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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?
Charles is NOT A MERRY MAN!
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.
Cmdr Taco, more apply more tech to the tech!
...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.
The one reason to not like Star Trek is its political system. I mean, a socialist utopia. http://colossus.mu.nu/archives/287079.php Theres no business, theres no enterpreneurship anymore.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
As opposed to Ron Moores method, writing a plot, dialog and roles, then randomly assigning characters without regard to anything else.
Seriously BSG is kind of cool, dialog is probably ok, but the plot and character development is among the worst things I've ever seen. I _really_ hope its not the model for new SciFi.
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.
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.
Extremely nerdy hard-science nerdy nerd kings are bitching about old TV shows because they were using almost made-up theoretical science as a plot device to advance the lives and drama of fictional characters for our entertainment...
Here's an article for you: Slashdot member deathtopaulw hates hard science fiction writers because they have no concept of fun and their minds exist only to crunch numbers and dwell on what is and isn't possible in a finite and boring universe.
Look at that, nobody cares either.
Plot and character development as irrelevant to technology.
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Go figure. Star Trek used flashy lights to get people's attention but in the words of Joss Whedon, "I don't know much about science but what I do know about science fiction is that flashy lights means....science."
That's about as science-y as it gets. You focus too much on making it within the realm of plausible extrapolation and you end up losing sight of things like interesting story arc, plausible plot turns and characters and you end up randomly writing your characters into roles and ending your series with some cliche reset-button-style let's-just-get-back-to-nature conclusion.
Why yes, I'm still bitter about BSG, why do you ask?
The biggest weakness of the entire genre is this: the protagonists don't tell us anything interesting about the human condition under science fictional circumstances.
I've been watching a lot of "Outer Limits" on Hulu of late (some of the best episodes aren't available there or on Netflix - only on DVD. What gives?!?). The best stories are about how people interact with aliens, their technology or both or with humans technology and progress. One episode has a plot based on transportation and duplicating folks and how people might deal with it. Or another plot that finds an alien and assumes their hostile only to find out they're friendly and we humans over reacted. Sometimes, it's the reverse. I painted some broad strokes here but I think I'm making my point. Although, some episodes were kind of hokey - the one with Alyssa Milano "Caught in the Act" was so-so, but it was nice seeing her half naked - what a doll!
Many of Star Trek's episodes were nothing but humans dealing with human subjects with a lot of technology around. The Naked Time (and the copy on ST:TNG) episode is a perfect example. It could have happened anywhere at anytime. The fact that it was on a spaceship really didn't add anything to the story other than filler.
Star Wars isn't any better, btw.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Just because someone watches or even enjoys Star Trek doesn't mean they think Stross is wrong. It just means they don't care enough about his point to base their enjoyment of Star Trek off of.
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
ie: Millions of people think Stross is wrong.
There's not much more to say on this.
Stross dislikes star trek.
Millions of fans like star trek.
The two are not mutually exclusive. People can have different preferences.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
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.
With the complaint that the writers would just leave "I can't tech the tech core anymore!" kind of language in the script isn't surprising to me, nor am I upset over it. I don't think there are many people who possess the skill to both write an interesting story and come up with realistic-but-yet-nonexistant tech. So if they want to take people who are good at writing stories and have them write a script and then find tech experts to fill in the blanks, good for them. That's one solution the problem and given Star Trek's huge success it's one that worked.
That said, like all TV there's good scifi and bad scifi. Often within the very same TV series. There is some tech in Star Trek that is just so silly sounding it does distract you from the story. "Red Matter" for example...
It's just entertainment and it has entertained millions for decades.. job done.
If you want real science, read a text book.
They have remodulated the phase colomators on the prion-antiprion exchange field surrounding the writer's conference room.
Squirrel!
Star trek != hard SF. Star Trek = western in space. (Firefly is too, in case you missed the subtle-as-a-brick hint of the horses in the pilot)
Nevertheless, it does manage to sometimes to SF-style exploration of the impact of technology. ST:TNG had a lot on the subject of machine intelligence, obviously. All versions explored contact with alien cultures, and if the aliens were a little more human than one could wish for.. well, the same is true of written SF. Even some of the worst Star Trek episodes explored some SF themes -- "Spock's Brain" explored the degeneration of a culture which relied too much on technology, and "Miri" explored paedophi.. err, no, the danger of genetic engineering.
