Previously on isoul.uk: We grew up in a house where the television was always on — older siblings, wrestling tapes, sci-fi reruns and films brought back from the video shop. Television wasn’t background noise. It was the recommendation engine.
There is a slightly odd thing about my childhood relationship with science fiction: I remember Star Trek far more clearly than I remember Star Wars.
That isn’t because Star Wars was obscure. It obviously wasn’t. It just wasn’t the centre of science fiction in our house.
My brothers were more like Trekkies.
So when I think about childhood science fiction, I think about Star Trek, Quantum Leap, Stargate and later Buffy. I think about television rather than cinema. I think about sitting in a busy family home where older siblings had already decided what was worth watching.
By the time Star Wars really became something I paid attention to, I was already in my teens.
Inheriting somebody else’s favourites
Having older brothers meant I was constantly exposed to things from before my own generation.
I was born into the 1990s, but the 1980s never felt particularly distant. Reruns were everywhere and my brothers already had favourites.
That is probably why Quantum Leap still feels so familiar to me. The same goes for shows like The A-Team. They were not “old television” to me. They were simply television.
Star Trek was similar.
The original series existed alongside the later shows rather than as a museum piece. Then there was Voyager, which became one of the versions of Star Trek I most strongly associate with growing up.
I didn’t have to discover the franchise. It was already in the house.
Television science fiction felt enormous
It is easy now to forget how big television worlds could feel before you could instantly look everything up.
You would catch episodes. Miss others. Learn characters gradually. Hear older siblings mention things you hadn’t seen yet.
There wasn’t a wiki open on another screen explaining the timeline.
That made fictional universes feel almost impossibly large.
When I watched something like Star Trek, it felt as though there were countless stories beyond the episode currently on the television. That sense of a bigger world is probably one of the reasons science fiction stayed with me.
Then came Stargate and Buffy
As I got older, the science-fiction and fantasy mix widened.
Stargate fitted perfectly into the kind of thing I already liked: technology, exploration, mysterious systems and a world that had rules you could slowly understand.
Buffy was different but still belonged in the same general space in my head. It was another show with its own mythology that rewarded you for sticking with it.
Long-running television did something films could not. You lived with these characters.
That mattered to me much more than spectacle.
Why Star Wars arrived later
I don’t remember sitting down as a very young child and having Star Wars become a defining moment.
It was more gradual.
By my teens, I obviously knew what it was and became much more familiar with it. But it entered a space that had already been occupied for years by Star Trek and television science fiction.
I suspect that shaped my tastes.
I like universes where people spend time living and working inside the technology rather than simply using it for an action scene. I like systems, ships, computers, rules and the mundane details of fictional worlds.
Which, when I look at my hobbies now, feels incredibly predictable.
From fictional ships to real servers
Years later I started naming machines in my homelab after things I liked.
One server became Voyager. Another became Deltaflyer. The names weren’t part of some carefully planned naming scheme at first. They were simply references that felt natural.
Then more appeared.
It is funny how something watched casually in a crowded family home can survive for decades and eventually become the name of a machine sitting quietly on your own network.
That is probably what nostalgia really is.
Not trying to recreate the past exactly.
Just noticing that parts of it never really left.