Far Beyond the Stars is one of the most powerful explorations of racism, representation, writing and hope in Star Trek’s 60-year history, and one that feels deeply personal to me
Happy Star Trek Day, and happy 60th anniversary to what I still consider the world’s greatest science-fiction franchise. I love pretty much all of Star Trek, across all its different incarnations, and there have been so many brilliant moments over six decades that choosing favourites can become a fool’s errand. Yet every now and then Trek produces something that rises above being merely fun, thrilling or thought-provoking and hits you so hard that it seems to send a shockwave through your body and soul, imprinting itself permanently on your memory and firing a phaser set to stun directly into your heart.
For me, one of those moments comes towards the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 6, Episode 13, Far Beyond the Stars. It centres on Benny Russell, a Black science-fiction writer in 1950s America desperately trying to publish a story about a futuristic space station commanded by a Black man called Benjamin Sisko. Across the episode he is put through an extraordinary rollercoaster of emotions, encouraged by a street preacher who tells him to write the truth in his heart, driven almost involuntarily to get his vision onto the page and finally given reason to believe that this groundbreaking, almost sacrilegious vision of a Black hero in humanity’s future will actually be published, read and perhaps even change the way people think.
Except it doesn’t.
Benny has already seen a young Black man senselessly killed and has himself been savagely beaten by racist police officers, but somehow he keeps going because the story gives him hope. Then he learns that the entire print run of the magazine containing it has been pulped because the owner refuses to accept it. This is what finally breaks him. The dam bursts and out comes this helpless, impotent, indignant rage, culminating in a complete mental and emotional collapse as Benny desperately insists that while they can pulp the story, they cannot destroy the idea he created because, to him, it is real.
That scene breaks me too. Every single time.
I genuinely mean that. It shakes me to my core and can reduce me to tears; even while writing about it now I can feel the emotion rising again. A huge part of its power comes from Avery Brooks, who played Benjamin Sisko and Benny Russell and also directed the episode. His performance carries such authenticity and sincerity that it ceases to feel like someone simply playing distress for a television camera. There is pain, fury, humiliation and desperation pouring out of him, and I find myself feeling it alongside him.
Perhaps that is because Far Beyond the Stars feels deeply personal to me. In a few extraordinary minutes it touches so many things that have shaped my own life: racism, identity, injustice, being treated unfairly, the yearning for a better world, the hope of a more evolved future, the need to belong and be accepted, and perhaps most poignantly of all, the almost irrational compulsion some of us have to create and tell stories.
When the people in your head become real
I’m a writer. Most of my professional career has been spent writing automotive journalism, but long before the cars, magazines, television, YouTube and everything else, I wanted to write stories. I was doing it back in primary school, inventing people who didn’t exist, placing them in locations I had never visited and creating adventures, worlds and possibilities from nothing more than a pencil, paper and imagination.
There is something extraordinary about looking at a blank page and realising an entire universe can exist there simply because you imagined it, and unless you are compelled to write fiction, I’m not sure it is possible to explain quite how real those imaginary worlds eventually become. You know the places and the people, hear them speaking, understand what frightens them, what they love, what they hide and what they regret. Sometimes they even surprise you by refusing to behave the way you had planned.
They are imaginary, obviously, but to the writer they have acquired a peculiar form of reality. That is what I hear in Benny Russell’s desperate insistence that his world is real.
Then, having created these people, we writers do something terrifying. We introduce them to everybody else. We actively hope as many people as possible will meet them, spend time with them and perhaps even care about them, despite knowing that in doing so we are exposing ourselves. The creator is reflected in the created, and when we unlock the doors to the fantasies inside our heads we inevitably reveal our experiences, beliefs, fears, prejudices, hopes, pain, insecurities and doubts, including things that perhaps even the people closest to us do not fully know.
We effectively hand all of that to complete strangers and say: Here. This is part of me. Please tell me it matters.
That vulnerability goes some way towards explaining why Benny’s breakdown feels so frighteningly complete, because rejection already hurts when everyone begins on an equal footing. Imagine being told that your story does not matter, does not count and deserves nothing better than pulping because of who you are, the colour of your skin, your religion, gender, background or name. Worse still, imagine being told that a character like you has no place in the story either.
Why Benny Russell feels personal
I was a skinny, goofy brown kid, born in Britain but of Pakistani heritage and from a Muslim family, which at its most basic childhood level meant I couldn’t even eat the Spam and pork sausages the other kids were eating. I stood out. I was different, so inevitably I was picked on, and school was only part of it because there was considerably worse waiting on the racist streets of 1970s London.
Yet I kept writing. I clung to the pencil and notebook and continued creating people and places that didn’t exist, while repeatedly being told that nobody cared, nobody would care and I was wasting my time. Whether those stories were actually good or bad almost seemed beside the point; the message I absorbed was that they were irrelevant and unlikely to be accepted because of who I was as much as anything I had written.
