Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Frakes

Frakes slips a small confession inside what sounds like an offhand list of tastes: sci-fi wasn’t the master plan, it was the job that found him. The sentence keeps stacking ordinary enthusiasms - contemporary lit, biographies, jazz, baseball - like a resume of credibility, the kind of cultural palate that signals he’s more than a guy in a starship uniform. Then comes the turn: “writers who write about the human condition,” a phrase that quietly stakes a claim to seriousness. It’s a defensive move, but a savvy one. He’s asking to be read as a person with a broad inner life, not a genre brand.

The rhythm matters. The repeated “I like” is deliberately plain, almost anti-performative, as if he’s refusing the polished origin story fans often want. Sci-fi, in this framing, isn’t a calling but an accident - “something that I happened into” - which doubles as both humility and subtle critique of how the industry types you. For an actor whose public identity is tied to Star Trek, the subtext is: don’t mistake my most visible work for my whole self.

Culturally, it lands in that long-running tension between “prestige” art and “genre” work. Frakes doesn’t insult sci-fi; he simply relocates it. By tethering his taste to jazz and baseball - American forms with mass appeal and real artistry - he nudges sci-fi toward the same category: popular, misunderstood, and worth taking seriously, even if it arrived by circumstance rather than design.