Jeffrey Morris has spent his whole life believing in the future we were promised—the one where humanity grows up, reaches the stars, and strives to become something better than its worst instincts. He built his life around that belief. And he’s watched, year after year, as the world drifted further from it instead of closer.
Q: What motivated you to write this book, and why now?
A: I can tell you almost the exact night the book began. In late 2024, I sat with a fear I’d never quite felt before—not about an election or a policy but about the species. A sense that we might be at a genuine hinge point, stepping onto a path we don’t come back from. I’ve watched a lot of what frightened me that night slowly come to pass since.
Somewhere in that darkness, two ideas collided. I’d been turning over the Fermi paradox—the strange silence of a universe that should be full of voices—and the unsettling possibility that the reason we hear nothing is that civilizations tend to destroy themselves before they ever grow up. Then I thought about Star Trek, and an almost unbearable irony surfaced: What if the story itself is our greatest achievement—not because we meet aliens or build starships, but because we never reach the part of the premise that matters most? The enlightened society. The civilization that made it through the filter. Lately it feels less like we’re heading toward that future and more like we’re heading toward Mad Max by way of The Hunger Games.
I wrote A Future Askew because I couldn’t stop asking why—why we’ve drifted so far from the future we imagined and whether we can still choose differently. Why now? Because the danger feels immediate, and because 2026 marks sixty years since Star Trek first showed us what we could become. If there’s a moment to hold that promise up against reality, this is it.
Q: What was the most challenging part of writing your book?
A: The hardest part was tone—refusing to be bleak. When you write honestly about AI, climate, nuclear risk, and the erosion of reason, it’s easy to slide into cynicism, and cynicism loses people. I never set out to write a doom book. The real challenge was finding the line between realism and despair: telling the truth about the dangers while holding on to the belief that we can still choose differently.
That’s actually why the book is built the way it is. I wanted each chapter to open like an episode of The Twilight Zone—a narrator stepping out of the shadows to set the scene, the way Rod Serling once did, then a short piece of fiction that pulls you in, followed by a thoughtful, well-researched essay on the real issue underneath. The story disarms you; the essay makes you think. Getting that rhythm right—hook first, then substance, warning wrapped in wonder—took real time to craft. I think I got there.
Q: How does your personal or professional background influence your writing?
A: Honestly, this book comes from where I live—inside my own head every single day. These are the things I read about, think about, and turn over constantly, and I’ve been this way since I was a child.
I was always a little different: I asked too many questions, I challenged authority, I lay awake pondering life and death. Media like Star Trek—and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos—is what helped me feel less alone. It told me there were others out there who took these things as seriously as I did. I’m not a small-talk-and-sitcoms kind of person; I like to go deep. I take life and thought seriously—to me, the goal of a life is to have a point, to actually mean something—and since we only get one pass at this, I want mine to be part of the small corner of the universe that reflects on itself with reason and intellectual integrity.
So in a real sense, A Future Askew isn’t a departure from my life; it’s a mirror of it. It’s how I’ve seen Star Trek since childhood—not as entertainment but as a pathway to a better world and the actualization of our species. That’s a beautiful thing to believe in, and I’ve never stopped. My years as a filmmaker and designer shaped how I say it—I think in images and stories first—but what I’m saying comes from a place much older than any career: a kid who looked at that future and decided it was worth taking seriously.
Q: Who do you hope this book will resonate with the most?
A: My biggest hope is that this book reaches beyond the fandom. I want to hand the very best of Star Trek to someone who’s never watched a single episode—the reader who assumes it’s all gadgets, costumes, and cosplay—and show them what’s actually underneath: a serious, hopeful philosophy about who we could become. Trek has always been more than special effects, and if this book proves that to even a few outsiders, I’ll have done something worth doing.
At the same time, I wrote it for the fans who already know—especially the ones who came up on classic Trek, from 1966 through the end of the ’90s. The people who felt its depth long before it was fashionable to admit a science fiction show could carry real ideas. I wanted to reach all the way into that, to honor what they always saw in it, and give them something that takes the show—and them—as seriously as they deserve.
Really, it’s for anyone willing to look up and think about where we’re headed. But if I had to name the two people I pictured while writing, it’s the curious skeptic who’s never given Trek a chance and the lifelong fan who always knew it was about more than the stars.
Q: What advice would you give to someone thinking about writing a book?
A: This is my first real book but not my first time telling a story—I’ve written graphic novels like Parallel Man, Venus, and Slingshot. Prose at this length was a different mountain, and here’s what it taught me. Start with a clear outline—a real sense of where you’re going, a road map. And then don’t cling to it. Let the book breathe. Let it evolve as you write; roll with the nuances and the things you learn along the way, the ideas that only surface once you’re deep in it. The outline keeps you from getting lost, but the willingness to wander is what lets the work grow from a solid foundation into something special. Build the map—then let the territory surprise you.
