There is a season two trailer out, which suggests the space race continues, but so does the Cold War. We see more of a militarization of space. Without going into spoilers, can you just give me a little bit of what your thinking is when you were contemplating what a second season might look like?

Yeah, we mapped out a big journey at the beginning of the show of what each season was going to be like. The second season did feel like, okay, now we’re going to jump 10 years roughly and get into the ’80s. Now, Reagan is president, and the Cold War has moved into space. So the Soviets and the Americans have expanded their lunar bases, and then you start getting into an era when Reagan and the Soviet Union were going face-to-face down on Earth. Well, wouldn’t they also go face-to-face up in space as well? We wanted to play that and see how our alternate history would treat that. There’s some interactivity between the events that happen on Earth and how they affect what happens on the moon and in low Earth orbit, and vice versa.

You see the Cold War competition between the superpowers get really intense and get hot. Yes, it starts to have more of a military aspect, as Reagan brings in his philosophy and the Soviets become more aggressive because they have now had an enormous victory in the Cold War —getting to the moon first — and an increase in their prestige around the world. They are getting more allies, the Warsaw powers are more stable, and we just have a different kind of Communist threat on earth. It just felt like it’d be really interesting to now see, well, how would this play out on the moon? How does that play out in terms of the space race?

You have Reagan narrate that trailer. A lot of space historians consider him a very pro-space president, given, for instance, the race to the Space Shuttle program. In his 1984 State of the Union Address, he talked about a permanent human presence in space, as some other subsequent presidents have. And, of course, in his speech after the Challenger disaster, he said, “Sometimes, when we reach for the stars, we fall short. But we must pick ourselves up again and press on despite the pain.”

Is that the Reagan we’re going to get? Are we going to get the utopian, “We can start the world over,” “If aliens invade, all the nations will pull together” (which is something he actually said)… Is that the Reagan we’re getting?

I think you’re going to see aspects of that Reagan, yeah. It’s really interesting for me, as a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who was not a fan of Ronald Reagan in my college years. Now, this version of history does play to a lot of his strengths. We are having Reagan listen to the better angels of his nature, as it were. He was a big supporter of the space program, so there is that aspect of it. He was a straight-up cold warrior in a lot of ways — and so was Jack Kennedy, and so were a lot of people. But also, the same Ronald Reagan that could figure out how to make peace with Gorbachev is also a part of our show.

Yeah, again, there’s that dreamy, utopian, “Hey, Mikhail, let’s get rid of all nuclear weapons.”

Exactly.

It’s what sometimes gets lost as people focus on, again, the cold warrior aspect. So, no, I’m super looking forward to season two. That sounds phenomenal.

One of the ideas I write a lot about — which is one of the reasons I was so excited to have you on — is this idea that America is no longer the future-oriented, techno-optimistic nation that it used to be, with the retreat from space perhaps being one bit of evidence. But there’s also a lot of other stuff — what we spend on infrastructure to ensure our GDP, science investment, underfunding entitlements, not doing much on climate change, electing a president whose campaign is based on all forms of nostalgia. So a lot of those things, to me, make it seem like we are not a future-oriented country, and you can trace a lot of these trends back to around 1970 or so. I think the culture is part of it, so it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing.

Back in the 1960s — you mentioned ‘Star Trek,’ which you were a big fan of, even before you later became a writer for ‘The Next Generation’ and some of the other incarnations. And we also had shows like ‘The Jetsons,’ and even ‘2001’ was also, I think, a techno-optimistic film.

But then in the ’70s, we started getting a lot of pessimism. You got all those Charlton Heston movies, like ‘Soylent Green’ and ‘Omega Man.’ And then today, you see America’s vision of the future, and it really seems just to be dystopian scenarios: zombies, plagues, climate disasters, and oligarchical societies run by the super-rich surveillance states.

Neal Stephenson, the sci-fi author, has publicly lamented this, and here’s a quote from him: “No one will be inspired to build the next great space vessel or find a way to completely end dependence on fossil fuels when all our stories about the future promise a shattered world.” Do you think our culture produces too many dystopian stories, and do you think it matters?

Moore: I think I agree with both questions. I think we do have too many dystopian future worlds, and I think it does matter. It’s a little easier to write a dystopian piece, in all honesty. It’s easier to make things really crappy and show people at their worst. You know, “What if this disaster had happened and all the people are dead except for…” It’s really easy to go to those places, because it’s a natural place of drama.

It’s harder to write “Star Trek,” which is why there’s really no other competitor for ‘Star Trek in terms of what we’re talking about. Trek stands alone in its optimistic idea of the future, at least in terms of pop culture science fiction on film and television. There’s really nothing else, and Trek kind of owns that space. Not only did it say, “Here’s an optimistic vision of the future,” but it’s a future that probably almost everybody now buys into. If you ask people what they hope the future’s going to look like, they’re probably going to describe a future that’s very much like Star Trek: a world that conquers disease, poverty, and racial tension; nations no longer go to war with each other; and we go out into the galaxy in peace and for freedom, representing democratic values. That’s the dream, and that’s what Trek is all about. It’s harder to find drama in that situation. It’s harder to figure out what the conflict is. You have to work a little bit more. So it’s a little easier just as a writer to draw up the dystopian scenario.

I think that is a really good point that Stephenson made in that quote, — if that’s the whole diet, then no one is going to be inspired to do things. “Star Trek” inspired generations of people. When I was working at “Next Generation” and “Deep Space Nine,” people were constantly coming to us who worked at NASA or worked in Silicon Valley. They had gotten into those professions because they were inspired by “Star Trek,” because they either wanted to be astronauts or they wanted to be engineers or wanted to make a transporter. They just were so inspired and excited by the ideas that they saw in that vision of the future that they literally dedicated themselves to doing it.

We need to provide that for people. We need to give people that kind of hope and that kind of inspiration if we want them to achieve those things because I think culture is very powerful. It does influence how we think and how we behave and what we achieve.

Is there an appetite for that kind of content? To me, on TV, I’m not sure there’s anything more optimistic than the opening credit sequence of “For All Mankind.” With the music and the graphics, you think, “Okay, good stuff’s happened. We’re headed toward the future.” But, again, to some degree, the market is saying, “We want zombies.” Now, probably, we’re going to get even more outbreak and pandemic kinds of science fiction. But is there an appetite for optimism out there from Hollywood or Netflix?

I think there is, and sometimes the business is slow to pick up on what there’s a market for and what kind of appetite there is. A classic example is during the Depression, where suddenly everyone just wanted to go to the movies and watch something optimistic and carefree and forget about their troubles, and then Hollywood serves that appetite. You just need one of these things — some optimistic piece — to catch people’s attention, and then suddenly you’re going to be inundated with 50 of them.