Most scientists, academics, and journalists who write about Star Trek claim to be fans and lovers of the various Starfleet Captains and their crews. But their customary methodologies function to deny to Star Trek its true originality as the creator of a reality-shaping "science fiction" that formatively influences culture, ideas, technologies, and even "hard sciences" like physics. Some book authors repeat the well-worn truism that Star Trek is a great modern mythology. Others follow the paradigm of The Science of Star Trek, substituting their own particular field of expertise for the word "Science" in that formula. This is exactly the opposite of clearing a path to the perception that Star Trek actively affects technoscience and techno-culture. It holds Star Trek in the weaker position of being "tested" against an established body of knowledge to see if it "measures up" on a scale of feasibility or correctness. The possibility that Star Trek is the lively initiator of a "new real" is thereby eliminated in advance.

What is the "essence" of Star Trek as a vigorously imprinting science fiction is for us a question still to be answered. To gain knowledge about something that we instinctively sense to be "inaugural" or "instituting," we must be willing to lose something that we already know with systematic certainty, to voluntarily dispose of erudition that we acquired with the instruments of fixed scholarly categories. We must stay keenly aware of the elusiveness of the object under study and the sought after apprehension. We must strive to see the object of the investigation as non-comparable with what we already know, and non-exchangeable in the currency of existing wisdom. Our goal is to learn Star Trek's internal and underlying logic. As a singularity, Star Trek can only be grasped through an exploration that is carried out in Star Trek's own terms. But we ironically do not know at the outset what these "own terms" are. Acknowledging this paradox leaves us with a seemingly daunting task, but it remains possible to take a few intuitions or "direct perceptions" as our starting point.