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Star Trek, Dynamics of a World-building Factory

Star Trek, dynamiques d’une fabrique de mondes

Expansion, Variation, Densification

Expansion, variation, densification

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Published on Friday, September 26, 2025

Abstract

Français English

Since its first broadcast on September 8, 1966, Star Trek has established itself as a prolific, transmedia, and intergenerational fictional universe that can be divided into three major eras. It is therefore not surprising that, since the 1990s, Star Trek has become a favored subject of study in Anglo-Saxon cultural studies, popular media studies, and science fiction studies, but such studies remain very rare in the French-speaking world. Most of the work focuses on its ideological, political, and social dimensions.

Announcement

Français English

Argument

Since its first broadcast on September 8, 1966, Star Trek has established itself as a prolific, transmedia, and intergenerational fictional universe that can be divided into three major eras. The first is that of the tentative beginnings of the first television series, now known as Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969), and its animated continuation (1973-1974). The second era began in 1979 with the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and continued with nine films between 1982 and 2002, as well as numerous spin-off television series: The Next Generation (1987-1994), Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), Voyager (1995-2001) and Enterprise (2001-2005). The third era, which is still ongoing, also began in the cinema in 2009 with a reboot of the franchise in the form of a trilogy launched by J.J. Abrams, which concluded in 2016. Since then, the initial continuity of the fictional world has been developed through prequels and sequels on video-on-demand (SVoD) platforms: Discovery (2017-2024), Picard (2020-2023), Strange New World (2022-), not to mention animated series and a TV movie. In addition to these audiovisual works, there are numerous novels, comic books, fan fiction, and video games.

Over the years and across media platforms, the franchise’s ambition has remained the same: to depict a relatively near future (from the 22nd to 25th centuries, with a more recent foray into the 32nd century), imagined by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, as a utopia, even though it has occasionally offered darker or more pessimistic moments. In Star Trek, humanity has overcome the political, ecological, and moral obstacles of the 21st century to reach for the stars and participate in the creation of the United Federation of Planets, bringing together numerous alien civilizations across the galaxy, divided into four immense quadrants.

Of course, it is probably no coincidence that this utopian science fiction series was created in the 1960s. The first version, which appeared at a time when the space race and the sexual revolution were capturing people’s imaginations, can also be seen as a critical reflection of the tensions of the Cold War and the social debates in the United States in the 1960s, particularly the civil rights movements. Obviously, the presence of Russian, Japanese, and African-American actors playing some of the officers on the bridge of the USS Enterprise did not go unnoticed, nor did the first interracial kiss on American television. But Star Trek’s relative progressiveness (it has since been nuanced by many) was not limited to the production; it also fueled the scripts, which each week presented a new planet and its inhabitants, a planet that expanded the ever-growing fictional world and allowed different political and cultural issues to be addressed by analogy. It is clear that expansion has been a defining dynamic of the franchise since its inception. This desire continues today: each era has its own version of Star Trek that addresses its specific or more universal problems. The Next Generation appeared while Ronald Reagan was in power and dismantled some of the gains made by the social struggles of the 1960s. Voyager introduced a strong female captain, yet she was also quite conservative and sometimes even authoritarian, but the context was that of a feminist backlash. Discovery focuses on issues of sexual diversity (sexual orientation and gender); Picard addresses the issue of environmental refugees and artificial intelligence, etc.

It is therefore not surprising that, since the 1990s, Star Trek has become a favored subject of study in Anglo-Saxon cultural studies, popular media studies, and science fiction studies, but such studies remain very rare in the French-speaking world. Most of the work focuses on its ideological, political, and social dimensions. Noteworthy are the early analyses of racial representations (Bernardi 1998, Kilgore 2003, Mittermeier and Spychala 2020), broader sociopolitical readings (Reagin 2013, Booker 2018), works on gender (Farghali and Bacon 2017, Mittermeier and Spychala 2020, Millsap-Spears 2024) and galactic diplomacy (Gonzalez 2015).

However, while the Star Trek universe has been the subject of an impressive amount of critical analysis, few works focus primarily on the construction of its fictional world as such—its internal logic, transmedia narrativity, and ontological plasticity. The notable exception is the field of fan studies, which examines how fan communities participate in the expansion, critique, or rewriting of the canon (Jenkins 1992, Falzone 2005, Drushel 2013), but without always articulating the aesthetic or narrative implications. Yet, from its inception, Star Trek has been viewed by some, such as Michael Moorcock (1968), as a true turning point for fiction and storytelling, ushering in a new demand for narrative diversity, social engagement with viewers, and the crossing of genre boundaries, integrating an interpenetration of scholarly texts with popular forms.

