THE CLASSIC NOVEL Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is rarely read as science writing. Certainly, when I first fell in love with it as a teen, I didn’t see it that way; I understood it as a bold and strange work of imagination. I was forced to reconsider a few years ago when I picked up Hester Blum’s fascinating text The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. Americans, defined during that period only as white members of the U.S. population, were a settler colonial community, one that understood itself through the concept of the frontier. Maritime memoirs, Blum writes, extended that frontier across and beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean that had carried them (or their ancestors) from Europe to the “New World.” The frontier now included the Pacific, home to an important resource for an increasingly energy-intensive industrializing nation: whales. Maritime memoirs, then, were often stories of the science and technology of being at sea—and of whaling. In other words, these texts were likely the first rather peculiar form of popular science writing in the United States. Moby-Dick, then, must be understood as fictional science writing.

I had come to Blum’s book as part of my research for the foreword to a new edition of my grandfather C.L.R. James’s book Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. In that book, C.L.R. points out that the whale ship was, at the time that Melville wrote Moby-Dick, the most technologically advanced machine in the world. Moby-Dick is not just a work of political fiction or strange cetacean obsession; it is also a book about technology and the frontier of American capitalism. When Moby-Dick was published in 1851, sperm whales contributed to how American households were lit and machines lubricated. Their spermaceti organ and forehead melon, which are important for how whales make sound, contain a liquid wax that burns brightly and gives off little scent, making it ideal for nighttime illumination. Sperm whaling became big business in the United States, especially in New England, where whaling expeditions usually began. This economic value drove curiosity in whale science, as well as the technology of whaling. Understanding Moby-Dick through this lens transformed my perspective on the book. Today, it falls in the category of “literary fiction” but back then might easily have read as what we would now call “genre fiction”—speculative or technoscientific fiction in the form of a competition between a man, Captain Ahab, and the whale he believes intentionally took something from him.

Understanding maritime writing in these terms also invites us to rethink twentieth- and twenty-first-century speculative works on space travel, which often use naval language. Gene Roddenberry’s show Star Trek, first conceived as a space Western, sits somewhere between space navy and science voyage. Starting in the fall of 1966, audiences were introduced to the show each week by lead performer William Shatner in his role as Captain Kirk, narrating twenty-third-century humanity’s purpose, “Space: the final frontier . . . These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!” These opening lines explicitly reference the myth of American frontierism, which erased the reality that the United States had been formed at the expense of Indigenous peoples, their sovereignty, and in many cases, their physical access to ancestral homelands.

In this way, Star Trek is an exemplar of American liberalism. Though the series did not stray from the triumphalist belief in American expansionism, Roddenberry understood his show as a vehicle for social justice commentary, even trying to put a white woman in the first-officer role. NBC rejected this premise, which might have been the end of the show if Lucille Ball and Desilu Productions hadn’t convinced executives to give it a second chance. When the USS Enterprise finally beamed into American living rooms, viewers saw a ship captained by a white American man (played by a Canadian) and staffed by a diverse crew, including an Asian American (George Takei’s Hikaru Sulu), a Black woman (Nichelle Nichols’s Nyota Uhura), an alien of bi-species ancestry (Leonard Nimoy’s half-Vulcan/half-human Spock), a white Scotsman (James Doohan’s Scotty), and beginning in the second season, a white Russian (Walter Koenig’s Pavel Chekov).

Chekov was intentionally written into Star Trek as a character who represented the possibility that the Cold War would end; that instead of competing for firsts in space, Americans and Russians would work side by side as curious spacefaring comrades. Eastern European representation was not merely a political statement; Koenig, Shatner, and Nimoy were all second- or third-generation descendants of Ashkenazi Jewish immi-grants. Nimoy’s Jewish heritage played a key role in establishing the Vulcan salute representing the message “live long and prosper.” Nimoy came up with the gesture based on one he saw in a Boston synagogue as a child, meaning “May the Lord bless you and keep you.”

