different from most earlier science fiction efforts on television and even in movies. In many ways, the series was more like the best of written science fiction than the Saturday-morning serials for kids that most people thought of when they thought of film science fiction, serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and based on--and with the sensibilities of--newspaper comic strips. Star Trek was in a different tradition, and while it used special effects and hardware, they were treated as adjuncts to characterization and plot development and were not the end-all and be-all of the material.
Science Fiction is a genre that has a wide variety of expressions. It is usually defined too narrowly, and for some any film with special effects and a machine is a science fiction film. Science fiction as a genre has a history almost as old as filmmaking itself. One of the first films to tell a story and to make use of the magic of the camera at the same time was Georges MTliFs's short "A Trip to the Moon" in 1902 in which a scien
...