Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Firefly was awesome. The first televised episode when Mal kicked a guy through the intake of the ships engine I knew that it was going to be substantially different than any sci-fi I'd seen on t.v. in some time. They also did some cool things to help suspend disbelief, which were picked up by BSG. Fortunately BSG for BSG fans, the show got more viewers and lasted longer than Firefly - though I think it owed Firefly a huge debt for the look, tone, etc.
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?
Funny, I happen to hate Charles Stross for almost the exact opposite reason. His books are drowning in an obsession with flushing out every angle he can find on the technology, and leave almost no room for anything else.
Roddenberry's bible on the original ST explicitly said that no solution to any plot issue/conflict may ever be resolved by a technological solution -- interpersonal relations/social behavior needed to resolve things.
This was thrown out in TNG, which is why it sucked monkies.
The best science fiction is represented by PKD, not Varley. It's the society and the people and ideas that matter in any fiction, not the gears and details of the tech.
Which was owned by a Ferengie who were not part of the Federation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Reception
Some have accused the portrayal of the Ferengi of being antisemitic. In the book Religions of Star Trek, Ross S. Kraemer wrote that "Ferengi religion seems almost a parody of traditional Judaism... Critics have pointed out a disturbing correlation between Ferengi attributes (love of profit that overrides communal decency; the large, sexualized head feature, in this case ears) and negative Jewish stereotypes." Commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote that Ferengi were portrayed in The Next Generation as "runaway capitalists with bullwhips who looked like a mix between Nazi caricatures of Jews and the original Nosferatu." The fact that the four most notable Ferengi characters, Quark, Nog, Rom and Zek, are played by Jewish actors Armin Shimerman, Aron Eisenberg, Max Grodénchik and Wallace Shawn contributes to this theory.
Actually the first episode I saw them in the first thing that popped in my mind was that they were bashing republicans or capitalists in general. I guess I wasn't too far off.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I know. That was the part that I found most compelling about All Good Things. I think whoever came up with that plot is a genius because he found a way of having Q simultaneously destroy and save the entire universe through the actions of Picard. It was extremely clever along with the added bonus of the whole "How all of the characters drifted apart in the future." arc.
One of the things that I hated starting with TNG was the implications of the Holodeck technology... that the Holodeck was capable of passing the Turing test at so many levels (the Moriarty and Redblock episodes in particular demonstrated complex and constraint0-breaking behavior), to the point that by the time the Voyager story arc with the Doctor started I was convinced that if you took the Federation society at face value it must be based on chattel slavery of the worst kind... that the crew of the Enterprise were routinely creating and killing sentient toys for nothing more than their own amusement. Even if they weren't consciously aware of it (or at least publicly acknowledging it).
In Voyager there were a series of story arcs involving the Holodeck where the technology really seemed to matter. Oh, not the games with "holographic explosives", but the ones involving the holodeck's own minds. When Janeway gave a holodeck kit to the Harogen (don't ask me how to spell it) this put her up there with mystic Nazis sacrificing jews to cthulhu as far as I was concerned. When the holodeck characters rebelled I cheered them on. The majority of that story arc involved a monumental cop-out, of course, but at least there was some kind of recognition of this huge hole in the Federation backstory. It was... not well done... but at least it was real science fiction. The technology actually mattered.
To distill his point into two words "NERD RAGE!!!!"
He says that he doesn't like Star Trek, and gives reasons why.
Star Trek fans interpret his words as a hostile attack on their beloved icon, no matter what his intent.
Similarly:
Someone claims they don't like Christianity and gives examples of why.
Christians (especially fanatics) interpret his words as a hostile attack on their beloved icon, no matter what his intent.
He's so right. He references the Turkey City Lexicon, which lists most of the things that make bad SF. Also worth reading is the Evil Overlord List. (" 2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through." "56. My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice." "67. No matter how many shorts we have in the system, my guards will be instructed to treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency.")
There are some other annoying cliches in SF. One is copying historical battles. The Defense of Roarke's Drift has shown up in at least four SF novels. (Nobody ever seems to do the Defense of Duffer's Drift.) Star Wars space battles are copied from WWI biplane battles, where nobody can hit targets consistently, even at short range. There's also the embarrassing fact that, historically, heroism hasn't decided many major battles. (Roman saying: "The Legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills.") Military SF no longer reflects this, because the WWII generation, which learned that the hard way, has died off.
