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Why Charles Stross Hates Star Trek
daria42 writes "British sci-fi author Charles Stross has confessed that he has long hated the Star Trek franchise for its relegation of technology as irrelevant to plot and character development — and the same goes for similar shows such as Babylon Five. The problem, according to Stross, is that as Battlestar Galactica creator Ron Moore has described in a recent speech, the writers of Star Trek would simply 'insert' technology or science into the script whenever needed, without any real regard to its significance; 'then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.'"
I think Scalzi was spot on in addressing this. I thought his second point was the best containing a couple great quotes - "At this point in my life (and, really, for the last quarter century at least), I simply make the assumption that film and television science fiction is going to hump the bunk on the 'plausible extrapolation' aspect of their science, and factor that in before I start watching." and "But, yes, when you admit that Star Trek has as much to do with plausibly extrapolated science as The A-Team has to do with a realistic look at the lives of military veterans, life gets easier. "
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The thing that annoyed me the most about Star Trek, and it was most common in the Next Generation, was the idiotic idea of solving a made-up scientific problem with made-up technology. It has no value to a plot; actually it's the opposite of plot, if there is such a thing.
...why exactly? How is ST any different from any other sci-fi series like BSG or Firefly? It's not as if those show have any less technobabble or are any less characters-first-technology-second.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
the fucking show for what it is make belief sci-fi/fantasy and if you don't like it why do you keep watching it?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Millions of people are wrong. Or, at least, stupid. I don't need to Godwinize this thread to explain how that might be so.
Stross is right about this. Of course, it is flamebait at an epic scale to attack not just the biggest of fan franchises, but the very logic upon which fan franchises are based: massive narcissistic projection. If SF on TV actually reflected on how our humanity itself would become unrecognizable in the wake of technological change, then fans wouldn't have easy heroes to identify with.
Star Trek was very good in its time. It opened up sci fi to a new tv audience and was quite cool.
However, as far as quality sci fi goes it's not as good as others even at its best.
The whole, warp core failures super easy, stuff exploding and shorting with regularity makes you question the competence of the Federation.
In contrast an amazingly logical, super goddamn sticking-to-the-plot and really rigidly logical writing with plausible concepts and amazingly entertaining writing, nothing comes close to Asimov. I've read 2000 pages of his novels over the course of 2 months after discovering it recently. It is amazing, if you like Star Trek, go read Asimov. More originality in *any* two books of his than nearly half of TV sci-fi historh.
If I want education, I'll watch Science/Discovery/History . . . better yet, I'll read a book. When I want entertainment, I want entertainment. Obviously, I'm not alone in feeling that Star Trek/Babylon 5/Firefly et. al. provide that.
Millions of people have been wrong before. All I'm saying is, the mob does not necessarily have to be right simply because it's the mob.
Not that it matters, "wrong" or "right" this is Science Fiction and I'm glad the story is based on plot. Star Trek is about overcoming humanities problems, not overcoming technical problems.
Quark's Bar would like a word with you.
I think that the fact that the science is not the focus of the plot excuses treknobabble, to a degree. It never really bothers me, because it's generally pretty self-aware that it's just making stuff up.
On the other hand, to use a current example, a show like Fringe distorts or flat-out makes up stuff about real world, modern-day science so often that I actually find it distracting, and I don't even have a particularly strong science background. Star Trek is at least in the far future - I can't call them out on making stuff up about dilithium crystals and transwarp mogons or what-have-you.
But if you're going to talk about things that aren't much more advanced than a high school science class, you should at least try not to just make stuff up because you're too lazy to look it up. Not only does it take people out of it who know that it's wrong, it misleads people and perpetuates a poor understanding of science in the general population. I'm not saying fictional programming should be educational, but it should at least make a modicum of effort to not be absurd.
B5 was very consistant and deliberately very low on the techno-BABBLE per se.
There was technologies needed for the plot (Hyperspace et al, etc etc etc), but it was established and not really changed.
