I sometimes wonder how much of a life begins in fiction.
Stories offer us possible selves before we have the language to invent those selves for ourselves. A character walks onto a screen or steps out of a book and shows us a way of moving through the world. We may not consciously decide to imitate them. The image simply takes up residence and waits for life to supply the terrain.
This week, Star Trek reached its 60th anniversary. The first episode aired on 8 September 1966, and a Guardian article marking the anniversary sent me back to the bridge of the original USS Enterprise and to two of my childhood heroes: Captain James T Kirk and Mr Spock.
I didn’t just see a television programme about people flying around space. I saw a way of being in the world.
Kirk was the explorer. He wanted to know what was over the horizon. He was willing to leave the safe harbour, accept the uncertainty of the unknown and make decisions when no perfect decision was available. There was something enormously attractive to me about standing on the bridge of the Enterprise, looking out into a universe that hadn’t been mapped yet.
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
As a child, I don’t think I heard that merely as the introduction to a television programme. I heard it as an instruction.
Go. Explore. Find out.
Don’t spend your life standing safely on the shore wondering what might be out there.
That impulse has never really left me.
The ship and the field
For a while, Star Trek made me want to join the Navy.
My father was a career Navy man, so the sea, ships and military life were already part of my imaginative world. Somewhere in the fantasy was the possibility of becoming captain of a ship one day. The Enterprise might have been fictional, but ships were real. Navigation was real. Command was real. There were still horizons you could sail towards.
Then my father introduced a little inconvenient reality. He told me it would take years before I would ever become captain of a ship.
Years?
That wasn’t what the boy who worshipped Captain Kirk wanted to hear. I wanted the adventure. I wanted to be out there, wherever there was.
So I changed course. Instead of joining the Navy, I went to West Point and became an Infantry officer. If command at sea lay somewhere in the distant future, the Infantry seemed to offer a more immediate route to the edge of experience: soldiers, terrain, uncertainty, leadership, hardship, movement and the possibility of being sent somewhere I had never been before.
At the time, I thought I was choosing a different adventure.
Looking back, I don’t think I was.
I was still following the Enterprise.
The vehicle had changed. The landscape had changed. Space had become terrain. Star charts had become maps. The bridge had become the field. But the underlying impulse remained the same: go where you haven’t been, find out what is there, test yourself against the unknown, lead when the way ahead isn’t obvious.
This is one of the things we underestimate about imagination. We often treat it as an escape from reality when it is frequently the workshop in which reality is constructed.
Before I became a soldier, I had imagined command. Before I had travelled far in the world, I had imagined distant horizons. Before I knew what adventure would actually cost, I had already fallen in love with it.
Fiction planted the image. Life supplied the terrain.
There is an irony in this that I can see more clearly now. A story about exploring without conquering helped lead me towards one of the oldest instruments of organised force. A life can contain contradictions like that. Perhaps maturity begins when we become willing to look at them without forcing them into a neat explanation.
Kirk and Spock
Kirk wasn’t the only figure who mattered to me. There was Spock.
If Kirk represented movement into the unknown, Spock represented another kind of exploration: the attempt to understand. He could stand slightly outside the emotional turbulence of a situation and ask what was actually happening. He watched for the pattern beneath the noise.
Kirk and Spock formed an internal polarity: instinct and reason, adventure and reflection, action and contemplation.
Kirk says: we have to go.
Spock says: we have to understand.
I can recognise both voices in myself. One wants to drive somewhere I haven’t been, take the unfamiliar road, walk beyond the obvious path, begin the project before I know where it will end, or follow the strange idea simply because it has energy.
The other voice arrives afterwards and starts asking questions. What happened there? Why did I choose that? What did the experience reveal? What is the pattern beneath the pattern?
The restless traveller belongs to Kirk. The reflective writer owes something to Spock.
A good life may require both. Movement without reflection can become repetition wearing the costume of adventure. Reflection without movement can become a beautifully furnished room that we never leave.
The bridge of the Enterprise held these different forms of intelligence in conversation. Kirk didn’t command alone. Spock brought analysis. McCoy brought feeling, bodily knowledge and moral protest. Uhura maintained communication. Sulu navigated. Scotty knew what the engines could actually withstand. The captain’s task wasn’t to know everything. It was to listen to people who saw what he couldn’t see, hold their disagreement and then decide.
