For a franchise whose core tenet is exploring the unknown, the universe of Star Trek is extremely well mapped out. Following the events described by its TV shows and movies, we can create a pretty comprehensive timeline of events from last year (the year of the Bell Riots, Irish reunification and the first crewed mission to Europa) to the mid-33rd century.If you want to know the distance from Betazed to Bajor, there are reference materials that exist to help with that. If you want to know the deck layout of the Enterprise D, or read the employee handbook for the Cerritos, you can do that.But the Star Trek universe has not always been so comprehensively catalogued. Once upon a time, nobody could decide whether the Enterprise served Starfleet, or the Federation, or the United Earth Space Probe Agency, and our only reference materials were 79 TV episodes with not always entirely consistent continuity.As Star Trek fandom became a thing, people wanted to learn more about this universe, starting to fill out the details, and naturally one of the first places they sought those answers was the authority on all things Trek, its creator, Gene Roddenberry. Much like Dungeons & Dragons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek is the work of countless individuals and collaborations, but suffers from credit being mounted on a single messianic visionary that, on closer inspection, proves to be problematic. As Lance Parkin documents in his blog about writing Roddenberrys biography, Roddenberry was what we euphemistically call a complex person whose public image as a prophet of an inclusive and utopian future was as much a career-salvaging marketing exercise as anything else.Once it became clear that this Star Trek thing could run and run, a lot of people saw that there was money to be made, and the story behind Treks journey from cancelled TV show to globally recognised multimedia franchise is one of legal, financial and creative battles. One of the key battlefields it was fought on was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a production that Roddenberry himself was thrown off multiple times.It can be hard, looking at Roddenberrys contributions to Trek, to see where he isnt taking credit for someone elses work (Gene Coon, for instance, or script editor D.C. Fontana) or having his own ideas watered down by budget or executives. But there is one place where we can see Gene Roddenberrys vision of the Star Trek future unfettered and unfiltered: Star Trek The Motion Picture A novel by Gene Roddenberry, to give it its full title.The Sexy FrontierThe slim paperback makes a surprising read today. For instance, a footnote has Kirk himself turn straight to camera and address the notion that he and Spock are lovers, a hotly discussed idea in early Trek fandom:I was never aware of this lovers rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself, although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien and mixed forms, I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years.This passage has been quoted here in full to demonstrate that a close reading will reveal Kirk never actually denies it.Relatedly, the book revels in a quality that saturated Trek through the original series and early The Next Generation, but which, to be honest, has been tragically lacking in the latest incarnations of the franchise sheer horniness. If we are to accept Star Trek as Roddenberrys singular vision, it is the vision of someone who, in the Star Trek The Next Generation writers bible, compares Doctor Beverly Crusher to a striptease queen.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!Roddenberry wastes no time telling us that the Enterprises Rec Room (which most fans will know as the place Kirk briefs the crew on VGer and where we first glimpse a picture of the Enterprise XCV-330) is definitely used for sex. When Kirk meets a Starfleet officer he once had a fling with he could feel the slight pressure of his genitals responding to those memories. Well skip the bit where Kirk calls her a whore a few pages later, and well just leave the whole unfiltered, Roddenberry-authored portrayal of Deltans well alone.But the most interesting parts of the novelization are the areas where Roddenberry can enter the blank space of the as-yet unexplored Star Trek universe, to show us what his conception of this future might look like when we move away from a single starship and its latest planet-of-the-week.Making HistoryFrom the off, the timeline of Star Trek The Motion Picture A novel by Gene Roddenberry does not line up with the history you learned on the Memory Alpha wiki. Where the movie Star Trek: First Contact places Zefram Cochranes discovery of Warp Drive and humanitys first context with aliens on April 5th, 2063, Roddenberry tells us that warp drive was invented nearly a century ago making it a pretty short