The Literary Galaxy of Star Trek: An Analysis of References and Themes in the Television Series and Films

by James F. Broderick

How is the android Data like Shakespeare's character Hamlet? Is the vengeful Khan (original series episode "Space Seed" and the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) an echo of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick? The links between Star Trek and literature are vast: themes and characters that reflect those in classic literature; characters that quote literature in their dialog; and an enormous body of nonfiction books, novels, articles that have grown from the saga. Finally, like literature, Star Trek seeks to help in the human endeavor of understanding the world and its place in the universe. This book explores all of those connections. The Next Generation's Captain Picard frequently quotes Shakespeare. Captain Janeway from Voyager reenacts literature in holodeck novels. Jake Sisko, son of Deep Space Nine's Commander Benjamin Sisko, becomes an award-winning writer. Beginning with Captain James T. Kirk's first appearance in the original series, then continuing through four subsequent series and ten movies, this book draws parallels between Star Trek stories and literary classics such as Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Ulysses, Dracula, and the New Testament, and works by the likes of Booker T. Washington, Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare. Appendices list the literary works discussed and the episodes and movies mentioned, each giving the chapters where references can be found.

Genres: Star Trek

239 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

James F. Broderick is a writer and an associate professor of English and Journalism at New Jersey City University.
After starting his journalism career in rural Indiana, he worked at newspapers and online news services in Cincinnati, Suburban Chicago, New York City, and Jersey City, New Jersey. After receiving his master's degree from Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he published his first book in 2003, PAGING NEW JERSEY, which the New Jersey Center for the Book named one of the 10 "Notable Non-Fiction Books of the Decade." His fifth non-fiction book, published in 2012, is NOW A TERRIFYING MOTION PICTURE! His suspense novel, STALKED, will be published by Whiskey Creek Press in 2013.
He lives in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, with his wife Miri, daughters Olivia and Maddy, and three rescue cats.

Reviews

[Peter Hawley]

Comprised of 24 themed sections, Broderick’s literary analysis of Star Trek is a commendable attempt at exploring pieces of literature that have either directly or indirectly influenced the series, but his attempt fails the standards I personally expect from both an academic work and from someone trying to give an in-depth examination of Star Trek’s messages/philosophy. This book fails at being academically rigorous because Broderick’s “analysis” often involves just a surface-level interpretation of the texts he’s approaching. Usually he relates two classic works of literature to two pieces of Star Trek media, whether it’s an episode or one of the movies. On an average of 8 pages per section, Broderick rarely gives his arguments room to breathe as he’s often onto comparing a Star Trek episode to another literary work before he’s truly convinced me of the last point he made. When it comes to Broderick’s fan credentials, he seems to have a preference/bias for The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation (TNG), which I feel hinders his ability to convince me of some of his takes when I know for certain that there’s an episode of Deep Space Nine (DS9), Voyager (VOY), or Entrprise (ENT) that might serve his purposes better.

For example, in the thirteenth chapter, Broderick compares the Borg to vampires, which is actually one of his more inspired takes, claiming that “the Borg really are just high-tech vampires” (111). There is a vampiric element to the Borg in how they assimilate people, much in the vein of how Dracula turns the people of Transylvania and elsewhere into his undead servants, always trying to seduce and/or capture potential victims to his side. In this respect, Dracula as a literary figure shares some qualities with the Borg Queen as seen most famously in her villain debut in Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and subsequent appearances in later seasons of VOY as a recurring antagonist. However, Broderick curiously spends his time on a laughably bad episode of TNG “Sub Rosa,” where Dr. Crusher is seduced by a spirit that’s been seducing her female ancestors for 800 years, along with a basic character profile of Odo from DS9 and how his abilities as a shape-shifter are a vampiric element.

