Customer Reviews

Star Trek: Parallel Narratives

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First and foremost, this book is in bad need of an editor. If it had an editor at all, I did not notice. If this book were well edited, I'd give it three stars instead of two. Secondly, there is simply not enough here to make the book worth buying. The text itself is only 195 pages long, and the first 101 pages are devoted to a very general and bland review of the histories of the various Star Trek series. Most readers will be familiar enough with the information in the first half of the book that they will feel impatient to get to the more interesting second half, with its interpretation and analysis. Unfortunately, the author is a lightweight, providing mostly description of various episodes in the next 90+ pages. He does not dig deep, but skims over his themes, developing nothing in depth.

And what are his themes? First of all, Mr. Gregory traces the growing sophistication of the show and its audience, beginning with Roddenberry's somewhat naive liberal humanist utopia, with its ideas imbedded in straightforward action stories, and ending with a complicated political situation, its ideas being presented along with challenges to those ideas, allowing for more complexity and a more inclusive perspective. Secondly, the author traces the growing technical sophistication of the show, explaining how the many artists involved in the series were able to make better and better use of the television format, or televisuality, as the years progressed. The author's ideas were sound, and I tended to agree with him in his assessments. Unfortunately, he seemed to have the attention span of a gnat. For a much better analysis of Star Trek as mythos, read _Deep Space and Sacred Time_, by Jan Lundeen and Jon G. Wagner.