Star Trek created in 1866 instead of 1966

[MAGolding]

PureCrimson said:

Considering Roddenberry got a lot of his views on life (ie, what he wanted to convey in Trek) from being in WW2, I don't think he'd even create Star Trek 100 years prior. No WW2, it's not Trek.

Whatever he created might be a wholly different entity entirely, even if he had the means to create a means of entertainment at the time.

Yes, in 1866, Star Trek would have been shaped by the Civil War, which had just concluded.

If 19th century Roddenberry was from South America his views could have been partially shaped by the terrible Paraguayan War of 1864-1870.

If 19th century Roddenberry was British his views could have been partially shaped by the Crimean War of 1853-1856 and the Sepoy Mutiny/Indian First War of Independence in 1857-1858.

If 19th century Roddenberry was Chinese his views could have been partially shaped by the Taiping Rebellion of 1851-1864, the Nian Rebelllion of 1851-1868, the Du Wenxiou Rebellion of 1856-1872, The Dungan Revolt of 1862-1877, and the Second Opium War of 1856-1860.

And so on and so on and so on for every literate country in the world.

PureCrimson said:

I can get why he wanted an ethically diverse cast after something like WW2, but with the Civil War... hmmm. Probably not nearly to that level; it'd probably be mostly about blacks and whites, if it was any sort of morality play at heart at all anymore.

Of course, contrary to what popular opinion might think, the US Civil War years also saw the Indian Wars in the West at their height, so that would add another racial element for 19th century Roddenberry to consider. The Mexican War of 1846-1848 added many Hispanics to the US population and the question of how fairly or unfairly they were treated by the Americans in the Southwest was an important question.

If 19th century Roddenberry read the international news - war correspondents were a new occupation in the 1860s - he would become aware of the Second Opium War of 1856-1860 (Europeans vs East Asians) and the Sepoy Mutiny/Indian First War of Independence in 1857-1858 (Europeans vs South Asians) and many other examples.

Furthermore, back in the USA white Americans were not only divided into Rebels vs Unionists but into various ethnic groups of more or less recent immigrants to the new country. For example, the Minnesota Uprising of 1862 is mentioned in as many Swedish movies as American movies since many of the settlers affected were Swedish immigrants. Some 19th century racists went so far, for example, as to deny that Irish immigrants were really white people. In my own home town of Philadelphia artillery pieces were fired by both sides during anti Irish riots in 1844 if I remember correctly.

So if 19th century Roddenberry wanted to depict examples of diversity and toleration he would have had many possible groups to choose from.

Those were good. Of course I would prefer Kirk had been made a Royal Navy captain rather than a cavalry officer, but oh well.

Note that Kirk is not depicted as a US cavalry officer. US cavalry full dress uniforms were much more Ruritanian than western movies usually depict, but that is not a US cavalry uniform. The closest countries that might have had such uniforms might be Canada and Mexico.

I think that I have reached my daily limit on posting on a thread. But some of the posters should do more research on 19th century science, 19th century science fiction, and 19th century ideas about life on other worlds.

 

[MAGolding]

Those were good. Of course I would prefer Kirk had been made a Royal Navy captain rather than a cavalry officer, but oh well.

Note that Kirk is not depicted as a US cavalry officer. US cavalry full dress uniforms were much more Ruritanian than western movies usually depict, but that is not a US cavalry uniform. The closest countries that might have had such uniforms might be Canada and Mexico.

 

[Discofan]

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!

I am impressed. You really know your subject!

 

[TrickyDickie]

A steampunk-ish version of Star Trek could be successfully done today, but it would have to be carefully written and crafted to avoid what happened with films like Wild Wild West, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Sky Captain.

 

[Tim Thomason]

A steampunk-ish version of Star Trek could be successfully done today, but it would have to be carefully written and crafted to avoid what happened with films like Wild Wild West, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Sky Captain.

But would it be canon?

 

[Maurice]

How about a Flintstone version of Star Trek... They could travel on the back of a giant pterodactyl...

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[Discofan]

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I had no idea. This is fun!

 

[Stevil2001]

^ This is good stuff. All input is valuable input.

I am impressed. You really know your subject!

Thanks guys!

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.

