In today’s episode, Captain Sisko learns that too much stress can actually make you travel through time. But there’s no Federation to save his 1950s counterpart from the harsh realities of systemic racism. Are the Prophets leaving Sisko Easter eggs in their visions? How many modern IPs did Benny Russell secretly come up with? And is the world ready for the kinds of dreams he writes about? All this and more in Far Beyond the Stars, the book that actually earns the reputation Star Trek thinks it has.

Far Beyond the Stars
Author: Steven Barnes
Pages: 271
Published: April 1998
Timeline: Middle of season 6
Prerequisites: Mild familiarity with characters introduced later in the show’s run will probably serve the reader better than any given episode.
Borrowable on Archive.org? No

The main thing that’s been on my mind lately w/r/t Star Trek is the gap between the public’s perception of its progressiveness and the reality. Don’t get me wrong: I do think it aims at much higher and loftier targets than most mainstream art. Nevertheless, that gap is a lot wider than most people realize. Not too long ago, I spoke in my review of Susan Wright’s The Best and the Brightest how the franchise had ample opportunity to claim a space at the forefront of queer advocacy and representation and struck out looking every time. If it hadn’t been for Wright, it would have taken nearly fifty years—half a century—for the series to get its first openly gay characters, and even getting there in 1998 made it later to the punch than other crucial watershed moments.

Sometimes, of course, my reading schedule dovetails with reality in ways I could never have planned. Part of the reason it’s so hard to drill down to the real truth about the true extent of Star Trek‘s progressiveness is that our society provides no shortage of opportunities for it to score an easy layup to look good. As I write, the franchise is currently basking in yet another fresh wave of liberal credibility thanks to Emily Compagno, co-host of the Fox News show Outnumbered, who dropped a belated Christmas present in every Trekkie’s lap on January 4 when she decried Star Wars for being too “woke” and “feminist” and proclaimed that that’s why she’s a Trekkie.

Naturally, the reactions of many ran along the lines of, “Wait, she likes Star Trek because it ISN’T woke? What show is she watching?” They are, of course, correct. Just because fruit hangs low doesn’t mean it isn’t ripe. But I happened to catch this uncommonly delightful morsel of conservative idiocy between rewatching the Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond the Stars” and reading its expanded novelization, and I’m not sure if there’s another episode you could point at to make the cognitive dissonance appear more glaring.

“Far Beyond the Stars” takes place right smack in the middle of the sixth season of Deep Space Nine. Amid a period of intense stress and self-doubt brought on by the unrelenting beatdown that is the Dominion War, Captain Sisko experiences the kind of elevated neural activity that tells him he’s about to get an incoming message from the Big Giant Head the Prophets, and sure enough, before he knows it, he isn’t Benjamin Sisko, but rather Benny Russell, a science-fiction writer living in Harlem in the 1950s and writing for a monthly magazine called Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder.

Benny has inserted Black characters into his stories before, though not any who dared to approach the prominence of the protagonist of his latest work. Instead of being relegated to the background while white men blaze the trail into the final frontier, the Black man in this one is the main character, the captain of a space station, and instead of being timid and subservient, he is strong, self-assured, and intelligent. More than a few obstacles litter Benny’s path, however, like a longsuffering girlfriend whose plans for their life together are a little more down-to-earth (though no less ambitious), corrupt cops spoiling for any excuse to destroy a Black man’s life, an editor who’s not quite as liberal as he fancies himself, and a world that’s not ready for a Black man to inhabit such a pivotal position of authority.

The original episode hits me like a truck every time I watch it, especially that climax, and I think it’s one of the few episodes that truly manages to put Star Trek‘s money where its progressive mouth is. Today, it’s my favorite episode of Deep Space Nine, narrowly eking out the win over “In the Pale Moonlight”, but beyond that, I’m prepared to even call it my favorite episode of Star Trek period. I will leave it to actual Black people to determine how poignant it is as a portrait of the Black experience, but I personally find it incredibly moving and an important reminder that the work of building a more equitable society is never done. You never know when today will be the day you are called upon to preside over the world’s transformation into a better place than it was yesterday—and when that day comes, will you have the strength to steward that growth, or will you be Douglas Pabst, rationalizing the current state of things with a limp “it is what it is”, or standing by like his colleagues, paralyzed by the sudden and painful reminder of the gaping chasm between your comfort and someone else’s oppression?

