain the best that twenty-fourth-century humanity has to offer, the same crises of social reproduction and the same racialized and gendered divisions of labor will continue to fester, even in a 'postscarcity' Federation economy. In the decades since DS9 aired, this warning has certainly proven prescient. Rather than dismissing Professor O'Brien as 'annoying,' we might yet learn from her example, finding fairer ways to organize and distribute the joys and burdens of care work and fighting for that work to be valued and supported."
11) "Finally, as we saw in chapter 1, Garak is central to the events of 'In the Pale Moonlight,' carrying out the outsourced, illegal, and immoral dirty work of espionage, including murder, that Sisko cannot undertake himself. Garak is at once an enabling queer outsider to the Cardassian imperial family who eagerly serves its shady security state and an illiberal, enabling outsider to the Federation's liberal multicultural empire who abets it by carrying out the same sorts of unspeakable deeds. We might even read Garak's work for Sisko as a metaphor for the contemporary alliances between military multiculturalisms and neoconservative imperialisms, alliances increasingly embodied in the U.S. Democratic Party."
2) "DS9's radical interventions also raise the question of place, and the role that local conflicts can play in global struggles against racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire. Attention to place is, perhaps understandably, dismissed in some corners of the political Left as sentimental, nostalgic, and reactionary. Place-based struggles, so the thinking goes, can never hope to defeat global systems of capitalist exploitation that are notoriously wily and adept at producing and taking advantage of differences across space. Challenging this view, the late geographer Doreen Massey argued that places are dynamic, capable of holding multiple identities and meanings, and defined through their specific material and cultural relationships to other places. Massey's work resonates with long-standing themes in many Indigenous cosmogonies. The late theologian Vine Deloria Jr., for instance, linked the priority of time over space in Western thought to the West's outsized role in environmental destruction, and to mass alienation in capitalist societies. These more complex views of place urge careful attention to context as a prerequisite for evaluating the politics of localized political struggles. They enable chapter 2 to affirm the progressive, emancipatory character of Bajoran anticolonial nationalisms and the Prophets' nod to theologies of liberation, and they enable A Different 'Trek' to evaluate the import of DS9's place-based intervention in Trek's hypermobile spatial epistemologies."
3) "Neither the script nor the novelization of 'Far Beyond the Stars' says much about Russell's time in the navy, where Black sailors faced a segregated division of labor, relegated to manual and service jobs, until 1944. But a brief exchange between Benny and Cassie in both texts in 1953 intimates that he began writing SF—'amateur stuff'—nearly fifteen years prior, in the late 1930s or early 1940s, while serving. At the beginning of Sisko's first extended vision as Russell, his interest in SF is met skeptically by a newspaper vendor (Aron Eisenberg/Nog), who prefers World War II films like From Here to Eternity. 'What's wrong with men from Mars?' Russell jocularly protests. He listens, both amused and uninterested, as the vendor gushes about Burt Lancaster's celluloid military heroics, and then silently hands the vendor a coin. Given Russell's experiences, is it not politically instructive that he would be more intrigued by 'men from Mars' than by reliving the wartime dramas of a white movie star? If not as openly seditious as draft resisters, we must take seriously Benny Russell's everyday, creative, 'amateurish' distractedness from harsh manual labor, his proneness to speculative fabulation, his susceptibility to dreams of 'otherwise possibilities,' including dreams of Black self-determination in the twenty-fourth century."
4) "More accustomed to the role of anticolonial freedom fighter than agent of a postcolonial state with which she often adamantly disagrees, Kira grows tremendously over DS9's seven years. She is often described as letting go of her anger, trauma, and Bajoran nationalism in a tidy liberal narrative of overcoming. Yet it is perhaps closer to the mark to say that Kira's politics and values don't change, but her heart does. Grounded in historical experience and insights from the Prophets, Kira remains in some sense a particularist—resolutely place based, religiously orthodox, fiercely anticolonial. But she becomes, in cultural studies scholar Ramzi Fawaz's felicitous phrase, 'a particularist with a heart for the universal,' making Bajoran experience a departure point for insight, empathy, and solidarity with a range of oppressed peoples. Kira models an alternative form of cosmopolitanism, one out of step with pretensions of liberal imperialist universality and replete with possibilities for international/interplanetary contact and comradeship."
