Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures

by Adam Zmith

As with the USA, the forces that Roddenberry put into keeping the United Federation of Planets going as an ideal are actually not so desirable. All the Star Trek series and films have shown that the Federation maintains peace through war and political interference, often in the name of science and development. Underpinning the Federation, and Star Trek as an entertaining exposition of politics, is the idea that we can engineer an ideal world. In fact, the idea that any one group of people comes up with to create an ideal world is a profoundly arrogant one. One person’s idea of an ideal world bulldozes through another’s. The British Empire tried to establish an ideal world through “civilisation”, the revolutionaries in France and Russia through equality and solidarity, the Nazis through racial purity. When you try to build your ideal world, you always spill blood.