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...
There's "fiction" in "science fiction"? Gee, I never noticed that.
Table-ized A.I.
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
While I can understand trying to make things "scientific" and being as accurate as possible, but at the same time it doesn't have to be accurate to inspire imagination. I know I grew up watching Star Trek, both the original series and later TNG. While later I became aware of a lot of the inaccuracies and "techno babble" that was spouted on the show, it did a whole lot to inspire my imagination and get me interested in a lot of areas. I think that was Gene Roddenberry's original plan/goal with the show anyway, to inspire the imagination and reach for the stars. Sometimes us as geeks forget that.
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...
As much as I love B5, if you're looking for a sciency hard science sci-fi, B5 isn't it. It was about characters and telling a heroic story.
Still, complaining that a story set in the future isn't more focused on extension of RL hard science is a lot like complaining that an Arthurian (in the case of B5 exactly like) story doesn't have more plague.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
The tech is a device to allow the viewer to accept that the story happens far away in a different society, so that the underlying social issues can be examined in a way that doesn't threaten the viewer. They're props - they're the functional equivalent of Victorian attire for a vampire movie. The story isn't about the tech, and if it was it wouldn't be any good.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
"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. "
That's a nice way of putting it. I always agreed that the way to tell if you're watching or reading a science fiction story is to see if you can pull out the trappings and still be able to tell the story. A movie like the Matrix is clearly scifi since it would be very difficult to tell without the technology angle. I mean you could try and do it but it would end up sucking as much as the sequels.
Something like Star Wars, on the other hand, it's heroic fantasy and you could do a bang-up job with it recasting it in a Tolkein world. The Force is magic, the Jedi are wizard-knights, the Galactic Empire is now more clearly Rome after the fall of the Republic, all the space travel is replaced with sailing around the great frontiers of the empire, the Death Star is downgraded to a city-busting weapon, Darth Vader borrows a spare set of armor from the Witch King of Angmar and swaps out his custom TIE Fighter for a fell beast, etc. Droids could become magical clockwork constructs, aliens are your various demi-human races. Chewbacca becomes a frost giant or a yeti. All of the essential themes of Star Wars work in this context because it's about the hero-quest, betrayal, redemption, and licensing fees.
Babylon 5 was good science fiction because it brought up concepts that would be hard or impossible to tackle in other genres. Yes, the basic idea of the Shadow/Vorlon conflict was accused of being LOTR with the serial numbers filed off but the resemblance I think ends up being superficial, it's the execution that makes the two stories different. Some of the storytelling in B5 was allegorical, just casting current problems in a different setting so that we could actually think clearly about the issues instead of getting worked up with our prior opinions.
The recent BSG was not just poor science fiction, it was poor storytelling. The writers were working without a plan and it showed. I've already gone a few rounds with apologists before and I know I won't convince anyone but the crap that made me stop watching BSG is the same crap that made me stop watching Heroes (and I frickin' lurved the first season of Heroes.) And the only reason I even care is that this genre is right up my alley. I don't complain about the writers ruining House even if they are because I don't care for medical dramas.
Trek died for me around the time B5 came about. What killed it is that there was no longer any drive and vision in the process, it was corporate-driven mung for the sake of making money. There was about as much joy and art put into it as you'd find in a Big Mac at the local McDonalds. So you get bland plots, reset buttons, and massive yawns. There were some good points in TNG even with all that, some people will defend DS9, nobody can defend Voyager and I think we've all agreed that Enterprise happened in Vegas and is staying there.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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.
The entire Sci Fi field suffers from this --> it's no different from the end of every fantasy movie you've ever seen. Harry Potter waves his magic wand and shoots a green light at the Dark Lord whose red light appears much stronger and is about to engulf poor Harry until, miracle of miracles he believes in himself or whatever. In how many episodes does a magic beam of reverse field tacheons or whatever shoot out of the Enterprise to magically heal the planet or confuse the Borg or yadda yadda yadda? Super science = super natural = BS. Please don't quote back A Clarke back at me. Good sci fi is dirty and broken and messy. I used to say like Star Wars before it was ruined. How about like Alien.