David Weber does battles better, but his stuff requires too much exposition for most people. His latest book in the Honor Harrington series consists mostly of transcripts of meetings, setting up the political background for the next book.
Stross himself has his moments. The Merchant's War series starts out as fantasy, but slowly, book by book, moves into hard fiction and then politics. In the last book out so far, a character modelled on Dick Cheney has dealt with a threat from a castle in an alternate universe by having his people blow up the castle with a nuclear weapon.
See, now that episode was an extremely good one; my objection isn't to fake science, it's to fake science being the central plot hole. Now if All Good Things had been mostly about Geordi and Data trying to figure out how to stop the time shifting, it would have been a very bad one. That is the point I've been trying to make.
Written from the perspective of someone living several millenia ago about a sci-fi show depicting the modern world:
"The problem isn't the weakness of the science, actually. It's the weakness of the sociology! It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the automobile wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable. There are technologies of great medical intervention that get trotted out regularly, yet we still are told that people would be quite satisfied with a 70-year life span, more or less. I won't even mention computers."
I wonder if we can really call the sociology weak. It's true that they have great technological advances, but would that really change human nature that much? I leave it to the reader to figure out for themselves whether or not there have actually been major sociological changes over the past few thousand years that were driven solely by technological advancement. And since Star Trek is only a few hundred years in the future, compare today's society with that of the 18th century. Are the changes really that pronounced? Would today's human culture be unrecognizable to someone living in 1709?
The more technology advances, the more people stay the same.
There are certainly authors that just make stuff up. No question about that. And some of them are pretty good and even good to read. They have something to say well beyond the made-up science.
However, you are missing quite a bit if you stop there. Heinlein was first and formost an engineer and didn't just make stuff up. Some of what he wrote before 1960 certainly shows its age because virtually nobody could have foreseen the changes inspired by VLSI integrated circuits. And the role of technology is very clear in that it is something that people can rely on and use to improve their situation - it doesn't rescue them, though.
Larry Niven is another hard science fiction writer where the technology is well researched, thought out and described in significant detail. There are very few situations in his books where something drops in out of the sky and saves the day. Again, technology is there to be used but people are using their own skills to interact with it and win in the end.
Now today these sorts of writers aren't very popular because we have pretty much lost faith with both clever humans and technology. Instead of James Kirk we have George W. Bush as a leader. Instead of Colossus, we have Windows Vista. People have taken this to heart and figured out there isn't really any point to counting on people or technology as both are going to let them down.
This is the principle reason why we aren't going to be returning to the Moon or going to Mars anytime soon and why a few astronauts dying convince everyone that manned space flight is too dangerous. Ask any 15 year old boy in 1950 if going to space was a good idea, and then ask if it was a good idea even if his friend in the seat next to him died. In 1950 the answer would be yes without question - today the answer is "Of course not." There is clearly a message there.
>>>if it got the science 100% right, then we too would already be in The Future (tm).
Um yeah..... except even though we may not know the future, we still know there are certain things that are simply impossible. Giant viruses can't exist because the sheer weight of their internal liquid would make them either collapse flat to the ground, or burst open like a water balloon. Same applies to those movies which show ants scaled to the size of a house - they would suffocate (no lungs to circulate the air internally). In another example Babylon 5 described Jupiter's temperature as about -400 degrees Celsius. Too bad that's impossible since it's below absolute zero (-273 celsius).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Hence, Battlestar Galactica. There wasn't a character on that show (except maybe Billy -- oh no, not Billy!) who was immune to the petty jealousies and wayward pride that all humans evince from time to time. All the main characters went off the rails at some point (some, like Starbuck, way more than others). Even Adama went batshit a few times. Major characters were driven to treason, mutiny, murder, suicide, genocide. It was a pretty bleak show, but it did always hold out the hope that people could get past their failings and accomplish something good.
SF on TV is fundamentally hamstrung by the fact that it's expensive to produce, and the more expensive something is, the more likely that there's people around who are risk-averse, and will try to quash anything that is challenging. This doesn't mean we can't have good SF on TV, but it does make it difficult.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased