I watched the first episode of Star Trek on its original air date in 1966, on a console television that must have weighed 200 pounds. See how science fiction worlds get built. It had a massive tube, a record player built into one side, and an 8-track player on the other. The whole family gathered around it the way families gathered around those enormous sets in the 1960s, and when the Enterprise appeared on that screen, it was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen.
I was hooked immediately. I had seen Forbidden Planet before that, and the connection was obvious: a ship, a crew, the unknown, the human drama playing out against an alien backdrop. But Star Trek did something Forbidden Planet did not. It came back every week. It built a universe one episode at a time, and I got to live in that universe for an hour every week for three seasons.
Star Trek Day is September 8th, marking the anniversary of that 1966 premiere. For me it is not a fan holiday. It is a personal milestone. That show shaped how I think about storytelling, about characters under pressure, about using impossible situations to reveal human truth. Fifty-some years later, I still think the original series understood something about narrative that most of its successors forgot.
The Original Series and Why It Worked
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were not archetypes moving through a plot.Share on X
The original Star Trek worked because it was about people first and science fiction second. For more, see national ghostwriters week. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were not archetypes moving through a plot. They were three fundamentally different approaches to decision-making: instinct, logic, and compassion. Every episode ran the problem through all three lenses. The drama came from the friction between those perspectives, not from the alien of the week.
Gene Roddenberry built a universe where humanity had solved its internal problems, racism, poverty, war on Earth, and then sent that improved humanity into a galaxy full of new problems. The genius was the contrast. The crew represented what we could be. The situations they encountered tested whether those ideals held up under pressure. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they did not. That tension is what made the show matter.
The writing was uneven because television writing in the 1960s was uneven. But the best episodes, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “Balance of Terror,” “Mirror, Mirror,” “Amok Time,” stand alongside the best science fiction ever produced in any medium. Harlan Ellison’s time travel tragedy. Paul Schneider’s submarine warfare translated to space. Jerome Bixby’s dark mirror universe. Theodore Sturgeon revealing that Spock’s logic was a cage as much as a gift.
These writers understood that science fiction is not about technology. It is about what technology reveals about the people using it. That principle drives every piece of fiction I write and every ghostwriting project I take on. The subject matter is the vehicle. The human story is the destination.
My Star Trek Collection
I own over 200 Star Trek books in hardcover, mostly novels. I have the original Enterprise blueprints from the early 1970s, the Franz Joseph set that every serious Trek fan of that era owned. The best Christmas present I ever received was an Enterprise model kit, the one with the little lights that you could wire up so the nacelles glowed and the deflector dish lit up. I built that thing with the care of an engineer assembling the real ship.
The novel collection matters to me as a writer because the Star Trek novels represent one of the longest-running shared universe fiction projects in publishing history. Hundreds of authors writing within the same continuity, maintaining consistent characters while finding new stories to tell. The quality varies enormously, but the best Trek novels, the ones by Diane Duane, Peter David, John M. Ford, are genuine literature working within a franchise framework.
That shared universe model taught me something about world-building that I use constantly: a well-built world generates stories. Roddenberry did not outline every episode in advance. He built a universe with enough depth, enough internal logic, enough unresolved tension, that stories emerged naturally from the setting. My World Builder’s Handbook teaches this principle directly. Build the world right and the stories come to you.
The Series Ranked by Someone Who Was There from the Beginning
I have watched every Star Trek series. My ranking will irritate some fans, but I have been watching since 1966 and I have opinions.
Deep Space Nine, particularly the last two seasons, is the best Star Trek ever produced. It is the only series that committed to long-form serialized storytelling with real consequences. Characters made decisions they could not take back. The Dominion War forced the Federation’s ideals into conflict with survival, and the show did not flinch from showing what that cost. “In the Pale Moonlight” is the single best episode in the franchise because it asks whether a good man can do a terrible thing for the right reasons and refuses to give a comfortable answer.
The original series is second. It had the strongest character dynamics, the most daring writing for its era, and the fundamental understanding that science fiction is about people, not technology. The best episodes still hold up sixty years later, which is more than most television from the 1960s can claim.
Enterprise, specifically the last two seasons, is underrated. Once the show committed to the Xindi arc and stopped trying to be a prequel nostalgia trip, it found real dramatic weight. The writing sharpened. The stakes became personal. It was cancelled just as it figured out what it was.
The Next Generation from season three onward is solid. Patrick Stewart elevated everything he touched, and the show produced genuinely great episodes. But the crew harmony problem I described earlier limited how much internal drama the show could generate. I covered this with a guest in my interview with sci-fi author Stephen Oram. It was at its best when something disrupted the professionalism.
