5.12 ST: “World Enough & Time”

Okay, it’s an easy admission, I’m an Old School Star Trek nerd. I mean, yeah, I would watch all kinds of old scifi when I was young: Lost & Space, The Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and The Outer Limits. None of these felt quite as clean a hit as Star Trek. At the time, its over-the-top morality plays felt profound: nothing is as stirring as watching Captain Kirk teach people on an alternate Earth about liberty by reading to them the US Constitution. 

Whew. Makes a patriot all over again. 

And before all you Trekkies out there ask me to weigh in on which series, which Captain, which Klingon translation of Hamlet, which multiverse, which Borg Queen,why Section 31, or where Thomas Riker really is now, cool your jets. We’re not here for all that.  (Strange New Worlds, Picard, the original Strader, obviously Alice Krige, because all utopias require a flaw, he’s still working with Nog in the Active Four, and it’s not multiverses, its timelines, and there are only two of those canonical so the better question is which era, and that’s definitely ENT/SNW/TOS era.) 

But I’m willing to bet that, for most of us–any but the most extreme fans–you have not heard of the Star Trek New Voyages series, one of maybe three fan-created series of episodes and films in the Star Trek universe. 

Now we all have heard of fan-fiction by now, and most of us are rolling our eyes. OMG, he’s not going to talk about the Buffyverse and Kirk-slash-Spock romances, is he? No, not exactly, but I have a few questions around these, and in particular, a New Voyages episode that fits directly into our recent discussions.

In 2008, the third episode of the short-lived series was called “World Enough and Time.” Anyone who’s been listening to this podcast in the past three months knows what that title is about, a direct reference to the first line of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: “Had we but world enough and time.” It’s the opening line to the false speaker who uses it to seduce a young woman, while of course simultaneously philosophizing on the notions of death and carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More. 

Did the writers, Michael Reaves and Marc Zicree, understand what they were up to? Or were they just googling a bunch of literary quotes that had to do with time? Is this episode a literary case of reverse ekphrasisArt responds to art. Originally, the Greek term meant a leng... More, a visual representation of the ideas of the written? Is it less so, an allusion that opens up the larger themes of the Star Trek universe? If it’s science fiction or a TV show, or–horrors–a fanfiction, does it matter?

Well . . . guess what we’re going to talk about?

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Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and we’re about to boldly take Andrew Marvell where no metaphysical poetThe metaphysical poets were generally Europeans from the 160... More has gone before.

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Un-Trashing Mass Culture

Now, I get it. You’re not nearly the Star Trek fan that I am, and no worries. I forgive you.  And if you’re listening to a podcast about “literature,” I suspect that you have little use for the “non-literary.” We create divides between what is fine reading of great books and what we call “beach reading” or “guilty pleasures,” shame-facedly hiding the E. L. James or Sarah Maas, the Julia Quinns or Sophia Kinsellas when company comes over for tea. 

And I admit, as I have said earlier, our choices about what we read speak to how we spend our thinking time. This is not to say that each of us does not have a favorite movie or book that we irrationally attach ourselves to. It’s a matter of identity formation psychologically, and it’s also a genuine coping strategy in times of stress, something the television has largely fulfilled for most of its existence. And even the monks illuminating great manuscripts took time out for naughty fables and poems. So yeah. I can say without (too much) apology that one of my guilty pleasure books is Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings, a parody of Tolkien, and a favorite film is 1972’s Horror Express, starring Peter Cushing AND Christopher Lee and even Telly Savalas as a Russian cossack. How can you say no to Telly Savalas as a Russian cossack, I ask? 

So let’s start by getting over ourselves a little. And if that’s not enough, let’s throw a bit of shade on what we call “literary,” anyway, our ideas of “high culture” or “literary merit.”

1. Literary can’t be what we identify in online stores and bookshops: Authors and publishers self-define their books by what they imagine will best sell. There’s no “central arbiter” of this term today.
2. And literary can’t be defined by what we call “the literary canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More.” I talk about this at length  in an earlier episode called “The Original,” but in brief, that canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More is either prejudicially constructed by a narrow band of dead white male critics and scholars or by a notion of what is easiest to teach lessons from in schooling, neither an effective measure of literary greatness. 
3. More, historically, many works that we consider canonically literary now were seen as mass-level trash writing when printed: think Canterbury Tales, The Great Gatsby, or most of Shakespeare’s plays.
4. More and more we recognize that the publishing world itself is more attuned to profit-making than artist-revealing, churning out books for consumption and BookTok fawning than for depth of read, anyway.

None of this is to say that there aren’t great reads out there, globally and in multiple languages. What I’m challenging is that we can identify them by history, corporate publishing choices, or even scholarly opinion.