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He's just mad because 100s of millions more people know what Star Trek is than who will ever know or care about him or his works. This is just a way to get publicity.
Totally. I'd much rather watch the episode where the Enterprise was reposessed due to the military cuts in spending, but because the construction was contracted to several different manufacturers (who then sub-contracted) and nobody really owned the thing, and because thousands of shares of it were sold off, making out who actually owned the thing an impossibility, and nobody knew who to serve the intergalactic summons to.
Oh, and the Klingons were waiting outside of spaceport cloaked the entire episode... waiting for a fair battle.. Good times.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
You're thinking of 'deus ex machina', which is a plot device along the lines of "and suddenly a god-like being appeared and fixed everything"...
You mean Q? Not only did he fix everything, he even caused everything.
The thing is, technology is irrelevant to plot and character. If it wasn't, then the stories they'd be telling would be so alien as to be incomprehensible. Stories are about people, not technology. It's something written into just about any guide to writing science fiction you can find: Don't let the technology overshadow the characters!
Yes, lightsabers and teleporters are cool. But the story is about a boy turning into a man and saving the world (Gee, thanks, Wesley). Or a continuing mission through space, etc. The story isn't about the technology. Sure, it'd be nice to have more realistic tech written into the story to begin with - BUT. I will note that the most popular episodes of TNG always revolved around characters. The episodes oriented towards 'how the teleporters actually work' as a plot device didn't fare so well.
Cos he's a contrarian little prick, who can't appreciate Nichelle Nichols flashing a little bit of red panties?
What's not to like, apart from the - easily overlooked - semitophillic and globalist/military world-government metaphor?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Charlie conflates SF novels with SF television series. They don't have the same criteria.
Unlike a novel, a good SF series doesn't take itself too seriously. That's what was so good about Star Trek. We expected it to be a little tacky and weren't disappointed. Every so often we'd get the equivalent to one of the characters turning to the audience and saying "this is just fiction, you know." Shattner's "Get a Life" was bang on.
The shows that lost sight of this, BG being the best example, were boring-to-annoying.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
What's the difference between fans and trekkies? Fans read.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
What the A-Team taught me was that all it takes to build an impregnable armored vehicle is a few empty 50 gallon drums. We'd have this Afghanistan thing wrapped up tomorrow if they could just ship a bunch of vans, empty 50 gal. drums and a welding torch or two over there.
50 gallon drums... and Mr. T.
You can't take the sky from me...
does ALL sci-fi have to be about the technology? is that a requirement?
star trek does a crummy job of predicting plausible technology and its deeper implications on man's place in the universe. but that's like saying Shakespeare's Henry VIII is not very historically informative. it sort of misses the point.
star trek, when it's about something, is primarily about meditations on what it means to be human. the writers would be trying to say something about, i don't know, honor or justice or leadership or whatever. they didn't care about how transporter technology would transform society. they definitely didn't give a crap about scientific principles or bosons or tachyons or whatever.
the science is flawed, and the whole scenario is more than a bit ludicrous.
but i'm ok with that.
is it really a huge problem that the ressikans, a dying culture with limited apparent technology, could build an indestructible, arbitrarily fast probe that could transmit a lifetime of completely real, interactive memories through the enterprise's shields into the brain of picard in a matter of minutes? who cares, that episode rocked.
i could live a little longer in this prison
I still remember the "motivational" speech Adama made when they started their exodus. That they all deserved to die. I was like WTF?! Is this what a motivational speech from a military commander passes for these days?
Then he disses B5. Just all the possibilities, socio-political effects B5 introduced from having telepaths was pretty amazing in of itself. Not to mention motivational speeches actually are motivational in B5...
The problem with the truly advanced technologies that science-fiction stories like to use is that their REAL effects on the world would be so transformative, that the characters in the story would be so different us that the reader wouldn't be able to relate to them at all.
An "accurate" Star Trek story would have people lying in bed all day, being fed through a tube, while they lived out their fantasies in the holodeck. Robotic mining ships would troll the galaxy for dilithium to power everything. Gee, that's interesting.
