media theory, science fiction theory,
future design research

The Cage was the first of two pilot episodes produced for The Original Series. It was filmed at MGM Studios in December 1964 and delivered to NBC’s executive offices in New York in February 1965. It was first shown to the public at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland.

It is the seventh decade of the twenty-first century, our future and Star Trek’s past. Only an act of great heroism can save a dying civilization. A global nuclear war, the Third World War, instigated by the bellicose Eastern Coalition (ECON), has taken place in the fifties. We are ten years into its aftermath.

Baudrillard sets out in his first book to “classify a world of objects.” He wants to go beyond a strictly “technological” analysis of how ordinary objects are intended – by the companies that manufacture them – to operate and to be used. He will instead study the “directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects.”

America is no mere impressionistic travelogue, but rather a witty and serious interpretation of American democracy and capitalism today, based on a synthesis of political ideas drawn from many different currents of contemporary thought, notably including left-wing neo-Marxism and right-wing entrepreneurial libertarianism.

This was one of the very first pieces of writing that I did in my life. I wrote it during the first two weeks of the Gulf War in 1991. I was living in New York City at the time. I tried to balance the perspectives of Chomsky and Baudrillard/Virilio.

Over the decades, the copious science fictional “explanations” of how Star Trek’s beaming technology really works, or might some- day be able to work, have undergone dis- cernable paradigm shifts. The original notion was that of the dematerialization-rematerialization, matter-to-energy conversion and back physical transporter.

After Captains Picard and Dathon are transported to the isolated world’s surface, the Tamarians use an ionospheric particle scattering field to block all attempts by Enterprise-D technicians to beam Picard back from the planet, and to make any communication with the two men impossible.

The basic situation of Robinson Crusoe’s early life was that of a young man who did not want to get a job. Robinson was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family. His father was a successful businessman, a trader in “merchandise.”

In one terminology, cultural citizenship is a process which takes place in the context of a specific historical relationship between the individual and the social. In what may be the most highly socialized society that ever existed, Americans tend to almost completely deny that there exists a social or cultural realm.

We think of Lindbergh as the far-right most prominent speaker at rallies of the “America First” movement in the early 1940s, an isolationist precursor of the unilateralist Donald Trump and his horrible MAGA movement. I present here an alternative existentialist view of Lindbergh’s pioneering 1927 flight.

In the pre-Klingon and pre-Borg Original Series episode Arena, Captain Kirk is involved in a one-on-one duel against an antagonistic and radical alien Other, the Gorn commander. The episode is entitled Kaijû Gôn tono Taiketus, or Duel With the Monster Gorn, in Japanese dubbing.

On their way to Altair VI (in the solar system visited by Forbidden Planet’s United Planets CruiserC57D) to represent the Federation at a postwar presidential inauguration on a rebuilding world, the Enterprise senior officers must contend with an increasingly irritable and violent Mr. Spock.

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet Sarpeidon, the only natural satellite of a star, Beta Niobe, which is going to explode as a supernova. Although it has been previously established that a “civilized humanoid species” dwells on the planet, Enterprise sensor scans strangely indicate that there is no intelligent life remaining anywhere on that world.

The Enterprise is en route to the NGC 321 star cluster to try to establish diplomatic relations with Eminiar VII, the most technologically advanced planet in the area. More than fifty years earlier, the Federation starship U.S.S. Valiant was listed as missing in space after it transmitted a report from Eminiar and then vanished.

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