This creates all kinds of problems in choosing what to read, though, doesn’t it? Word of Mouth has become as valuable to many readers and watchers and listeners as anything else as the field of content publishing magnifies to unheard-of sizes. Fewer cultural or political gateways to prevent publication, no more suggesting that there are universal measurements for quality. It’s madness, I tell you, sheer madness.

And none of this is to at all argue that therefore all works we encounter we should value equally. Nonsense. When DIY content distribution becomes the norm, we’re bound to get (and we do) a powerfully big pile of crap. And a whole tone of fan-fiction style work is exactly that–people who fawn over books or shows and churn out their own fantasy drivel for their own entertainment, and maybe to receive complimentary platitudes from other fans. It’s harmless, but most of it is, shall we say, “not for the mainstream” reader.

But even this judgment isn’t absolute. A ton of fan fiction has gone on to full-time major industry best-sellers: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare had Harry Potter fan-inspiration; Anna Todd’s After was Harry Styles fanfiction; Reynard’s Gabriel’s Inferno was Twilight fanfiction originally; and then there’s Gregory MaGuire’s Wicked. Want another? Many of Shakespeare’s plays could be called fanfiction of Plutarch or Bocaccio or various Italian poems.

So we can’t claim that fanfiction–because it is fanfiction–alone disqualifies it from literary consideration. The genesis of literature is irrelevant to its product. And the judgment of its product cannot be assigned to for-profit businesses or to someone looking for an action-book for boys so they can manage their classroom better. 

We have to, ourselves, be discerning about what we choose. And that’s pretty scary.

And so here we are, about to look at some fanfiction–though on a different level altogether. Because while the lines of production and quality of reading blur and my semi-literate uncle could publish a semi-fictional family history and call it autobiography, the realm of the professional and the amateur are themselves confusing the situation more. 

New Voyages Backgrounder

Now we don’t have time for all of the issues and behind-the-scenes controversies surrounding a major production of a Star Trek episode by mostly amateur fans. So if you’re here looking for my take on the Nebula awards and the deCandido LiveJournal blog and Zicree’s tall tales, again, you’ll have to go elsewhere, Trekkies. For the rest of us, know that this episode had some struggles, and they are fairly poorly documented when you search through the internet’s WaybackMachine since most of what was posted has since been taken down. (The Wayback Machine, by the way, is the internet archive where everything that was ever on the internet is . . . still on the internet. Take the lesson, kiddos: there is no such thing as deleting from the internet!)

What I can do today is let you know a little about the series and then a lot about this episode. After that, I’ll give you a breakdown/summary of the episode, and then we’ll look at why it’s significant to our journey, what it has to say about my essential carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More question. Because, if even the Roman poet Horace couldn’t give me a full answer to its significance, why not go in the exact opposite direction?

For Star Trek: New Voyages, understand first that this is not an altogether amateur creation. Many of the writers, actors, and behind-the-scenes crew actually worked on various portions of the various Star Trek series previously or had other background in film or television production. And with more modern computers than they had in the early 1990s, the special effects were as good or better than those in The Next Generation series. The budgets were much smaller–I think this episode was made for about $60,000–but that’s also because these are 200-300 fans, and they worked as volunteers more than paid employees. The whole thing was filmed in just 12 days. 

At the time, Paramount Studios did not sue for copyright infringement or anything of the sort. It understood that supporting the fanbase was good for its brand and future products. According to some, they even helped by providing locations and access to databases of sounds and music. And they said nothing on this episode when The Original Series cast members George Takei (Hikaru Sulu) and Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Rand) joined in their original roles. In other words, the fan production was made in plain sight of Paramount studios, and they were okay with it. At least, at the time of this production. Later, they would put several of these fan productions, including New Voyages, out of business for reasons that would require a special Star Trek podcast to discuss–I think there are a dozen out there to listen to.. 

The plot of the story is based on Sulu’s character. An aging captain Sulu on the starship Excelsior thinks back to a time on Captain Kirk’s ship, decades before. Young Sulu and an ensign are seemingly killed in a temporal explosion and are thrown through time (and maybe universes) to a dead planet where they resign themselves to never being rescued, but they have and raise a daughter. Meanwhile, moments after the explosion, the Enterprise brings Sulu back through the transporter, but in the temporal mess after the explosion beams aboard this older Sulu from the dead planet where he has spent thirty years. They are also able to half-transport the daughter, keeping part of her on the Enterprise and the other part of her is quantumly anchored to the planet where she was born. Weird, I know. And I’ll now try to avoid all the science fiction jargon going forward! Anyway, the problem they face is this: for Sulu, how important are those last 30 years, torturously survived only by him but also his daughter, compared to his earlier life as a helmsman on the Enterprise? What if he had to choose between them?