From description: "...Battlestar Galactica creator Ron Moore..."
Ron Moore didn't create Battlestar Galactica...he just took a very good pre-existing idea and ruined it.
Seriously? Has the anti-socialist political fearmongering gotten so bad that now they have to pick on a fictional TV show?
Please reread your comment again. You are saying we should not like Star Trek because the Federation's economic system is a "socialist utopia". And presumably this is because socialism is bad! (Would you say the same thing if it were the equally implausible capitalist utopia?)
Not to mention that your characterization of the show not having any business or entrepreneurship is just not true, not to mention that some of us LIKE the idea of a world where human beings primary motivations are no longer purely and crassly economic... essentially you're saying that the ideological position of "Capitalism is teh best" is SO important to you that if a fictional work doesn't conform to it, people should dislike that work.
No, the TRUE one reason not to like Star Trek is the fact that they solve 95% of problems by reversing the polarity of something.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
OK, let's look at the effect of technology on a society.
The star trek universe has:
1) Replicators capable of creating any material object except gold pressed latinum.
2) Holodecks (presumably a replicated product) that can create any imaginable experience.
3) A seemingly unlimited number of colony worlds where any group can migrate via the magic of ships with warp drive (created via the replicator)
4) Unlimited energy using matter-antimatter.
OK, so in that environment, a capitalistic society is nearly impossible. There's nothing to buy or sell. As replicators themselves are replicated, anything of "value" can be had for virtually nothing. Acquisition, per se, now means nothing. Experiences themselves are similarly cheap, or free. If your neighbors complain, you leave and join the anarcho-syndicalist collective colony on Kaka 4. Where does capitalism fit in with this technology?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I agree, and after reading the article (I know...) I doubt Mr. Stross has even seen the show. Some of his issues are the lack of story arcs or lasting impact to the universe, yet the show had both. The series had major story arcs with actions from the first and second season directly impacting what occurs in the final one. You definitely got the feeling that the major points of the series had been planned years in advance. Likewise the fate of several races varied tremendously with major effects to the surrounding galaxy (effectively the universe for the races in the show). Babylon 5 also took an interesting approach in not making humanity some überpowerful utopian society, in fact it was much closer to the opposite (earth wasn't even close to a powerhouse in the galaxy, and its political climate approached dictatorship through the series). I get the feeling that he has a bit too much prejudice against non-hard science fiction to fairly evaluate several of the shows.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
B5 was very consistant and deliberately very low on the techno-BABBLE per se.
There was technologies needed for the plot (Hyperspace et al, etc etc etc), but it was established and not really changed.
B5 technology was a lot more internally consistent than Star Trek. The races that had gravity control used it to propel their spaceships (though not at FTL speeds) as well as keep their crew stuck to the decks and healthy. The races that did not (most notably humanity) had to find other means, most notably rotating sections on their spacecraft, or strapping everyone into their seats. Babylon 5 itself even had an innovative craft-launch system that was only possibly because of its rotational momentum.
Telepathy was dealt with in a typical human social fashion: ostracism, discrimination, and eventual Draconian legal regulations. This led to the corruption of the institution that was responsible for keeping telepaths under control.
They even ran across a sleeper ship once. Also, time travel was used precisely once, required an entire planet worth of power generation to implement, and spanned three episodes: one near the end of the first season, and a two-parter in the middle of the third season; henceforth, it was never used again. You never see that kind of forward planning, and restraint, in any Star Trek series.
Babylon 5 does not deserve to be lumped into the same dung pile as Star Trek. Sure, it has its faults, but it's not even close to as sloppy as Star Trek.
Reminds me too of that Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man." "The rest of the book...it's a COOKBOOK!!"
