Star Trek and the audience

[Voth commando1]

Okay so I'm not sure about the proper literary term for this maybe all the Star Trek shows are from the future like 31st century AD or something

Roddenberry got a message from a time traveler preparing the denizens of 20th and 21st century earth for what was to come?

What does everyone think of this idea? Has it been explored before?

 

[Green Shirt]

Never gave it a second, let alone a first thought.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

My theory is that there is a time traveler from a dimension parallel to ours came back in time to meet a man named Gene Roddenberry, and tell him all the great things he did that inspired the future.

What that time traveler didn't know was that his timeship malfunctioned, and actually sent him into a dimension parallel to his own, one first visited by James T Kirk seven centuries ago. He explained everything to Gene Roddenberry and showed him his historical records, and Gene Roddenberry murdered him, and published his historical documents as a television show.

 

[diankra]

The closest to this is that Roddenberry's TMP novel states that TOS was a popular dramatization of the actual Enterprise missions, while the first Crucible book suggests that McCoy accidentally kills GR's father before he has a son.
Alternatively, Terry Nation claimed his Dalek stories were based on his translations of alien 'history cubes' he found in his garden.

 

[Greg Cox]

And, of course, we all know that Deep Space Nine was created by an underappreciated science fiction writer named Benny Russell . . ..

 

[1001001]

http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/J._R._Rasmussen

 

[Shawnster]

The introduction to the Star Trek Technical Manual by Franz Joseph was written as if it was a historical document transmitted back in time

 

[KelisThePoet]

Okay so I'm not sure about the proper literary term for this maybe all the Star Trek shows are from the future like 31st century AD or something. Roddenberry got a message from a time traveler preparing the denizens of 20th and 21st century earth for what was to come?

In romance and novel studies, this literary device is called the "found manuscript." Of course, in the case of a television program (expanded into a franchise), the term should be tweaked or broadened to something like "found narrative."

 

[Greg Cox]

This was once a fairly common literary device. Many of Edgar Rice Burrough's early novels began with some preface explaining how the following manuscript came to light: found in bottle, hidden in a secret compartment, a chance meeting in some exotic locale, or whatever.

Even today, a lot of modern Sherlock Holmes pastiches begin with an introductory note relating how some hitherto-unknown manuscript by Dr. John Watson has finally turned up in a long-forgotten truck, attic, or safe-deposit box.

 

[KelisThePoet]

Yes, earlier still, there's the famous example of Cervantes presenting Don Quixote as his translation of an Arabic manuscript he found. And, Cervantes was drawing on earlier uses of this common device in the romances of the middle ages and of late antiquity. Though, once the text gets old enough, it becomes hard to track down and differentiate between real and fake sources of an author's stories. Sir Thomas Mallory's Morte d'Arthur, for instance, repeatedly refers back to earlier sources of the Arthur legends as the singular "French book." Now, no question, Mallory drew some of his material from real French sources, but he has an interesting habit of dropping a reference to the "French book" most often when telling a part of a story with no known source. Were they all lost, or is Mallory playing a kind of fictional game by giving credit to sources precisely when he invents something new?

The device continues to be used in current fiction. A science-fictional example would be Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, ostensibly a translation of an Arabic travel narrative.