I find it rather bizarre that Broderick starts this chapter with a rather interesting take that connects itself to a oft-adapted piece of literature but does no follow-up by actually talking about the Borg as vampires in-depth beyond a few brief comments, something he could have easily done by examining the two Borg characters with the most screen time in Trek, the Borg Queen and Seven of Nine from VOY. Especially given that the Borg Queen’s appearances in VOY revolve around her trying to persuade Seven into rejoining the Borg Collective, there’s a case to be made for Broderick’s argument that these two characters’ relationship has a vampiric quality to it, heightened by the sense that their relationship is about a grotesque, monstrous figure trying to turn a beautiful (implicitly virginal) woman to its side, a common trope you can find in any kind of vampire tale. Broderick could have also made a similar analysis between the Borg Queen and Captain Picard, who comments on the horrendous things she did to him when he became assimilated by the Borg and turned into Locutus. Even the season six TNG episode “Man of the People” where an ambassador with telepathic abilities turns counselor Deanna Troi into a “receptacle” for his negative emotions could have been a fine example to use about vampirism if Broderick didn’t want to venture too far out of his comfort zone.

That he chooses to talk about none of these examples in his chapter trying to relate vampires to Star Trek but instead focuses on a crappy ghost story with superficial Gothic elements and a shape-shifting alien who only has shape-shifting in common with Dracula suggests not just a lack of in-depth knowledge of Star Trek from the author but an academic laziness in how he wrote this book. Just because a ghost or shapeshifter has one or two things in common with a vampire doesn’t make it a vampire or their story a vampire story; there needed to be a stronger definition from Broderick as to what he means by “vampiric” qualities because the Trek comparisons he uses are weak. This chapter to me wouldn’t even be passable from a high school essay standard because he has no coherent through line to what he’s talking about here and in many sections, stringing along moments from Star Trek and trying to connect them to a literary work to varying degrees of success.

Besides this criticism, there are varying moments where Broderick makes a good point that isn’t banal and the chapters where he takes a more inspired approach to his literary connections usually were the better sections for me. In chapter 16, he compares the disorienting and cryptic structure of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake to that of Q and the Q Continuum. Joyce’s infamously hard-to-read novel and Q are in a constant state of perpetual flux. Both produce unstable identities and are difficult to get a read on. Upon a bit of quick research on Broderick as an author, I’ve noticed that he’s written in more recent years a couple of books on James Joyce, a literary companion and a fiction novel. Perhaps his enthusiasm for Joyce came through in this section of his Star Trek book which is why I find it one of the stronger sections.

His 19th chapter, on the other hand, is maybe the most perfunctory of all the chapters in this book. It focuses on the TOS episode “A Piece of the Action” and DS9’s “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang,” both of which are more entertaining than necessarily substantive episodes dealing with the aesthetic of mid-20th century mobsters. Though I agree with Broderick’s sentiment at the end of this chapter - “To ignore the delights of Trek’s mob-inspired episodes because they lack the weight of more substantive, more philosophical outings would be a crime” (p. 170) - he doesn’t do a great job, in my opinion, of unearthing anything of philosophical interest out of these two episodes. His literary connections are Elliot Ness’s 1957 memoir The Untouchables and Ben Hecht’s screenplay for the 1932 movie Scarface, and while I’m all for arguing that crime books and film screenplays can indeed be qualified as “literary,” Broderick merely focuses on the aesthetic commonalities that these Trek episodes have with the two pieces he chose. This chapter is the worst offender in Broderick’s tendency to only do surface-level interpretations of the texts he picks and chooses from, at times with seemingly little relevance. It might have served this chapter better if he chose a broader focus on crime and how it’s depicted in the Trek universe. This was my deepest disappointment with the book as I happen to love crime stories.

I’m always interested in reading more books like this in the “pop” academia vein that purport to explore the philosophy, psychology, or in this book’s case, literary connections of a piece of pop culture, yet I’m simultaneously deterred from reading more of them because I’ve always been left somewhat disappointed with each one I’ve read so far. This book’s problems are indicative of what I’ve noticed from other books that claim to take the ideas of a pop culture franchise like Star Trek seriously, whether it’s written by an academic or an enthusiastic fan, or both. Much like Broderick here, they typically don’t do as much of an in-depth examination as I’d like them to, with the worst of the bunch revealing how little the authors actually know about the source material. The worst of these I’ve read is The World According to Star Wars (2016) by Cass R. Sunstein. Sunstein is an actual American legal scholar, and happens to be married to Samantha Power, a former UN ambassador. Both worked for the Obama White House so you’d think that Sunstein’s book would’ve been filled with interesting tidbits about law and possibly foreign policy, perhaps developing a thought experiment as to how legal authority seems to function in the Star Wars galaxy, but he did none of that. His book reads like someone’s personal online rant at times that it’s embarrassing that a book of such poor quality was released with someone with all the “respectable” political establishment credentials who probably could’ve written a better version if he’d tried.