road getting from there to here. This chronology doesnt even map to the tiny amount of continuity Star Trek already had. The TOS episode Metamorphosis tells us the inventor of Space Warp, the aforementioned Zefram Cochrane, supposedly died 150 years earlier more than 50 years before he was supposed to make the discovery.It also casts doubt on Star Treks claim at presupposed Miguel Alcubierres invention of the Alcubierre Drive theory. Canonically, Treks warp drive allows for seemingly faster-than-light travel without any of the problematic time dilation effects by creating a warp bubble around a ship, compressing space in front of the vehicle and expanding it behind to traverse interstellar distances.Roddenberrys description is a little different when that starship reached the threshold of light speed, it also reached that boundary between normal space and hyperspace. That boundary was time, making it appear to those first hyperspace travellers that the universe around their starship had suddenly begun to shrink in size. Beginning with warp one and increasing geometrically, the higher the warp speed, the smaller the universe and the closer together the points within it become.Whats interesting is this description does hint at a throwaway line in the unused Star Trek pilot The Cage, where a crewmember tells marooned space travellers scientists have broken the Time Barrier within recent years, which lines up more neatly with his idea that Warp Drive is a relatively new invention in the Star Trek universe.Ancient AliensBeyond interfering with people who like writing timeline spreadsheets (thats me, Im those people) Roddenberry was also not afraid to go entirely off-piste. As the Enterprise flies out of the solar system to meet VGer, it refers to the so-called mutant-farm civilization of pre-history who had somehow received a gift of the secrets that would later be learned by Galileo. It also passes Io, which held some shocks for the first Earth scientists to land there but not as shattering as the discovery that Earths own moon had once served as a base for space voyagers (their identity still a mystery) who had conducted genetic experiments with Earths early life forms millions or more years before human history began.This leaning into Ancient Aliens lore had predecessors and descendants in on-screen Trek lore. Who Mourns for Adonis? had already introduced us to the idea that the gods of Greek myth had been powerful aliens. The Paradise Syndrome introduced us to ancient aliens who had scooped up Native Americans and transplanted them to alien worlds to continue undisturbed by European invaders. The unfairly maligned Animated Series would give us an episode where Satan himself would turn out to be a similar Ancient Alien, and also a thoroughly chill guy.Eventually the Star Trek The Next Generation episode The Chase would introduce us to the precursor civilization that had seeded sentient life across the galaxy (giving each world a different variety of bumpy forehead), while aliens have also been seen popping in to steal Amelia Earhart (Voyagers The 37s), towns from the Old West (Star Trek Enterprises North Star), and people sheltering from nuclear war (Star Trek Discoverys New Eden).Star Trek on screen wouldnt give us a glimpse of how humanity at large responds to discovering how often our history has been meddled with by other species until maybe Lower Deckss introduction of a member of the Greek God species in its last season (although maybe the Prime Directive is a clue).The Earth of Star TrekBut the really interesting parts of The Motion Picture novelization are the bits where we get to see a bit more of Earth. Even in the entire expanded on-screen Trek universe, Earth has always been a bit of a mystery. We only get glimpses of park-like areas surrounding glass and metal Starfleet buildings, the occasional recognisable cityscape with some monorails and domes thrown in, or close-ups of pedestrianised streets with horse-drawn carriages and people LARPing at running a restaurant or vineyard.And thats the thing Star Trek on screen has always been frustratingly vague about how humanity achieved post-scarcity, post-social inequality utopia (however much fans of the franchise whisper the answer is definitely Communism). As far as we can tell, people who live in this utopia have two choices of lifestyle Starfleet officer or scarcity-era historical re-enactment.So the most interesting bits of Roddenberrys book are the bits that let us see what The Great Bird of the Galaxy himself thought the utopia he had envisioned looked like. It is very different to the one we have in modern Trek.One of the first things to notice about Roddenberrys Future Earth is a question of scale. During the Enterprises flight out to meet VGer it not only passes Ancient Aliens archaeology digs, but also the scattered necklace of energy