I write a lot here about my rela­tion­ship with my father, and some­times I feel guilty for giv­ing my mother short shrift (lit­er­ally!). My father’s quiet and dis­tance make him more of a mys­tery to me, in much the same way I imag­ine I am inscrutable to oth­ers. My mother’s rel­a­tive direct­ness long made me believe I knew her bet­ter than him. These days I find I under­stand them both about the same (i.e., poorly), so I really should favor Mom with a few more words. The con­flu­ence of Mother’s Day and a new Star Trek movie give me an excuse to make amends.

I blame my mother and Gene Rod­den­berry for the way I’ve turned out. The clas­sic Star Trek series had come and gone by the time I was born, and it would be years before its Next Gen­er­a­tion revival. But I can­not think of a point in my life before I knew, and loved, Trek.

The Search for Spock (the third Trek movie, for the uninitiated…it’s not the one with the whales) hit the­aters when I was five and a half, and I’m almost cer­tain I saw it first run. I wasn’t yet nine when The Next Gen­er­a­tion debuted, but I knew its pre­mière date months in advance, and Mom and I made every­body in the house watch it. It’s the first media event I ever made plans for.

Once a month we received a pack­age by mail con­tain­ing one VHS tape with two clas­sic Trek episodes on it. I mem­o­rized each episode’s descrip­tion on the back of the VHS case, infat­u­ated with the lofty titles, like “Who Mourns for Adon­ais” and “For the World is Hol­low and I Have Touched the Sky.” By the time The Next Gen­er­a­tion aired I had prob­a­bly seen the 70+ orig­i­nal series episodes a dozen times each. I can’t even guess how many times Mom had seen them before that.

All I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Star Trek

Many of you are now smirk­ing as you read this, yet another paean to some geeky sub­cul­ture to which you do not belong. I won’t begrudge you your sneer (much) but con­sider this: Star Trek was the anti­dote to the fun­da­men­tal­ism per­va­sive in my youth­ful daily life, and with­out it there’s a real chance I might never have made it to college.

To be hon­est I don’t know what about Trek appealed to my mother. Maybe she was drawn to the ratio­nal­ity and opti­mism, as I was, or maybe she thought Spock was hot (not that these are mutu­ally exclu­sive). For me, the Star Trek uni­verse often felt much more com­fort­able than the one in which I lived, and like any kid with an over­abun­dant inte­rior life, I escaped to it as fre­quently and com­pletely as possible.

There are things about the cul­ture in which I grew up that I felt uneasy about well before I encoun­tered any kind of alter­na­tive. It never made sense to me that the women in my fam­ily cleaned up after meals while the men sat around at leisure. I was con­fused by the matter-of-fact racism that seemed borne of nei­ther fear nor hatred but a sim­ple acknowl­edg­ment of the infe­ri­or­ity of any­one who was dif­fer­ent. It seemed odd to me that nobody around me was aware of these and a great many other injustices.

I can account for my sense of not quite belong­ing to some extent. First, I read all the usual pro­pa­ganda about how to treat my fel­low humans. Mom had instilled in me a rev­er­ence for books, and I took to heart every­thing I read. Clever of her to throw what appear now to be self-help books my way when I was 5 years old. I also knew the Golden Rule, and was such an earnest child that I truly did try to do unto oth­ers. A clear case of do-as-they-say-not-as-they-do in my family.

Star Trek was the other thing that col­ored my world. Each episode is on a basic level an hour-long moral­ity play. The cul­tural influ­ence of the show has been dis­cussed at length else­where. I’m cer­tain its mes­sage of pro­gres­sive opti­mism wasn’t some­thing I con­sciously under­stood or appre­ci­ated as a kid, but I rec­og­nized that Star Trek was unlike any­thing else I was exposed to.

Friends to Know and Ways to Grow

I pic­ture my mother as I’ve most often seen her: read­ing a book. My par­ents’ house is over­flow­ing with books, despite semi-annual purges to make room for new ones. Mom took me and my broth­ers on what seems like weekly trips to the book­store, where I could have any book I wanted. These were sup­ple­mented by vis­its to the library, and I checked out stacks of books at a time, mar­veling that I could bor­row so many. For prob­a­bly a solid decade, I would go to bed cozy with a book. Mom would come in after my bed­time and nego­ti­ate a rea­son­able stop­ping point a chap­ter or two beyond where she found me.

