Writing speculative fiction can be a perilous undertaking.
Most artists hope that their work endures in the public imagination long after its initial
publication.
But sometimes that endurance can lead to problems down the road, especially if the work in question
becomes part of a long-running series.
In this video we’ll look at one example of how Star Trek has encountered this problem,
and some of the ways the creators of various Trek projects have dealt with it, as we wrestle
with the question
When Did Star Trek’s Eugenics Wars Actually Happen?
First, for those of you who aren’t familiar with them, what the hell are the Eugenics
Wars?
The Eugenics Wars are first mentioned in the Classic Trek episode “Space Seed,” which
introduces Khan.
A group of genetically engineered supermen took control of dozens of nations.
Eventually they were overthrown, and managed to escape the planet prior to being executed
as war criminals.
After drifting through space in suspended animation for centuries, they are discovered
and revived by the crew of the U.S.S.
Enterprise, and that didn’t go so well.
Subsequent mentions of the Eugenics Wars provide a bit more detail.
On Enterprise we learn that Captain Archer’s great-grandfather fought in them.
We also learn that the genetically engineered supermen were called Augments.
And we learn casualties of the wars were high, numbering somewhere north of thirty million.
As a result of the Eugenics Wars, the people of Earth continue to take a dim view of genetic
engineering into the 24th century.
The Eugenics Wars are among the most consequential and influential events in Star Trek history.
Or so we’re told, anyway.
Looking back across fifty years of Star Trek TV series and films, they don’t come up
all that often.
They’ve never been dramatized, and we have little information about them.
What I just told you is basically it.
Except for one detail – the detail referred to by the title of this video.
See, we do know when the Eugenics Wars actually happened.
And that’s the problem.
They happened in the 1990s.
In “Space Seed,” Spock establishes that Khan’s reign, during which he controlled
over a quarter of the Earth’s surface, lasted from 1992 to 1996.
Since they apparently coincided with the dictatorships of the Augments, it’s reasonable to assume
that the Eugenics Wars took place during roughly the same period.
The thing is, I lived through the 1990s.
I came of age in the 1990s.
I watched The X-Files and listened to Third Eye Blind in the 1990s!
It was my decade!
And I don’t remember any Eugenics Wars happening in the 1990s!
Outside of Bosnia, Rwanda, and probably a few other places.
So, why does that matter?
Well, it doesn’t really matter.
Star Trek is an empire of lies.
Thanks for watching, everybody!
Okay.
It matters because it’s fun to think about and talk about.
That’s why it matters.
I mean, what the hell else are we doing here?
The interesting thing about the dating of the Eugenics Wars is that so far Star Trek
has never retconned them into taking place some other time, which makes them one of the
most obvious points where Star Trek’s fictional history and the real history of Earth don’t
agree.
And that’s of particular interest to me as a Star Trek afficionado because Star Trek
has a longstanding habit of incorporating our world’s actual history into its world’s
fictional history.
My favorite example of this is the inclusion into Star Trek canon of the space shuttle
Enterprise.
I’m sure most of you know at least part of that story, but just in case some of you
don’t: in the mid 1970s NASA was gearing up the space shuttle program, and they announced
that they were building the first test shuttle.
Star Trek fans wrote to NASA asking them to name the first space shuttle after the U.S.S.
Enterprise.
According to a memo sent to President Gerald Ford by one of his senior advisors, NASA received
hundreds of thousands of letters from Trekkies pushing for the shuttle to be named Enterprise.
So Ford went for it, and when the first space shuttle was rolled out, it bore the name Enterprise.
Gene Roddenberry and the cast of Star Trek – everybody but Shatner – were on-hand
for the unveiling.
And here’s a detail that isn’t usually included when Star Trek fans talk about the
space shuttle Enterprise: the original name for that shuttle was the Constitution, and
the unveiling was on September 17, Constitution Day.
So Star Trek fans were able to successfully pressure the United States government to name
the first space shuttle after their favorite imaginary starship instead of the U.S. Constitution
– in 1976, no less, the year the country celebrated its bicentennial (not the bicentennial
of the Constitution, since it wasn’t drafted until after the revolution, but still).
That’s an all-time boss move.
I’m not usually an Us vs. Them sorta guy when it comes to fandom, but beat that, Star
Wars fans!
Get back to me when you convince NASA to name something after the Millennium Falcon!
Anyway, the space shuttle Enterprise was incorporated into Star Trek canon pretty much immediately
– an image of it is visible on display on the recreation deck of the Enterprise in Star
Trek: The Motion Picture.
Later, in the TV series Enterprise, a sketch of the shuttle is seen hanging in Captain
Archer’s ready room, and footage of the space shuttle Enterprise being rolled out
is also part of that show’s opening credits montage.
We also see a model of a space shuttle, presumably the Enterprise, in Admiral Marcus’s office
in Star Trek Into Darkness.
So a space shuttle that was named Enterprise because of Star Trek is now an official part
of Star Trek canon.
And sure, you can reconcile that by saying, well, in the Star Trek universe the shuttle
was named Enterprise because of the proud naval lineage of ships with that name – which
is something that was actually mentioned in the memos to President Ford as an additional
justification for giving the space shuttle that name – but to me it’s a lot more
fun to treat it like the inside joke that it is and leave this world-breaking anachronism
right there in the middle of Star Trek’s in-universe timeline.
Just as the space shuttle Enterprise became part of Star Trek canon, so too has the rest
of actual history as it has transpired.
Whenever characters from Star Trek travel back in time and find themselves in the present
day, it’s always our present day.
When Kirk and crew arrive in San Francisco circa 1986, it’s not an alternate version
of 1986 extrapolated from the Star Trek version of 1968 we glimpsed during the original series,
it’s a representation of the same 1986 the people sitting in theaters watching the movie
were living in – and that’s the whole point.
