Hey Mastoneighbors who are historians and anthropologists.
... Did we have anything like Star Trek before Star Trek?
What I mean is that we've had mythology before. Stories of people, gods and heroes, parables that explore the human condition and try to encode the important truths.
But most of them are about the past, right? The past or the magical present just on the edge of the comfortable. The Arthurian legend. The Greek stories. The Roman stories. The Journey to the West. Aesop fables. The stories of the native peoples of the Americas. The stories of The peoples of Africa, and India, and the Polynesian regions and the mid-East and Japan and the rest of Asia (and of course I have to apologize for glossing over like 1400 cultures here, my knowledge is limited).
Apart from the occasional apocalyptic story forward to the end of time... Were there any collections of mythology that dwelt in the future and that imagined who people could become, or is this a relatively modern phenomenon?
It's just interesting to me to think about. It's a series that was started by people who survived a war that was predicated upon, among other things, people chasing a national identity that involved a mythology that they had fallen and could reclaim glory. And in a sense Star Trek (and several other stories in the science fiction genre) sort of counterpoint that with the idea that, to the extent glory is possible at all... We're not there yet.
... But with a lot of effort and care and empathy, we could be.
@mark I think you're waxing a bit on the hyperbole side on this one. Star Trek was, by Gene's own definition, meant to be "Wagon Train in Outer Space". And while yes, Wagon Train did explore personalities and motivations, it was basically conflict driven episodic television, as has been the entire ST franchise. Gene had his own views of course, not all of which are widely known today, but ultimately it all comes down to a famous line reaching back a long, long way: "It's only TV."