Bill MacKenty

The problem with Star Trek and our future

Future-kitsch, indeed...

My dislike of Star Trek comes from a position of deep respect for science fiction as a speculative discipline rather than a comfort genre. In full agreement with Stanisław Lem, I see science fiction as an instrument for expanding the space of possible futures, not for stabilizing them into reassuring templates. Star Trek, for all its cultural importance, presents a future that is already resolved: humanity has found its moral equilibrium, its political structure, its technological idiom, and even its aesthetic. This closure is precisely the problem. Once the future is rendered coherent, bureaucratic, and familiar, it ceases to provoke serious imaginative or philosophical effort.

Lem repeatedly warned against what he called “futurological kitsch”: futures that merely project contemporary values, institutions, and anxieties forward under the guise of speculation. Star Trek exemplifies this tendency. Its Federation is essentially a mid-20th-century liberal technocracy transplanted into space, complete with naval hierarchies, courtroom ethics, and managerial rationality. Aliens, despite cosmetic differences, overwhelmingly think like humans, argue like humans, and resolve conflicts within recognizably human moral frameworks. The universe is vast, but the conceptual space it allows itself is narrow. The unknown is domesticated before it is allowed to be genuinely strange.

What troubles me most is not that Star Trek is optimistic, but that its optimism is static. It assumes that progress converges on a single, stable end state: post-scarcity, enlightened governance, ethical consensus. Lem, by contrast, insisted that true futures would be messy, non-intuitive, and often incomprehensible to their ancestors. Science fiction should unsettle our assumptions about intelligence, society, consciousness, and meaning itself. It should force us to confront futures that do not want to resemble us, that may not even recognize our categories as coherent. In this sense, Star Trek reassures us that we will remain central, legible, and morally correct—comforting, perhaps, but intellectually limiting.

Science fiction, at its best, should not tell us that everything will work out if we are sufficiently virtuous; it should remind us how little we understand about what “working out” might even mean. Lem’s futures resist narrative closure, moral tidiness, and anthropocentrism precisely because those are the habits that constrain imagination. My objection to Star Trek is therefore not aesthetic but philosophical: it offers a future we can easily inhabit, when science fiction ought to confront us with futures we can barely survive imagining.