Agreed. Star Wars very well could have had a medieval setting and it would have made no real difference to the plot. Instead of warriors who build their own light-sabers, the Jedi very well could have been warriors who understood blacksmithing and forged their own blades. Instead of visiting other planets, they could have been traveling to far-away lands. Instead of a Death Star, the evil Empire could have had some kind of super siege engine. The Force isn't terribly unlike the use of magical powers that is standard fare for many games or movies with a medieval setting. Instead of dogfighting spaceships, there could have been large-scale naval battles or even the use of cavalry. The story is your basic "good vs. evil" in which good ultimately prevails even though it looks pretty hopeless for a while, with some elements of philosophy thrown in. It could easily be adapted for a non-technological setting without giving up any of its themes or crucial elements.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yo,
If you watch science/discover/history channels, I hate to break it to you, but there ain't no educational purpose to any of those shows. I know, because I've been cast as an "expert" on no less than eight of them. It's all about entertainment baby.
Want to really learn something, shut off the TV and read a book. Geez, for the price of cable TV these days, you can buy a new book every 3 days or so.
But if you want to be entertained with the illusion that you're learning something factual, when it's often just as made-up and sensationalized as any other made-for-tv drama, then carry on.
You want a sci-fi fiction that actually is science dependent, look at novels by Phillip K. Dick, or check out the anime series Ghost in the Shell SAC. They depict plots where technology plays a much larger role in the story and fundamentally affects how people think and behave, to the point where they start to question their own humanity because of infusion of technology.
From the article:
SF, at its best, is an exploration of the human condition under circumstances that we can conceive of existing, but which don't currently exist
This is Charles Stross' definition of science fiction (and explains a lot of his writing). And he doesn't hate just Star Trek, he hates Babylon 5 and didn't watch BSG. If this is Charles Stross' starting point, then its perfectly reasonable for him to hate ST/B5/BSG.
The creators of TNG/B5/BSG simply had a different world view from Charles Stross. They wanted to use their shows as a reflection of our current world. TNG was so touchy feely (and upon recent viewing, fairly preachy), its a reflection of the politically correct atmosphere from which it was wrought. Nothing like an classically trained Shakespearean actor to bring a moral voice to the world. Likewise BSG is a reflection of its times with flawed characters making morally ambiguous decisions. Or, more concrete examples of a science fiction as a mirror would be a religious nut for a president or Battlestar Pegasus as a reflection of military zealotry.
I'm surprised no one seems to have brought up the difference between Star Trek under Gene Roddenberry, and Star Trek under Rick Berman.
If you watch ST:TNG in order, all the way through (yay Netflix), there is a CLEAR change in the series after Roddenberry passed away.
With Roddenbery, Star Trek was about tackling the big issues and (mostly) unanswerable questions facing humanity. Under Berman, it turned into a (still mostly entertaining) technobabble soap opera, where some bug in the Enterprise supplies the main plot point for every other episode.
It really is a night-and-day difference. Go back and watch.
Why would anyone not hate Star Trek?
It is boring, uninspired and stupid. It has the charm of a fascist dystopia combined with the silliness of "Plan 9" technology mockups.
Close, but not quite
Science fiction has always been 99% fiction and 1% made up science. Probably best that way.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
DS9 had its problems (the whole Sisco is the Chosen crap I found pretty abysmal), but it was still a lot more interesting than the later seasons of TNG, and far more watchable than Voyager and the even more repugnantly awful Enterprise. The latter two left me cold. They were made up of uninteresting, flat characters, dull and derivative story lines, and where they did try to get philosophical, unlike TOS and TNG, simply came off as preachy and banal. By those two series, it was definitely Trek From A Tomb.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That's an often stated argument when the topic of star trek comes up. But that isn't really supported by the show. If the economy were truly post scarcity wouldn't everyone and his dog have a huge starship? Or at least a few private citizens? The only ones who do seem to be not part of the federation or it's an old piece of junk. Furthermore, if capitalism were impossible with that kind of tech what about the ferengi? Who tells people back on earth what jobs to do? Sisko's parents have a restaurant, are we supposed to believe that there are people who actually want to be waiters to better themselves? Is there a waiting list to get in? How are people chosen to get to eat at the restaurant? What about the wine made at picard's family winery? Real wine, restaurant seating, etc. These are all still scarce resources, they always will be, there has to be a means of distributing said scarce resources. If it isn't through the exchange of currency it must be through barter, which is just a less efficient way of trading, or through regulation.
