It’s Star Trek, but not as we know it…
Novelist Michael Chabon is boldly going where no man has gone before with his take on the sci-fi show. By Sam Leith
‘There were things Patrick Stewart didn’t want to do any more. No uniform. No crew. No planet of the week’
‘This show’s about mortality. My father was dying and that haunted the experience of making the series’
The joke about Orson Welles used to be that he lived his career backwards – starting
by making Citizen
Kane and ending up shooting Carlsberg ads. Observers not on his wavelength might mistake the 56-year-old Michael Chabon for having done the same thing. His first
novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, got a six-figure advance and was an instant bestseller. He won the Pulitzer
Prize for The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier and Clay. For three decades he has been one of the most admired and imitated novelists in the English language.
And now he’s writing – checks notes with a sniff of disdain – Star
Trek? But that sniff of disdain, that note of dismayed surprise, is a mistake that only those who distantly weigh Chabon’s literary reputation rather than loving his work would make. In reality, Chabon has been a pioneer among the new generation of writers who revel in so-called “genre” storytelling, and are gleefully platform agnostic.
Margaret Atwood, Naomi Alderman, Alex Garland, Ta-nehisi Coates, Marlon James and Colson Whitehead – all are feted literary figures who are now as likely to be found writing zombie novels, sci-fi films, swordand-sandals TV or even video games and superhero comics. Chabon, like his friend Michael Moorcock, was way ahead of almost all of them. And his new gig – as the head writer on
Star Trek: Picard – is a job that as a self-declared “big Star Trek fan” he hasn’t the slightest embarrassment in delighting in.
“I think ultimately it’s about pleasure,” he says. “What gives you pleasure as the artist or the writer. Very gradually at first, and with increasing speed in the past couple of decades, artists have come to realise that no medium is any better than any other medium, or any worse. A medium is simply that: a means to storytelling. [And] no genre is intrinsically better or worse than any other genre, either: it’s all about what you do with it.”
What Chabon has done with Star Trek is intriguing. As the new series begins, we encounter the ageing former captain of the USS Enterprise, Jeanluc Picard, in rural retirement, tending his vineyards in France, alongside his faithful canine companion Number One. Patrick Stewart revives the role he made famous, playing the elderly Picard as a melancholy figure. He is haunted by the destruction of the home planet of arch-enemies the Romulans, and his failure to deal adequately with the resulting refugee crisis. And he broods over the death of his best friend, the android Data. So the new series is infused with themes of mortality, grief and regret, as well as topical issues such as immigration, dehumanisation and othering (android “synths” have been banned after some were involved in a terrorist incident).
Star Trek, as fans know, has always engaged with politics (“If you’re not telling stories that have political resonance with the times you’re living in, you’re not making Star Trek,” says Chabon). But it was the injection of these weightier issues that persuaded 79-year-old Stewart to revisit a character he hadn’t played for 17 years. Chabon, whose own father died during the writing of the series, drafted a document to “show Patrick that we understood the things that he didn’t want to do any more – that we took that seriously.
“No uniform. No crew. No planet of the week, alien race of the week: he’d done all that. So I wrote this document where I tried to put Beckett in there – to try to show that we understood he had greater ambitions to do something… and I guess it worked.”
So is there Beckett in the finished artefact? “No, there is not,” Chabon laughs. “There is not a single word that I wrote that is in the final show at all. Once the document had served its purpose in proving our bona fides, once he trusted us, we started all over again.” (For his part, Stewart has said that Chabon’s involvement was one of the main reasons he signed up.)
“Ultimately I looked at what we had done and saw how much it was about mortality, how much it was about coming to terms with the choices you’ve made in your life, and not wanting to be alone at the end of one’s life,” he adds.
“All the issues that were coming up for my dad and his family and for me – as he was dying… they’re all there in the season. Not on purpose, but looking back I was able to see I was sort of haunted by that experience the whole time we were making the show.”
Of course, anyone who tinkers with a series as beloved as Star Trek risks upsetting fans, and Chabon and Alex Kurtzman, the creator of Star
Trek: Picard, have been subjected to venomous attacks on social media. Just before our interview, I saw online claims that Chabon had been fired from the show. But when I mention the rumours he rolls his eyes.
“You have to really watch out for the people with all-caps who are shouting horrible things about Star
Trek and Alex Kurtzman and who are declaring things as facts,” he says. “Not only do they have their facts wrong, but they have no way of knowing what the facts are…” In fact he hasn’t left the show – though in due course he’ll step back as showrunner to produce the TV series of Kavalier and Clay with his wife Ayelet Waldman.
But Chabon, who himself grew up writing fan fiction modelled on H P Lovecraft, Larry Niven and Moorcock, is generally positive about fandom and has described it as “arguably the dominant cultural mode of our time”. He wants to reclaim the term “amateur” in its best sense – as people who do things out of love.
“Fan fiction can be a training ground for writers,” he says. “And as someone who wrote fan fiction as a kid, it never occurred to me there was any reason I couldn’t do that. To me it only helps the prime artefact – it only helps Star Wars when there’s a fandom that’s so passionate that it drives them to keep making things.
“And it can be meaningful for people who really adhere to that fandom as, say, a religion might feel. It provides at least some of the same consolations and sense of meaning and purpose… and it also belongs to Marvel, or DC, or CBS.”
But doesn’t he think it can be toxic?
“That’s the nature of the internet,” he replies. “It’s not something peculiar to fandom; that’s an effect the internet has on all kinds of things. The internet – I always compare it to the second coming of fire. Fire can warm your home, it can cook your food – and it can burn you up and destroy entire cities.”
He adds: “As a fan, what I try to remember is that I am a fan, and I know exactly how it feels to be disappointed that something new is not the same as what it is that you loved to begin with.”
If Michael Chabon could give Star
Trek: The Next Generation a chance, and come to love it, perhaps those “all-caps” fans currently trolling Picard on social media – not to mention those who high-mindedly affect to look down on Star Trek – can learn to love it, too.
Star Trek: Picard is available on Amazon Prime Video from tomorrow