Probably the best example of "franchise fiction" is the old dime novels. The Frank Reade stories were started by Harry Enton, but mostly written by Luis Senarens, and others wrote stories on occasion. The Stratemeyer Syndicate starts in 1899, too. I can't think of a less lowbrow series by multiple authors before the Oz novels, either.

I think that I have reached my daily limit on posting on a thread. But some of the posters should do more research on 19th century science, 19th century science fiction, and 19th century ideas about life on other worlds.

It was in 1865 that the astronomer William Whewell (who coined the word "scientist," fact fans) wrote On the Plurality of Worlds, which argues that life on other planets is impossible. It was a pretty fierce scientific and theological debate.

I guess Roddenberry does have the Wellsian instinct of recasting contemporary social issues in sfnal form, though Wells is a bit more subtle about it than Roddenberry. (At least, early Wells was.)

 

[J.T.B.]

Note that Kirk is not depicted as a US cavalry officer. US cavalry full dress uniforms were much more Ruritanian than western movies usually depict, but that is not a US cavalry uniform. The closest countries that might have had such uniforms might be Canada and Mexico.

Nobody said anything about it being a US uniform, with which I am quite familiar.

The officer in the original photo is almost certainly from a British hussar regiment. The braided tunic is the hip-length "Attila" style which replaced the waist-length dolman jacket in the later 1800s. The busby is a distinctively British style with braiding on the colored "bag." The rank is lieutenant or second lieutenant. I think from the ornaments on the pouch-belt it is probably the 11th Hussars.

 

[MAGolding]

I did some looking up. Even though they had drafting in the Civil War, only 2% of Union Soldiers were draftees. The vast majority of the military was volunteer. I also have Gene Roddenberry in his 40s. So he probably wouldn't be out there fighting. (link)

Gene Roddenberry's experiences during the Civil War would be those of a Civilian and whatever would influence his work would be from that perspective. Which would be as interesting as if he'd actually fought in the war, even though it wouldn't be quite the same.

On the other hand: he would've been the prime age for serving during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Land that was acquired through James K. Polk's wanting to carry out both Andrew Jackson's legacy and the concept of Manifest Destiny. The Whigs were opposed to the War and the fight for this land but then thought it wasn't such a bad idea after the fact once they had the land, even nominating General Zachary Taylor, who fought in the war, in 1848 as their candidate. I mention the Election of 1848 because I see Gene as being more of a Whig (and later a Republican) than a Democrat and wanted to put it into perspective. Or he might have been a Free-Soiler who turned Republican.

What would Mexican-American War Veteran Gene Roddenberry bring to the table?

* And I know Gene Roddenberry was born in Texas. But if his family immigrated to the United States from Ireland, they would've immigrated here pre-Texas joining the Union (in order for him to take up arms in the Mexican-American War), so he almost definitely would've lived in another state and might have even been born in wherever that state was. I'm putting him in the North only because I prefer Star Trek to not be a Confederate Vision of the Future.

I'm not sure that 19th century Gene Roddenberry would have been a civilian in the Civil War. The vast majority of Civil War soldiers were in their 20s and thus born about 1831 to 1845. But soldiers who were in the minority age wise covered a vast spread of ages. Lots of fans think it doesn't make any sense for such young children to be on the Enterprise and be endangered by space menaces in TNG. But if you think of all those children from the TNG episodes, most of them were older than the youngest Union and Rebel soldiers and sailors in the Civil War. And on other the end of the age spectrum, there were Civil War soldiers old enough to be the father of 19th century Roddenberry or maybe even his grandfather.

Being in his 40s would make 19th century Roddenberry in the most common age range for officers in the Civil War.

Tim Thomason said:

If he's from Texas or Western (say, California, maybe even a 49er who failed to find gold but got into book publishing instead), then he most likely spent much of his youth fighting the Indians. Spock could be based on the idea of the "noble savage" (i.e. Tonto) but as an alien instead (possibly literally a half-Martian, as described in his original pitch).

If he's a Californian by the time of the Civil War, then he would likely be away from the front lines, still Union (but conflicted because of his roots), and be spurred into writing his ideas down in the lens of fantasy future fiction.

You could even have him stealing ideas from other authors and releasing them in dime (penny?) novels, when those become popular.

Most of the California units were on Indian duty. Some of them were in the California Column that marched to Arizona and New Mexico and and campaigned against Apaches and Navajos.