I actually owned the Far Beyond the Stars novelization as a kid. I think one of my grandparents bought it for me—I would have been 13 when it was published. It would likely have been the last Star Trek novel I had until I started picking them back up in the mid-2010s, meaning it was probably given to me when it was fairly new. I remembered virtually nothing of it before reading it today except for one detail: the signal for when the story is about to move to another time period, which is a boldfaced, italicized, all-caps SHUFFLE that is about as subtle as an air horn. This is exactly as goofy as I remembered it being. It’s disheartening that even Star Trek novels don’t trust their readers to stay on top of temporal shifts in a narrative, though it may have been an editor’s decision, not the author’s. Looking back on the time, however, there is one thing I realize now I remember with much greater clarity, and that is how I, a white 13-year-old, perceived my world and my country’s relationship with race and racism.

I distinctly remember feeling as a kid, taking into account the general vibe around me, and also experiencing a childhood that was largely mediated by television and other media, that racism was largely a solved issue. There were a handful of Black kids I went to school with. I had no beef with any of them; I worked and played alongside them happily, and it never occurred to me to question why there were so comparatively few of them in my neighborhood. On TV, their situation looked pretty all right. Carl Winslow was a cop; Phillip Banks was a judge. They were shaping the enactment of law and order and the rhythm of society as much as any white person. All appeared well.

So when they had a Very Special Episode, like Eddie getting racially profiled while pulled over or Will and Carlton getting arrested because the cops assume they stole the Mercedes they’re in, these registered to me as aberrations rather than systemic realities. They left no room whatsoever for doubt about who was in the wrong. Like the naive young Carlton, I believed facts and logic would prevail. I took little notice of current events and serious fictional dramas with less pat endings until around high school, and things like the L.A. riots and the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill trial and their ramifications didn’t enter my sphere of awareness until well into adulthood.

I’m not sure if I finished Far Beyond the Stars back then, but thanks to my lily-white upbringing, I suspect many of the realities of Black existence in the mid-20th century that it presents would likely have been lost on me at the time—or, if somehow not, I would have found them overblown. The novelization goes far deeper than the episode into the long and sordid history of Black oppression, and it’s most certainly an indictment of our stagnant societal evolution that many aspects of it read as potent (or more so) today as they would have in 1998. This deeper dive mostly takes place amid the most significant element author Steven Barnes added to the story, which is an extended foray into an earlier year in Benny’s life: 1940, the year he goes to the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, observes what is clearly a Bajoran orb at the Hall of Nations, and briefly gains a sort of future sight. Benny has visions within visions in this version of the story, ranging from thousands of years in the past to the 24th century, and the weight of the overall effect is palpable.

On one hand, it’s hard not to feel like things start getting a little off the rails when Benny uses his newfound powers of prognostication to help his gambling-addicted aunt win at the numbers game, and this sometimes combines with a certain amount of drag inevitably caused by stretching a 45-minute episode of television to nearly three hundred pages.1“Far Beyond the Stars” is one of only two single-part episodes to receive a novelization. The other, which we’ve already reviewed, is Michael Jan Friedman’s treatment of TNG’s “Relics”, which is also excellent, albeit for different reasons. But there’s also a lot of outstanding character-dynamic development in these parts between Benny and Willie Hawkins (the charismatic, athletic Worf equivalent who plays for the New York Giants in the episode), Cassie (Kasidy Yates), and a third girl named Jenny who never appears in the original episode, so it’s hard to write these bits off entirely. Besides, the overall effect of it as intended by Barnes is more than enough to smooth over any rough edges.

In a way, it’s a little strange how all of this transforms the impact of the TV version. Often, it feels more like Barnes’s own creation that happens to be regularly punctuated by the events of a preexisting Star Trek episode than like a Star Trek episode turned into a book. By the time the novel reaches Benny’s climactic breakdown, brought on by editor Douglas Pabst’s revelation that the magazine’s owner has had the print run of the issue in which Benny’s story was to be featured destroyed, it feels like a weirdly small event given everything that came before it. That’s because after 250 pages of a more layered Black history than 45 minutes of TV can give us, the reader is unable to even hope for the eleventh-hour breakthrough that we get a dopamine hit from TV shows giving us, replaced instead by a sad inevitability backed by the truth of generations of appalling abuse. It’s more grim, to be sure, yet ultimately more nutritious to anyone genuinely seeking real growth, personal or otherwise.

