Late Star Trek
The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era
by Adam Kotsko
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Pub Date Mar 25 2025 | Archive Date Mar 11 2025
University of Minnesota Press | Univ Of Minnesota Press
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Description
How Star Trek’s twenty-first-century reinventions illuminate the unique challenges and opportunities of franchise-style corporate storytelling
Late Star Trek explores the beloved science fiction franchise’s repeated attempts to reinvent itself after the end of its 1990s golden age. Beginning with the prequel series Enterprise, Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within Star Trek’s sprawling continuity—including authorized books, the three J. J. Abrams “Kelvin Timeline” films, and the streaming series Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds—as well as fan discourse, to reflect on the perils and promise of the franchise as a unique form of storytelling.
Significantly including the licensed novels and comic books that fill out the Star Trek universe for its fans, Kotsko brings the multiple productions of the early twenty-first century together as a unified whole rather than analyzing them in their current stratified view. He argues that the variety of styles and approaches in this tumultuous era of Star Trek history provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the nature of the franchise storyworlds that now dominate popular culture. By taking the spin-offs and tie-ins seriously as creative attempts to tell a new story within an established universe, Late Star Trek highlights creative triumphs as well as the tendency for franchise faithfulness to get in the way of creating engaging characters and ideas.
Arguing forcefully against the prevailing consensus that franchises are a sign of cultural decay, Kotsko contends that the Star Trek universe exemplifies an approach to storytelling that has been perennial across cultures. Instead, he finds that what limits creativity within franchises is not their reliance on the familiar but their status as modern myths held not as common cultural heritage but rather owned as corporate intellectual property.
Advance Praise
"Combining the rigorous critical eye of a literary and political theorist and the encyclopedic knowledge of a devoted fan, Adam Kotsko offers an original, persuasive, ethical, funny, grim, and nevertheless hopeful examination of Star Trek’s twenty-first-century incarnations. Late Star Trek is a salutary intervention, a sustained, cogent analysis of what’s gone wrong, what’s gone right, and what possibilities remain for creative and critical storytelling in our late-neoliberal streaming era." —David K. Seitz, author of A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781517919108 |
PRICE | $22.95 (USD) |
PAGES | 256 |