Star Trek was not science fiction, any more than the Jetsons was science fiction. Once you flip the switch in your head from sf to fantasy, the show doesn't grate on the nerves nearly as much.
The deus ex machina didn't bother me. What bothered me was that we'd never see the introduced technology again. What happened to the water that made you move a thousand times faster? The food that amplified psi talents? What became of the various AI's that Kirk talked to death? The drug that turned crones into beautiful women in a few seconds? These are breakthroughs that would utterly change even a faux-utopia like the Federation, but they vanished without a trace.
Whatever, Batman has been doing it for years.
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
I consider myself a fan of science fiction and I've probably seen every episode of ST, STNG, and Enterprise, yet I've only read one book by Stross, "The Jennifer Morgue". I wouldn't walk across the road to speak with him about his opinion on Science Fiction. If Roddenberry were still alive, I'd go considerably further.
Heck, I've read more Shatner than Stross!
The guy is either full of himself or this story was submitted by kdawson...
oh.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
That cancer of lazy fiction has even metastasized into the real world.
I blame fire.
exactly. In a huge number episodes of ST:TNG, you have a crew of explorers encounter a new and unexplained phenomena. They then explain it, invent a new technology to deal with it and then implement it. All in a matter of hours.
In 5 seasons of B5, the only thing close to that kind of mcguffin is the White Star Fleet. And that took the better part of 2 seasons to develop on screen (with prior work done to its first appearance). It may have been a military and political drama (with spaceships) instead of a story about science, but at least it wasn't a gross perversion of science like ST:TNG.
I thought people realized a long time ago that there was "soft" science fiction that really was just using SF to say something about current society and its problems and "hard" science fiction that was actually about the science and technology. Star Trek is probably the most famous example of the "soft" style. Stross obviously just prefers the second type.
From TFA:
Um, yeah ... there's a reason why Roddenberry pitched it as "Wagon Train to the Stars".
I've been watching a lot of "Outer Limits" on Hulu of late (some of the best episodes aren't available there or on Netflix - only on DVD. What gives?!?). The best stories are about how people interact with aliens, their technology or both or with humans technology and progress. One episode has a plot based on transportation and duplicating folks and how people might deal with it. Or another plot that finds an alien and assumes their hostile only to find out they're friendly and we humans over reacted.
That's all well and good, but it sort of seems to be tilting at windmills to complain that popular sci-fi isn't hard sci-fi. The most popular sci-fi movies and TV shows have almost all been stories about humans dealing with human subjects, with the sci-fi as window dressing and action/effects fodder--Star Trek and Star Wars come to mind most readily.
There's certainly a place for hard sci-fi/speculative fiction/whatever you want to call it, but just yelling at the fact that most popular shows aren't _that_ is just cranky and obvious.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
What was your point again?
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
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.
There isn't any "wrong". It's just entertainment.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
Is that a Godwin of the 2nd degree?
Star Trek episodes are philosophical parables, like most good science fiction. Suppose the world has this property. Then how would we behave under those circumstances?
Absolutely spot on. Complaining about the technobabble in StarTrek is really missing the point. The show was all about exploring interesting ideas and asking "What if?" questions, the technology was just a way to get to interesting places where those questions could be asked. Aside from Outer Limits and Twilight Zone there really haven't been all that much other TV shows that did that.
Shows like Battlestar or Firefly are much lower on the philosophical aspects and basically just drama in space. They did throw a bit of plausible technology in the mix every now and then, but those where much more decoration then the core of the show.
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.
Actually, I thought that "The Next Generation" did make some plausible speculations on the effects of the holodeck, what they called holodiction. They also did raise the occasional philosophical point about what Data was. Generally, while the science and tech may have been ad hoc, they did try to explore ideas from time to time, as in the "Rashomon" like episode "Matter of Perspective". However, there's no way anyone can predict the effects technology will have even 100 years from now. Presumably there will be a 'singularity', when machines become smarter than humans. The famous science fiction writer and editor of 'the Golden Age' of science fiction, John W. Campbell, challenged his writers to write stories involving aliens who were smarter than humans. As I recall, about all they could do was either have the aliens be juveniles, or have them do a bunch of seemingly random things that somehow made things work out for them.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
While not perfect either, I'm happy, instead, to re-watch my Firefly and (more specifically) Farscape DVDs.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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
Doesn't the use of technology in Star Trek reflect how we use it in real life? How often do you see a person with a broken computer get a full lecture on how it works and the significance of each component? I don't think any Sci-Fi needs to focus on the importance or implications of a particular theory. The entire point of Sci-Fi that it is fictional. It is very hard to explain advanced scientific theories to the masses. Futuristic science is even more difficult because we don't know it yet because it is in the future.