Alluding to “World Enough and Time”

Now let’s back up for a moment to recall what Marvell was about with his poem. Because the title is an allusion to the poem, and for all of my reading about the fan dedication and set controversies around the story, no one talks about the story writing itself except for where the story idea came from and its use of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well. 

Let’s make sure we understand something about allusions, when they are done well. Allusions are not just “references” to other works to make us sound more literary. And they are not just references in order to say, “Look! I’ve found a matching idea in the same words.”  An allusion is one of the most powerful literary devices. It points to another cultural work for us to recall it, and then also demands that we understand the larger ideas inherent in that reference. In other words, we cannot understand this episode fully unless we also understand The Tempest and “To His Coy Mistress,” the two literary references in the script. Knowing what they are about should be essential to understanding how the new story uses, speaks to, alters, or challenges the original ideas.

In my classroom, my students were often fairly quick to point out a Christ reference or metaphor in literature, but there they would often stop. Or, if I urged them forward, they would find a few parallels between the work and the story of Jesus, noting the match. What was most difficult, though, was my inevitable follow-up question: Okay, if Simon from Lord of the Flies or Nakata from Kafka on the Shore is a Christ-like character, where do they differ? Because it is often in the variation, the changes the new writer makes from this allusion, that help us understand how the theme is built, the reason for the reference in the first place.

And while the Star Trek story uses several direct references to The Tempest, even quoting the play in several places, the title itself as allusion to Marvell’s poem is what we’re about here.

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

The speaker then goes on to explain that the lady deserves that much time, hundreds of years for each part, for adoration and love. But, of course, such time is not available to us. Death approaches, so our speaker says that lovers cannot enjoy each other in death, so they must therefore have sex now and quickly. 

We know the argument is false, his motives impure, manipulative. For those just catching up, there are four large episodes on this poem earlier that develop this ad nauseum, but through that poem we also have the larger philosophical question: if our seducer’s method for how to live–his carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More argument–is a cheat, then what should we do?

In short, “world enough and time” is mankind’s call of despair against time and mortality. We have neither of these things, and so we must ask ourselves what we might do with a life which will end in inevitable death? Does the Reaves/Zicree story address this question? 

Star Trek Answers Marvell (All Spoilers!)

Fair warning: this entire chapter of the podcast has lots of spoilers, but if you are at all a Star Trek fan, you’ll want to watch it, anyway. Or you could pause now, go watch the show linked in the Show Notes, and then come back! 

Back, now?  Pretty cool, right?  Okay. So let’s see what happened:

The story goes right after Marvell in the opening teaser, with Rand and Sulu talking about how much time they have, though each are much older. 

What’s on today’s schedule?

I cleared it. You’ll have all the time in the world.

All the time in the world . . . 

From there we flashback to Sulu on the original Enterprise–all the characters are played by new actors, of course–and we have our young Sulu in temporal jeopardy story. If anything, science fiction offers us a vehicle for testing the limits of mortality by playing with time travel. One of the real strengths of fantasy and science fiction is just this: an opportunity to redesign our circumstances in order to test political and philosophical questions. Star Trek is fairly famous for it. Here we have a special field in space that opens up portals of time and other dimensions; and we have a transporter technology that beams people from place to place by breaking down their molecular structure into unknown spaces, subspaces.. With that kind of framing, we can do anything!

When describing his time on the planet, Sulu talks about why he decided to give up any chance of rescue: 

A desert that stretched forever. There was wildlife, fruits, we were able to survive…

And in time, you and Chandris . . .
There comes a point where one has to start living a life, whatever it is, rather than waiting for one to begin.

Subtle, but perhaps a hint of an answer to carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More: live what you have. But he also says that Captain Kirk is always able to snatch life from the jaws of death. Kirk can cheat death, escape his own mortality. A trickster figure, as we know from the larger canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More of Kirk stories, but that isn’t how Sulu lives.

Alana, Sulu’s grown daughter, half-arrives via transporter. She’s locked between two universes: partly Kirk’s and partly on the planet in another dimension of time. Spock describes her existence in a wonderful phrase which echoes what we’ve discussed earlier when it comes to literary interpretation: “She exists in a state of quantum indeterminacy.” In a bit of ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More, Sulu will promise her, this beautiful young woman, everything: 

This is only the beginning: . . .  Centauri 3, The Valis Marineris on Mars, San Francisco, all the places I’ve told you about. We’ll roll them out like a red carpet. You can go anywhere, do anything. The whole universe is ahead of you . . . 