Q: What’s one thing readers might be surprised to learn about your journey, whether in life or in writing?
A: People tend to file me under “filmmaker,” but I’ve never fit neatly in one box. I’m a director, but I’m also a visual artist and a musician—and, to most people’s surprise, I spent part of the early ’90s in Prince’s orbit: choreographing, dancing in a few of his music videos, and directing commercials for his dance company. I think it comes from the same restlessness I’ve had since I was a kid: a need to understand how things work and a need to make things, in whatever form the idea demands. Film, image, music, movement—and now prose—have never felt like separate careers to me. They’re just different languages for the same impulse: taking an idea and giving it a shape people can feel.
Q: Do you have a writing routine or ritual that helps keep you focused?
A: I do, and it’s specific. The entire time I was writing A Future Askew, I listened to one thing: a playlist I built of Hermanos Gutiérrez, the instrumental guitar duo. I’ve thought about why it worked so well. First, it’s instrumental—no lyrics to compete with the words forming in my own head. Second, it’s a specific, smooth style—warm, atmospheric, unhurried—consistent enough to build a kind of sealed room I could disappear into and stop noticing the world. But there’s just enough variance from song to song that it never flattens into wallpaper or goes dull. That balance—one mood, many shades—put me straight into a groove and kept me there. It became a kind of switch: Put that playlist on, and my head knew it was time to work. I think the book has a rhythm it wouldn’t have had without them.
The other half is simpler: Once I get going, I don’t stop. I’ve never been “blocked” in my life—I don’t really believe in it, at least not for me. When the work gets hard, I push through instead of waiting for inspiration to rescue me. The only breaks I take are physical—a walk, a bike ride, a workout—to move the body and let my head reset. Then I sit back down and keep going.
Q: Is there a particular quote, motto, or piece of wisdom that guided you through the writing process?
A: “Never give up. Never surrender.”
Fans will recognize that as the battle cry from Galaxy Quest—which makes it the perfect motto for a Star Trek–inspired book, equal parts sincere and self-aware. But I mean it plainly too. It’s how I work: I push through, I don’t quit, I don’t wait to be rescued. And it turns out to be the heart of the book as well—A Future Askew is, at its core, an argument against surrender: against giving up on reason, on each other, on the future we’re still capable of building. A line I’ve always loved for fun turned out to be the thing the whole book is about.
Q: Are you working on another book or project you’d like to share?
A: Yes—and it’s all one connected vision. A Future Askew is the first book in a series. The sequel, A Future Aloft, arrives in 2027. Where this first book diagnoses how far we’ve drifted, the sequel turns toward the fix—and all of its fiction will live inside a single universe I’ve been building called SparrowHawk, a fully mapped future history I’m developing for both page and screen.
Set roughly three centuries from now, it imagines a humanity spread across the solar system—living in cities that float above the clouds of Venus, coexisting in harmony with the AI and androids it created, even as it fights for survival against a runaway artificial superintelligence. The universe lets me dramatize not just where our current path leads, but how we might still change course—using story as a road map, to show what a better way through could look like rather than just argue for it.
SparrowHawk is an original universe of my own, and I’ll admit what it means to me: Star Trek gave me a future to believe in when I was young, and my hope is that one day SparrowHawk might do the same for a new generation.
It’s all part of something larger. I’ve founded Rational Future—a home for books, filmed conversations (Rational Talk), and live events (Rational Live), built around reason, curiosity, and action. And on September 8, the sixtieth anniversary of Star Trek, I’m launching a Kickstarter to help bring this vision further to life. This is only the beginning.
Q: What are five books that have had a lasting impact on you?
A: Five is hard, but these are the ones that rewired me:
Cosmos by Carl Sagan: The one that shaped me more than any other. Sagan made the universe feel vast and meaningful at once and taught me that reason and wonder aren’t opposites.
2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke: Clarke wrote about intelligence and evolution on a cosmic scale, and no one made the unknown feel more awesome or more possible.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin: Proof that science fiction could be literature. A story about an entire alien society that was really about us—our politics, our loneliness, our capacity to understand one another.
Ringworld by Larry Niven: Pure sense of wonder. A single impossible structure so enormous, it rearranged how I thought about scale, ambition, and what fiction could dare to dream up.
Voyage by Stephen Baxter: His alternate history of a NASA bold enough to send humans to Mars; it’s the space-faring future I was promised as a kid, and the ache of the one we didn’t build is part of what fuels everything I do.
More broadly, those are the writers I keep returning to—Clarke, Ben Bova, Niven, Baxter, and Le Guin. Between the hard science and the human questions, they’re the tradition I come from and the one I’m trying to carry forward.
Learn more about Jeffrey Morris and his new book, A Future Askew, here. Coming soon November 2026!