Star Trek, The Official Guide to Our Universe : The True Science Behind the Starship Voyages by Andrew Fazekas

In my college years I had the audacity to call Star Trek "boring", which caused a Trekkie to say defensively "What's so boring about an optimistic future?" I had grown up as more of a Star Wars fan, but as an adult I've grown to appreciate the Star Trek franchise for its striking optimism and imagination. Star Trek writers have a boundless outlet to comment on human nature and the universe at large by extrapolating a future that's built on the best aspects of our present. In this book, Andrew Fazekas uses the fictional voyages of the TV series and movies as a jumping-off point to explore real-life astronomy and physics.

To be upfront, this isn't a book that I can "review" as it's pretty much a reference book and isn't intended to be read cover-to-cover (though I did). Published by National Geographic, The Official Guide to Our Universe contains beautiful space photography from NASA (some with necessary false colorization) and information about celestial objects such as stars, black holes, and nebulae. Each section begins with a summary of a Star Trek episode or movie in which the crew encounters the object in question ("____ in Star Trek"), with the following page talking about the real-life equivalent ("____ in Our Universe"), and a few pages later a guide detailing how to spot it in the night sky ("Stargazing"). The stargazing pages includes what area of the world from which the object is best viewed, the best time of year to gaze upward, and a map that shows the nearest constellation. In between chapters, there are pages about Star Trek technologies like starships, weapons, and communicators, but these pages kind of feel like filler that would be better used in a more fan-targeted reference book.

As science fiction, Star Trek certainly tries harder to be accurate to the science than some of its genre brethren, but of course sometimes it just tosses out cool-sounding space words in the name of compelling stories. For instance, in the Original Series, Kirk and company get up close to a quasar, but as explained by Fazekas, in reality that's something that could only be found at the center of a galaxy other than our own. The book is careful to distinguish the fiction from the facts, and it's pretty interesting when the two overlap.

There's one paragraph in each chapter of this book that takes a quick look at how close real science is to reaching the technology that's been depicted on screen, and some of it is closer than one might have considered. Although we won't be traversing the galaxy at warp speed any time soon, we've come close to replicators with 3-D printers, and virtual reality is advancing quickly, just not to the extent of holodecks. We've come a long way in the fifty years since Gene Roddenberry's original series premiered, and continuing innovation at this pace for another couple hundred years, who knows where we'll boldly go. Stargazing has been limited to an Earth-centric point of view, but someday we might see our solar system, or even our galaxy, from the outside. The Official Guide to Our Universe will appeal to any Star Trek fan, and/or anyone with an interest in astronomy, and it may increase your interest in either subject.