It therefore seems necessary today to examine Star Trek from the perspective of its narrative, aesthetic, and mythopoetic practices (Kapell 2010), refocusing attention on the modalities of its fictional construction. Far from rejecting the political and cultural approaches that have dominated research on Star Trek, this conference aims to extend them in another direction, by questioning what it means to “make worlds” in, around or from Star Trek. This conference, which celebrates the franchise’s 60th anniversary, thus seeks to shift the focus to the worldbuilding of Star Trek, understood not as a fixed backdrop, but as a dynamic process, an expanding system, sometimes contradictory, always in transformation. This universe, which articulates continuities and ruptures through its many iterations, offers a privileged terrain for thinking about the creation of universes that are coherent in their very plasticity, as well as the tensions between continuity, divergence, and revival; utopia, dystopia, and uchronia; narrative, imagination, and encyclopedism.

Furthermore, the encyclopedic dimension of the Star Trek universe is sometimes so obvious that it has fueled the publication of works that treat its fictional material—considered an “expressive good” (Kavanagh et al 2001)—as real encyclopedias would (Ruditis 2013). And that’s not to mention the science fiction megatext (Broderick 1995) and the xenoencyclopedia (Saint-Gelais 1999) that it has largely contributed to building and feeding: spaceships, teleporters, communicators and scanners, universal translators, androids, federation of planets, prime directive and first contact protocol, etc. There are countless examples of novums that built the fictional world of Star Trek before becoming essential elements of any space opera.

As part of this symposium, we invite you to reflect on the construction of the Star Trek universe, which is much broader than a simple possible world, using a variety of approaches: narratological, aesthetic, semiotic, intertextual, mediological, or anthropological. This may involve questioning:

  • the narrative modalities in Star Trek: serial forms, transmedia forms, experimental episodes, devices for linking or reconfiguring the diegetic world;
  • the tensions between coherence and contradiction in the extended universe (continuity, retcon, temporal paradoxes, parallel worlds);
  • the invention of languages such as Klingon (Lecercle 2015) as a poetics of otherness, or the universal translator as a politics of universalism;
  • space exploration, time travel, and the virtual world (holodeck/holosuite) as modes of fictional expansion;
  • the use of mechanisms from human history and mythology in the creation, by analogy, of worlds, peoples, and planets;
  • Reuse and intertextual appropriation (classic science fiction, Shakespearean tragedy, characters from detective novels or maritime novels, but also derivative works, pastiches [The Orville, Galaxy Quest, Dans une galaxie près de chez vous, etc.], tributes, parodies, and fan fictions).

This symposium therefore aims to join the current debates on transmedia (Baroni 2017) and seriality (Mittell 2015, Letourneux 2017, Favard 2018, Machinal 2020) narratology, speculative fiction (Forêt and Yulmuk-Bray 2024, Stengers 2020 and 2000), the poetics of myth, and the contemporary construction of imaginary worlds (Kapell 2010, Besson 2015). The aim is therefore to think of Star Trek not only as a critical mirror of the world, but also as a fictional and narrative machine, self-reflexive and constantly expanding, which raises fundamental questions about narration (from the point of view of both its creation and its reception), coherence, norms, and otherness.

Submissions guidelines

Proposals for papers (25 min) of no more than 350 words, accompanied by a short bio-bibliographical note, should be sent before January 15, 2026, to the following address: startrekparis2026@gmail.com. Papers may be in French or English.

Organizing committee

  • Elaine Després (University of Quebec in Montreal),
  • Florent Favard (University of Lorraine, CREM),
  • Anaïs Guilet (University of Savoie Mont Blanc, LLSETI Laboratory),
  • Hélène Machinal (University of Rennes 2, ACE) and Jessy Neau (University of Poitiers, FoReLLIS). 

Bibliography

Baroni, Raphaël. (2017). “Pour une narratologie transmédiale”. Poétique, no 182 (2), pp. 155-175.

Bernardi, Daniel. (1998). Star Trek and History : Race-Ing toward a White Future. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.

Besson, Anne (2015). Constellations. Des mondes fictionnels dans l’imaginaire contemporain. Paris: CNRS edition.