The point of a good Sci-Fi story is to use technology as a backdrop to talk about an issue or just tell a story. If they went into any more detail, the shows would just become a lecture on science that may or may not have a valid basis. While it is important to keep things consistent, too much information is distracting. We really don't need to know exactly how a warp drive works. All we need to know is the general idea behind a warp drive and that people use them for space travel. Realistically, even if there was something wrong with a warp drive, nobody would need to explain the theories in detail. The characters would either know enough so that a simple explanation would suffice, or they wouldn't know nearly enough to have the situation explained to them in a timely manner.
I actually had a class that looked at philosophy through science fiction. Episodes of TNG would often help to jump-start our discussions.
Science fiction has always been 99% fiction and 1% science. Probably best that way.
That's why I watch the Simpsons. Very little techmomababble...
I'm sure it would be more enjoyable for there to be a spy movie that stayed within plausiblilty science-wise so I don't keep getting pulled out of the movie by bad physics and have to convince my brain to turn back off. Quality of the action would have to be maintained by other means.
If you can agree with me, then you can get how sci-fi can be improved by some science backing. "Non-science" sci-fi isn't bad (I like most sci-fi I've seen), it just lacks an element that could potentially make it more enjoyable.
My webcomic
He's just being a Hard Science Fiction vs SciFi vs Fantasy snob. I happen to agree with him frankly, doesn't stop you enjoying other things, but reversing the polarity of the neutron field is a bit far from the logically explained and well researched cutting-edge-nearly-science for purists.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Stross's hate might be more about envy. i've heard of Star Trek, but not this Stross guy. How many Stross movies have i seen? Do you own any DVD sets of TV series made about his work? HE'S talking about Star Trek, who is talking about him? Reminds me of fat women whining about beautiful women being slutty.
Outdo, v. to make an enemy
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
The thing that annoyed me most in Star Trek is the invention of new technology during the show:
1. Ship is in grave condition.
2. Crew member has recently been studying some obscure bit of science and how it went disastrously wrong for the best minds in the universe.
3. Someone says, "what if we do this instead?"
4. Someone counters that it the only mention of doing that was a hypothetical and has never been experimented with.
5. In the next 2 hours of ship time the crew of the Enterprise proceeds to advance the state of the art in both engineering and physics in the same effort on a ship that's getting its ass kicked.
Well done.
We all know it's Science Fiction and that we're going to have to suspend disbelief at some point, but that should be at the onset. The curtain should open with a "What if this universe existed as such?" It should not be introduced as a major plot element unless you are producing farce. An Outer Limits or Twilight Zone might ask, "what if we were the aliens?" and play out the consequences, or "What if all disease were cured?". The viewer suspends disbelief and watches the creator's interpretation of how that plays out. In Star Trek they ask that "What if we can't get out of this bind?" and they ask the viewer to suspend disbelief in the last 5 minutes of the show. It's one step short of having a magic genie show up, wave his hands and fix everything. Oh wait, Q.
t
Perhaps the Jetsons is more up your alley
even the whitestars weren't a huge advancement, it was just a light destroyer built using a combination of Vorlon and Mimbari technology, then mass produced to fight the war. Humans did something similar when they coated some of their ships with Shadow derived bio-skins. Both tech's had serious limitations, however, something that continued to the ships seen in Crusade.
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IIRC, when jms started the show, he ran everything he could past the JPL (who were big fans) to get their take on things. Outside of the jump gates, which were a necessary plot point, everything had at least *some* grounding in real world science, however tenuous. The jump gates had some gag line about being "(C) Minbari/Centauri Consortium", and they deliberately didn't explain how they worked, so as to prevent humans from making cheap knockoffs.
B5 itself actually looked like some of the proposed space stations, using centripetal force for gravity, etc. The handheld weapons were PPGs rather than slug throwers, because handguns in space have all sorts of problems.