JirenPanthosa said:

At what point did people start seriously imagining intelligent life on other planets? And when did it become friendly intelligent life as opposed to monstrous enemies? Somewhere around the turn of the century?

I agree 1866 would focus on Civil War and Restoration issues, but I think it'd focus less on aliens, have more religion, and involve man going out and colonizing space. They'd take Manifest Destiny and extend it outward, and glorify expansionism.

And the Enterprise might look more like a submarine.

People started seriously imaging intelligent life on other planets centuries before 1866 Star Trek. For example, Johannes Kepler, the famous scientist, imagined nonhuman intelligent life on the Moon in the Somnium 1634. Is that early enough and serious enough for you? Bernard de Bovier de Fontenelle published Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds in 1686, describing the heliocentric model and discussing the possibility of life on other worlds.

And I am not an expert but I think that the first monstrous enemies from outer space in science fiction might have been the Martians in H.G.Wells's The War of the Worlds 1897, and even then Wells compared the Martian treatment of humans to the English treatment of Tasmanians.

Discofan said:

The "universe" would have been a lot smaller, limited to our solar system and in a pinch a couple of nearby stars.
Note that War Of The Worlds was about Martians. That's how far people were willing to let their imagination go.

By 1866 educated people knew that astronomers believed the galaxy/universe contained millions of stars. Some people let their imaginations go farther than Mars on occasion. Voltaire's Micromegas (1752) involved a person from a planet of Sirius and a person from Saturn visiting Earth.

Discofan said:

I don't think there would be any mention of "faster than light". Even in early Asimov novels, the stories were about the solar system, Mars, Venus, Mercury...

The early Asimov novels set in the solar system were the Lucky Starr novels starting in 1952. Asimov's first novel Pebble in the Sky (1950) was set in a Galactic Empire. Interstellar travel was popularized by The Skylark of Space (1928). The Struggle for Empire: a Story of the Year 2236 (1900) involved interstellar war.

Lawman said:

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.

Henrietta Leavitt discovered the method of estimating the distances of Cepheid variables from their luminosity curves about 1913.

In 1838 Frederick Bessel measured the parallax, and thus the distance, of 61 Cygni fairly accurately. Thomas Henderson measured the parallax and distance of Alpha Centauri in 1832-1833 but couldn't believe how far it was and didn't publish his results until 1839. Friedrich G. W. von Struve measured the distance to Vega by 1840.

By the end of the 19th century, about 60 stellar parallaxes had been measured.

Tim Thomason said:

Galaxies weren't even a distinct concept from obscure nebulae until the 1930s or so.

Thomas Wright in 1750 and Immanuel Kant in 1755 speculated that some nebulae might be distant galaxies beyond out own. The Earl of Rosse discovered that some of the nebulae were composed of many stars about 1850. A character in The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908) speculates about the possibility of other galaxies. And in the late 1910s the the possibility of other galaxies became hotly debated by astronomers.

Tim Thomason said:

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.

The Old Mixer said:

He could have been drawing from real-world newspaper accounts of what was going on out there.

Yes, after the Civil War the newspapers published many accounts of outlaw crimes and Indian battles, most of which actually happened.

Or like Mark Twain and Brete Harte, the 19th century Roddenberry could have written about a west that he knew because he was there.

 

[TrickyDickie]

The Stratemeyer Syndicate

The ones responsible for The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and many others.

I enjoyed The Hardy Boys when I was young. More recently, I collected a full set of the original editions. When I read that the boys thought it was just fine to message in a bomb threat as a means of solving a problem they had, that was enough for me. I sold off the collection.

 

[Discofan]

The ones responsible for The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and many others.

I enjoyed The Hardy Boys when I was young. More recently, I collected a full set of the original editions. When I read that the boys thought it was just fine to message in a bomb threat as a means of solving a problem they had, that was enough for me. I sold off the collection.

Was it a fake bomb threat at least?

It must be heartwrenching to sell off a lifetime of collecting.

 

[J.T.B.]

On the subject of Westerns, there were also the frontier army stories (mostly Indian fighting) which later became sort of a Western sub-genre, though I don't think they really hit a wide audience until Charles King in the 1880s (please corrected me if I am wrong on that).

The officer in the original photo is almost certainly from a British hussar regiment.

