I've been reading through Fredric Jameson's book on science fiction and utopia lately, and was shocked by his lack of commentary on the _Star Trek_ franchise. In many respects, _Star Trek_ is the most significant work of 20th-century Utopian fiction, certainly the one with the most lasting cultural footprint. The changes of the franchise across its history also seem to support Jameson's thesis in quite a neat fashion - that the decline and demise of the Utopian fiction has been the result of the enclosing of our creative imagination to think of new possibilities beyond postmodern capitalism.

_Deep Space Nine_ represents this fractious relationship with Utopianism in culture at large. By the time of this series, Roddenberry's Utopian vision has been mostly destroyed: the Federation is a decadent bureaucracy; its commanding officers willingly dirty their hands to get the job done; humanity no longer has the ability to use its own creative powers to solve its problems - it must appeal to quasi-religious entities for its salvation. The conflicts between Sisko and his superiors more often resemble moments of hopeless bureaucratic entrapment in _The Wire_ than any kind of Utopian fiction. In contrast to the communistic sentiments (albeit of a non-Marxist kind) of both _Star Trek_ and, to a lesser extent, _The Next Generation_, _Deep Space Nine_'s depiction of perpetual compromise as a necessary political tool expresses a decidedly conservative worldview. Its later season war focus served to further exacerbate these existing strains on its Utopian framework (its criticisms of the hopelessly naive Federation politicians and their inability to serve the Federation's military needs could easily be mistaken for contemporary warhawk rhetoric).

Yet, interestingly, the series itself contains an episode which affirms the positive relationship between Utopian fiction and contemporary political struggle. In the famous episode, _Far Beyond the Stars_, Sisko's character - under the influence of spiritual intervention - imagines himself as Benny Russell, a black science fiction writer in 1950s America who attempts to get his story published, against the racialist pressures of his time. Russell's story - through its meta-textual incorporation of _Deep Space Nine_'s universe and the crew of the titular space station - envisions a post-racial political order in which black Americans can live and work together without identity divisions. The story not only acts as a means of conceptualising potential futures for an oppressed race in the past, but it also makes a general comment about the function of Utopian fiction - that it exists as a means of projecting onto the future possible alternatives to current social and moral conditions. By imagining a political order which is post-racial and expressing it in fiction, Russell is able to suggest that such a future is possible for his people; _Star Trek_ - at its roots - fulfills this same role in our world. I suspect that this nod to Utopianism-as-method is expressed unconsciously, given that the writers tend to focus on the superficial anti-racist text when speaking about the episode retrospectively.

This dichotomy at the heart of _Deep Space Nine_; its simultaneous commitment to Utopianism as a means of political and moral struggle and its desire to ground this Utopianism, thereby negating its revolutionary power, is in many respects what lends the series its dramatic tension and why perhaps, in a cultural age as cynical as this one, people still continue to enjoy it. That said, I think its deeply ambiguous attitude towards Utopianism as a political methodology is ultimately negative, particularly now that we can see how it served as the foundation for the relentless cynicism and mean-spiritedness of _Star Trek_'s contemporary incarnations. This is a terrible shame, not because I have any special love for the _Star Trek_ franchise, but rather because it could be the potential foundation for a re-vitalised, popular Utopianism.