There was obviously a lot of "this is beyond you" technology (Minbari, Vorlon, Shadow, and Centauri), but the story was never about the tech. It was about the politics that used the tech.
In contrast, Star Trek just made up tech as required, and promptly forgot about it at episode's end. Need to transport Picard to another galaxy? Just sprinkle some plot dust over the transporter, and hey, he can transport 57.2 light years safely. It's not like the Federation would ever bother to research that for future use or anything. In one episode, Barcley became super smart and actually dragged the Enterprise (at something like warp 56) to a planet that had given him the brainpower to upgrade the Enterprise to the point that they'd come visit. Why aren't all starships doing warp 56 afterwards? No technical or military use?
In the first season of B5, they came up with an alien medical device that could be used to cure or kill. Surprisingly, in the second season, they actually remembered it, and used it to restore a character (at cost to two other characters). It was deemed too dangerous to use. Lo and behold, in season four, it showed up again, and this time it did kill someone. Can anyone honestly see that happening in Trek?
My problem with Trek was that the tech was nothing but a plot crutch. Engineers could research, develop, and implement a generation's worth of technology, in a day, on board ship, in order to solve a crisis. And it would promptly be forgotten. How many episodes would be resolved if they just used the magic wand they created six episodes back? Too many. So, they'd handwave it away.
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.
I had always considered the technology in Star Trek as the most successful ever implemented. It was so reliable and intuitive as to allow anyone to use it and it rarely ever failed. The idea of technology as the center point is only our perspective because most of our technology is so crappy it take a degree to properly implement and much training to even use. When done right, technology quietly and seamlessly will make our lives better without becoming obtrusive or overwhelming. /Me would REALLY REALLY REALLY like a food replicator in place of my microwave oven thank-you very much...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
Star Trek and the Jetsons clearly have nothing to do with "fiction dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals or having a scientific factor as an essential orienting component"
"Swallows and Amazons" is "just a book". (It's actually a damn good kid's book.) Didn't stop it from also being extremely realistic and very technical. "Weirdstone of Brisingamon" and "Moon of Gomrath" are also just books, but didn't stop the author from having a very elegant magical system.
In short, the realism, the technicality and the elegance don't alter the enjoyability. What dictates the enjoyability is the script, how the writer employs the universe to tell the tale.
Let's compare two movies - "Dr No" and "The IPCRESS File". Both came out about the same time. The former used babble and glitz, the latter used some ideas circulating at the time on brainwashing techniques and was dark/gritty. The latter probably gets a lot more airtime today.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
This is also why such a complaint is strange coming from Strauss. In *his* rebels-vs-evil-despots novel the rebels find a insta-cloning machine and in the last four pages of the book make enough copies of themselves to assure total victory. Brilliant use of science and storytelling there.
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.
What's more, the writers were actually, for all that they often got things wrong, very careful to avoid offending too many people all at once. While there was no special push for one point or another, even the conservative Christian population (~30% of the US) was not alienated ... in most episodes, allowing for the show to make its social commentary to as wide an audience as possible.
So.. is there anything to discuss here?
Hey remember that popular TV show from the 90s? The one that limped along for years with lousy ratings before it was finally cancelled? I have just discovered the edgy opinion that it wasn't very good.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Scalzi deals with this as well in "Old Man's War" - the religious aspect is highlighted rather than the technological issue of creating a duplicate.
There's a saying I heard once - "Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem".
Babylon 5 was far more realistic in that things weren't magically wrapped up in 45 minutes.
No kidding. It's hard enough to keep a decent sci-fi show on the air while they are entirely entertainment / plot / character-driven. If he wants them to shoehorn in more hard-science technobabble to replace all the soft-science technobabble (bearing in mind that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic anyway) then I fail to see how the entertainment value will be enhanced beyond a very niche demographic.
You forgot the ???? step.
"Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up"
That's exactly what ST TNG was. A soap opera for geeks. I read Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise from Stross and liked them both but haven't read anything else. Now if Stross made a TV show that could be compared to ST: TNG he may have some leg to stand on. But he's a novel writer and has written some good hard sci fi along with a lot of other types of short stories and novels. When he writes a successful sci fi TV show then his comments about hating ST: TNG and BG might have some weight.
Star Trek might not contain real science, but it gets people excited about real science. I'd say that is pretty important.
or else!
