THE ART OF STAR TREK: DISCOVERY
Mushroom visions
RELEASED OUT NOW!
208 pages | Hardback
Author Paula Block, Terry J Erdmann Publisher Titan Books
Returning the final frontier to the small screen, Star Trek: Discovery gave itself an outsized mission statement. Co-creator Alex Kurtzman, current Great Bird of the Galaxy, wanted television with all the scale and spectacle of a movie – “to push at the visual possibilities” of Trek’s first home.
This copiously illustrated art book celebrates that Warp 10 sense of ambition, collating Discovery’s production design from ships to planetscapes, tricorders to hairless Klingons. The imagery of the first two seasons (only) is charted in impressive, near-fetishistic detail, cleanly displayed on the page and supplemented by insight from the show’s makers.
While the Disco-porn dazzles, it’s the words that deliver the real insights. Prop master Mario Moreira talks about the timeywimey challenge of reverseengineering the future seen in the ’60s series – Discovery began as a prequel, after all – even as our own technology outraces the clunky but iconic kit of Kirk’s time. Most intriguing of all are glimpses of a subtly different show, the one envisioned by original showrunner Bryan Fuller before his exit. It’s a lingering ghost of a universe where season one’s Tardigrade is a full member of the crew, complete with a handy translation gizmo and going by the name of Ephraim. Nick Setchfield
Those metallic stripes on the sides of crewmembers’ trousers are, we’re told, intended to monitor life signs.