Beyond the economics here are a lot of other problems with the way the federation is run. There seems to be little distinction between the politics of earth and starfleet command, which is clearly military. The enterprise is routinely sent into situations that are likely to end in combat, yet only very rarely do they separate the saucer first. With a thousand civilians on board this would be against international law even now, since it amounts to using human shields. Sure, ya, it's a peaceful ship, with full shields, weapons targeted, on the edge of a DMZ between romulan and federation space? Gimme a break. I love star trek as much as the next guy, but it's unrealistic, and not even really desirable, on so many levels it's absurd to defend it.
Star Wars space battles are copied from WWI biplane battles, where nobody can hit targets consistently, even at short range.
YES! We have technology today that can keep a laser pointed at a car hood for multiple seconds, from a plane flying by. Why can't they have targeting computers IN THE FUTURE that can do anything like that????
Big pet peeve right there. Best episode though from DS9 was the season finale when Sisko tells Warf to enable auto-targeting and all the photon torpedos just start sailing out of the station. Great battle.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
I agree with you in that those episodes where generally good.
However, for each one of those there are at least 10 in which someone mentions "some kind of dampening field" that "can't be overriden by realigning the teleporter matrix"... :(
So what?
Plenty of people don't like Star Trek.
Why is it important to any of us that this guy doesn't?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
He didn't claim it was unpopular. He didn't even claim it was objectively bad. He just explained why he personally didn't like it.
Pick any lowest-common-denominator popular culture. Britney Spears. Dogs playing poker. The Transformers movie. Whatever. The reason it sells is that a lot of people like it. But the fact that it's popular doesn't mean that it should be magically insulated from criticism.
Let's translate from science fiction to a different genre, say westerns, so Star Trek becomes Wagon Trek. Stross is basically saying that he doesn't enjoy Wagon Trek, because he's an enthusiast for westerns, he's spent a lot of time reading good westerns, and he's developed enough taste to discriminate between shitty westerns and good ones. In particular, if a western novel has Cherokees in Spanish Colonial California, he's not going to enjoy that western, because he can't suspend his disbelief, and he can tell that the author was an idiot who didn't even have enough respect for the genre to do his research. Ditto if a Montana cowboy in 1895 is using flintlocks.
Science fiction used to be a niche market. It was part of the "long tails," before the notion of the long tails was invented. What's happened over the last 40 years is that it's become such a commoditized thing that a lot of SF (and especially a lot of the TV/movie SF) is written for people who have no actual affection for or knowledge of the genre. There's nothing wrong with letting those people enjoy their SF, just as there's nothing wrong with listening to Sonny and Cher sing "I Got You, Babe." But sometimes there are people who don't want Sonny and Cher, they want James Brown.
Find free books.
intellectual property will be the only way for people to make money
You fail at thinking.
Why would you need money?
The problem isn't that the science is right or wrong, it's that it is irrelevant (he put it best saying you could stick them on an 18th century wind powered war ship and have Geordi fixing the rigging or something). The show is not even remotely internally consistent; if you have replicators that only require raw materials and energy, and energy is abundantly available from fission, fusion, warp drives and whatnot then why are there any poor people or such a disparity with technology within the Federation itself? To say nothing of the lack of protective gear (hint: wouldn't the security guys maybe wear uniforms that are resistant to weapons fire? Their union must suck or something.). They are pretty much socially identical to current standards, and yet in the last 20 years I have seen the world change almost unrecognizably due to technology. Basically it boils down to really, really bad script writing, which as entertainment is sort of a critical thing.
Replicators capable of creating any material object except gold pressed latinum. ... ...
Unlimited energy using matter-antimatter.
a capitalistic society is nearly impossible. There's nothing to buy or sell. As replicators themselves are replicated, anything of "value" can be had for virtually nothing.
A couple of problems here.
