Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Paul Stamets

Time has brought us back around once more at a rate faster than an energetic Krenim chronophage. It feels like only yesterday that we were making a list for Doctor Hugh Culber. One year later, in this the month, it is only fitting that we spend the loop with his husband, Paul Stamets.

A brilliant scientist, Stamets was one of — and one half of — the most unique characters in Star Trek history. As co-creator of, and for the longest time sole navigator for, the 'displacement-activated spore hub drive' ('spore drive,' for short), he broke distance and speed records long before Tom Paris hit warp 10. Alongside husband Hugh, Stamets broke several more barriers across the five seasons for LGBTQIA+ representation in Trek — by being there and being open, and later by being with his newly extended family.

Markedly abrasive, if not downright rude, at the start, Stamets had also mellowed out quite significantly by Star Trek: Discovery's end. In the far future, Stamets found new purpose as adoptive father and mentor, and as a critical component (pretty literally as the spore drive's 'plug and play') in the re-building of the Federation of the 32nd century. Discovery's premature cancellation might have cut his character development a little short, but there's still a good deal left to say about Paul Stamets. I do hope you like mushrooms!

You can take the 'astro' out of 'astromycologist' — the 'stella' out of 'stellaviatori' — but you can't take the fungi from Paul Stamets. Star Trek: Discovery's galactic mycelial traveller had down-to-Earth, in-the-Earth, inspirations — the real-life Paul Stamets, a longtime purveyor, and mostly self-taught scientist of all things fungal.

When spawning Discovery in the first place, creators wanted to inject a bit of science-based sci-fi magic with mushrooms into the show that was destined to bring Star Trek back to the small screen. Series co-creator Bryan Fuller, still on staff at the time, already had previous with the fungi guy — 'Eldon Stammets' was the name of a mycelial serial killer in Fuller's so-delicious-you-could-almost-eat-it TV hit Hannibal.

For permission and pointers in creating the on-screen version of Paul, Discovery producers got in touch with the real Stamets, who just so happens to be quite the Star Trek fan, having built a holiday home on Cortes Island (part of the Discovery [!] Islands off the coast of British Columbia, Canada) "in homage to the Starship Enterprise," according to CBC News. The real Stamets also informed producers about the real Prototaxites — a giant genus of fungi that went extinct several million years ago — which was then used (with added 'star traveller,' stellaviatori) as the basis for Discovery's spore drive.