A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine. David K. Seitz. 2023.
Deep Space Nine is my favorite show. I pretend to no objectivity when writing about it; I think it’s better than much canonized prestige television. I think in a just world, it would at least be acknowledged alongside endlessly analyzed pre-golden age genre shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Twin Peaks, works which have justly invited both devotion and academic analysis. DS9 has never really gotten that; other Trek shows have, of course, but not this one, the richest and most complex and best one. I’ve seen every episode many times. I could talk about it for hours.
Which is why I was so happy to find out that this book existed. There are books about the tv shows I love, but sadly so many of the ones I’ve found have been heavier on trivia than analysis. I was afraid that even something celebrating the greatness of my favorite show would be based soley around liberal representation politics: the show is great because Sisko makes Black fans feel good, and Dax makes queer fans feel good, without any exploration of the complexity of those characters and the ways they subvert the audience’s desire to unambiguously admire them. This wasn’t that, thank god. I was looking for something academic with a lot of citations and references to theory and I got it. I got something unapologetically left wing, too, which was a bonus, and again without leaning on anything that looked like “this show is great because it’s communist, and the same kind of communist I am.” Seitz is a geographer, and I think geography is a surprisingly apt field for an exploration of this series, one so concerned with place and peoples’ relationships with place.
Which is not to say A Different Trek is perfect; it’s not. It’s maybe an unfortunate side effect of writing the first extended academic treatment of something, but Seitz spends what seems like an awful lot of time defending the exigence of his project: explaining why this show deserves extended analysis. Maybe if he had been able to write in conversation with other academics he would have been able to relax a little bit; the validity of what he was doing would have been self-evident, because it had been done before. As it is, his thesis seems to be at least half the basic fact that DS9 deserves analysis, rather than taking that for granted and going from there. And (I’ve noticed this in other academic works dealing with new or under-discussed subjects), Seitz can fall prey to a tendency to cram everything he thinks about the show into this one book, which is impossible in any case but particularly with a text this large and rich. It can make the book feel a little unwieldy.
I don’t agree with everything Seitz says. He analyzes the show almost purely through a political lens, which is of course important and natural, but neglects how the show’s writers were often more concerned with character and relationships, rather than political allegory. And he can see the (existing) political allegories as more straightforward and less murky than I believe they really are. He writes of the Bajorans as almost total stand ins for Palestinians, focusing on them as an active anti-colonial resistance movement, but neglects how the bulk of their story on DS9 takes place after that movement has largely succeeded. They are Palestinians, but they are also Jews after the formation of Israel, the Irish after the creation of the Free State, and China after the defeat of Imperial Japan - and American leftists have (for good reason) varied and conflicting appraisals of all these peoples. Making the Bajorans fill the role of the people for whom you have the most sympathy robs the story of much of its depth; you’re not forced to confront the ways oppressed peoples can make moral compromises, some of them messy or hard to forgive, when they attempt to build new societies.
But I may be myself falling into the trap I wrote about above: wanting the work to encompass all there is to say about DS9 because there’s been so little written about it, and who knows when more will be written. Seitz has a particular perspective, and he is not obligated to take on anyone else’s; this is as it should be. I suppose if I have a real source of dissatisfaction with this book it’s that I wanted more; I wanted it to be twice as long. I want ten more books like this. I doubt I’ll ever get them, sadly, though I’ve found more people have been discovering the greatness of DS9 in the last few years, so who knows.
If you don’t know the show, you should watch it - there is so much there to love. As much as anything else, it’s great hangout show - Trek is sometimes at its best when you’re just spending time with your space friends as they solve problems, and DS9 has a lot of that. And when the stakes are high they hit like little else; it goes for darkness and complexity more than most sci-fi of its time. It’s a Star Trek show for grownups, possibly the only one. And if you have seen the show, you’d dig this book I think. It’s academic, and heavy on theory, but not excessively so - it’s a quick and accessible read. I recommend it.