A lovely piece on the nostalgia of utopian science fiction by Brian Phillips at Grantland; he writes about that period spacetime, Star Trek: The Next Generation (one of the first colon-ed titles). Watching it very occassionally on rerun, it still seems too kitschly alive to be enbalmed into anorak classic territory. Brian Phillips:
We had orange carpet in our living room in Oklahoma where, on regular weeknights, I would stay up, semi-religiously, and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, usually instead of doing my algebra homework … It’s 25 years old now[,] 25 this week … One of the problems in revisiting sci-fi is that, sooner or later, every voyage into the future becomes a voyage into the past.
He dutifully notes the “only-global-superpower, world-policeman feel” about the framing and themes, to counter which there is this elegant allusion: Where else but space could you find a thousand points of light? For the Trekkies among us, he provides a perfect final flourish. (Plus, he also embeds an ingenious, brilliant explanation for the universal success of Harry Potter.)
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