collectors linking Sol and Earth (Kirk cant remember if they were foreseen by Einstein and Clark, but I suspect the answer was Freeman Dyson), as well as planettes based on ONeills predictions a reference to the ONeill Cylinder, a space megastructure designed as a piece of NASA concept art, and frankly, the sort of thing the Star Trek universe could really stand to see more of.On Earth itself, one of the first places we visit is the island of Gibraltar, a location weve definitely never had cause to visit in the TV shows. Here we find a Starfleet office on top of a gigantic hydroelectric dam complex spanning Gibraltar, Africa and the Atlantic, apparently based on the Atlantropa concept proposed over the 1920s and 30s. Kirk comes here to speak to Starfleet seniority over a holographic video call Roddenberry having apparently forgotten that with TOSs flip-top communicators, he also invented the mobile phone.From here Kirk travels to Los Angeles, by tube. As well as being a delightfully batshit bit of futurism, is also potentially a sly attempt at bringing Roddenberrys failed Genesis II pilot into the canon (where a modern-day astronaut awakens from a suspended animated experiment to travel a post-apocalyptic Earth via its widespread underground subshuttle system).Perhaps most charmingly, as Kirk pulls into San Francisco, the always canonical home of Starfleet, he passes Alcatraz Childrens Park.The New HumansYet aside from all these megastructures, we also see innovations in microtechnology. Starfleet officers might not have mobile phones, but what they do have is senceivers, brain implants that allow Starfleet to send messages that appear in the recipients brain like a memory. In a nod to near future history, Roddenberry points out that Starfleet keeps these telepathic brain chips a secret to avert associations with the Mind Control Revolts of 2043 to 2047.But the thing is mind control seems to be a grey area, in the paradise of the 23rd century.Throughout the Starfleet canon, from TV to movies to videogames, books and comics, from the canon and approved to those annuals where the Enterprise bridge had seatbelts, the depiction of what a Starfleet officer is has remained the same. Starfleet officers are the bravest, the smartest, the most adaptable. A Reginald Barclay on the Enterprise is a 10 anywhere else. Whichever way you slice it, if you wear Red, Gold and Blue (or the beige, white and pale blue if were in the Motion Picture era) you are the absolute cream of humanitys crop. Not that humanity has a cream of the crop, you understand, because we have done away with all forms of discrimination. Ahem.But in his novel, Roddenberry pitches things a little differently.In Kirks preface to the novel, he notes that his masculine name is unusual in most circles, but not in Starfleet. We are a highly conservative and strongly individualistic group. The old customs die hard with us, he says, while conceding that Some critics have characterized us of Starfleet as primitives and with some justification.Kirk goes on to explain that early space travel for humanity was disastrous, full of ship disappearances, crew defections and mutinies. For all the dead redshirts in his wake, even Kirk stands out as exceptional for having returned from a five-year mission with so much of his ship and crew still intact. By the time of Star Trek, it is accepted those early disastrous missions were because Starfleets standards were too high.As Kirk explains, The problem was that sooner or later starship crew members must inevitably deal with life forms more evolved and advanced than their own. The result was that these superbly intelligent and flexible minds being sent out by Starfleet could not help but be seduced eventually by the high philosophies, aspirations and consciousness levels being encountered.To reiterate Starfleet policy is to recruit people too dumb to be won over by more advanced intelligences.So what is the rest of humanity up to if theyre not running Creole restaurants? This is where we come back to the mind control issue. Kirk describes Starfleet officers as not part of those increasingly large numbers of humans who seem willing to submerge their own identities into the groups to which they belong even as he accepts that these so-called new humans represent a more highly evolved breed, capable of finding rewards in group consciousness that we more primitive individuals will never know. If those descriptions sound a bit familiar, and indeed, sinister to a modern Star Trek fan, it is for good reason.It is basically a description of Number One Star Trek Villain, the Borg. A Borg who, possibly because they are too smart, is not as good at space travel as its primitive counterparts, who are sent out to explore the universe while the hivemind chills out at home and, this being Roddenberry, probably have a great deal of group sex.