Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Rebecca Douglass, Beth Camp, Liza @ Middle Passages, and Natalie @ Literary Rambles.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

Each month, the Insecure Writer’s Support Group asks us a question.  The question is totally optional!  IWSG member can answer it if they like, or they can talk about something else if that’s what they want (or need) to do this month.  No pressure, no judgment.  This month’s optional question is:

Describe someone you admired when you were a kid.  Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?

Oh boy… so I had an assignment in school once.  I had to pick an American historical figure I admired and give an oral presentation on that person to the class.  The teacher said we could pick anybody, so I picked Gene Roddenberry.  Then the teacher said to take this seriously and made me pick somebody else.  I’ve been bitter about that ever since, but now—finally!—I can satisfy little kid me’s dream and tell you why I admired Gene Roddenberry so much.

Truth be told, though, little kid me didn’t know much about Roddenberry.  All I knew was that he created Star Trek, and I absolutely adored Star Trek.  When I was happy, Star Trek was the most fun and exciting thing on television.  And when I was no so happy, Star Trek offered hope and the promise that the future would be better than today.  No matter who was bullying me at school, and no matter what I was dealing with at home, Star Trek reassured me that the future would be better.

It’s also one of the main reasons I started writing.  Some of the first “books” I wrote as a kid were just Star Trek fan fiction.  I then branched out into writing Jurassic Park fan ficiton, Aliens fan fiction, Star Wars fan fiction, Battlestar Galactica fan fiction, Doctor Who fan fiction….  Later, I created my own original characters and sent them off adventuring in my own original Sci-Fi universe.  Meanwhile, I started reading Scientific American, Sky and Telescope, Universe Today… I tried reading more challenging, more technical sources of science info, too.  I didn’t understand everything I read, but the more I learned about space and science, the more convinced I became that Star Trek got it right: the future will be better than today.  Or at least, the future can be better, if we don’t lose faith in ourselves.

This isn’t a message unique to Star Trek.  All Sci-Fi, regardless of how realistic or unrealistic the science may be, offers us hope for the future.  Even darker, more dystopian visions of the future still offer hope, in their own way: hope that we may yet choose a different path forward.

As an adult, I’ve come to learn that Gene Roddenberry was kind of a jerk.  He cheated Alexander Courage (the guy who wrote the Star Trek theme song) out of half of the royalties he was owed.  He was wildly unfaithful to his wife.  He had a notoriously short temper and created a toxic work environment on set.  In short, Roddenberry was not the hero little kid me might have thought.

Still, Roddenberry had some good ideas, and (with the help of many other talented people) he made something that made a real difference in my life.  Now more than ever, here on this blog and in all my other creative work, I hope I can pass on some of that Star Trek-ian optimism to others.