In this way, the film was influencing viewers to develop an understanding of whales as planetary kin.

This cultural touchstone was not unusual. Roddenberry’s original Star Trek continues to be a rich text because it was deeply concerned with philosophy and enamored of literature and world cultures. Uhura’s name comes from the word uhuru, Swahili for “freedom.” Sulu, named for the Sulu Sea in the Philippines and played by a Japanese American, was constructed by Roddenberry as a representative for all of Asia, while Uhura represented Africa. Shakespeare references are strewn across the franchise, and the connection to the Bard was strengthened when the second television iteration of the show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, debuted with Patrick Stewart, a classically trained Shakespearean actor, at its helm. Roddenberry understood the USS Enterprise as a mini–United Nations, representing peaceful cooperation among peoples who had moved beyond the need for money as an organizing feature of their social and political economy. In this way, it contrasts strongly against the maritime narratives of old, which were driven by mercantilism as it transformed into industrial capitalism. At the same time, the human-centric structure of the Federation, their exploration, and the ship’s leadership reinforces the idea of a cultural hierarchy, much like the ones that have driven the United States as a settler colonial and imperial state.

Given that Star Trek’s is a maritime fiction in space, maybe it was only a matter of time before it stumbled into a story about whales. That finally happened in 1986, with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, also known among fans as “the one about the whales.” The Voyage Home emerged in the midst of a cultural and political fight over the future of humpback whales. By the mid-1980s, humpback populations had collapsed from hundreds of thousands just decades before to fewer than ten thousand, thanks to whaling for meat and blubber, as well as other human activity in the oceans. There was real risk that humpback whales would be extinct by the twenty-first century, making them creatures of the distant past by Star Trek’s twenty-third century. The creative team behind The Voyage Home, including director Leonard Nimoy, wondered what implications that loss might have for the future of humanity and any civilization it might build—even one where warring humans and capitalism are both obsolete.

Their answer comes in the form of a warning: that the humpback whales’ alien friends might accidentally destroy Earth during an attempt to contact whale civilization. Viewers are forced to reckon with the possibility, vocalized by Spock, that “only human arrogance would assume [an alien] signal must be meant for mankind.” Though science fiction tends to focus on stories where humans are the first species to make contact with extraterrestrials, in reality, we might be the ones they’d least want to talk to given the damage humanity has done to the planet. Spock’s remark also invites us to imagine what we can learn about being human by honoring the intellects of other species.

Though this may be the most important moment in the film among Trekkies (fans of the franchise), I think Spock’s remark is hardly the most memorable. We’re more likely to recall Chekov wandering around Cold War–era San Francisco asking everyone, including a police officer, where to find the “nuclear wessels.” It’s funny but also intensely political.

Elsewhere in the film, Spock goes for a swim with captive whales at the fictional Cetacean Institute in San Francisco, a smaller version of the famed Monterey Bay Aquarium. Spock isn’t just being weird. He has already understood that their mission—to return to the future with two humpback whales—requires the consent of the whales. In this way, the whales, known to humans as George and Gracie, become characters with agency—with rights. As a four-year-old watching in the theater, I remember sensing that Spock had made friends with George and Gracie. In this way, The Voyage Home was influencing viewers to develop an understanding of whales as planetary kin, rather than as subordinates to be dominated in any way we pleased—a notion first articulated by Spock’s observation of human hubris to believe that aliens would think no other species was worth contacting.

