The Trek Files: A Roddenberry Star Trek Podcast

Norman Spinrad's original March 1967 story outline for "The Planet Eater" introduced Star Trek to an unstoppable machine roaming the galaxy, consuming planets for fuel and leaving destruction in its wake. By the time it reached television, the story had a new title, "The Doomsday Machine," and became one of the most celebrated episodes of the original series.
Author and filmmaker Jeffrey Morris joins Larry Nemecek at Star Trek Las Vegas to revisit that original outline and consider its warning through a distinctly 21st-century lens. Drawing from his new book, A Future Askew, Jeffrey explores artificial intelligence, social media, technological disruption, and the increasingly complicated distance between the optimistic future Star Trek imagined and the one we're actually building.
Could today's rapidly developing technology become our own version of the Planet Eater: enormously powerful, increasingly autonomous, and ultimately beyond the understanding of its creators? Sixty years after Star Trek began imagining the future, an old-fashioned doomsday machine provides a surprisingly timely place to ask where we're headed next.

Document of the week:
"The Planet Eater" by Norman Spinrad — Story Outline, March 6, 1967
Additional references:
Jeffrey Morris — A Future Askew: Urgent Essays Inspired by the 60th Anniversary of Star Trek
"The Doomsday Machine"
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All - by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares 
Center for Humane Technology
The Social Dilemma
Borg
V'Ger

What did Star Trek fans have to say in 1976?
John Champion returns to The Trek Files for a look through Gene Roddenberry's fan correspondence. This season's selection captures a moment in Star Trek history, ten years after the original series debuted, but before the arrival of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
A Cincinnati attorney credits Spock's logic for helping persuade a jury. An artist shares his hand-painted "Mr. Spock" portrait… on an egg. A teacher explains how she's bringing Star Trek into the classroom, while another fan gently reminds Gene that he still owes her friend for a videotape.
Documents and Additional References
Fan corresponsence with Gene Roddemberry - 1976
Letters to Star Trek by Susan Sackett
Gene Roddenberry's Inside Star Trek album
NASA's Space Shuttle Enterprise

Authors John and Maria Jose Tenuto return to The Trek Files to share a seemingly ordinary filming notice distributed to guests at the Monterey Bay Aquarium during production of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. But for John, it's much more than a production handout, it's a family keepsake.
In April 1986, John's parents unknowingly visited the aquarium on a day when Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, and the Star Trek IV cast were filming. They saved the notice, recorded the production on a home VHS camcorder, and brought home an extraordinary piece of behind-the-scenes history. Decades later, that footage and flyer helped document one of the franchise's most beloved films.
Larry, John, and Mary Jo explore the logistics of filming at a working public aquarium, Leonard Nimoy's commitment to the film's environmental message, and how a family vacation unexpectedly became part of Star Trek history.
Documents and Additional References
Document of the Week
Monterey Bay Aquarium visitor filming notice for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (April 1986)
Additional References
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Leonard Nimoy
William Shatner
John Tenuto
Maria Jose Tenuto
The Making of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home by John and Maria Jose Tenuto (Titan Books)
Previous The Trek Files appearance by John and Maria Jose Tenuto discussing Star Trek II, Star Trek III, and Star Trek IV production history.

Following last week's look at the earliest concepts for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Larry Nemecek welcomes back author and historian Ben Robinson to examine Gene Roddenberry's handwritten response and the surprising conversation it sparked.
Revisiting documents first explored in earlier seasons of The Trek Files, Larry and Ben trace the pivotal weeks of September 1986, when Gene challenged early ideas for a Starfleet Academy-centered series, questioned the show's heavy emphasis on Klingons, and argued that Star Trek's true strength had never been its characters alone but the stories it told.
Some of Gene's observations proved remarkably prescient. Others reveal how his own thinking had evolved since the 1960s. Together, they paint a portrait of a franchise at a crossroads, just weeks before The Next Generation officially became the series we know today.
Documents and Additional References
Document of the Week
Gene Roddenberry's response to the early Star Trek: The Next Generation series proposal (September 19, 1986)
Additional References
Early Star Trek: The Next Generation series proposal by Greg Strangis (September 1986) (revisited from Season 1, Episode 4)
Gene Roddenberry
Greg Strangis
Rick Berman
Ben Robinson
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Related Trek Files episodes: Season 1, Episode 4 — Early The Next Generation series proposal
Season 13, Episode 2 — Gene Roddenberry's response to Paramount's proposal
Season 15, Episode 11 — Greg Strangis' earliest notes for The Next Generation

Before Captain Picard. Before the Enterprise-D. Before Gene Roddenberry stepped back into the captain's chair of his own creation...
This week on The Trek Files, Larry Nemecek is joined by author and Star Trek historian Ben Robinson to examine one of the earliest surviving documents in the development of Star Trek: The Next Generation: a September 1986 memo from writer Greg Strangis to producer Rick Berman outlining the first concepts for a new Star Trek television series.
The document reveals some fascinating ideas: a Starfleet Academy setting, a young captain, a Klingon observer serving aboard a Federation starship, familiar themes of friendship, diplomacy, and the Prime Directive, but viewed through the lens of Cold War politics and 1980s television.
Together, Larry and Ben explore why some of these ideas disappeared, why others evolved into the Next Generation we know today, and how the process of reinventing Star Trek began long before Gene Roddenberry ultimately reshaped the concept himself.
Documents and Additional References
Greg Strangis to Rick Berman — Early Notes on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (September 4, 1986)
Additional References
Greg Strangis
Rick Berman
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Gene Roddenberry
Ben Robinson
Related Trek Files episodes: Season 1, Episode 4 — Early Star Trek: The Next Generation series treatment
Season 13, Episode 2 — Gene Roddenberry's response to the early Next Generation proposal