The Literary Galaxy of Star Trek is definitely a better book than Sunstein’s, but not a great one. Perhaps one level above it in terms of quality. What irks me the most is that the authors of these types of books never seem to take the material they’re analyzing quite as seriously as the fans who read these do. I whole heartedly believe that works of pop culture should deserve close examinations much like works of classic literature. Regardless of the quality and longevity of cultural relevance of pop culture nowadays, what people find popular currently can be a helpful indicator as to cultural/generational shifts and where society may find itself in the near future, for better or for worse. Even something as cherished within English academia as Shakespeare was once deemed pop culture in a negative connotation, as disposable trash. Fans deserve higher-quality analysis of their favorite pieces of media and books like Broderick’s I hope become better over time.

Because this book was published in 2006, before the J.J. Abrams reboot movies and the new Trek shows that have been airing since 2017, I can easily see someone else expanding upon Broderick’s book and doing a much more comprehensive dive on the literary connections that Trek often employs as this book is 15+ years outdated. My suggestion for a better version of Broderick’s book would be to maybe condense the number of themes to only the most prevalent ones that appear in each series. Broderick has 24 chapters each with their own theme, when I feel he could’ve just focused on maybe 6 themes with the strongest examples found in Trek, therefore giving much more space for a deeper, balanced analysis that goes over more episodes from each series. Besides a few exceptions, the second half of Broderick’s book is the stronger section because themes like artificial intelligence (chapter 18), the depiction or absence of religion/spirituality (chapter 17), the concept of the afterlife (chapter 22), the vain attempt at becoming perfect or creating the perfect lifeform (chapter 20), is reality a static or fluid state of being? (chapter 16), etc., are themes that provide a bountiful number of episodes from Trek to gleam off of, even though Broderick fails to truly capture Trek’s storytelling potential for each one.

If there’s one thing I can say wholly positive about Broderick’s attempt is that it has inspired me to look more deeply into the literary influences/connections of Star Trek. Even though I think his attempt is a mostly failed one, being critical of it has helped me to see where one could expand thoroughly from points that aren’t too bad, just half-baked. I might try to write more about this book and come up with some of my own takes in the future. Much like certain episodes from Star Trek that get improved upon over time, Broderick’s book is a flawed but perhaps necessary step towards something better in the future, I hope.

While this isn’t a book, I would recommend a podcast called Meta Treks, which applies different philosophical concepts to characters/episodes of Star Trek. It hasn’t been updated unfortunately since 2020 (their last episode has maybe one of the best episode titles for a podcast I’ve seen), but it’s a good podcast and the hosts have experience in teaching/examining philosophy and theology. A good recommend to anyone who prefers a podcast that takes a more analytical focus on topics. It’s a good example of what I prefer and come to expect from something that strives to be informative, regardless of the medium it’s produced in. I’d recommend Meta Treks to anyone who has read this book and felt a little cold after reading it, wishing to find something that catered to some fans’ scholarly interests in a deeper fashion.

https://www.trek.fm/meta-treks-home

There is an appendix that tells you which Star Trek installments Broderick cites and while DS9, VOY, and ENT do get some mention, it’s still comparatively less than TOS and TNG. VOY only gets a pitiful 2 episode mentions while ENT gets 3, which I find interesting as this book was published in 2006 not long after ENT was cancelled, therefore it was the most contemporary of the Trek shows at the time Broderick was writing this book. DS9 fares a bit better with 7 episode mentions, but TOS and TNG take the lion’s share with 15 for TOS and 13 for TNG, along with the first 10 movies getting mentioned at least once, bumping TOS to 21 mentions (22, if you want to count the Kirk stuff in Generations as making it a joint TOS/TNG installment) and TNG to 17.

