Ben and Babylon 5

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In some ways it's unavoidable, because Star Trek is the one example of space opera that your average non-SF fan can put a name to. (Though Star Wars comes a close second.) And I try to make allowances, even when I find myself at a dinner party sitting at the same table as a Trek fan who has worked out a Voyager plot involving the first captain of the Enterprise and a throwaway plot line from Deep Space Nine, and wants to tell me about it. But, it also grates ... because, no, His Majesty's Starship is not like Star Trek. It features, yes, a starship; the hero is the starship's captain ... but there the similarity ends, and I don't just mean the way I carefully say "flight deck" instead of "bridge", "landing boat" instead of "shuttlecraft" and so on.

Let me explain.

Once upon a time, a man named Gene Roddenberry had a vision for a TV series. It would combine the idea of a Western wagon trail adventure in space with his rose-tinted view of the future: a time when bigotry, greed and ignorance had been banished from the human race by science, and the starships of a mighty United Federation of Planets cruised the spaceways, enforcing this enlightened lifestyle at the point of a phaser.

So far, so good, apart from the bit about science curing the human condition, but no one's perfect. The original series of Star Trek deserves its fame and Roddenberry deserves every penny he made from it. Looking at it nowadays, what tends to come to mind is the miniskirts and high heels of the female crew, William Shatner's gesture-intensive style of thespianism and an overall sense of tackiness. This is a shame because in its day it hummed with creativity and new ideas. When Roddenberry released the pilot adventure, "The Cage," the pundits gave him two pieces of advice, one of which he could ignore and one of which he had to accept. The first was to drop the guy with the pointy ears — he rode that one out. The other was more serious — he had committed the heinous offence of giving the Enterprise a female second in command, and this was just unacceptable. (It should also be noted that she wore exactly the same uniform as the men — the miniskirts were another later concession to the age.)

Star Trek was the first SF show to have a racially mixed crew (it also had television's first interracial kiss), where women were as equal to men as the times would allow. The Enterprise was a United Starship (though would you go into space in the alternative?). The crew had character faults: they weren't supermen. The aliens were more than commies in disguise: sometimes they could even be sympathetic. There was an upbeat feel to the show that gave a sense of optimism for the future: there may be trouble ahead, but we could survive (compare and contrast the Prime Directive with US foreign policy towards one particular less developed culture at the time — clue: we're talking about the late sixties). The original series is repeated so often that it is easy to forget it only ran for three seasons, and for at least two thirds of that time, new ideas were churning out.

And then the fans got hold of it, and that is the kiss of death for any show. They seized hold of every scrap of information released in the series and codified it. And when the Star Trek concept was resurrected in the 1980s with TNG, its freshness was stifled by the holy writ of Star Trek tradition and Roddenberryism. To make it worse, Gene Roddenberry's own rosy tinted view of human nature got more and more red-shifted: by the 23rd Century there would be no starvation, no disease, no poverty ... no conflict, not even the verbal sparring that was such a joy between Spock and McCoy. And now? Everyone likes everyone else; everyone is everyone else's friend. The liberal, all-embracing Federation is essentially California in space, and woe to anyone who contradicts it. The most desirable condition of any sentient species, regardless of the way they evolved or their own culture, is to be liberal, tolerant, agnostic, late twentieth century Californians. Writer guidelines for the show stipulate that the net movement of the characters in each episode should be nil: whatever happens, they should finish the episode no closer to, and no further away from, the other characters than when they started.

This is no way to tell a story, and that is why His Majesty's Starship is not Star Trek. At the end of His Majesty's Starship there is no question that things could ever be the same again.

Now, if people asked, "is it like Babylon 5?", that would be a different matter ...