And you’d be right that such promises are only foreshadowing of tragedy.

Now, I shouldn’t have to tell you that the presence of an attractive young woman, even one only half abroad the Enterprise, makes for a Kirk romance storyline. And Kirk’s reputation is well known, even by the daughter: she calls Kirk a lonely man, one who has a “girl in every world, none mattering beyond the moment,” so that he sounds much like Marvell’s speaker. And yes, loneliness could well be one part of the explanation for this approach to seduction. In this way, Kirk’s fleeting and meaningless romances are his way to cheat death.

But our crisis develops. The Enterprise must escape the temporal disruption, but doing so may cause them to sacrifice Sulu’s daughter who is still half-bound to the planet. As Spock says, reminiscent of Marvell’s second stanza: “Time is a luxury we do not have.” 

It is Alana, however, who may have the best concept of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More. She is given a brief opportunity to tour the starship, and while on an otherwise boring deck, she spins about and hugs herself, then says to Kirk:

This.

What?

The best moment of my life.

Few people recognize it while it’s happening.

All the better reason to notice it.

It is not death that we must fear: it’s not even something she thinks about. It’s only that present moment, of (literally in her case) embracing the life she is in. In plucking or harvesting what she has, the right now. And Sulu himself, not a moment later in another scene, says: 

Uhura. Don’t let it all go by.

But there’s the rub: the ship finds a way to save itself, but only if they restore Sulu to his original younger self, the self that never spent time on a planet. He would lose memory of the last 30 years, including his daughter. This is a sacrifice Sulu is willing to make, but the process of leaving also means that Alana’s life would be lost in the escape. Either Sulu’s daughter dies and Sulu loses all memory of her, or the Enterprise and its 430 crew are dead. Sulu can’t bear this possibility, making his past 30 years utterly meaningless by losing everything, his daughter dead and his memory gone.

But then Alana stops him:

I can’t let you do this!

Alana!

Even if Mr. Spock is right, and I survive, what kind of life would that be? How can I go back to that empty world? How can I live knowing that you–and that all of you died because of me?  I don’t know if there’s an afterlife. I don’t know where we go when we die. Oh, but father, it’s not how long we live, it’s how we live that matters. Let my life mean something!

Even her last moments, watching the bridge do its business, all filmed in slow motion, are full of wonder.

Now, I haven’t spent any time at all talking about The Tempest references in the show, and they are many. Kirk as Ferdinand, Sulu and Alana as Prospero and Miranda (or Ariel), the planet named Caliban. Father and daughter in their last words recite Prospero’s lines from Act IV to each other:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

…  We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, …

It’s a fitting cap onto the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More philosophy, excerpted this way, though more might have been made of it if drawn outward more thematically.  But heck, Reaves and Zicree are bringing together three texts here: Marvell, Shakespeare, and the Star Trek canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More itself, so we can’t blame them for not crossing every “t” in a one-hour program.

In a closing scene, young Sulu, having forgotten everything (or more rightly, never having lived it), is given the chance to get those memories back from Spock’s mind meld. He is warned that with those memories will come all of the grief. And he accepts it.

We come back from the flashback, Captain Sulu’s present time on the Excelsior. Sulu’s daughter Demora, from this timeline, arrives with his new granddaughter, and Sulu has asked that she be named Alana. He says to the baby, “The whole universe is ahead of you,” again this paraphrasing of ‘world enough and time,” and he confesses to his daughter who doesn’t understand: 

I don’t understand. Who’s Alana?

You had a sister.

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Did We Get An Answer?

Better than Horace? I’m not here to compare. 

The more important question is what “World Enough and Time” does with Horace and Marvell and all of the others that re-invents those questions for us. 

• What are we to think of encroaching and inevitable death?
• What are we to do with the time we have? 
• How must we understand time and memory, grief and love?

Yes, Horace offers in his Ode 11 an admonition to live for the present moment, forgetting everything, but it is also subtly a cover for a physical seduction over someone who is below his own status. The later Cavalier poets seem little different, though are brazen, entitled. Marvell mocks this chauvinism and assault, though exemplifying it crassly, and he offers no clear alternative to the larger philosophical questions. Even Peter Keating, responsible for our popular imagination of “take all the risks” carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More, finds that his teachings end in tragedy. The Epicureans might offer us more, of course, were we to look all the way back to them–Epicuris, Philodemus, Lucretius–and perhaps we should, but I couldn’t help but wonder why no one else we’ve touched upon so far has been able to do much except misread and manipulate and sexualize the philosophy. 

