In the Star Trek Universe, fantastical things are happening everyday. While Captain Kirk was off galavanting about the galaxy, what were science fiction writers on Earth writing about?
I mean, in Kirk's time, it seemed like even time travel was some what routine. What new stories could have been told?
Would science fiction be a dead genre?
I wouldn't say time travel was routine in Kirk's time; remember, when it happened in "The Naked Time," Spock called it proof of something that had only been theoretical to that point (implying that the existence of the Temporal Cold War was classified and Spock didn't know about it).
I actually go into this in some detail in my upcoming novel
Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History (which despite the subtitle is more a TOS novel than anything else). Time travel may have been something the
Enterprise did on a recurring basis, but that's because they already knew about it and had experience with it; I assume in the book that it's still classified and largely unknown where everyone else is concerned.
And in both my DTI novels, I've assumed that there's still a genre of "time fiction," speculative fiction focused on the idea of time travel. After all, even if time travel is known to happen by the 24th century, it's still far from routine. We don't see starships using slingshot maneuvers or historians jumping through the Guardian of Forever as a matter of course in the TNG era, and time travel seems to be mainly the result of accidents or intervention by more advanced civilizations. So it would be analogous to the situation today, where space travel is something human beings have done but only to a limited degree (and even less in some ways than they did in an earlier generation), so that fiction based around more extensive or advanced space travel still qualifies as SF.
Beyond that, there could be SF about the invention of more advanced propulsion methods that allow intergalactic travel. Aside from a couple of visits by aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy (and, in Trek literature, a couple of sojourns to the Small Magellanic Cloud), life in other galaxies remains a complete mystery to the Federation, and reaching them remains an elusive goal. It would be seen by UFP citizens the way fiction about interstellar travel appears to us today, or the way fiction about life on Mars and Venus appeared to readers in the early 20th century.
There's also a lot of the Milky Way Galaxy that's still unexplored, so there's room for speculative fiction about what could be discovered there -- although it might be seen more as the kind of fictionalized travellers' tales that you got in the age of exploration (like
Gulliver's Travels, say).
I imagine there would also be room for fiction speculating about the future evolution of humanoid life, or of the Federation as a political entity. What if the Vulcans and Romulans successfully reunified? What if the Federation fell? What if warp drive ruined subspace and had to be abandoned? What if sentient holograms replaced organic life? There's still plenty of room for technology, politics, evolution, etc. to advance beyond where they stand in the 24th century, so there would still be plenty of room for speculative fiction.
Not to mention alternate history, the sort of thing Trek literature is already doing with the
Myriad Universes series (though those are treated as "real" alternate timelines rather than conjectural histories). Even granting the proven reality of alternate timelines in the Trek universe, people could still write fiction about conjectural alternate histories, with the bonus that they could be presented as realities that might actually exist somewhere.