The Voyage Home is significant in the Trek canon as the first of what would come to be many episodes in the franchise that grappled with whales as both kin and enemies. New Trek, as the twenty-first-century series are known, has taken seriously the proposal in The Voyage Home that whales are not subordinates but rather potential comrades. In the series Star Trek: Lower Decks, an animated comedy for adults, the USS Cerritos carries two beluga whales who are members of the ship’s crew. Known as the special “Cetacean Ops” unit, the belugas are Lieutenants Kimolu and Matt, who carry out missions the humanoid crew cannot do. Because of the comedic nature of Lower Decks, Cetacean Ops sits at an entertaining intersection: they are essential crew on a ship that travels faster than light, while also being a couple of horny jokers. This portrayal of their personalities represents current human knowledge about beluga whales, who have a wide vocal range and are very playful. I have no idea how a beluga would perceive the representation, but I have to hope they’d see the writer’s room tried.

On first glance, this is a very different story from Moby-Dick

The presence of beluga Starfleet officers is not a twenty-first-century streaming-era gimmick. Cetacean Ops was first referenced in the late twentieth-century series Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), the product of a seed planted by Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda in their 1991 book Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual. Sternbach and Okuda played key roles in designing the visual culture of TNG, so it makes sense that their vision would be fully realized in an animated series. Cetacean Ops features not only in the adult-focused Lower Decks, but also in the children’s show Star Trek: Prodigy that aired around the same time, giving younger viewers a chance to see belugas’ importance in their ships’ missions. Their presence also functions as a postscript to the story line in The Voyage Home, which is set a century before Lower Decks. One can imagine that the events portrayed in the film have led to a transformative relationship between humankind and whalekind.

Though the visual effects and budgetary capacity of TNG precluded visual representation of Cetacean Ops, this did not stop the franchise from exploring the maritime metaphor, including fears about unfamiliar monsters. This is especially true in big-screen representations of the alien species known as the Borg, one of the innovations of TNG. The Borg are a hyper-colonialist cyborgian species that reproduces by forcefully assimilating members of other species, collecting and reproducing each individual’s memories and knowledge in the process. A terrifying nemesis for Starfleet, they are virtually impossible to beat in battle, and individuals who have been assimilated are difficult to recover. The damage they do to whole planets could be likened to the damage an orca does when it attacks a ship, though in reality a better comparison would be what Europeans did in the Americas after 1492.

In a well-remembered TNG story line, show lead Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is assimilated by the Borg. During his time as a part of the Borg collective, he does so much harm to the Federation and Starfleet that even when he recovers his humanity, he emerges not just traumatized but also guilty and furious. This experience becomes the context for the second film centered on Picard and his era of Enterprise. Star Trek VIII: First Contact is, like The Voyage Home, a time-travel film. But this time, it’s about making sure the past is undisturbed by the Borg. In First Contact, the Borg seek to head off the formation of the United Federation of Planets by assimilating Earth in the twenty-first century, right before humans make first contact with aliens (Vulcans). Picard, initially commanded to avoid the battle between Starfleet and the Borg, relentlessly pursues the Borg into this past, determined to stop them.

On first glance, this is a very different story from Moby-Dick. In Melville’s narrative, Captain Ahab is not a hero. He is an old, psychologically broken man who lost his leg during an unsuccessful attempt to kill the white whale known as Moby Dick. In my grandfather’s reading, Ahab represents American captains of industry who have been alienated from their humanity by capitalism. Captain Ahab’s first officer, Starbuck, is the voice of reason on the ship, though in Mariners he is indicted for not trying harder to stop Ahab from putting the entire crew at risk. It’s easy to imagine that Picard has more in common with Starbuck than Ahab. But First Contact tells the story of the work we have to do to actually embody our ideals. It’s not enough to proclaim them.

We learn these lessons through Picard’s relationship with the twenty-first-century character Lily Sloane, in an astonishing performance from Alfre Woodard. Quite notably, Woodard is the first Black woman to play a truly leading role in a Star Trek franchise film or series. Though the presence of Nichelle Nichols in both the original series and the subsequent 1970s animated series and films broke barriers, her Lieutenant Uhura was never given enough lines. In each of the films centered on the original series cast, Uhura is sidelined in favor of a lighter-skinned, non-Black (usually white) woman as the main female character. Thus, Woodard had the opportunity—as well as all the associated pressures—to step into the role of the woman lead. She did so alongside a revered Shakespearean actor who was worshipped by a fandom not always kind to women or Black people, much less those who are both.

