Shatner Talks Sci-Fi, Trek

IGN recently spoke with William Shatner about his most recent project, the sci-fi film Groom Lake. While talking that, he briefly talked Trek and Sci-Fi in general.

IGN: Do you become more and more of a sci-fi fan as you do more and more projects within the genre?
SHATNER: I was always a sci-fi fanatic. I was reading all those guys who came to write for us on Star Trek several years before Star Trek existed. Those great science-fiction writers of the 50's and 60's and 70's, they were brilliant storytelling minds, and the fascination, for me, is imagining a world that you'll never see, you'll never be a part of. In 2020, when the last bubble of methane comes out of the arctic lake, what's going to happen? What's going to happen in 100 years when what the planet has planned now goes through its many manifestations? It drives me crazy that I will not know what's going to happen. It's like a child growing up and going off and you don't know what becomes of them. You yearn for a letter. Write home! Yet they never do. And that's the tragedy of death. One of the fears of dying is that you won't know what's going to happen – not just the next minute after you die, but what'll happen in 50 years when all your relatives are dead and a new set has come along. Who are they? Will there be a cure for cancer? Will there be interplanetary travel? Will we find answers to all these incredible questions that plague me? What is Dark Matter? What is the essence of light? The very questions that scientists are asking themselves today, and are striving to find the answers to, what's driving them is an outrageous curiosity as to the nature of our world…Somebody was able to transport a molecule…Now, that's interesting. They got a molecule, which means they can do two molecules. And then…what? You know the adage that if you can imagine something, it's possible? It's true. Because what's really out there, we can't imagine. That's the most fascinating part. Instead of straight-line travel, it's all bent. So if you think in bent-line terms, nothing makes sense. Maybe the galaxies are speeding up. The mystery of everything! But I hate mysteries. But that drives my interest in science-fiction…If you think finding life on Mars is going to be a big thing, the day we find that the speed of light isn't the law of the universe, that'll be something!