But isn't reading something that doesn't take you out of your comfort zone and make you feel something, especially an emotion you may not have wanted to feel, a big ol' waste of time?
Sure, you'd get what you want out of the story: A spatial anomaly, some new alien of the week, maybe spaceship fight and in the end everybody zips away at Ludicrus Speed. But isn't that something you could just do in your head? Or bust out a DVD of the show and play a random episode to the same result?
For me it's not even about liking Star Trek or the characters. If I invest the time to read something, I want to get something new out of it. I want that emotional response. I want to maybe feel a little uncomfortable. When that happens the story transends Trek, it becomes literature.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, but I can see the other side of it. A lot of people read for comfort and escapism, and I really do the same thing in a lot of ways, just to a lesser extent. I don't read very much that's incredibly depressing, unless it really makes me think; one of the things that attracts me to Trek is its fundamental, and at times unrealistic, optimism.
I mean, I could just say "I like to be challenged when I read, I just prefer stories with an optimistic bent!" But then, someone like Lynx could say "I like to be challenged too, I just prefer stories where main characters don't die and everything turns out the way it started! Along the way, ANYTHING could happen!" And then there's my sister, admittedly only in middle school at the time, was totally freaked out by Year Of Hell, and she was a HUGE Voyager fan. She didn't even want things to get THAT bad before the reset button kicked in. I feel that in large part it's simply a matter of degree, really.
And on another note, this is absurdly picayune, but I wouldn't personally say "literature"; that sounds like some stuffy old guy had to pronounce its Worth To Society first. I just say "art"; which to me just has the connotation of being purely in the eye of the beholder. To me, Destiny is art. I can imagine others for whom it is an agonizingly awful bastardization of something they love (Lynx, perhaps) and on the other hand those who would find it boring and completely meaningless (my mom, just as an example). Art is subjective.
It's just cool for me that they happen to be writing the art I love to read.