First off, it takes energy to run a replicator. Yes, perhaps a replicator can make the matter and the anti-matter and then react them to get energy but it's pretty clear that the laws of thermodynamics are still in effect in the Star Trek universe. The second law of thermodynamics prohibits perpetual motion types of scenarios like this. Energy is still a resource.
Another resource would be real estate. At some point most easily accessible places in the universe will be owned by someone. Yes, the universe is a large place but you are still limited by time constraints to a relatively small portion of it during your lifetime.
Yet another resource would be thought, invention, and innovation. Thinking beings would still demand some sort of value in exchange for plying their skills.
I'm sure there are other resources that can be brought up but you get the idea.
Sapere aude!
The setting and the science existed primarily to provide a sufficiently epic stage on which to encounter compelling social and philosophical subjects without seeming pretentious or absurd to the average viewer.
Watching TNG was an ennobling experience.
See: Chain of Command, The Measure of a Man, Ship in a Bottle
Heck, even look at Encounter at Farpoint. The acting and the dialogue had real flaws, but the premise, humanity as a species on a trial, isn't something you can pull off on any other series so directly and on such a scale.
Ever noticed how fantasies are so much more exciting when they are possible? I think that that's where he's coming from. There are enough TV shows about hostile narcissist super-men who use their "magic" to zap the bad guys, all the while licking their lips. Make it real -- not just something to titillate the crocodile brain. We've got pr0n for that.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
From my own SUPER exciting, Stross-approved scifi script, which contains only technology that scientists from the present can master or easily explain :
"Oh boy, this ship sure is cramped and boring. How long until we get to the next planet?"
"Oh, just three more generations."
"Great. It sure is nice that we haven't encountered anyone new, or anything interesting at all, over the course of these numerous years in interstellar space."
"Yeah, but it's really too bad we won't encounter any other civilizations in the foreseeable future, or within the next several generations. And I wonder what has happened on Earth in the last 500 years, since we are 500 light years away and don't have any means of faster-than-light communication."
"Uh huh. If only we had faster ways to communicate, more (or any) connections with beings from other planets, near-light speed (or better) means of travel, and other futuristic technologies that couldn't even have been explained hundreds of years ago."
"Yeah. And it's too bad we're so inbred from generations of space travel. Oh well."
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Books are not a substitute for cable television. You also heavily overestimate the cost of both books and cable television. If you can only choose one for informational needs, you choose television, hands down. News, oddly enough (not the crap on CNN) doesn't tend to age well. If I want to learn that Barack Obama won a nobel peace prize for doing nothing, I'm not going to read about it in a book. If I want to find out how my investments are doing, I'm not going to find that in a book either. If I want to learn organic chemistry, I'm going to learn about it in a lab, not in a book. If I want to learn computer science, I'm also not going to use a book. If I want to learn grammar, maybe I'll use a book. It could be more efficient than an english course, which tends not to focus on books. On that note, based on your grammar, you must have been watching a ton of science/history/discovery channels.
While books tend to age well, what you really pay for with tv is up to the minute news, live sports, and occassional escapes from reality. Sure, if all you use tv for is to watch reality shows or daytime soaps, you missed the point.
Personally, my favorite sports team is Barcelona, but I live in Atlanta. $30 a month is amazingly cheaper than hopping on a plane, getting a hotel, going to the stadium, watching the 3 hours football game, grabbing a bite to eat, and flying home (nevermind the time costs). Instead, I watch it on FSC.
Simple really. Not everyone spends every waking moment learning things.
On the other hand, a lot of books are also entertainment. I'm not going to learn anything from Dan Brown or Tucker Max. I might read them because my flight is delayed, I already had to convince TSA that a toothbrush is not a weapon, and if I want a drink my choices are $4 for coffee at starbucks or $4 for a flat 20 oz coke at a generic airport vendor.
The best way to learn things is not tv or books. Experience is the only teacher worth listening to (cue the ridiculous examples of why this isn't true in 5...4..3..)
Wasn't it called 'Amistad'?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.