When the crew of the starship Voyager travels to Los Angeles circa 1996 in the two-part
episode “Future’s End,” it seems pretty clear that it’s meant to be our Los Angeles.
And, oh, hey, would you look at that?
Things seem pretty normal despite the devastating Eugenics Wars that were raging at around this
same time, huh?
Obviously when “Space Seed” was produced in the 1960s, the 1990s were still way in
the future, so it made sense to set the Eugenics Wars during that time period.
The producers of Star Trek were making TV for the people watching then, not for people
watching fifty years in the future – nobody expected anybody to still be paying attention
to this shit in 2019!
But lucky for us, Star Trek grew into a decades-spanning franchise, a franchise with an in-universe
history where the Eugenics Wars still took place during the 1990s, and where Los Angeles
looks like this around the same time.
Isn’t speculative fiction fun?!
I’m still not over the fact that the year 2001 looked like this instead of this.
Could have made a 9/11 reference there.
Didn’t do it.
Not how I roll.
I’ve got a little thing called class.
Make a note of that.
Write down how classy I am.
Anyway, according to Star Trek canon, as far as I can tell, both of these things are true:
the Eugenics Wars happened from roughly 1992 to 1996, and Los Angeles in 1996 was apparently
totally unaffected by them – none of the 20th century characters encountered by the
Voyager crew mentions the Eugenics Wars, and none of the Voyager crew expresses any concern
about the wars posing a threat to them when they beam down to the planet.
So what gives?
How do we reconcile these two things?
For the purposes of “Future’s End” it’s relatively simple: we just assume the fighting
in the Eugenics Wars took place outside the United States.
According to Spock, Khan’s territory was located in Asia and the Middle East.
If we assume the countries controlled by the other augments were also outside the western
hemisphere, it’s entirely plausible that the U.S. would remain untouched by the conflict.
Remember, World War II was the most devastating war in human history, raged on for years across
Europe, Africa and Asia, resulted in over 80 million total deaths, and the mainland
United States emerged virtually without a scratch.
The U.S. did suffer over 400,000 military deaths, and about 12,000 civilian deaths from
various causes related to the war, but it would have been entirely possible to walk
through any major American city during the height of the war and see little or no direct
evidence of it.
If we expand beyond the immediate setting of “Future’s End” and assume that the
1996 the Voyager crew visits was the same as the real 1996 everywhere else besides Los
Angeles, finding room for the Eugenics Wars becomes a lot trickier.
We didn’t exactly have world peace during the ‘90s – there were regional conflicts,
acts of terrorism, plenty of horrific violence – but a global war killing thirty million
people?
Thankfully, no.
I mean, unless we all just missed it.
Which is possible.
I mean, I watched a lot of TV in the ‘90s, you all, and wasn’t none of it the nightly
news, know what I’m saying?
Ha ha ha!
The “it happened but nobody noticed” angle was adopted by author Greg Cox for his series
of novels chronicling the Eugenics Wars.
With the intention of reconciling the wars as described in “Space Seed” with actual
history, Cox presents Khan’s dictatorship as more of a behind-the-scenes, shadow government
kinda thing.
In Cox’s version, Khan is not officially in charge of anything, but through a vast
secret conspiracy it was Khan who held the real power.
And the wars themselves were similarly clandestine, fought without the knowledge of the general
public, the millions of casualties attributed to civil unrest, terrorist attacks, or natural
disasters – in Cox’s novel, the 1993 Latur earthquake, which killed nearly 10,000 people
in southwestern India, was triggered as part of an assassination attempt against Khan by
one of his augment rivals.
Those of you who were personally affected by the Latur quake might find that in bad
taste, but in general Cox’s story is a clever attempt to fit the Eugenics Wars into actual
history.
The Eugenics Wars novels aren’t considered official Star Trek canon, but they don’t
contradict canon in any major ways, so if you’re struggling to reconcile the Eugenics
Wars with the rest of history, you might find it useful to add them to your headcanon.
One of the most appealing aspects of Star Trek is the way it positions itself as our
future.
It doesn’t take place in some alternate timeline – except when it does – it takes
place in our timeline, just a few hundred years down the road.
Of course, the longer Star Trek endures, the more of its fictional history our real world
will catch up to, and we’ll have more opportunities like this to try and smoosh the two together
in a way that makes some kind of sense.
There’s a big one coming up in about five years: one of the best episodes of Deep Space
Nine is the two-parter “Past Tense”, which has Sisko, Bashir, and Dax accidentally thrown
back in time to San Francisco circa 2024.
Hopefully – fingers crossed – the real 2024 won’t include crowded ghettos where
homeless and unemployed people are forced to live, walled off from the rest of their
cities, so we Trekkies’ll have to figure out a way to explain that when the time comes.
Here’s my preferred explanation, and it can apply to the Eugenics Wars, too: maybe
when our real history diverges from Star Trek, it’s because we’ve somehow managed to
change things for the better.
The version seen or referred to in Star Trek is the first draft, and the version we lived
is the revised version where we managed to correct a few of the mistakes that were made
the last time around.
While Star Trek’s vision of humanity’s future is mostly very bright – at least
by the time we get to the 22nd and 23rd centuries – its version of our present is often pretty
bleak.
If our actual present turns out better than the one we’re shown in Star Trek, maybe
it means we’re doing something right.
Okay, I didn’t say we’re doing everything right.
Obviously we’re still capable of screwing up in really big, horrible ways that threaten
our chances of reaching a Star Trek future or any future, but at least we avoided the
Eugenics Wars.
So far.
Nothin’ like ending on a downer!