Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry’s “Vision of the Future”: The Creation of an Early Television Auteur

Gene Roddenberry propagated a narrative of himself as a “visionary” writer-producer and the primary author of Star Trek in the 1960s.  From the 1970s onwards, Paramount Pictures (and later, CBS) co-opted that narrative to market what would become the Star Trek franchise.  This paper will examine to what extent this narrative can be substantiated, and to what extent certain aspects can be contested.