5) "The decision to minimize Bajoran makeup requirements stems from producer Rick Berman's admiration for TNG actor Michelle Forbes, who portrayed Ensign Ro. Berman reportedly told Michael Westmore, the celebrated makeup supervisor on TNG and DS9, 'We've hired a pretty girl and I want to keep her that way. Think of something that we can take and make her look a little alien, and still get the idea shes from another planet, but she's still gorgeous.' Forbes, whose full name is Michelle Renee Forbes Guajardo, is of English, Welsh, and Mexican American descent and has dark-brown hair, light-brown eyes, and fair skin. The point here is not to scrutinize Forbes, a brilliant actor and a refreshingly thoughtful Leftist voice in Hollywood's sea of inchoate liberals. Rather, it is to note that the Bajorans as we know and see them are a product of Berman's valuation of fair-skinned beauty, of his directive to make that beauty visible.
Casting white actors in the roles of colonized peoples is by no means a problem unique to the Bajorans, DS9, or Star Trek. The whitewashing of anticolonial allegory is a defining crisis of mainstream American SF. International studies scholar Robert A. Saunders remarks that such a habit 'inverts the genuine threat that Euro-American imperialism has posed to the non-white people of the world.' Anthropologist John G. Russell argues that such racial camouflage in SF is a cynical move that protects writers and studios from both critiques of appropriation and right-wing reaction while cashing in on the palatability of whiteness with global audiences."
6) "Some critics see in the Dominion and its galaxy-ordering mission a purely racist social formation, devoid of any profit motive or other economic imperative. Yet as Gonzalez astutely observes, the Dominion's racism and its extractive economic logics are intimately intertwined. The very first mention of the Dominion comes in 'Rules of Acquisition,' which follows Ferengi attempts to expand 'synthehol' booze sales into the Gamma Quadrant. When Quark presses a trading partner for details about this mysterious 'Dominion,' she grows circumspect, counseling, 'Let's just say if you want to do business in the Gamma Quadrant, you have to do business with the Dominion.' When Bajor later signs a nonaggression pact with the Dominion to prevent a redux of the Cardassian Occupation, the Dominion isolates the planet from all external trade. And the Dominion war machine relies heavily on intensive resource extraction, notably for mineral ingredients for Ketracel-White, which directly informs its territorial interests. Even the Founders' gelatinous default state—their shape-shifting abilities—allegorizes not only the phantasmatic mobility of whiteness but that of capital as well."
7) "But if Odo is queer, he remains a queer of a particular, privileged sort. He is indeed alienated, cast out from home, the only one of his kind on the station—and yet the community from which he hails is one of extreme wealth and power, one whose persecutory anxieties authorize an ideology of race and class supremacy. What could it mean, then, for privileged queers like Odo to fail, or refuse, to reproduce the cultural and political logics of his 'own people'—especially if those logics are oppressive and cruel?"
8) "'Bar Association,' then, is a wonderful exception to Hassler-Forest's observation that Star Trek rarely fleshes out the democratizing implications of its postcapitalist premise. Ironically, refusing to follow Trek rules and simply banish money enabled DS9 to critique capitalism, in the twenty-fourth century and in the twentieth. Shimerman has praised the episode for addressing class contradictions that mainstream television often elides: 'People think of this as a comic episode. And it is, of course. But in truth, it's really about union-management problems. The irony of it is that I play management in the episode. So I thought that to make Rom have a reasonably hard job as a union organizer, I would have to be tough about it, to show the struggle to the audience. Although you don't see it on TV very often, this is something that goes on in America all the time.' Rather than some distant future in which technology smoothly outsources so-called 'repetitive, energy-intensive, low-skill, high-output labor' to machines, 'Bar Association' critically reflects the rise of a service economy in the United States, returning us to the contradictions of our own world and the struggles to transform it."
