Leadership conundrum: What do Star Wars and Star Trek really mean?
- The authors who dominated the Golden Age of sci-fi — Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein — wrote primarily about a future in space.
- Writers of the sci-fi New Wave — including Delany, Dick, and Le Guin — were interested in widening the horizons of the genre.
- Allegorical interpretations of Star Wars and Star Trek among leaders can tell their own story.
One of the most unfortunate articles to ever appear in the New York Times fashion section is a “confirm or deny” interview that Maureen Dowd conducted with Peter Thiel in early 2017, during his stint on then president-elect Trump’s transition team. “You like Star Trek more than Star Wars,” she asked. “Deny,” he answered. “I like Star Wars way better. I’m a capitalist. Star Wars is the capitalist show. Star Trek is the communist one. There is no money in Star Trek because you just have the transporter machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot of Star Wars starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes and so the plot in Star Wars is driven by money.”
Thiel’s reading of Star Wars is strange. It’s a stretch, at best, to say that the whole plot—even if we’re just looking at the first movie—is driven by Han Solo’s debt to Jabba the Hutt. Similarly, it’s a stretch to call Star Trek communist—and it’s interesting that Thiel doesn’t seem to like the idea of everyone having whatever they need for free.
Despite his apparent difficulty with understanding science fiction, Thiel thinks it’s an important source of inspiration. At the 2009 Singularity Summit, Thiel was one of the panelists in a discussion on “Changing the World.” In response to a question about what things people can build in order to change—and save—the world, Thiel told the audience that “there are many different things that one could be developing…If you wanted to have a menu, I would just give you the list of science fiction books from the ’50s and ’60s and go through those as starting points. Development of the oceans, development of the deserts, development of outer space, robots, nanotech, biotech, AI.” This is another bizarre answer that seems to betray a misunderstanding of science fiction. “Development of the deserts” sounds like it’s probably a reference to the 1965 science fiction epic Dune, by Frank Herbert. But the message of Dune certainly isn’t “develop the deserts” any more than Star Wars was meant as a guide to building a space empire.
When asked about the origins of the evil Emperor Palpatine, [George] Lucas gave a simple answer. “He was a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name.”
The time period of science fiction Thiel picks out is even more telling. The 1950s and ’60s are the middle and end of the Golden Age of science fiction, which started with pulp sci-fi magazines in the very late 1930s like Astounding Science Fiction. The authors who dominated this period—such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein—were almost all white men, and they wrote primarily about a future in space. Asimov’s stories were often centered around robots, space empires, or both, with nuclear power depicted as a nigh-limitless energy source used for everything from rockets to radios. Heinlein’s stories frequently had a flavor of Ayn Rand in space, usually featuring a self-reliant, polymath male hero dabbling in eugenics or undermining workers on strike for a living wage.
It was Clarke, more than the rest, who dealt in immortality. Clarke’s two most famous novels—Childhood’s End and 2001—both feature humans evolving into deathless, spacefaring creatures of pure mind, transcending the need for physical bodies, composed of patterns of energy. In both novels, these evolved humans take their place alongside similarly transcendent aliens of ancient lineage, with technology enabling godlike powers of creation, destruction, and transformation. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” said Clarke in his most famous dictum. In the meantime, before humanity’s technological apotheosis, Clarke saw other reasons for taking to space—reasons echoed by Jeff Bezos decades later. “Interplanetary travel is now the only form of ‘conquest and empire’ compatible with civilisation,” Clarke wrote in 1951. “Without it, the human mind, compelled to circle for ever in its planetary goldfish-bowl, must eventually stagnate.”
Not all of the authors of the Golden Age shared Clarke’s optimism about technology and the transcendental possibilities of space. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, uses Mars as a setting to explore and critique then standard myths about colonialism and the American frontier. But more trenchant commentary on science fiction tropes largely had to wait until the mid-1960s and the rise of the New Wave, a set of sci-fi authors who wanted to push the genre past its pulp-magazine origins by telling richer stories about a broader range of subjects. These authors included Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Philip K. Dick, and, perhaps most famously, Ursula K. Le Guin. The New Wave authors were interested in widening the horizons of the genre. They wanted to interrogate contemporary notions of progress; they wanted to tell stories about people who weren’t straight white men; they wanted to think about politics and class and gender and how they intersect with technology and culture.
In time, the New Wave led to the cyberpunk authors of the 1980s and ’90s (such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson) who were interested in questions about how the wealthy might use technology—especially computer technology—to further concentrate money and power.
In time, the New Wave led to the cyberpunk authors of the 1980s and ’90s (such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson) who were interested in questions about how the wealthy might use technology—especially computer technology—to further concentrate money and power. Small wonder, then, that Thiel’s willingness to use science fiction as a blueprint for the future ends around 1969. The first Star Wars movie came out almost a decade after that, but that movie was intentionally patterned after the science fiction from thirty years earlier, when George Lucas was a kid. In many ways, Star Wars is more like a fantasy movie set in space than a science fiction movie, right down to its setting of long ago and far, far away. But Thiel seems to have missed a crucial detail about Star Wars too. Despite Thiel’s insistence that Star Trek is the communist story, Lucas based the rebel heroes of Star Wars on communists. “They were Vietcong,” Lucas said. “It was really about the Vietnam War.” When asked about the origins of the evil Emperor Palpatine, Lucas gave a simple answer. “He was a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name.”