There are a few other reasons this book is rather striking, the first of which is one I’ve spoken about before, which is that this is a case of an established sci-fi author playing in the Star Trek sandbox. This has happened since Star Trek novels were even a thing, going all the way back to the James Blish episode adaptations, with varying success. It’s been happening since the very earliest years of the Pocket Books era as well, in which it has historically almost never gone well, generally because the authors they courted didn’t watch and/or respect Star Trek and chose not to engage with it on its own terms. This sort of dissonance reached its absolute nadir with another DS9 book, the normally estimable Robert Sheckley’s The Laertian Gamble, though I suspect there are at most maybe only one or two more instances of it lying in wait in the future.

Steven Barnes has been publishing since 1979, when he wrote a novella in collaboration with Larry Niven that went on to get nominated for a Hugo. Yet in all the time since Star Trek novels have been appearing on bookstore shelves, he is the first person with preexisting sci-fi pedigree to actually FEEL like a fan of the series he has been tasked with writing about. Even if some of the elements that aren’t in the final episode originally did appear in Marc Scott Zicree’s story or Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler’s teleplay, like Jennifer Sisko and the Bajoran orb, Barnes handles them so adeptly that you can’t even see the seams. It’s astounding how refreshing this is. I would honestly have thought it an impossible thing to achieve at one point.

Another remarkable element is that Steven Barnes, in case you could not divine it from the way I’ve been writing about the book, is himself Black. John Ordover asked Barnes specifically to write this book, which is a canny move that I imagine may well be able to withstand the test of time. It would have proven embarrassing at best in the long run to ask a non-Black person to speak at novel length on the experiences of someone like Benny Russell. Unfortunately, if it gets you wondering what else authors of color have contributed to the Star Trek literary universe, I’ve got some bad news for you.

As of 2024, of all the Star Trek novels published, even going outside our usual purview of only those published by Pocket Books, a measly five are by a person of color.2The others are 1985’s Shadow Lord by Laurence Yep, 2003’s Do Comets Dream? by S.P. Somtow, 2007’s Sword of Damocles by Geoffrey Thorne, and 2023’s Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko by Derek Tyler Attico. There is somewhat more representation when it comes to officially published short stories, but it still falls unacceptably short. Duly note that that further amounts to exactly zero by a woman of color. Expressed as a percentage, it is less than .01 (point-zero-one) percent of all Star Trek novels published by Pocket Books. This is an absolutely pathetic track record for a franchise that prides itself so vocally on utopian diversity and inclusivity. Again, when you really get down to it, we as fans and creators of Star Trek may fancy ourselves Benny Russells, but the ugly truth is that history reveals us to more often be closer to Douglas Pabsts.

That said, another interesting factoid is that Barnes took the gig with a deadline of just one month to get it done. He accepted the job because he believed so wholeheartedly that Deep Space Nine was the first truly revolutionary instance of mainstream representation of Black excellence. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe his high praise is misplaced. And given that he wrote it in such a short amount of time, the fact that it’s as outstanding as it is is practically a miracle. I’m not sure I could crack out a novel if you gave me all the time in the world. That Barnes did it in less than thirty days at the level he did it at is nothing less than a testament to a king’s ransom of talent.

For now, I can’t stop thinking about that Fox News lady saying she prefers Star Trek over Star Wars because it isn’t woke. To say nothing of how pointless and facile pitting the two properties directly against each other always has been and always will be, from my vantage point I see two factions fighting an ideological battle that neither really understands. But Far Beyond the Stars, both in televised and written form, is the real deal. I’m loath to use the word unironically, but it’s far more woke than either of these groups can even fathom. It’s much more authentically woke than the popular conception of the side that actually does understand it to some extent would have it, and the side that doesn’t is living in a completely different reality altogether. And yet, there it goes, light years ahead of them both. I wish there were a million more episodes and tie-in efforts like it. And though I wasn’t able to pick up what it was putting down when I was kid, I’m proud today to call it my favorite.

MVP & LVP

• This time out, my MVP goes to the character who ended up being my favorite in this version of the story, which is the Preacher, the role filled by Brock Peters/Joseph Sisko. My favorite part is when he approaches the orb at the Hall of Nations, holds his hand up to it, and gives a sublime little Mona Lisa smile. There’s really some cool otherworldliness going on with the character that’s hinted at in the original episode, but it’s even more fascinating here.
• Co-LVP to Ryan and Mulkahey. In a city full of white people of varying degrees of bigotry and racism, they’re the absolute lowest of the low, making active efforts to make Black people’s lives substantially worse. Some may argue, however, that they’re at least more honest and upfront about their alliances than Benny’s colleagues at the Incredible Tales office, and I don’t think that would be such a wrong argument to advance.