9) "What is rightly hated in Trump, like what is hated in the Ferengi, in truth implicates a system that is bipartisan, to say the least. The very founding of the United States—a plantation economy fueled by kidnapped and coerced African labor and built on stolen Indigenous lands and the genocide of Indigenous peoples—would seem to embody the 52nd Rule of Acquisition, itself a political theology of accumulation by dispossession: 'Never ask when you can take.' Likewise, the rise of a permanent military-industrial complex in the United States after World War II—a thoroughly bipartisan affair that has also militarized U.S. police departments—exemplifies the 35th Rule: 'War is good for business.' Faced with contemporary economic and public health crises, both major parties rush to take care of corporate donors and neglect the multiracial poor and working classes, heeding the 162nd Rule: 'Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.' These contradictions cannot be pinned on Trump, nor even on the Republican Party, alone. To suggest as much is to fetishize both Trump and the Ferengi, rather than heed the occasion for thoroughgoing critical reflection and more transformative political commitment that both offer."
10) "If there is a heroic, suffering O'Brien, then, perhaps it is the indispensable Professor Keiko Ishikawa O'Brien, first and foremost. As an engineer, Miles might keep the lights on at DS9, but it is Keiko who, consigned to the position of trailing spouse, champions efforts to collectivize social reproduction on the station, founding and defending the station school and welcoming Kira into her extended family as a brave experiment in collective kinship. Keiko produces scholarship on local botany in collaboration with Bajoran colleagues who are rebuilding agricultural and scientific infrastructure in the wake of the devastating Cardassian Occupation. She does all of this while raising her own children, pushing her husband to be a better person, and abiding the stress of routine threats to her husband's safety as a condition of his work. We only get glimpses of station life from Keiko O'Brien's perspective occasionally. But taking Keiko's geographies seriously challenges fantasies of a future that has automated away the 'low-skilled' work of social reproduction or 'innovated' away the political problems that surround racialized and gendered divisions of labor.
Keiko's frustrations also offer a cautionary tale, suggesting that if the privatized, neoliberal family values of the 1990s remain the best that twenty-fourth-century humanity has to offer, the same crises of social reproduction and the same racialized and gendered divisions of labor will continue to fester, even in a 'postscarcity' Federation economy. In the decades since DS9 aired, this warning has certainly proven prescient. Rather than dismissing Professor O'Brien as 'annoying,' we might yet learn from her example, finding fairer ways to organize and distribute the joys and burdens of care work and fighting for that work to be valued and supported."
11) "Finally, as we saw in chapter 1, Garak is central to the events of 'In the Pale Moonlight,' carrying out the outsourced, illegal, and immoral dirty work of espionage, including murder, that Sisko cannot undertake himself. Garak is at once an enabling queer outsider to the Cardassian imperial family who eagerly serves its shady security state and an illiberal, enabling outsider to the Federation's liberal multicultural empire who abets it by carrying out the same sorts of unspeakable deeds. We might even read Garak's work for Sisko as a metaphor for the contemporary alliances between military multiculturalisms and neoconservative imperialisms, alliances increasingly embodied in the U.S. Democratic Party."
January 7, 2025
From the moment I accidentally caught the series premiere while in high school on a family vacation (the first Trek series I'd ever watched and my gateway to the franchise), Deep Space Nine has had a special place in my heart. It brings me great joy to see a new generation discovering the show, and even greater joy to have stumbled across this book. Seitz puts into words far more eloquent than I could the ways in which the series pushed boundaries and commented on the social issues of the mid 90s, and then makes compelling arguments for the ways in which it can provide a critical window through which to view contemporary issues as well. I forgot how daunting academic writing can be, and the 32-page intro nearly broke me, but I'm so glad I persevered, since I'm pretty sure I was grinning in a state of nerdy, trekker euphoria for the rest of the book.
May 17, 2024
I have a lot of thoughts, but my hope is that the idea of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "depressive/reparative readings" of media stays with me a long time.
