Star Trek created in 1866 instead of 1966
- Thread starter Lord Garth
- Start date
Possibly, on the former count; almost certainly on the latter. We should keep in mind that we had no accurate measurements of the distances to other stars, nor any concept of the speed of light as a cosmic "speed limit," until the work of Henrietta Leavitt and Albert Einstein (respectively) in the early 20th century.
When Einstein first communicated his theory of special relativity, people were mocking him, even physicists (though not the smartest) were openly mocking his theory so it's very unlikely that a writer of S.F. would have anticipated it.
Galaxies weren't even a distinct concept from obscure nebulae until the 1930s or so.
Maybe the ships have sails that ride on the aether wind.
Uhhhhh.... you guys are aware that there's a comic book out there that does exactly what you're talking about, right...?
No. I wasn't. I haven't read comics in a long time. Star Trek comics even longer.
EDIT: What I want to do isn't along the same lines as this. Airship Enterprise is done in 1903 style and takes a different approach than what I'm trying to explore here.
That having been said: now I want a copy of Airship Enterprise! Thanks!
Last edited:
This is good! Maybe they'll make a TV movie out of it someday. That would be fun!
Would have been a book that would have then been made into terrible TV movies by the BBC 150 years later.
It all depends on the talent of the people involved. Talented people can make great things with little means.
Sea (and river) going vessels with engines were new, but not brand new. So the spaceship enterprise would travel the heavens to arrive at a new planet, adventures would commence.
Would exactly how the spaceship engines worked be germane to the story? Not necessarily.
A small ship's boat (a cutter perhaps) would convey our heroes down to the planet, assuming the entire spaceship didn't descend to the surface.
Revolvers instead of phasers.
Telescopes not sensors.
No communicator, messagers with dispatches would be used.
Aliens would be dressed in their colorfully native costumes.
Would exactly how the spaceship engines worked be germane to the story? Not necessarily.
A small ship's boat (a cutter perhaps) would convey our heroes down to the planet, assuming the entire spaceship didn't descend to the surface.
Revolvers instead of phasers.
Telescopes not sensors.
No communicator, messagers with dispatches would be used.
Aliens would be dressed in their colorfully native costumes.
I'm an academic who studies nineteenth-century science fiction, and I can tell you exactly what Star Trek would have been like in 1866.
It would have been shit.
It would have been shit.
I disagree. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells invented everything, space travel, time travel, extraterrestrial wars, computers, lasers... plus many other things.
To say nothing about the contributions of Mary Shelley and E.A. Poe.
Well, I was being flip. But in 1866, Wells was thirty years off. Verne was writing, of course. A Vernean Star Trek would mostly be travelogue, I suspect, and it would be restricted to the Earth and the moon. Ditto Poe. (Though Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, is delightfully creepy.) Frankenstein is a triumph, and I really love The Mummy!, but there's no space travel in either of them, so no real model for Star Trek.
But most of the nineteenth-century writing we would now call science fiction is pretty poor. Plotless utopian tracts without characters, just mouthpieces. Or tales of conquest of future England, designed to rile up Germanophobia. (Or Francophobia, or Sinophobia, or Russophobia, depending on the author. Or all of the above.) Or stories where fantastic inventions somehow have no effect on society (like Verne did often). George Griffith, in 1893, combined the utopia, the future war, and the invention story in Angel of the Revolution, which features airship-on-airship battle that's reminiscent of Star Wars. (A modern publisher reprinted the books as "Tsar Wars," actually!) But Griffith's novels are about the imposition of an Anglo-Saxon world government on the Earth.
The first person to depict space combat was actually Garrett P. Serviss, an American astronomer, in his unauthorized War of the Worlds sequel, Edison's Conquest of Mars, in 1898. (Edison builds a fleet of spaceships to take revenge on Mars; American ends up annexing Mars for its own good.) The first person to depict spaceship-to-spaceship combat was Samuel Barton, in the 1900 novel The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236. Barton was inventive when it came to space combat, but lacked imagination in every other way. Both of these novels are dreadful, racist, and dreadfully racist.
Around the same time you had the American dime novels, which were sort of sf; boy genius Frank Reade Jr. would build fantastic ships (e.g., an electric air canoe, the electric prairie schooner, the electric tricycle, the electric dolphin), travel to the American West / South America / Africa, and slaughter natives.
Unless we were really lucky, a Victorian Star Trek would be a racist embarassment, and it might have inspired good stuff later on (I think you can draw a lineage from George Griffith to Samuel Barton to the Lensmen to Star Trek, actually), but only academics would remember it. There was one H. G. Wells, and a hundred George Griffiths.
EDIT: Sorry, that was a bit of a rant. You get near my research area, and I get excited!
Last edited:
^ This is good stuff. All input is valuable input.
Star Trek, as envisioned by Roddenberry, has more basis in Westerns than classic sci-fi. Which is why it became popular, it took the very well-liked Western style, at the height of the television Gunsmoke/Bonanza days (and dozens of other shows), and combined it with the developing sci-fi setting.
The "Old West" is still a very new, unexplored frontier in 1866, and Western fiction as we know it hasn't really begun for Roddenberry to draw from. I'm know expert at all, but the closest equivalent I could imagine would be our faux-Roddenberry to be taking the Romanticism of 18th-early 19th century novels and combining it with the 1860s dime novels that our introducing Western concepts.
How to get that into space is tricky, and may have to just rely on Roddenberry using an outlandish (literally) idea that isn't well-received beyond a few books before his death in 1891.
It would be later writers, after the age of Verne and maybe Wells, who stumble on these dime novels and (with permission from the Roddenberry estate?) extrapolate to form an early literary Star Trek universe.
I'm not sure if franchise fiction existed prior to Baum's Oz books, but it could be that a posthumous printing of Star Trek novels lead the publisher of record to buy out the property and use ghost writers to write similar novels in the same world as Roddenberry.
The "Old West" is still a very new, unexplored frontier in 1866, and Western fiction as we know it hasn't really begun for Roddenberry to draw from. I'm know expert at all, but the closest equivalent I could imagine would be our faux-Roddenberry to be taking the Romanticism of 18th-early 19th century novels and combining it with the 1860s dime novels that our introducing Western concepts.
How to get that into space is tricky, and may have to just rely on Roddenberry using an outlandish (literally) idea that isn't well-received beyond a few books before his death in 1891.
It would be later writers, after the age of Verne and maybe Wells, who stumble on these dime novels and (with permission from the Roddenberry estate?) extrapolate to form an early literary Star Trek universe.
I'm not sure if franchise fiction existed prior to Baum's Oz books, but it could be that a posthumous printing of Star Trek novels lead the publisher of record to buy out the property and use ghost writers to write similar novels in the same world as Roddenberry.
He could have been drawing from real-world newspaper accounts of what was going on out there.