Stray Bits

• Today, Barnes posts regularly on Medium, where he appears to specialize in trite mantras and spiritual self-improvement programs that, to put it kindly, seem at least mildly out of touch with reality—though if they’ve worked for him and others, perhaps I shouldn’t be so judgmental. In more reassuring news, he’s also got his first Star Wars novel in twenty years coming out this year: The Glass Abyss, in which Mace Windu carries out Qui-Gon Jinn’s uncompleted final mission.
• Barnes does not technically qualify for the “one-and-done author” tag, as we will see his name one more time on one of the stories in the Lives of Dax anthology in 1999.
• It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize “Jenny” was Jennifer Sisko. Suffice it to say I was only a handful of pages away from the first digit of the page number being 2 when it clicked.
• Something that didn’t occur to me until I was reading this book was how cool it is that in the six years since “Emissary”, the Prophets have gotten to know Sisko well enough to incorporate baseball into the visions they give him.
• Cover Art Corner: I have always loved the cute little 3D mockup of the “U.S.A.F. DS/9” station on the cover, with its little fighter-jet runabout, satellite dish parked on top of Ops, and the running lights on top of the pylons. There’s also something so adorable about the station’s rounded edges that clashes with its military aesthetic. I also dig the “magazine contents” off to the side, especially Albert Macklin’s (O’Brien’s) story, “Me, Android.”
• There’s an extra bit of stress for Sisko at the beginning of the book that isn’t in the episode. In addition to his friend Quentin Swofford dying while on Cardassian border patrol, First Minister Shakaar won’t allow the Federation to mine Bajor for the uridium ore they desperately need to repair damaged ships.
• Barnes nails the neoliberalism of a guy like Pabst unnervingly well: “[He] was dismissive, but not unkind, and behind his words was a damnably implacable reasonableness.” (p. 55)
• Far Beyond the Stars is arguably no more chilling than, naturally, when Benny encounters cops. Of course, it should not be lost on either the viewer or the reader that the two policemen he runs into equate to two of the very most brutal villains of the Dominion. But Barnes’s descriptions are especially unflinching, bringing to stark light with withering clarity all the truly evil things that lurk in the hearts of the men that many once believed were put in place to serve and protect them, which our modern era has validated with all its great and terrible technological advances.
  • “Ryan smacked his nightstick into his palm. Hard. He stared at the oncoming Benny, and there was some part of this man that actually hoped something would go wrong, that hoped that there might be … an excuse. Yes, there was really no other word for it … to employ some of the force that he was legally entitled to use.” (p. 82)
  • No single sentence in this entire novel hits harder than when Barnes explicitly reads between the lines of Mulkahey’s question of what Benny is doing in their neighborhood: “The unspoken subtext? What makes you think you can shuffle out of Harlem without getting a nightstick so far up your ass you look like a licorice popsicle?” (p. 83)
• Benny has also written stories about Kirk and Picard … but of course, they were white captains, so they had no problem getting published. (p. 107)
• Benny almost dreams up The Terminator as well (or at least, some conflation of it and T2). (p. 242)
• Benny reflects on the savage beating he received at the hands of Ryan and Mulkahey: “If only it could have been recorded, he thought. If only someone had cared enough to make a film, certainly they would never have gotten away with something like that. Maybe in the future, every streetlight would have cameras built in, and the police would have to be more careful…” Well, I’ve got good news and bad news, Benny. The good news is, the cameras are placed in an even more upfront spot than a traffic light; they’re right on the cops’ bodies! The bad news, obviously, is that it doesn’t matter and they still get away with murdering innocent Black civilians anyway. (p. 243)

Final Assessment

Excellent. There are aspects of Far Beyond the Stars that would ordinarily probably drag a book down to Good, but I think in this case the holistic experience is much more important and needs to be emphasized over any individual nitpicks. What starts as a short tale of an isolated instance of the unfair treatment of a Black man turns into a long recounting of the full history of their suffering in novel form. Black people have been trying to tell us these things for years, decades, centuries even, and are never listened to. Any . “Far Beyond the Stars” is one of the very greatest episodes in all of Star Trek, so it’s little surprise that it also makes for one of the very greatest novels.

NEXT TIME: Lieutenant Lefler has an unexpected family reunion in Fire on High