January 1, 2025
Liking Star Trek: Deep Space Nine always made you cool and sexy, but as this book reveals, it also means that you're the correct kind of leftist! Jokes aside, this book evaluates the dark horse of the Star Trek franchise through various critical lenses such as feminism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. It is well worth picking up if you are a Trekkie, and I will never view my favorite Trek series again after reading this book.
December 27, 2025
3.5/5
A few thoughts: I think many of the points the author made were good. Many I hadn’t thought of or reconsidered over the course of reading this book. However I do think some of his points were not well-thought out, or, arguably, too thought out to a point where perhaps there was an analysis of something that really didn’t need to be analyzed! In addition, there were a few claims he made that I found to be more conjectural and loosely strung together than well-thought out. For example, at one point he made the claim that because Rick Berman instructed casting to cast someone "beautiful" as Jadzia Dax that implies that Berman only thinks that Western facial features are beautiful. What a strange conclusion to draw from that quote! That didn't feel like any sort of analysis to me, just illogical conjecture. Perhaps he has better evidence for this claim but if he does, he didn't use it which made his statement feel empty and like he was grasping at straws.
Two more pedantic points: his use of “queers” to refer to queer people settled uncomfortably with me. The referrals of Trek fans as “Trekkers” instead of “Trekkies” elicited an eye-roll from me as well.
A few thoughts: I think many of the points the author made were good. Many I hadn’t thought of or reconsidered over the course of reading this book. However I do think some of his points were not well-thought out, or, arguably, too thought out to a point where perhaps there was an analysis of something that really didn’t need to be analyzed! In addition, there were a few claims he made that I found to be more conjectural and loosely strung together than well-thought out. For example, at one point he made the claim that because Rick Berman instructed casting to cast someone "beautiful" as Jadzia Dax that implies that Berman only thinks that Western facial features are beautiful. What a strange conclusion to draw from that quote! That didn't feel like any sort of analysis to me, just illogical conjecture. Perhaps he has better evidence for this claim but if he does, he didn't use it which made his statement feel empty and like he was grasping at straws.
Two more pedantic points: his use of “queers” to refer to queer people settled uncomfortably with me. The referrals of Trek fans as “Trekkers” instead of “Trekkies” elicited an eye-roll from me as well.
August 11, 2023
"A Different Trek" is the perfect book for someone like me: a fan of both Star Trek (and Deep Space Nine in particular) and essay collections about media studies.
In case you don't happen to also be in the sweet spot in that Venn Diagram, though, I think you will also love "A Different Trek" if:
* You are interested in viewing media through place- and time-based critical lenses, rejecting "death of the author" (and actors and writers and the myriad other people who create a television show)
* You want to read more analyses combining approaches like Black studies, American studies, and "post"colonial studies
* You are critical of science-fiction (and/or Star Trek in particular) as a vector for discussing "real world problems"
That being said, I must emphasize that, while you can learn about Star Trek through media studies frameworks in this book, you cannot learn about media studies through Star Trek here.
(If you are interested in learning about media studies through Star Trek, there are other avenues. My favorite resource of this ilk is the YouTube channel Jessie Gender. https://youtube.com/@JessieGender1)
In case you don't happen to also be in the sweet spot in that Venn Diagram, though, I think you will also love "A Different Trek" if:
* You are interested in viewing media through place- and time-based critical lenses, rejecting "death of the author" (and actors and writers and the myriad other people who create a television show)
* You want to read more analyses combining approaches like Black studies, American studies, and "post"colonial studies
* You are critical of science-fiction (and/or Star Trek in particular) as a vector for discussing "real world problems"
That being said, I must emphasize that, while you can learn about Star Trek through media studies frameworks in this book, you cannot learn about media studies through Star Trek here.
(If you are interested in learning about media studies through Star Trek, there are other avenues. My favorite resource of this ilk is the YouTube channel Jessie Gender. https://youtube.com/@JessieGender1)
July 11, 2024
Wow.
I thought I knew the politics of DS9.
Reading this showed me I knew but one quark (you can bet your latinum that pun was intended) of one subatomic particle of one hydrogen atom of one water molecule of the iceberg of the politics of DS9.
