I have signed the contract and submitted the final manuscript for my next book, Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era, to be published by University of Minnesota Press as part of the Mass Markets series edited by Gerry Canavan and Benjamin Robertson. A description of the project follows “below the fold.”
Late Star Trek is a study of the beloved science fiction franchise’s repeated attempts to reinvent itself after the end of its golden age. It begins where most studies of the franchise end: with the failed prequel Enterprise. While most see that widely reviled series as the end of the golden age that dawned with the success of The Next Generation, this book reads it as the beginning of a new era where Star Trek becomes fully self-aware. The productions that followed—the sprawling continuity that emerged in the tie-in novels, the blockbuster films helmed by J.J. Abrams, and the explosion of new streaming series like Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds—all implicitly reflect on their relationship to franchise “canon.”
The book’s approach is unique among scholarly works on Star Trek, which have primarily focused on the foundational Original Series or the critically and commercially successful Next Generation to the relative exclusion of the many other spin-offs and derivative works within the franchise. Not only is it the first monograph to bring the varied productions of the early 21st century together as a single unified era, but it is one of only a few to take seriously the licensed novels and comic books that do so much to fill out the Star Trek universe for the most devoted fans. And where most academic texts on Star Trek are essay collections by multiple authors, Late Star Trek’s status as a single-author monograph provides a unified and cohesive overview of a neglected era of the franchise.
More broadly, the variety of styles and approaches in this tumultuous era of Star Trek history makes it a perfect opportunity to reflect on the nature of the franchise storyworlds that have come to dominate our cultural scene. By taking the various spin-offs and licensed tie-ins seriously as creative attempts to tell a new story while remaining faithful to what came before, Late Star Trek shows the perils and promise of the franchise as a unique mode of storytelling. The result is a book that will be of interest to serious Star Trek fans, scholars of science fiction, and anyone interested in how capitalism shapes art.
Adam Kotsko 