Of course, the problem with these series is their miserably short filming time and low budget. A movie like Pitch Black can actually get nearly everything spot-on tech wise because it has the time and budget. The average TV show has a week to figure it out and come up with something that's not utter rubbish. Considering that, shows like B5 are at least a little bit plausible and self-consistent. We watch them months or years later and consult bibles full of quotes and plots and tech. Those guys had days to cobble together dialogue and make it all come together. You have to give them credit for at least trying.
Of course, perhaps that's the real issue. Time. A good example of this was the original Doctor Who shows. They were shot on a much longer production schedule and the writers had much longer to figure out the fine details. And while the production budget is clearly zero and it all looks a bit fake, the tech was remarkably self-consistent and stayed with you from episode to episode.
Of course, they mangled it all with the new series, which is purely entertainment and filler. Though, very enjoyable beer and pizza filler, and I kind of want that after a week at work...
I wonder how much things would improve if they took twice as long to produce each episode? I'd rather have amazing shows that came along every other week than half-baked weekly stuff that's rushed.
Hard and soft science fiction are different genres, and really should have different names.
Each have their problems. Hard sci-fi can be dry, and soft can be annoying when they push believability too far. Still, I have no problem being entertained by Firefly, Iron Sunrise, or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Quality counts for way more then genre.
Humans have obviously reached the human frontier on that umm... front. And found Ferengi staring at them from the other side.
So, having warp-drive and replicators (which nearly eliminated scarcity), they decided to be guided by their natural curiosity, instead of their natural greed.
Space exploration sure beats "who has more valuables at the time of death" competition in my book.
As for inherent repulsion towards anything starting with social...
You do realize that you have been brainwashed by your rulers?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The technology in Star Trek is such that they'd eliminate material want. They had access to essentially unlimited resources and energy. In that situation, capitalism breaks down.
That is one of the interesting things about Sci Fi is that when you consider the far future, you pretty much always have to consider what economic system will replace capitalism. It WILL break down at some point, and I say this as someone who like capitalism. It is the best system so far we've found for distributing limited resources and encouraging growth of production. Ok fine, however that requires that resources be limited, and that we sustain growth, capitalism only works when the economy grows. So at some point, no time soon but some distant point, things will change in one of two ways and either will cause capitalism to need to be replaced with something new:
1) The distopian version is that we run out of resources. We can't sustain growth, we can't even sustain our current levels. Increasing shortage is the perpetual state.
2) The utopian version is that we develop technology such that we essentially don't have any limits on resources. Through whatever means we get it to the point that just about everything in life is trivial to produce in whatever quantity we desire.
In either case, capitalism won't do the trick. We'll need a new economic system.
that just stringing together 100 different futuristic tech words together in every sentence for 500 pages does not make a story either. no plot exposition, no backstory, no character or emoition, just being hit in the face with a wall of text filled with doubletalk.
so no charles, i really dont care what you have to say about one of the most popular scifi shows of all time.
Unfortunately it was also very low on the "good dialog" meter. Never understood how people could comment favorably on the character dialog on B5.
Don't get me wrong--I loved the show (at least seasons 2-4), but I found the dialog very wince-inducing in many cases. One of my pet peeves...
This is a tiresome attitude. I'm perfectly willing to ignore the opinion, as 'wrong', of anyone who thinks Dan Brown writes 'amazing' fiction. And those people do exist. That it doesn't fit into your arbitrary classification of things worth sorting into 'right' and 'wrong' is irrelevant, and your comment is essentially the same as the grandparent comment, except you have added a layer of abstraction.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Unfortunately for Charlie the Unicorn, he forgets that the best writers of sci-fi, Asimov, Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick among them, used it as a medium to show that, no matter the circumstance, humans are humans. People aren't going to buy your books or watch your shows unless they can find a connection to themselves. To write otherwise is intellectual masturbation, as you are only writing for your own ego. I guess authors like him are the reason I don't read any recent sci-fi literature. When Asimov died, the genre died with him.
Star Trek isn't really sloppy, it is simply episode based and like in all episode based shows there is very little that carries over. That has it good and bad sides of course. You don't ever get much of a story arc in Star Trek, but being episode based gives them a lot more freedom on the concepts that they can explore. A lot of what happened in Star Trek just wouldn't work if you couldn't hit the reset button at the end of an episode.