Seen this way, the Enterprise was also a thinking environment. It worked because different kinds of intelligence had a station on the bridge.
I suspect that image has stayed with me too. I have spent much of my working life in rooms where people are trying to think together: military units, classrooms, workshops, conversations and now the strange bridge formed by a writer, an archive and an artificial intelligence. The equipment changes. The question remains: how do we create the conditions in which different perspectives can meet the unknown without immediately collapsing into noise or certainty?
Exploration without conquest
Reading about Star Trek at 60 reminded me that its radical idea was never really the spaceship. The technology was spectacular, obviously: transporters, communicators, talking computers and warp drive. But Gene Roddenberry’s deeper proposition was that humanity might grow up.
We might move beyond some of the tribalism that has defined us. We might stop organising civilisation entirely around scarcity, domination and accumulation. We might encounter difference with curiosity instead of immediately experiencing it as a threat.
The Enterprise wasn’t sailing through the galaxy primarily looking for territory to conquer. It was there to explore.
Exploration asks: what is out there?
Conquest asks: how can I make what is out there mine?
Those are completely different relationships with the unknown. One allows the encounter to change us. The other tries to force whatever we meet into a shape we already control.
There was danger in the Star Trek universe. Almost every episode made that clear. You might encounter Klingons, Romulans, bizarre energy beings, homicidal computers or a man in a rubber lizard costume. Curiosity didn’t make danger disappear. It meant danger wasn’t allowed to have the final word.
You went anyway.
That idea feels increasingly precious now. We live in a period that has become very good at imagining dystopias. Our stories are full of collapse, apocalypse, authoritarianism, environmental catastrophe and technology turning against us. Some of those stories are necessary warnings.
But warnings alone cannot tell us where to go.
That was the peculiar gift of Star Trek. It offered a future worth travelling towards: a civilisation curious enough to explore, confident enough to encounter difference, intelligent enough to value science, mature enough to prefer dialogue to war and adventurous enough to keep moving outward.
There is something almost countercultural about that optimism now. The future in Star Trek wasn’t perfect, but it remained possible to imagine that human beings could become better than the frightened, tribal and acquisitive creatures we so often appear to be.
That mattered to me as a boy.
It still does.
The frontier moves
As a young man, adventure meant something outward and physical. It meant movement, travel, military life, unfamiliar terrain and putting myself somewhere the outcome wasn’t guaranteed. I wanted to be where things were happening.
Over time, my idea of exploration has widened.
The frontier can be a landscape, a city walked without a plan, a forgotten footpath, a book that rearranges the furniture in your mind, a philosophical idea, a conversation, an occult symbol, a new technology, a question about consciousness. Even the self becomes territory. There are rooms in us we haven’t entered, beliefs inherited so early that we mistake them for the shape of reality, and ways of seeing that have become invisible through familiarity.
Writing is another form of exploration.
You begin with a sentence instead of a starship. You set off without knowing exactly what you are going to find. You follow the energy, encounter resistance and discover strange new worlds hiding inside thoughts you assumed you already understood. If you are lucky, you return slightly changed.
That may be why Star Trek still resonates with me after 60 years. Somewhere in me is still that boy looking at the stars, feeling that little surge of possibility when the Enterprise begins moving across the screen.
He was there when I dreamed about ships. He was there when I chose West Point and became an Infantry officer because I wanted the greatest adventure I could find. He was there in the traveller, the walker, the man who takes the unfamiliar road, the writer who becomes restless when the map feels too complete.
Maybe to boldly go became something larger than space travel. It became a philosophy: stay curious, cross the boundary, meet the strange thing, talk to the stranger, question what you think you know. Don’t let comfort become your final frontier.
When I was young, I thought the adventure was somewhere out there waiting for me: a ship, a battlefield, a distant country, an unknown horizon.
Now I understand that the horizon keeps moving because that is what horizons do. You walk towards one and another appears. There is always another world, another question, another part of life that refuses to fit the map.
Perhaps the promise of Star Trek was never simply that humanity would reach the stars. It was that we might become the kind of people worthy of exploring them.
I don’t know whether we will.
But the Enterprise is still moving across the screen, and some part of me is still following it.