In an earlier post, I commented on the way The Lord of the Rings has dominated the course of the fantasy genre for decades, and how its presence presents special challenges for the aspiring writer of fantasy. Is there anything similar in the world of science fiction? I think the answer is no, not really. There are certainly a suite of overused ideas, and classics that everyone knows (or at least knows about), but no one single book that every science fiction writer must inevitably come to terms with.

However, I have a personal elephant in the room when it comes to science fiction: Star Trek. I was born in 1961, so the original series was airing for the first time when I was at a very formative age. It's hard to imagine now how special those shows seemed at the time. They were about the future, about space travel (and sometimes time travel), and they occasionally went beyond the basic action plot to say something interesting about society, science, or human nature. And, unlike other science-fictiony shows of the time, Star Trek seemed to take itself seriously as a projection of humanity's future.

Add to this that I grew up in a family that respected science and upheld the scientific world view, and you can imagine how Star Trek became my default science fictional universe. Surely, the future was bound to be something like this, in broad strokes if not in minute detail. Much of the written sf that I began to read a few years later fit in: Asimov's robots and galactic empire, Arthur C. Clarke's enigmatic encounters with alien civilizations, and most certainly Larry Niven's Known Space stories, which had the advantage of aliens that were (marginally) more exotic than the actors-in-makeup Star Trek set.

Star Trek has been (rightly) criticized by discerning science fiction readers as being unsophisticated space opera, pulled along by catch-phrase characters and familiar action-adventure tropes. Nevertheless, from time to time some interesting science fiction would actually sneak in. There was Harlan Ellison's intense "City on the Edge of Forever", which actually coaxed a moving performance out of William Shatner, there was Spock's spiritual revelation from contact with V-ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and numerious occasions in all the series where a science fictional idea was used to good story-telling effect.

But my interest is not really to assess the merits of Star Trek as science fiction, but to acknowledge and manage its influence on how I understand the genre. I remain somewhat caught up in a vision of the future wherein humanity solves most of its problems and expands into the universe to seek out those new worlds and new civilizations. I never quite accepted the gritty post-apocalyptic and cyberpunk futures that became popular as the space program waned. And Star Wars was too blatantly fantasy to really impinge on my inner science fictional esthetic.

And, truth be told, I think that deep down I share much of Gene Roddenberry's optimism toward humanity, its potential and future. I like characters who struggle with life's issues and somehow end up a little wiser than they began. The goody-goody world of Star Trek: The Next Generation is a perennial seduction for me.

So what to do? I've injected some seminal shifts into my vision of the future to help it stay clear of the tempting clichés of the Star Trek future. I look ahead to the near collapse of life on Earth, with humanity surviving mostly in the asteroid belt in isolated worlds entrenched in their separated insular cultures. No United Federation of Planets here. And there's no faster-than-light travel. These choices nip the whole space opera temptation in the bud, and open the door to the cultural and interpersonal complexities that I prefer to focus my fiction on. And it's a future with lots of ordinary people in it, trying to work and raise families, not heroes exploring the universe a planet each week.