Star Trek created in 1866 instead of 1966

[lpetrich]

I think that an 1866 Star Trek would get variety in its destinations by supposing multiple nations and ethnicities and cultures on the other planets of the Solar System. Thus, making them much like Earthling society over all of its history, and unlike what many planets' societies often seem like in the various series and movies -- homogeneous over their entire planets.

 

[The Old Mixer]

there isn't a 19th century equivalent to Forbidden Planet that you could draw comparisons to.

There's a 17th century equivalent.

 

[Stevil2001]

Sounds like TNG when Roddenberry was in charge.

Even "The Neutral Zone" holds up better than Looking Backward and News from Nowhere.

 

[lpetrich]

I think that Star Trek fits into a kind of literary genre that has been around for centuries: adventures in distant lands.

One of the oldest of these is Homer's Odyssey, where the eponymous hero has numerous misadventures in distant lands as he tries to get home. An early modern one was Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a work that used such adventures as a way to do social commentary.

Such distant-land adventures were common in the pulp fiction of the late 19th cy., but they gradually faded in the 20th cy. as more and more of our planet became easily accessible.

But if one can't have adventures on our planet, then one can have them elsewhere in the Universe. One of the first was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who started his Barsoom series in 1912, with A Princess of Mars. That became a common part of science fiction, though it faded in the mid 20th cy. as it became apparent that the other Solar-System planets were not very nice places to live. Habitability defenders could point out that it was hard to know for sure unless one visited them, but when spacecraft did so, they reported back very hostile conditions.

So one had to have one's adventures outside the Solar System, and that's where Star Trek is set.

 

[apepa]

There's a 17th century equivalent.

Of course, but thankfully not every episode of Star Trek is based on the plot and characters of The Tempest. I was speaking more about the film's influence on Star Trek as a landmark Sci Fi production.