Following up, I found a version of the original photo:
http://www.britishempire.co.uk/forces/armyuniforms/britishcavalry/11thhussars1883.htm

 

[TrickyDickie]

Was it a fake bomb threat at least?

Yes. Still wildly out of character and in reality they would have done prison time for it.

I had put together the book collection over the course of months, not years, so that was something....

 

[lawman]

Wow. Some people in this thread have got impressively specialized expertise!...

(19th century cavalry uniforms? Seriously? And so much more!...)

 

[MAGolding]

also see my post # 26 in this thread: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/what-if-they-had-made-western-star-trek.293341/page-2

 

[lpetrich]

In 1866, the notion of space travel had already been around for some time, though I doubt that anyone considered it practical before Konstantin Tsiolkovsky worked it out in detail at the turn of the 20th cy.

Some time around 150 CE, Lucian of Samosata wrote "True History", in which he gets taken to the Moon by a tornado.

Johannes Kepler wrote "Somnium" in 1608, describing someone who is taken to the Moon by "daimons". He describes in detail what he found there and what the Earth looks like from there.

Not long afterward, in the 1620's, a certain Francis Godwin wrote "The Man in the Moone", about someone who goes there in a basket with geese harnessed to it.

Some time in the 1950's, Cyrano de Bergerac wrote in "The Other World" about someone who gets accidentally sent to the Moon in a vehicle propelled by small rockets.

The first known description of an artificial satellite is "The Brick Moon", written by Edward Everett Hale in 1869. It is a 200-ft brick sphere launched into orbit with flywheels.

 

[lpetrich]

As to how one might travel through space, HG Wells had a "solution" in "The First Men in the Moon", published in 1900 and 1901. It was a material called cavorite that blocks gravity.

As to what our heroes would find, it was taken for granted that the rest of the Solar System was inhabited by whole biotas of organisms, including sentient one. Astronomer William Herschel believed that the Sun was also inhabited, with the Sun's inhabitants living below the fiery parts that we see.

But in 1836 - 1838, astronomers Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mädler wrote some books about the Moon in which they established that the Moon has no significant atmosphere or bodies of water. That was the beginning of skepticism about planetary habitability among mainstream astronomers.

In 1904 - 1907, biologist Alfred Russel Wallace argued that the rest of the Solar System likely does not have liquid water, and that Mars in particular could not support the civilization proposed by Percival Lowell as the builder of Mars's canals.

But science-fiction writers depicted other Solar-System planets as habitable well into the 1930's, as Isaac Asimov wrote in "The Lovely Lost Landscapes of Luna". He described growing up with such stories and feeling disappointed at discovering how hostile the rest of the Solar System is.

 

[lpetrich]

One of the first stories about interstellar travel was E.E. "Doc" Smith's "The Skylark of Space", published in 1928.

With the rest of the Solar System habitable and interstellar travel very difficult, a 1866 version of "Star Trek" would likely play like "Firefly", with our heroes going to lots of places on other planets in our Solar System.

 

[apepa]

It's hard to imagine what certain details would be like, as there isn't a 19th century equivalent to Forbidden Planet that you could draw comparisons to.

In terms of worldview, I think it would have probably been liberal for the time, certainly abolitionist, anti-mercantilism and pro free trade. Pro-democratic. Probably still racist and colonial by today's standards in same way that TOS is quite sexist.

As far as the universe it's set in, I think the sentient aliens would probably still look a lot like us because they would be made by god in his image. Nobody drinks, because that was the way to cure the unwashed masses at the time. The Enterprise doesn't represent a united earth, let alone a federation of planets, it would represent the British Empire, and compete with Earth's other great powers for the rewards of space. Society would still have a class system, but would be less toxic. Spock would definitely be a Martian.

Technologically, people could have imagined quite a few modern items in 1866. Power stations, telephones, wireless telegraphy, and light bulbs were all being perfected at the time. Charles Babbage created the first programmable computer about 40 years earlier, so you could throw those in as well. The big question is how the Enterprise would actually move, and for that I would suggest a propeller to move through the aether of space ( a popular concept back then).

But most of the nineteenth-century writing we would now call science fiction is pretty poor. Plotless utopian tracts without characters, just mouthpieces.

Sounds like TNG when Roddenberry was in charge.