First Contact takes seriously the idea that the human relationship to whales can teach us how to be our best selves.

The action puts Sloane on Picard’s USS Enterprise, which is under attack internally from a growing Borg colony on Deck 16. Deeply curious about the futuristic spaceship she finds herself on, Sloane asks how much the ship costs. Picard explains: “The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the twenty-fourth century . . . The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves . . . and the rest of humanity.” This exchange is critically important because it sets up Picard as someone who represents the ideal of a civilization that has moved past capitalism and war over resources. They are a civilization, he is suggesting, that sanctifies life. But just minutes after this conversation, Picard sacrifices a member of his crew. When Sloane asks him if that was strictly necessary, she notices how cold and calculating he is. In this story, Lily Sloane is a more principled Starbuck, and Captain Picard emerges as Ahab.

The analogy is not subtle. At the end of the film’s second act, it becomes clear that the only way to protect humanity from the Borg is to destroy the ship. But Picard is unwilling to accept this kind of defeat, one where he and his crew never return to their temporal home. The Borg have become Picard’s white whale. He is willing to drive his crew and his ship to destruction in what is likely a losing battle because he is so full of vengeance that he can no longer stand to put life ahead of hatred. Picard’s crew try to argue with him, as Starbuck argues with Ahab, but they give up when he is not moved—and agree to follow orders. It is Sloane who follows Picard into his Ready Room and goes toe-to-toe with him, even asking directly if he had failed to read the classic book Moby-Dick. This is such a strong blow to book-collecting Picard’s ego that he responds by angrily smashing his collection of starship models. Sloane’s reply? “You broke your little ships. See you around, Ahab.” At this moment, Picard is forced to acknowledge that he knows the story and understands it well. He replies with a (lightly edited) Moby-Dick quote from Chapter 41, “Moby Dick”: “He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.” Picard then calls for the crew to abandon ship, to sanctify life.

The irony of Sloane and Picard’s powerful philosophical battle is that in the end, the person who physically saves the day is Data, a one-of-a-kind synthetic life-form. He resists attempts by the Borg Queen to assimilate him and, in the process, heads off her attempts to stop first contact. This raises the question of why the scene between Woodard and Stewart is at all important. To be sure, it’s some of the finest acting in all of Trek. Few people can match Stewart’s energy and Woodard is more than his equal. But what matters here is the way that Sloane saves Picard’s soul—and those of his crew. Though Data stops the Borg Queen, it is Sloane who reminds Picard of why they are there and who they are supposed to be. He must live up to the ideals of the Federation, or else what is he fighting for? In this way, Moby-Dick offers Picard a lesson about what it means to wield technology. Though fiction, the novel is also a guide for living a good, technoscientific life. And it all hinges on not becoming the monster that Ahab imagined Moby Dick to be—or the monster his obsession with Moby Dick turned him into.

The Jonathan Frakes–directed First Contact is the best-reviewed Star Trek film in history, even though one could credibly accuse it of being too heavy-handed with the Moby-Dick references and sexist for sidelining Gates McFadden’s Dr. Crusher and Marina Sirtis’s Deanna Troi, the two main women characters from the show on which the film is based. But, despite its flaws, First Contact is also like a deeply satisfying episode of classic Trek for the way it invokes Moby-Dick and says yes, even in three hundred years, this remarkable and strange work of literature will matter. Like the Trek before it and the Trek that would come after, First Contact makes the case for understanding science through literature and takes seriously the idea that the human relationship to whales can teach us how to be our best selves. As we face the continued crisis of capitalism-driven global warming and the impact it has not just on human life but also on all species, we must listen to the message that our future depends on learning to live well with our whale kin.