Our Children’s Children’s Folktales: Inside Adam Banks’s “Deep Space Nine” course
In 1969 (the year of the first moon landing), the Moody Blues released their fourth album, giving it the deliberately mythical and futuristic title To Our Children’s Children’s Children. An image on the inside of the record sleeve combined photography with painting to show the members of the band sitting around a campfire in a cave, while around them and outside the cave the viewer can detect various clues that we are not on our old familiar Earth: a glowering orange moon (or sun? or planet?) floats above a jagged alien landscape; computers and other high-tech gadgets lurk in the shadows of the cave. This image made clear that even on an alien world, even in an age of space travel, humans would still gather around the fire to tell their stories. (Each of the album’s songs takes on this theme of future times and distant worlds.)
This image came to my mind (it may have helped that I recently listened to this album, to mark the recent passing of Mike Pinder, the Moodies’ original keyboard player) as I sat in on Adam Banks’s class, "Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Alternative Futurisms and Radical Worldbuilding," co-taught with Grace Toléqué, a Program Officer in the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Grace told a story about a turtle who could do amazing tricks, but would not simply do these tricks on demand; it had to feel like it. “Never underestimate the power of the little man,” she offered as a possible moral to the story. Stories embody community, Grace stressed, carrying forward the memory, the very life of the community, as everyone took part in the sharing of narratives.
—Which is what the class then proceeded to do. Students were invited to contribute a folk tale out of their own heritage, tales in which wise or trickster animals showed up the limits of much-vaunted human intelligence. As Adam then guided the discussion, current examples of animal folk-heroes were proposed: the orcas sinking sailboats in the Mediterranean, for reasons that they still keep to themselves; the female elephant who trampled a woman to death in India in 2022, in revenge for the woman’s having helped hunters kill the elephant’s calf. The folk tale offers us a chance to engage with an intelligence that stands apart from merely human experience, to see ourselves from a different angle.
Science Fiction carries on this storytelling tradition, Adam suggested, composing folk-tales to be told around the fire even when we become a multiplanetary species. How different is the turtle or the elephant from an alien in a Sci-Fi story? Are not such imagined extraterrestrials speculative extensions of our own consciousness, funhouse-mirror reflections of our own qualities—for better and sometimes possibly for worse?
We then turned to an example out of Deep Space Nine, the Star Trek spin-off show from the 1990s that depicted life not on a spaceship zapping hither and yon around the galaxy at warp-nine, but on a space station, a waypoint for travelers and intermittently a touchpoint for interstellar conflict. On space station Deep Space Nine (known formerly as Terok Nor to its actual builders, the militaristic Cardassians), everyone is an alien; there are communities and sub-communities, tribes and shifting alliances, but a sense of equality prevails. Everyone on the station can be both an insider and an outsider, relative to everyone else. The station’s commander is a human, a Star Fleet officer, Captain Benjamin Sisko, a widower who lives on the station with his son, Jake (and the actor who played Jake, Cirroc Lofton, regularly sits in on the class via Zoom). Otherwise the command staff of the station are almost all non-human, ranging from the symbiont Dax (whose species, the Trill, combine a humanoid host body with a much longer-lived symbiont) to the Bajoran executive officer, Major Kira (the space station orbits planet Bajor, and the Cardassians relinquished control over the station when they ended their long colonizing rule), to the shape-shifting chief of security, Odo. Odo was thought to be one of a kind until his long-lost kin, the Changelings, made contact, precipitating a war that drove the plot of the series for multiple seasons. Spoiler alert: the Federation (i.e., the good guys) win—but we have to wait until the series finale to see this victory realized.
As it emerges in the course of this discussion, world-building lies at the heart of storytelling. “We are always engaged in world-building,” Grace remarked. “We bring ourselves into the worlds we build.” But who are we? Who builds these worlds, and for whom are they being built? Many of the characters on Deep Space Nine come from subaltern or conflicted backgrounds, as survivors or sometimes refugees. As mentioned above, Major Kira represents a planet emerging from a long, brutal period of colonization; Odo must live as a minority of one, profoundly alone among peoples he finds it difficult to connect with. Even the station’s tailor, Mr. Garak, has a complicated back-story: he is a superannuated Cardassian intelligence officer who cannot come in from the cold. He is exiled to DS9 and must make what shift he can both merely to secure a livelihood as well as to hold off various attempts to pull him back into a dangerous life that he had hoped to have left behind.
The show takes on heavier themes than one might ordinarily associate with Sci-Fi on television: colonialism and its aftermath; the fraught questions of one’s identity, the challenge of staying true to oneself while also finding a sense of community with others. But this is Star Trek, after all: even if Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura did not after all share the very first interracial kiss on TV, there can be no doubt that it was an early instance; Star Trek routinely addressed pressing questions of the day, such as the Cold War, racial tensions, and the perils of overreliance on technology.
To cope with this range of possibilities, Adam interweaves stretches of discussion with brief timed writing prompts, called “Quick Treks.” One such prompt invited students to consider the question of ancestry: who in their biological or chosen family line shaped them decisively? To whom do they see themselves connected across time, across generations; who helped make them who they are? This could also be approached in terms of professional or artistic influence. And how, moreover, would they like to see such connections depicted in art and media? Students were given ten minutes to pair and& share, and then discussion was opened up. Students shared out their own narratives of connection, and then Adam shifted the discussion to consideration of collective heritage. To whom do we feel a connection in community?
As Sandra Bishop, a Zoom-guest (and mentor of Adam’s) pointed out, “Our ancestors echo through time and show up as us.” But sometimes in reflecting on these ancestors we also have “forgiveness work” to do; in keeping with the day’s theme of non-linear time, Sandra and Adam invoked the complexity and occasional ambivalence of our relationship with our past(s). We may also need to practice forgiveness for ourselves.
All of this deep and thoughtful discussion then turned seamlessly to consideration of the Deep Space Nine episodes assigned as viewing for that week. How did these episodes treat these problems of non-linear time and intergenerational connection (and possible disjunction)? How do such concepts shape plot lines and relationships among characters?
As classtime drew to a close, Admiral Banks docked the shuttlecraft, bringing us in for a smooth landing: we need to be able to walk through the educational experience with our whole souls intact, to be free as writers, not cowed or made to feel ashamed. We need to make sure there is room for our ancestors–chosen, familial, artistic or professional–and for our whole selves. Writing instruction must not cut us off from ourselves but should instead equip us to express our whole selves.
Grace left us with a final thought: once our ancestors have passed, they are freer to be present; we call out their names.
