SPAAAAAACK!(Well, you must admit, SPOOOOOOCK! would have looked strange.)
We have a simple one for you this week, which grew out of another discussion. After forty-some years of TV series, movies, spinoff novels, comic books, lunchboxes, and whatnot, there are some things I'm finally coming to understand about Star Trek. For example, Gene Roddenberry was a decorated B-17 combat pilot during World War II, and after the war a commercial pilot for Pan-Am for some years, so yes, of course starships will have windshields, and the captain and his command crew will sit facing the windshield. (And not, as a Navy man might imagine, facing each other, in a more ship-like Combat Information Center.) And given that Captains Pike and Kirk were consciously patterned after C. S. Forester's Captain Horatio Hornblower, yes, of course starships will maneuver as if they're floating on the plane of the ecliptic, and no doubt engage in combat by trading broadsides.
But one thing continues to bug me, and that is the basis of this week's question. In the universe of Star Trek, is the Federation:
a.) a socialist utopia,
b.) a fascist utopia,
or c.) a load of fuzzy-minded technotopian twaddle too silly to be considered as having any coherent political and/or economic philosophy at all?
Let the arguments begin.
ULTIMAGE GEEK FU runs every Wednesday. Have a question that's just bugging the heck out of you about Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Gallactica, Farscape, Firefly, Fringe, Heroes, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Smallville, The X-Files, X-Men, The Man From Atlantis, or pretty much any other SF-flavored media property? Send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com with the subject line, "Geek Fu," and we'll stuff it in the queue.
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