Booker, M. Keith (2018). Star Trek: A Cultural History. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Broderick, Damien (1995). Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge.

Després, Elaine (2020). “La sentience des androïdes : de Star Trek à Westworld”. In J.-F. Chassay and I. Boof-Vermesse (eds), L’âge des postmachines, Montréal: PUM, pp. 73-92.

Després, Elaine (2019), “Voyage (impromptu et déroutant) au bout de l’univers”. Otrante, art et littérature fantastique, no 46, automne, pp. 13-33.

Drushel, Bruce E. (ed) (2013). Fan Phenomena: Star Trek, Bristol: Intellect Books.

Falzone,  Paul J. (2005). “The Final Frontier Is Queer: Aberrancy, Archetype and Audience Generated Folklore in K/S Slashfiction”. Western Folklore, summer-fall, vol. 64, no 3/4, pp. 243-261. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25474751.

Farghali, Nadine and Bacon, Simon (2017). To Boldly Go. Essays on Gender and Identity in the Star Trek Universe. Jefferson: McFarland.

Favard, Florent (2018). Le récit dans les séries de science-fiction. De Star Trek à X-Files. Paris: Armand Colin.

Favard, Florent et Hélène Machinal (dir.) (2019). “La sérialité en question”. TV/series, no 13.

Favard, Florent et Hélène Machinal (dir.) (2022). “Séries télévisées de science-fiction”. Res Futurae, no 19.

Forêt, Marceau et Yulmuk-Bray, Ketzali (2024). “Nouvelle alliance entre science et fiction”. Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine, no 28. https://doi.org/10.4000/11u01

Gonzalez, Georges A. (2015). The Politics of Star Trek. Justice, War, and the Future. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, Henry (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.

Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm (ed) (2010), Star Trek as Myth: Essays on Symbol and Archetype at the Final Frontier. Jefferson: McFarland.

Kilgore, De Witt Douglas (2003). Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (2015). “Bleghbe’chugh vaj blHegh! From an Ethics of Alterity to a Politics of Style”. In M. Rospide and S. Sorlin (eds), The Ethics of Alterity : New perspectives on Genre Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge Publishers, pp. 14-32.

Letourneux, Matthieu (2017). Fictions à la chaîne. Paris: Seuil.

Machinal, Hélène (2020). Posthumains en série. Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais.

Millsap-Spears, Carey (2024). Star Trek Discovery and the Female Gothic. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Mittell, Jason (2015). Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press.

Mittermeier, Sabrina and Garcia-Siino, Leimar (eds) (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. New York: Routledge.

Mittermeier, Sabrina and Spychala, Mareile (eds) (2020). Fighting for the Future – Essays on Star Trek: Discovery. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Neau, Jessy (2024). “Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) : un procès caché de l’humanité en sept saisons”, TV/Series, no 23.  https://doi.org/10.4000/12lhs 

Reagin, Nancy (2013). Star Trek and History. Hoboken: Wiley.

Ruditis, Paul (2013). Star Trek: The Visual Dictionary: The Ultimate Guide to Characters, Aliens, and Technology. London: DK.

Saint-Gelais, Richard (1999). L’empire du pseudo. Modernités de la science-fiction. Québec: Nota Bene.

Stengers, Isabelle (2020). “Ursula Le Guin-Penser en mode SF”. Épistémocritique, hors série, https://epistemocritique.org/ursula-le-guin-penser-en-mode-sf/ 

Stengers, Isabelle (2000). “Science-fiction et expérimentation”. In Philosophie et science-fiction, Bruxelles: Vrin.

Places

  • Collège britannique, Cité internationale - 9 Bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris
    Paris, France (75)

Event attendance modalities

Full on-site event


Date(s)

  • Thursday, January 15, 2026

Keywords

  • Star Trek, série télévisée, média, fiction, monde, représentations

Contact(s)

  • Anaïs Guilet
    courriel : anais [dot] guilet [at] univ-savoie [dot] fr

Information source

  • Anaïs Guilet
    courriel : anais [dot] guilet [at] univ-savoie [dot] fr

License

CC-BY-4.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0 .

To cite this announcement

Helène Machinal, Elaine Després, Jessy Neau, Florent Favard, Anaïs Guilet, « Star Trek, Dynamics of a World-building Factory », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Friday, September 26, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/14rcj

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