Even when Broderick refers to post-TNG shows, I find his analysis less insightful, which I think also indicates rather obviously that he has far less knowledge of the later shows. To refer back to the book’s 13th chapter, his description of Odo claims that he can shape-shift into humanoid beings and while this is perhaps technically true, Odo claims more than once throughout DS9’s run that he struggles to pull off humanoid shapes, specifically faces. He can shape-shift into humanoids, but he’s not very good at it. I might be wrong, but he never actually successfully pulls off looking human, as that’s literally the point of his character, someone who tries to look human but will never quite get the hang of it because his natural form is a pool of liquid.

At the end of the fifth chapter, which deals with Trek’s flirtation with Westerns and how the origins of TOS rely on the prevalence of Western TV shows in the 50s/60s, Broderick claims that the Xindi, antagonists in ENT’s third season, are “a time-traveling species (from the twenty-ninth century)” (p. 48). This is inaccurate. The Xindi are not time-travelers but are rather being manipulated by trans-dimensional beings known only as the Sphere-Builders into attacking Earth. I think Broderick confused the Xindi with the Na’kuhl, an alien race from the 29th century that represents one of the factions in the Temporal Cold War, an ongoing plot point in the first three seasons of ENT. I can’t necessarily fault Broderick’s error here as the Temporal Cold War stuff in ENT gets a bit convoluted in season 3 as it wraps up, as both the Na’kuhl and Sphere-Builders are opposing factions in the conflict, along with another one called the Suliban Cabal, a sect of genetically engineered aliens. The Temporal Cold War arc was never completely finished as the main champion/creative voice of the idea Brannon Braga left his producer position at ENT after season 3, with season 4 choosing to focus on more TOS-era storylines instead, leaving some significant gaps to viewer knowledge as to what was going on since it was a mostly off-screen conflict with Archer’s crew and races like the Xindi being used as pawns during various situations. But an error is still an error and I still talked more about ENT right now than Broderick did in his entire book.

[Andrew]

There is a wealth of literary content in all forms of 'Star Trek' and as someone who is both a fan of the science fiction series (in almost all its TV and film iterations) and an English teacher I had highe expectations for this book. However Broderick has not delivered the quality of analysis and criticism that I had hoped, leading to my less than positive rating of this book.

The basic problem with 'The Literary Galaxy of Star Trek' is that it takes a far too shallow approach to each text, offering up far too many exanples of references and episodes or films of 'Star Trek' to consider. Broderick would've done far better to take perhaps a thematic approach based on a five or six major texts or composers and then gone into greater depth when critiquing the relationship between these and the relevant 'Star Trek' text. For example, Shakespeare is the most screamingly obvious author to use as an avenue for textual analysis of 'Star Treks' as a literary product. Broderick does apply the Bard's work as a means to decoding 'Star Trek', yet he does it in an often desultory manner. From a reader's perspective I would have preferred to have seen the author consider the overarching themes of Shakespeare and how he develops character and plot in his plays applied as an analytical tool to more episodes (not just from the original series) and also make the salient point that 'Star Trek', just like Shakespeare, is in fact popular entertainment.

There are some useful and interesting passages in 'The Literary Galaxy of Star Trek' and Broderick is to be commended for making an effort. He does have a workmanlike understanding of the authors and texts he refers to, however at times his exploration of them and also the 'Star Trek' episodes or films he refers to is slightly off kilter. From a personal perspective I believe he underplays the impoirtance of the later series 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine', 'Star Trek: Voyager', and 'Star Trek: Enterprise' however that may also be due to the familiarity of these shows contrasted to earlier series.

In summary, whilst this is a decent effort at an interesting subject I would suggest that students of literature and 'Star Trek' might be a little underwhelemed by the end result of Broderick's work.

[Javier Avilés]

Quería que me gustara más, pero quizá fui buscando lo que el texto nunca pretendió ofrecer... Es un buen libro didáctico que examina -de una forma demasiado expositiva para mi gusto- cómo Star Trek se ha nutrido, y ha servido para divulgar, de la cultura literaria occidental. El Gran Viaje (La Odisea, La Divina Comedia) siempre informó la premisa Trek y el Bardo mayor siempre ha estado circulando los pasillos del Enterprise.