Gene Roddenberry made the mistake of calling Star Trek a 'Wagon Train' to the stars when trying to sell it to the idiots who made the decisions, and ended up stuck with a swashbuckling hero who was always improperly abandoning his ship to interfere with other life forms and screw their women. But it was still better than anything else at the time. When it took off in reruns, the suits wanted more, and Gene said not unless we do it my way. TNG was his way. The science was better, the interaction with other life forms was better, and the ship was managed better. When that went away, Rick Berman and the suits drove it all straight into the ground.
B5 used a some arbitrary technobabble, but it was used sparingly. Most of it was advanced technology that was used consistently, and with limitations that they stuck with throughout the series.
You mention hyperspace, and that's a good example. Sure, the hyperspace gates were an arbitrary technology that let them bridge interstellar distances quickly, but it wasn't instantaneous -- it still took time to traverse hyperspace, and more or less in proportion to the distance away from the destination. Sometimes that was days. They still had to build the gates, and in one episode they showed the ship necessary to build them. Only larger ships had the ability to open a portal to hyperspace directly. Small ones were stuck in normal space and had access to hyperspace only via gates (or by tagging along with bigger ships).
B5 also spent a fair amount of time trying to keep the ships in normal space behaving like they would according to normal, everyday physics, and showed battle strategies that reflected that (e.g., ships did not have to meet "right side up" all the time as if they were sailing on a 2D map). Even the B5 station itself made a decent amount of sense -- with low/zero-g sections for different purposes, and rotation to generate artificial gravity. You even had characters looking out windows on the floor (i.e. the outer hull of the rotating sections). They didn't have to do all that, but they obviously tried to get it right rather than inventing "particle of the week" to explain things.
Finally, some alien societies had artificial gravity on board their ships, some didn't (e.g., all of Earth's ships). The way it was done technologically was never explained because it wasn't important. The uneven distribution of the technology across alien societies was important to the story, and that distribution made sense. So, the less advanced cultures were stuck with having rotating sections of their larger ships. Smaller ships didn't even have that, and the crew were therefore shown strapped into their chairs like you should be if you were doing maneuvers using normal physics.
They still stretched things, of course, and there were flaws (e.g., the first thing you'd probably do on a ship with rotating sections when you go into battle would be to stop the rotation to avoid having to change the angular momentum as you are maneuvering) but there was a lot more attention to keeping things realistic than usual, and when they had to make stuff up for the sake of plot, they did it once and more or less stuck with it.
It was only with shows like Firefly or BSG that I remember a comparable attention to detail. I sure as heck wouldn't lump Star Trek and B5 together. Bad example. There's never the attention in SF TV shows as in SF novels, but B5 didn't do badly for TV.
Mimbari
Argh! Minbari! It's Minbari!
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.
The other key to the Babylon Squared/War Without End time travel is that it stays consistent. In Star Trek, characters are repeatedly traveling backwards in time to fix or prevent something. In B5, everything happened because they went back in time, and going back in time simply ensured that what happened did happen.
Well Ron Moore inserts "cause God said so" into his scripts when it's convenient, so who is he to talk! :-P
http://www.unfocus.com/
Agreed. Star Wars very well could have had a medieval setting and it would have made no real difference to the plot..
I think that movie was called Willow
There's one problem with trying to explain your way through new technology. You end up with people sending printed messages through pneumatic tubes on intergalactic battleships, because the author couldn't thoroughly explain a more practical technology.
If I want education, I'll watch Science/Discovery/History
Better avoid American shows. Just the other day I watched "Lock N' Load with R. Lee Ermey" where host happily omitted Pinfire mechanism invented by French Gunsmith, instead declaring American inventors as fathers of modern shotguns/ammunition. Rewriting history much, eh?
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
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
The reset button is sloppy. Sure they get more concept freedom, but the last 15 minutes or so of the episode is spent resetting. A really egregious example of this was some Voyager two part episode that had a ship that was going around wiping out civilizations and their past. The episode reset by having the ship hit with its own time weapon thingy. I suppose the draw there was some sort of Moby Dick analogy (where the Captain Ahab equivalent was trying to rescue his long dead wife from some accident and he kept having to destroy more and more stuff in order to do it). But you could see the ending from the beginning, merely because there was no other possible outcome available.