That insecurity has never entirely left me. Even today, my books are published under the pen name BC Guy, derived from Brown Car Guy, rather than under my own name, Shahzad Sheikh. If I’m being completely open about it, somewhere consciously or subconsciously there remains a part of me that struggles to believe somebody browsing books will pick up a novel written by an old brown bloke called Shahzad Sheikh.
That isn’t especially easy for me to admit, which probably explains why Benny Russell hits a nerve that runs so deep.
K.C. Hunter, D.C. Fontana and Star Trek writing about itself
There is another fascinating parallel embedded within Far Beyond the Stars. Nana Visitor, normally Major Kira Nerys, plays writer K.C. Hunter, whose gender is concealed from readers and who publishes under initials. When photographs of the writers are discussed, her identity as a woman becomes an issue.
The obvious real-life echo is Dorothy Catherine Fontana, better known to generations of Trek fans as D.C. Fontana, one of the most important writers and story editors in the early history of Star Trek: The Original Series. Fontana used her initials in a television industry where being immediately identified as a woman could make it harder for a writer to get action and adventure scripts taken seriously.
That gives the episode another wonderfully meta dimension, because if you think about it, Benny Russell, K.C. Hunter and their colleagues are essentially writing Star Trek. The writers of Star Trek created an episode about writers fighting for the right to imagine and publish precisely the sort of future that Star Trek itself represents.
And suddenly Far Beyond the Stars becomes a remarkable distillation of what Trek has been saying since 1966: infinite diversity in infinite combinations, equal opportunity, human dignity, curiosity, progress and the conviction that our differences do not need to disappear before we can live, work and thrive together.
Above everything else, it represents hope.
The writer has to imagine it first
Far Beyond the Stars performs this extraordinary trick by showing us the person who must imagine the better future before anybody else can see it. That person is the writer.
Benny Russell has to imagine a Black space commander because the society around him will not. This is one reason science fiction matters so much. Fiction can warn us about the future, showing us dystopia, climate catastrophe, authoritarianism, warfare, runaway technology and artificial intelligence turning against us, and we absolutely need those stories. Somebody also has to imagine the future worth fighting for.
Somebody has to imagine human beings walking on alien planets. Somebody had to imagine conversational computers before I could sit here interacting with one. Somebody imagined a Black commander called Benjamin Sisko, a Japanese-American helmsman, a Black woman serving as an officer on the bridge, a Russian working alongside Americans during the Cold War, an android aspiring to become human and a future in which humanity had finally begun growing beyond some of the stupid, primitive divisions that continue tormenting us today.
Before we can build a better world, somebody has to be able to see it.
Sometimes that somebody is simply a writer sitting alone in front of a blank page with an idea everybody else thinks is ridiculous.
It is striking that in 2026 we are simultaneously closer to some of Star Trek’s imagined technology than ever before while remaining painfully distant from its humanity. That makes continuing to imagine those better futures increasingly important. Keep telling the stories. Keep putting people into futures where others insist they do not belong. Keep creating worlds in which humanity has become wiser, kinder and better than it is today.
And if you are a writer, keep believing in those strange people living inside your head even when nobody else knows them yet.
Because they are real to you.
Benny understood that.
Give our stories a chance
And to everyone else, I would ask this: give us the chance to tell our stories and reveal ourselves and the worlds we create. Maybe you will hate them. Maybe you will love them. Maybe they will entertain you, challenge you or perhaps even change something in you. Judge the work, absolutely, but don’t dismiss the story because of the colour, gender, religion, background or name of the person who wrote it.
Give us the chance to entertain you, excite you and enlighten you.
So on this Star Trek Day, exactly 60 years after this extraordinary franchise first boldly went, I want to celebrate more than the magnificent Enterprise, more than Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway or Pike, more than Klingons, warp drives, transporters and all the wonderful things we Trekkies obsess over.
I want to celebrate the stories and ideas, the writers who imagined futures nobody had seen before and the performers who made us believe in them. Stories that challenge our prejudices, expand our imagination and sometimes fundamentally alter the way we see ourselves and each other.
Because before there can be a better future, somebody has to imagine it, and sometimes that somebody is sitting alone with a blank page desperately hoping that what exists inside their head matters.
Benny Russell believed his story mattered.
Every writer has to.
Sixty years of Star Trek has also taught us, in Spock’s words, that “there are always possibilities.”
So here’s to the next 60 years of possibilities, strange new worlds, new voices and stories none of us has even imagined yet.
And, as Picard put it: “Let’s see what’s out there.”
Happy Star Trek Day. Happy 60th anniversary, Star Trek.
And to every writer still wondering whether their story matters, keep writing it.
Live long and prosper. 🖖
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