Voyager I mostly cannot stand. The premise, a ship stranded on the other side of the galaxy, should have produced desperate, resource-scarce, morally compromising storytelling. Instead the ship looked pristine every week and the crew behaved like they were on a routine mission. The Borg episodes and the Species 8472 arc are the exceptions. Those episodes understood what the show should have been the entire time.
The modern series are simply terrible. Bad writing. Incoherent plotting. Characters who exist to deliver speeches rather than make decisions. The craft principles that made the original series and Deep Space Nine powerful, character-driven conflict, speculative premises serving human stories, respect for the audience’s intelligence, have been abandoned in favor of spectacle and sentiment. They should be burned.
I say this as someone who loves this franchise deeply enough to own 200 hardcover novels and a set of 1970s blueprints. Loving something means being honest about when it fails.
The Craft Lesson: Harmony Kills Drama
The difference between the best and worst Trek series comes down to a single storytelling principle: characters who agree with each other produce comfort, characters who clash produce story.
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had fundamentally incompatible worldviews and the show let those worldviews collide every episode. Instinct versus logic versus compassion. The drama came from inside the crew, not just from the alien of the week. Deep Space Nine understood this. Sisko, Kira, Odo, Quark, Bashir, and Garak had competing loyalties, conflicting ethics, and personal agendas that the Dominion War forced into the open.
The Next Generation’s weakness was crew harmony. Picard’s bridge was professional, competent, and largely aligned. When everyone agrees about what to do, the drama has to come entirely from outside the ship. The best TNG episodes broke this pattern. “The Best of Both Worlds” stripped Picard away and made the crew function without their center. “The Inner Light” put Picard in a situation where his Starfleet identity was irrelevant. “Chain of Command” replaced him with someone the crew could not stand. Every great TNG episode disrupted the harmony that was the show’s default state.
Voyager should have been all disruption. A Starfleet crew and a Maquis crew forced to share a ship seventy thousand light-years from home with no resupply and no reinforcements. That premise demands friction, rationing, mutiny, moral compromise. Instead the show smoothed every conflict into resolution by the end of each episode and kept the ship looking factory-new. The premise was perfect. The execution wasted it.
The one redeeming element was Seven of Nine. She added tension and genuine interest to a show that had flattened both. A former Borg drone relearning humanity aboard a ship full of people who did not entirely trust her was exactly the kind of internal conflict the show needed from the beginning. And the real tension between Jeri Ryan and Kate Mulgrew was visible on screen whether the writers intended it or not. When the actors do not get along and the characters are not supposed to get along, you get something electric that no script can manufacture. Voyager was a better show every minute Seven of Nine was on screen, which says more about what the show was missing than what she added.
This principle applies to every kind of fiction, not just science fiction. If your characters get along too well, your story is too comfortable. Readers do not turn pages because characters are happy. They turn pages because characters are in conflict, especially with people they care about.
Star Trek and the Craft of Science Fiction
Star Trek demonstrated that science fiction audiences will accept any premise as long as the characters behave like real people within that premise. Transporters, warp drive, phasers, universal translators, none of it matters if the audience does not believe in the people using the technology.
This is the lesson that bad science fiction ignores and great science fiction understands. The technology is not the point. The technology creates the conditions under which human nature is tested. A transporter malfunction that splits Kirk into his aggressive and passive halves is not a technology story. It is a story about the necessity of integrating both aspects of personality. The technology is just how you get there.
My own fiction operates on this principle. Peacekeeper, a project I have been developing for 45 years, uses a cosmic framework to explore how individuals respond to power, isolation, and moral obligation. The science fiction elements serve the character exploration, not the other way around.
For writers working in science fiction or fantasy, the Science Fiction Writer’s Handbook and the Fantasy Writer’s Handbook both address this principle: build the speculative elements to serve character and theme, not to showcase imagination. The Conflict and Tension Handbook covers why tension between allies is more powerful than tension between enemies, a lesson Deep Space Nine understood better than any other Trek series.
Star Trek’s Legacy for Writers
Star Trek proved that popular entertainment can carry serious ideas without sacrificing entertainment value. It tackled racism, war, imperialism, individual rights, and the nature of consciousness during a decade when most television was afraid to address any of those topics. It did this by wrapping the ideas in alien cultures and interstellar conflicts, giving the audience enough distance to engage with the themes without defensiveness.
That technique, using fictional distance to explore real issues, is one of the most powerful tools in a fiction writer’s kit. It is why science fiction and fantasy endure. They give writers permission to ask questions that contemporary fiction sometimes cannot.
Star Trek Day, September 8th, is a good day to revisit the episodes that shaped how a generation of writers thinks about story. It is also a good day to acknowledge that a television show watched on a 200-pound console TV in 1966 can still teach you something about craft in 2025.
For writers developing their own speculative fiction, my writing handbooks cover every element of the craft. For one-on-one guidance, book coaching is available. Start with a conversation.
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