And along comes Star Trek. And not even Star Trek but a fan version of it. And it’s true that in this simple melodramatic hour of science fiction clapped together by a team of creators  could not by itself be called the most artful of creations, it manages to do a bit more in some ways than we’ve seen before.

And you’re right. A lot of Star Trek and a lot of television and a lot of Hallmark cards tend to oversimplify their messages, scraping down nuance and complexity to a bare bones preaching, a didactic message that batters the heads of those in the audience who may be a bit slower.

But even so. Here, the message of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More is more stark, more clear: embrace where we are and when we are; enjoy the splendor that’s before us, but also recognize it for splendor. (I am reminded of times that when I travel, I always ask the locals something like, “How do you not love living beneath these beautiful mountains” or “with such a view of the sea,” etc. And inevitably I get a shrug; they are used to it.) We have to recognize what we have before us. Our lives are made meaningful by these perspectives, that time was not wasted, so that death, when it comes, matters far less: “we are such stuff as dreams are made on” and “our little life is rounded with sleep.” Yes, the life we live has grief, pain, but these memories are what we live on, what we use in engaging the world before us. The future is not a place for anxiety but for expectation. 

And, if I am not going too far, Reaves and Zicree omit a key word from Marvell: They abandon the “If” from the first line. The title of the episode is not “If we had world enough and time,” which is the opening to the fallacy and set-up for the seduction; it’s “World Enough and Time,” which we do have, always. It’s not measured by the hundreds of years of adoration for a woman as promised by Marvell’s speaker, nor in the rushed urgency of “every pore with instant fires.” The meaning we make of life has very little to do with time at all. And still more, since the life that became so sacred to Sulu was a dead deserted planet, meaning has very little to do with where we are, world enough, either. 

This seems like a good moment to talk about the strategy I used in looking over this episode. We already talked about Noticing as a first step in interpretation: trust what you see because it’s likely to be significant. In “World Enough and Time,” I made a list of everything I saw that might be connected to Marvell or carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More.  Then I went on to the next step: Significance. I asked myself what these things I noticed might possibly mean. I tried out different ideas to wonder at how they were connected. For instance, at first I thought that maybe Kirk’s role was a kind of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More live-in-the-present character, but if he is, it’s clearly only under the conditions that Alana spells out: loneliness and the cheating of death, so I had to revise my idea of Significance. 

Then I went on to the third step, a new one for us: Pattern. Do all of the meanings or Significances we have found come together to form a clear pattern?  If they don’t, I might want to reconsider my thinking, because either the author screwed up in the writing or I did in the reading. What is that Pattern (or maybe Patterns?) How do they alter the original ideas I had in mind? What might the text or story be therefore telling us? This is heading in the direction of message or theme, isn’t it? What I discovered here is that, in this episode, some small details I wasn’t sure had Significance actually were more important than I thought, because they did support and add to the Pattern I was discovering, that the EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More philosophy was more pronounced here than even in Horace. 

Notice, Significance, Pattern. Three of the four key steps for interpretation we’ve now discussed. I’ll add the fourth step a little later. 

But to the Pattern of this episode, No, this is not a thorough exploration of this thematic argument: again, it’s one hour of Star Trek, but it’s enough to start us thinking again. Where does such an argument fail? Can it endure other tests more realistic than a “temporal indeterminacy” in fan-iverse film-making?  It’s worth finding out. 

So we’ve got an examination to conduct. There’s a world out there pretending to live carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More in all kinds of interpretations. Is there anything at stake in our misreadings of it?

That’s an argument for another episode. But if you have a moment, look around this next week or so to notice how many places we make “seize the day” sorts of arguments and appeals. How is it being used? Star Trek’s Alana tells us to take the time to notice.

And, oh, while you’re doing that, go read something.

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Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

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Bibliography

Cawley, James. “Home and Introduction to Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II.” Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II - English, http://www.stnv.de/index.php. Accessed Apr. 2025.

—. “The Future of New Voyages.” Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II - English, https://www.stnv.de/en/news-nvfuture.php. Accessed Apr. 2025.

KRAD’s Inaccurate Guide to Life - SFWA Screws the Pooch. 11 Mar. 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20120311145911/http://kradical.livejournal.com/1178770.html.

Reaves, Michael, and Marc Zicree. Star Trek New Voyages, 4×03, World Enough and Time. 28 July 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4TC5wl0IzE.

Star Trek: Phase II: The First Professional Fan Film? | Den of Geek. 6 Sept. 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150906022942/http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-trek/19418/star-trek-phase-ii-the-first-professional-fan-film.

startreknewvoyages. Star Trek New Voyages, World Enough and Time, Making Of - Documentary. 6 July 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=binieGtiwmg.