| Popis: |
In 2016 William Shatner and Jeff Rovin published Zero G, the first novel of what is expected to be a trilogy set in near-to-earth Space Station Empyrean. The protagonist is Samuel Lord, a stout 83-year old FBI agent with an artificial leg who plays the role of a rugged law enforcer in a frontier environment. After a brief description of the relevance of the myth of the frontiersman in American culture and its relocation to interplanetary space (the “final” frontier) as space cowboy, the discussion will focus on Samuel Lord’s most evident antecedents, James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise (played—embodied—by William Shatner himself for about 30 years) and Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the same ship in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and will argue that Samuel Lord’s hybrid body in Zero G and Zero G: Green Space (2018) promotes the reinterpretation of previous traditional and impermeable versions of male embodiment and offers new, alternative portrayals of (aging) masculinity. |