There's so much detail here. The book focuses on examining the narrative of the show and its societal context through several characters / sets of characters, particularly as those characters pertain to specific themes, like Kira as a freedom fighter / terrorist, the entire main cast as one big polycule (Sisko is Space Dad™, of course), and finally, finally, Keiko gets the respect she deserves. There's an entire chapter dedicated to all the queerness in DS9 (by far, easily several parsecs, the queerest Trek besides my second Trek love, Discovery) and, unsurprisingly, I made more highlights in that chapter than any other--but this isn't to say I only paid attention there. So many passages--over one hundred, in fact--hit so hard, were so insightful, revealed things to me I never knew/noticed.
There are the obvious anticapitalist and other themes endemic to every Trek, and I still learned so much here. Things that young Luna was too young to understand / grasp at the time (I was 16 when the show finished, growing up in a very conservative area), things that present Luna appreciates more than 16 year old Luna ever could. It's clear from the start that the author is a proper leftist, even properly socialist, and it's refreshing.
The book covers all the actually great episodes that never make the "best of Trek" lists. It's not all about In The Pale Moonlight here! The exploration of Far Beyond the Stars in particular is lovely--not least because it's my favorite episode of the series, but also because, in my not-humble-at-all-have-rewatched-the-series-many-times opinion, it showcases all the themes of the show in one of the best hours of television.
I'm afraid I don't have any actual critiques. The best I can come up with is I wish it was longer. More detail, more explorations of themes.
I thought I knew the politics of DS9.
Reading this showed me I knew but one quark (you can bet your latinum that pun was intended) of one subatomic particle of one hydrogen atom of one water molecule of the iceberg of the politics of DS9.
There's so much detail here. The book focuses on examining the narrative of the show and its societal context through several characters / sets of characters, particularly as those characters pertain to specific themes, like Kira as a freedom fighter / terrorist, the entire main cast as one big polycule (Sisko is Space Dad™, of course), and finally, finally, Keiko gets the respect she deserves. There's an entire chapter dedicated to all the queerness in DS9 (by far, easily several parsecs, the queerest Trek besides my second Trek love, Discovery) and, unsurprisingly, I made more highlights in that chapter than any other--but this isn't to say I only paid attention there. So many passages--over one hundred, in fact--hit so hard, were so insightful, revealed things to me I never knew/noticed.
There are the obvious anticapitalist and other themes endemic to every Trek, and I still learned so much here. Things that young Luna was too young to understand / grasp at the time (I was 16 when the show finished, growing up in a very conservative area), things that present Luna appreciates more than 16 year old Luna ever could. It's clear from the start that the author is a proper leftist, even properly socialist, and it's refreshing.
The book covers all the actually great episodes that never make the "best of Trek" lists. It's not all about In The Pale Moonlight here! The exploration of Far Beyond the Stars in particular is lovely--not least because it's my favorite episode of the series, but also because, in my not-humble-at-all-have-rewatched-the-series-many-times opinion, it showcases all the themes of the show in one of the best hours of television.
I'm afraid I don't have any actual critiques. The best I can come up with is I wish it was longer. More detail, more explorations of themes.
August 3, 2024
This is the the most niche/nerdiest thing I've ever read and it was awesome. DS9 is slept on. Classic Star Trek has a lot of imperialism vibes and DS9 was so bold and complicated and badass. It was totally ahead of its time and radical and queer and pro-palestine and also has its problems and this book p much covers it all. Thanks David Seitz lol did not know I needed this.
October 14, 2023
The book lays out socio-political analyses of different aspects of what has become over the years the flavor of ST that I critically value most. The narrative does get a bit jargon heavy, and also sometimes connects dots that are a stretch. Nevertheless, it did inspire me to revisit the series.
May 19, 2024
An interesting and thoughtful collection of scholarly essays on politics and identity in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Quite accessible/readable for academic writing, and I enjoyed it's exploration of several fascinating elements of one of my favorite shows.
May 2, 2025
Wow. Must read for all DS9 super fans & people willing to get their hands dirty in the franchise 🤘🏼
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