Even­tu­ally I dug into my mother’s fan­tasy col­lec­tion. I remem­ber Her Majesty’s Wiz­ard, about a PhD stu­dent who finds him­self in a world where recit­ing rhyming verse cre­ates magic. I was maybe ten years old when I read it, but already I was learn­ing to be infat­u­ated with the power of words. I’m not sure I could dis­tin­guish well between fan­tasy and reality.

A com­mon fan­tasy nar­ra­tive depicts a young boy plucked from his anony­mous life in some back­woods town and, through fate or for­tune, thrust into a life of adven­ture and noto­ri­ety. It should be appar­ent why such sto­ries appealed to me.

It was an easy leap from fan­tasy to sci­ence fic­tion. I bor­rowed my mother’s copy of Ender’s Game some time around mid­dle school.  It was another tale of a young boy–a genius, no less–removed from his hum­drum home life and prepped to save human­ity, and two things about the book struck me.

First, the gad­gets were inven­tive, the world fully real­ized. I could see the bat­tle room and the way the laser tag of the future would work. The ansi­ble, anal­o­gous to the inter­net (which I hardly knew any­thing about in the late 80s), made enough sense to me that I accepted it. So many details about the way the world was put together had the effect of help­ing me focus more on the tech­nol­ogy in my own life. Not long after I read Ender’s Game I broke our first com­puter, try­ing to under­stand how it worked.

Beyond the gad­getry, that book was suf­fused with a potent com­pas­sion for its pro­tag­o­nists. I iden­ti­fied very strongly with Ender, who was ostra­cized because of his supe­rior intel­lect and also faced with crip­pling expec­ta­tions. And Orson Scott Card, the author, made very clear how alien­at­ing such a sit­u­a­tion could be and how clue­less the adults manip­u­lat­ing the world really were.

I doubt I thought of myself as a genius; my friends and fam­ily wouldn’t have let me sit on that high horse for long. But I was smart, and I did end up pulled into spe­cial school pro­grams apart from most of my class­mates. Already pretty shy, I had no chance at build­ing nor­mal rela­tion­ships while so clearly marked as dif­fer­ent in the unfor­giv­ing eyes of middle-schoolers.

Real­ity Has Pretty Awe­some Spe­cial Effects

I met my first fel­low geek in 4th or 5th grade. Tom is still the only other per­son I’ve known in real life who can recite a Star Trek movie from start to fin­ish (his spe­cialty was Star Trek IV: The Voy­age Home). As if our slight builds and gen­eral social awk­ward­ness weren’t bad enough, we spent most of the next few years parad­ing around school in char­ac­ter: his dra­matic flair made him a nat­ural Kirk, and my already strong ten­dency to dead­pan made me Spock. We each wore long brown coats one win­ter, which ensured we were called “Brown­coats” (and not kindly) long before Fire­fly was a glim­mer in Joss Whedon’s eye.

My mom paid an air­brush artist in Gatlin­burg, TN, to paint this for me in 1993.

I don’t know where I found the con­fi­dence amid myr­iad ado­les­cent inse­cu­ri­ties to stare down the mono­lith of middle-school eti­quette and sim­ply walk another way. When I think of who I was then, the per­son I am most reminded of is my mom. My friend Tom might have given me per­mis­sion to creep out of my shell, but Mom taught me to be unapolo­getic about who I was in the first place. Her con­trary nature made it okay for me to reject the sta­tus quo as well.

So I embraced learn­ing, because Mom let me know the value of peo­ple who can think for them­selves, and because Spock, Ender, and all my heroes were highly intel­li­gent and well trained. And I exulted in the eso­teric when most of my peers were lis­ten­ing to Dave Matthews Band and try­ing hard to look all the same, because my mis­sion was to explore strange new worlds, not the plain old one that insists upon itself a lit­tle too urgently.

There’s a new Star Trek movie out, and I’m tak­ing Mom to see it for Mother’s Day. Con­sider it pay­back, Mom, for intro­duc­ing me to sci­ence fic­tion in the first place. For show­ing me, directly or indi­rectly, what poten­tial it describes. I am not bold, so it’s hard for me to boldly go. But I see the path where oth­ers have gone before, and it’s not usu­ally the one I want to choose. Thanks, Mom, for point­ing out this other way of doing things.