Star Trek: Discovery Season 1 at the SFRA Review

I've been trying to publish more recently, including in venues that aren't "scholarly" per se. The first of those publications is out, my review of Star Trek: Discovery's first season for the Science Fiction Research Association Review, the quarterly newsletter of, well, the Science Fiction Research Association, the world's nicest scholarly association dedicated to the study of science fiction. (Obviously this is scholarly in a sense, but it's not a peer-reviewed journal article; the SFRA Review is supposed to communicate to sf scholars where an item fits into the history and concerns of the genre and what kind of potential it has.)

Here's how it begins:

Star Trek: Discovery marks the return of the Star Trek franchise to its small screen roots for the first time since Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air in 2005. Though drawing on the visual aesthetics of the J.J. Abrams-spearheaded big screen reboot of the franchise (2009’s Star Trek, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, and 2016’s Star Trek Beyond), Discovery is set in the so-called “Prime timeline” home to the previous six Star Trek television shows and the first ten films. Set about ten years before the original Star Trek (1966–1969), the show focuses on the character of Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), a Starfleet officer on the USS Shenzhou and the human foster daughter of Spock’s father Sarek (James Frain). The first two-part story, “The Vulcan Hello” and “Battle at the Binary Stars,” chronicles Burnham’s involvement in the instigation of a Federation-Klingon war; the remaining thirteen episodes detail Burnham’s adventures on the USS Discovery under Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) during the war.
     The main story arc of Discovery is about the war, and like much Star Trek, it is a none-too-subtle mirror for our own times. The faction of the Klingons that instigates the war is led by T’Kuvma (Chris Obi), who employs nationalist rhetoric about the cultural, not military, threat of the Federation, arguing the Federation’s multiculturalism will assimilate and gradually eliminate traditional Klingon values. He sees “we come in peace” as more of a threat than physical attack. On the other side, the Federation in general, and Michael Burnham in particular, struggle with the ethics of wartime: Burnham initially proposes a violent course of action that her captain, Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) dismisses as conflicting with Federation values; later Burnham becomes the proponent of Federation values butting heads with the ends-justify-the-means attitudes of Captain Lorca. While at first Discovery seems like a “grim and gritty” wartime take on Star Trek, especially during its third and fourth episodes, which focus on Lorca’s dubious actions, the story arc’s trajectory ultimately serves as a refutation of Burnham’s initial impulses as well as Lorca’s utilitarian morality.

If you want to read the rest of the review, which focuses on how the show plays with traditional Star Trek tropes and the joys of franchises, it begins on page 23 of this PDF. There are some spoilers, though I tried to not go too far.

It turns out that 750-1000 words is not a lot of words to discuss a fifteen-episode entry in the television franchise about which I have the most feelings, so there's a lot that had to go to the side because of the focus I selected. I may ruminate on that here some day (I have a lot of opinions about sound design in Discovery), but I may not.

Issue #324 also contains reviews of N. K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky, Nnedi Okorafor's Binti: The Night Masquerade, the film version of Annihilation, and Gothic Science Fiction, 1818 to the Present, a particularly dreadful monograph I reviewed for Science Fiction Studies a couple years ago (the SFRA Review reviewer agrees with me). Read it!