Including Klingons, Vulcans, and the occasional Romulan. My older sister, Maria, had brought me to the convention after promising my mother she would watchĪs an experienced younger brother, I escaped onto the floor of the exhibit hall, where I was surrounded by beings of all races, To a realm of pure mind that negates “cosmos.” Trek serves as a proving ground for nerd narratives that affirm material existence in a multi-species democracyĪgainst the urge to evolve away from a prison house of matter.ġ976, I attended my first Star Trek convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Is threatened from within by a metaphysical error, the idea that evolution points beyond material bodies and planetary ecosystems Threatened from without by Khan, the Federation

Which gradually extends to Hortas and whales, Klingons and cyborgs. Khan stands for the tyranny of pureīlood, and by rejecting him, Trek grounds its cosmopolitics in egalitarian pluralism, By virtue of this trajectory, Spock invites resistance from the proponents of eugenics, whose avatar is Khan Noonian Singh, the mortal foe of the Enterprise. The nerd as the hero of trans-species friendship. Spock serves as the lynchpin of Trek’s cosmopolitan project, revaluing Of Planets, a galactic and democratic state.

The ship thereby becomes a microcosm of the United Federation At the same time, he is the machine, the personification of mathematical accuracy, redeemedįrom his isolation by friendship with the crew of the Enterprise. The movementįrom Loser to Alliance constitutes a metanarrative endemic to nerd culture.Īs the “alien half-breed” of the original series, Spock inhabits the paradoxical role of the superior degenerate, a corruption of pure blood from anĪdvanced civilization. Spock, the nerd protagonist of a stellar cosmopolis. In which I trace the plot of alliance in Star

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