Star Trek: 2063

My favorite author is certainly Jo Belano, the Chilean expat who spent her final years in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I was fortunate enough myself to grow up. The library always displayed her book 2063 prominently, and I must have sat there reading it, and borrowing it, about half of my first twenty years on this planet, which, thanks to the era in which she lived, ended up being my last twenty, after I agreed to live in Tycho City on the moon. And of course I’m taking a copy of her book with me.

2063 is a kaleidoscope of the the millennium as she understood it. She opens with a story about the Bell Riots from 2024, knowing many of her readers would have forgotten the massive reforms already happening before First Contact, most of which stayed in place even when WWIII broke out. She’s one of the few historians of any extraction to link the riots, and the efforts of Gabriel Bell himself, to the war, the desperate attempts to prevent it, after the Eugenics Wars had all but precipitated it, the conflict between Starling and Cochrane that launched a thousand ships into space, one of Starling’s of course containing the infamous Khan Singh in cryostasis. She also talks about the final World Series in 2042, how the aging baseball star Buck Bokai volunteered himself for the draft after playing in the last game as a symbolic gesture of unity.

The book really hits its stride for me, though, as she describes President Rios’s difficult path to the White House, how the country very nearly split apart upon his election, and then First Contact occurs on his watch, and he transforms the controversial Cochrane and the backwater town he had exiled himself to in rural Montana into a beacon of hope, inviting the world’s leaders to an international summit with the new Vulcan ambassadors. 

The way she weaves all this together, this rich tapestry of humanity’s potential, at a time when we had just begun to live among the stars…So I’ll live on the moon, now, and sometimes I wonder if I’ll go deeper still into space. Even Cochrane is thoroughly respectable these days. He’s talked about the “final frontier,” as he works on his new warp engines, like a credo, and…we really don’t know what we’ll find out there. But it seems like a challenge worth taking. I wonder what Jo would have discovered, there. Sometimes I wonder if I should be the one to write about it. Following her example.