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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."
Star Trek gave many people a vision of a future much more peaceful and prosperous than the present day, and awakened who knows how many minds to the potential and wonder of the universe and science. I'm in the sciences today because of it.
The hope that tomorrow can be better than today is what keeps all people going. Star Trek really connected with people on a level I've rarely seen.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
No way. They wouldn't take the phaser out of the box.
The DVD Box sets, that's another story.
Through-line series like Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Alfred Gough's and Miles Millar's "Smallville" have raised our expectations of what episodic sci-fi and fantasy ought to be.
Fantasy, yes... science fiction, no.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
...And so the Trekkies were executed in the manner most befitting virgins - they were thrown into volcanoes -- Futurama
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The problem though comes from a friend who doesn't have the money for cable or Satelite. Unless NBC starts carrying BattleStar Galactica, Enterprise is the ONLY current BROADCAST space-opera style sci-fi. When you consider that there will always be a younger generation of kids discovering science fiction for the first time, space opera still has a place. Maybe not Star Trek- which is particularily bad space opera- but space opera all the same.
With Firefly and Enterprise canceled- and fewer stations than ever before carrying the syndicated version of Stargate and Andromeda (the second of which I'm sure Mr. Card would say suffers from the Roddenberry curse) what can step up to take the hole?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Part of what makes this country great is the (unfortunately declining) encouragement to tolerate people that are wrong. The alternative is worse.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
It's puzzling, to me, that Card (a writer whom I respect greatly, BTW) spends his entire column arguing that the "Star Trek" series(es) should be cancelled because ST:TOS was a bad show.
Why should that even matter? ST:TNG was (by the third season, anyway) a far better series, and DS9 was better still, despite stealing ideas left and right from "Babylon 5". It's the last twenty years of Trek that's being cancelled, not the first three.
Postscript: Now we finally have first-rate science fiction film and television that are every bit as good as anything going on in print. If only....
In short, people loved Star Trek because it WAS both thought provoking and accessable to people who aren't interested in "hardcore sci-fi" visions of the future.
Emphasis on the WAS.
The problem here is too many people view Trek as one big, indivisible thing. It's not. You can't have a rational conversation about "Trek is Good" or "Trek is Bad". Some Trek was good. The current state of Trek is bad.
The worst thing that can happen to a piece of Sci Fi is for it to become commercially successful. The more commercially successful something is, the greater the temptation to extend the franchise just for the sake of profit. The more money a franchise is worth, the lower you can set your creative standards and still justify releasing a product.
Why do half of the Star Trek movies suck? Because PAramount wanted to make a Star Trek movie, regardless of whether the script was any good. Sometimes they got good scripts, sometimes they didn't. But the people who get to decide whether a Star Trek movie should get made don't make that decision on whether the script is going to produce a good movie. They make that decision based on whether money in will be greater than money out.
The Original Series was a ground-breaking series that only happened because Roddenbery believed in it and made it happen. Next Generation only happened because Roddenbery believed in it and made it happen. Star Trek XXXVJWII, Voyager, and Enterprise was made because if Paramount didn't churn out new Trek they'd be wasting this huge, profitable sci fi franchise they'd built.
That can't go on forever though - eventually you produce so much crap just for the sake of making a buck that your franchise becomes worthless.
Unprofitable or New Sci Fi will only happen if it's good. Profitable Sci Fi will happen REGARDLESS of whether it's good.
If Star Trek hadn't been successful, it would have died after DS9 or earlier, and we'd all still think Trek is Good. But it didn't. But new trek being bad doesn't make old trek any less good.
paintball
OMFG!! I can't believe you played the Orson Scott Card!!!
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.
As geeks, we LOVED Card because he wrote about Ender Wiggin; a very bright young boy who could not get along with his peers because of his intellectual capacity. C'mon, this is Slashdot. If you read Slashdot, and you've read Ender's Game, you identified with Ender to some extent.
We all like to believe that we are special. Geeks like to believe they are smarter than the average person. Is it so crazy to believe that maybe it wasn't Card's extraordinary writing and plot that made Ender's Game so popular -- perhaps it was because Ender's Game was the ultimate braniac dream? To be smart enough to save the world, and get the accolades that go along with it.
His blatant religious proselytizing in his other books, most notably the Alvin Maker series, choked me with its sickly-sweet taint. I enjoyed the series at first because it was well written and fun, but it soon turned into a carousel of reptition. Alvin did and said the same things over and over, Card using him as a hand-puppet to express his Love Thy Neighbor and Turn the Other Cheek platitudes until I was racing through to the end of the novel not out of enjoyment and eagerness to see what happened, but just to be able to put the book down and go wash the veneer of his homophobic Christianity from my hands.
Card is not a saint. He wrote something that we all very much wanted to read; that we were alienated from our peers as children for a reason. There's a destiny waiting for us so we can use these big brains. We were humiliated on the playgrounds in grade school, but we'll show them! Someday!
Card gave us this pipe dream. But it's time to let go of the security blanket, Linus. You're smart, but you don't need a writer to give you a raison d'etre in a science fiction fairy tale.
Good point regarding the allegories...the technique is classic, and Star Trek (has been at times) one of the finest examples in popular fiction.
Take issue A. Not everyone really wants to deal with issue A in a serious context all the time. And if issue A is something so divisive or ugly that people don't even want to consider it, you may be in danger of offending people in any discussion or scenario in a realistic setting. So take issue A and set it on another planet, (or in another country--Shakespeare was always lifting recent English politics into Rome/Italy/Denmark) where you can explore the bejeazus out of it without naming names or identifying your readers or viewers as villains.
I'd have to say that science fiction used to be a prime place for this, particularly on highly-censored media like television. Frankly, though, television doesn't need to worry as much about offending anymore...can anybody find me a social issue that isn't dealt with in documentary or mainstream fiction these days? (Within a script-cycle on Law and Order, for one.)
Also, with that breed of social sci-fi/fantasy has always been at risk--see Utopia, Erewhon, Planet of the Apes (the book, folks)--of becoming a preachy polemic on the author's ideals. Roddenberry and the original writers rode the edge well, for the most part, for their time, and they really made "ripping good yarns" out of some of the episodes. (Anyone wants to argue "all" is kindly asked to watch "Spock's Brain before posting).
But I think that long-term interest--both the kind that makes the whole dorm show up for each new episode AND the kind that makes every succeeding generation turn to their kids and say, "Hey, you're old enough, read/watch this," have been lacking for a -long- time in too many of the shows.
Anyway, returning to my main point...there are other shows out there visiting an allegory a week, and there have been for a while. Original Trek had to compete with Lost in Space--no contest. STNG owned the dial at our place (Dr.Who came on late Saturdays only). Since then, though, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise have had to endure comparisons with B5, Stargate, Farscape, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and Atlantis...none of which are or were saddled with as much backstory...and all of which were free (see parent sidenote) to look at the grimy side of the future and present in ways that Trek was not.
People slag Star Trek for having every alien be humanoid, but that is deliberate. Roddenberry wanted people to see the humanity in every character.
Personally, I don't watch much Sci Fi because most of it shows a future which sucks. Star Trek shows a future that I want to believe in.