Trekology.com shows you how powers of persuasion can be discovered and examined inside Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek and inside Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica.  The writer of this site is Woody Goulart, PhD, who is solely responsible for its content.

This is not a fan site, but science fiction space adventure fans certainly are welcome here. The purpose of Trekology.com is to share research findings and related observations about Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek and Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica.

That these two successful television franchises are similiar should not be news to anyone. They are similar by design.

How these science fiction television properties work, however, may not be visible to everybody. Not to worry. This site will go a long way to explain and show you why the processes are working within.

This site was started during the late 1990s and originally dealt primarily with Star Trek. But, the content of this site was updated because after what happened on September 11, 2001, the persuasive powers of the science fiction space adventure format were put to use in Battlestar Galactica for very different reasons compared to Star Trek’s use of the genre. Whereas Star Trek in the 1960s during the U.S. involvement in warfare in Southeast Asia functioned as a voice that spoke for peace and against military involvement, Battlestar Galactica started in 2003 during the U.S. involvement in warfare in Iraq and uses the medium of television to challenge how people think about things like terrorism, the occupation of a country by a foreign military force, suicide bombers, insurgents, and the oftentimes violent political agendas behind supposedly peace-loving organized religions.

Ronald D. Moore had producer and/or writer responsibilities on three of the Star Trek television spin-off series and two of the Star Trek motion pictures. So, if there is any science fiction television franchise that has earned the right to be called a successor to the persuasive power in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, it most definitely is Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. 

Trekology.com will show you what the 21st century version of Battlestar Galactica has to teach us about the persuasive power of science fiction space adventures on television and in movies.

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So, what is trekology? As a writer, I settled upon this made-up or coined word. I wanted a word that would remind readers of the famous Paramount Pictures franchise, but also illuminate the careful focus on research and study of Star Trek to learn how it works. We know that in the English language the suffix “-logy” on the end of a word creates a word that means “the study of…” There are numerous well-known examples: Archaeology is the study of ancient history. Bacteriology is the study of bacteria. Climatology is the study of the climate. And so on.

I am a writer who studied Star Trek in particular so that I might examine the idea content within narrative entertainment that enabled producers and writers to attempt to persuade the audience. After I finished studying Star Trek both formally and informally during the 1970s, I arrived at a conclusion that people widely accept today: This U.S. television series that employed the space opera genre is more than just entertaining and fun to watch; it has specific powers of audience persuasion deliberately embedded within the storytelling by producers and writers.

Not surprisingly, I have also arrived at the conclusion that science fiction storytelling in the visual media that employs the space opera genre reasonably can be expected to work in similar ways to how Star Trek works. The inner workings of persuading an audience using the space opera genre is what this site explores. The umbrella term trekology signifies the importance and relevance of the study of Star Trek. But, I know of no single word that means the study of audience persuasion in science fiction, so let me leave coining a new word to someone else while I get on with presenting my findings and comments.

Persuasion in Science Fiction

Skeptics may scoff and ask: Yeah, well, did the producers and writers of Star Trek have an intent to persuade an audience about anything?

Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, University of Chicago Press (1961), wrote: “The whole question of the differences between artists who consciously calculate and artists who simply express themselves with no thought of affecting a reader is an important one, but it must be kept separate from the question of whether an author’s work communicates itself. The success of an author’s rhetoric does not depend on whether he thought about his readers as he wrote…”

But, wait a minute! There is specific proof that the producers and writers of Star Trek did have an intent to persuade an audience about specific themes:

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek specifically said so:

“What you have to understand is, when we made Star Trek between 1966 and 1969, this was before Laugh-In came on which opened up a lot of frontiers on television. Women had before appeared in bikinis before, quite shaking their hips the way they did on Laugh-In. There was a lot more censorship restriction. Television was very afraid of anything that had to do with sex, politics, religion, war, controversy. Now, much of that has been changed by shows such as All in the Family, which gets involved in adult subjects, and Maude and others. But we were severely restricted and as a result we hid a lot of our theme statements. In fact, the whole idea of doing Star Trek was to be able to write about things we wanted to talk about. We figured if we went to a strange planet and did it, why, it would somehow get past the network censors, and indeed it did.” [Source: Personal interview with Gene Roddenberry, Burbank, California, August 7, 1973.]

During the summer of 1979 as Paramount Pictures promoted Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the studio released a newsletter in which Gene Roddenberry was quoted on the “idea content” that the film promised implicitly to bring to moviegoers. He noted that since Star Trek as a television series in the 1960s “didn’t have the reality of straight drama, we could do an anti-war story, make a statement against involvement in Vietnam; we could have a multi-racial crew on the Enterprise with many key roles play by women. These weren’t acceptable ideas on TV a dozen years ago–but we could get away with them in a science fiction show.” Emphasizing that part of the popularity of Star Trek has always been both its social commentary as well as its dramatic entertainment, Roddenberry concluded: “You can turn out the action and adventure that appeals to one segment of the audience, and at the same time make incisive or daring comments about our times. Science fiction happens to be one of the most versatile literary forms for making comment, to talk about alternative todays and possible tomorrows.”

Why Not Call it Galacticalogy Instead of Trekology?

These two entertainment industry productions–Roddenberry’s Star Trek and Moore’s Battlestar Galactica–can best be understood by looking at them in the order in which they were created.  Of the two, because  Roddenberry’s Star Trek was created first, using the made-up word trekology makes logical sense rather than making up another word like galacticalogy.  In the specific context of this website, the word trekology is used to mean the study of the storytelling processes and the character development processes that worked inside Roddenberry’s Star Trek.  Since Ronald D. Moore utilized those storytelling and character development processes when he worked on Star Trek, one should expect that Moore likely would utilize the same or similar storytelling and character development processes in Battlestar Galactica.  The proper credit for initiating these storyteling and character development processes–embedded with idea content that could be used persuasively upon the audience–belongs to Roddenberry and other producers and writers of Star Trek.  So, the word trekology is the most accurate choice of a word to use in describing and analyzing storytelling and character development processes in both Roddenberry’s Star Trek and Moore’s Battlestar Galactica.