No Need For Trek Anymore

dcsmith writes "In an article at the LA Times, Orson Scott Card says 'So they've gone and killed Star Trek. And it's about time.' SciFi blasphemy? Not really. Card makes several good observations about the growth of SciFi over the past 30+ years. The article also comments on several other genre gems, including Joss Whedon's Firefly." From the article: "...the hungry fans called their friends and they watched it faithfully. They memorized the episodes. I swear I've heard of people who quit their jobs and moved just so they could live in a city that had Star Trek running every day."

Comments

Re:Orson Scott Card

[Doc Ruby]

Card is an excellent writer - his Ender character is immortal, and the writing is some of the best in the genre of his contemporaries. But outside of his own novels, who cares what he thinks about anything else? For example, he's an insane Christian homophobe. That doesn't affect his SF writing, but it does impugn his judgment about "society", even the place of the writing of others in society.

Re:It's not a fair evaluation.

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Correction:

If Star Trek hadn't been successful, there would have been no TNG or movies. It would have been something different that milked the nerd-urge of the seventies and eighties. Trek had decent grounding and so got quite a bit more popular, but TNG was what made Paramount their real cash on TV, and the movies made a killing.

Without its rabid fanbase that created success, Trek would have died an earlier death. A much earlier death...

OSC is not known for judgement...

[joeldg]

As much as I like his books (at least ones that are not trying to turn me into a drooling mormon) he is a dispicable human and an outrageous bigot:
See
http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card /index.html
and his actual views
http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html

Those articles will turn you off on that guy.. or at least stop purchasing his books.

Re:Orson Scott Card

[AhtirTano]

There is no need for this to be an issue of opinion. Words have definitions.

Good point. Let's check the Oxford English Dictionary.

Christian, a. and n.
B. n.
1. a. One who believes or professes the religion of Christ; an adherent of Christianity.
2. One who exhibits the spirit, and follows the precepts and example, of Christ; a believer in Christ who is characterized by genuine piety.

The official name for the Mormon church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The subtitle of the Book of Mormon is Another Testament of Jesus Christ (the first being the Bible). Articles of Faith 1, 3, and 4 (which they basically brainwash their children with via ritualized repetition) all claim belief in Jesus Christ as a member of the Godhead and their personal savior.

Ergo, Mormons fit the definition of "Christian".

As you said "There is no need for this to be an issue of opinion. Words have definitions."

(For the record. I'm an ex-Mormon. I was raised one, but left once I actually started thinking about what I was told rather than just accepting things.)

OSC is known for bad judgement...

[joeldg]

As much as I like his books (at least ones that are not trying to turn me into a drooling mormon) he is a dispicable human and an outrageous bigot:
See
http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card /index.html
and his actual views
http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html
Those articles will turn you off on that guy.. or at least stop purchasing his books.

(this was originally buried in another thread, but reposting here as OSC is really not a nice guy, so does not surprise me that he would turn on a large segment of his fans.)