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.
I don't know why, it just always struck me as a very sci-fi like show despite the total and complete lack of any actual science fiction elements. Anybody know what I mean? (Assuming anyone has even heard of Damages...)
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
SF tends to use science in at least two (probably more) ways to explore the human condition.
One way explores modern issues in a different, usually future, setting to gain perspective. Star Trek did it with race and political issues. It is a good way to get some objectivity.
The second is to propose a technological change and explore what that might mean for humanity. This tends to be what Stross does, and does quite well in my opinion. It is a great way to explore the essentials of what it means to be human by thinking about how both individuals and societies might respond to changes.
I'd say both have their place, but I would think that the second way would be of more interest to science/tech geeks.
* * * --they cant all be your best, that would be confusing
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.
Hey just because you were "cast as an expert" on some dodgy pseudo-scientific shows on Discovery Channel, that doesn't suddenly make all documentaries like that. I can name a few excellent piece of television:
Universe (History Channel)
Cosmos (Carl Sagan)
Elegant Universe
Most documentaries by David Attenborough
Now the focus might be entertainment (though David Attenborough makes me want to go to sleep). You're not going to learn calculus from mainstream TV. But that doesn't make the medium rubbish. If you want good educational value download some video from MIT OpenCourseware, or buy a The Teaching Company series DVD.
By the way it's particularly silly of you to be telling people to stay away from documentaries if that's how you make part of your living.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
Hard and soft science fiction are different genres, and really should have different names.
I thought they did...
'Soft' is called 'syfy' (pronounced to rhyme with 'syphilis')
'Hard' is called 'scifi' (pronounced like 'sigh-figh')
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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.
the first thing you'd probably do on a ship with rotating sections when you go into battle would be to stop the rotation to avoid having to change the angular momentum as you are maneuvering
They actually did this in many battles. I remember one scene from "In the Beginning" where a guy was killed on the bridge of a ship. Everyone was strapped in and drops of his blood was floating around the cabin. I think they even mentioned locking the rotation of ship sections at one point where they were preparing for a fight.
Any time I saw a ship still rotating sections in a fight I always assumed that they were doing it for tactical reasons (such as presenting a moving section of hull so that enemy fire couldn't focus on a single spot) or that they didn't have the time or the energy needed to spin down the section.
Sapere aude!
Charles Stross just figured out what every Trekker has known for a decade or more. The writers depend on someone else to fill in the science-y sounding gaps. ... and then goes on to write a huge diatribe about how much better his writing is.
I've read his writing. For all the nerd-dropping[1] I couldn't get through more than 3/4 of it before I had to put it down in disgust.
His rip-off novel Saturn's Children (he should've just called it Friday 2) was readable only because it was borderline erotica.
You don't tear down an infinitely more successful (and therefore relevant) .. Universe.. of scifi.. by comparing it to your own works without inviting a legion of people to mock you endlessly for all the stupid little mistakes and problems in your own writing.
And Star Trek isn't *SCIENCE FICTION* you turd. It's scifi. The entire genre is borderline space opera--and this is what you're claiming you dislike! So what?
Space Opera
SciFi ] CS stuff is
Science Fiction ] right in between here.
Hard Science Fiction
His "science" isn't science either. There's just as much hand-wavy fucking CRAP in the Atrocity Archives as any ST:TNG episode with Q plagued with techno-babble in the whole friggin' series.
If you're going to so completely rip someone else off (*cough* Lovecraft) that your work is no longer a work of original fiction, but a derivative--and a poor one at that--don't sit back and congratulate yourself on how smart and clever you are.
You want a bad-ass Lovecraftian book with an interesting spin on it? Resume with Monsters. There's a mostly-original piece that doesn't constantly congratulate itself on how COOL it is, on how much the author GETS IT, on how well the author is HIP AND TRENDY. There's an amusing story with an interesting core of an idea!
Nothing HAPPENS in CS's Atrocity Archives. The only reason to read it, by the halfway point, is to find out how the author ENDS it.
[1] Nerd-dropping is the constant dropping of nerdy concepts and marketing-friendly terms that will rapidly make your work irrelevant once people get over the idea that you've managed to--poorly--fuse geekery and Lovecraft into a single work.
I'm always disappointed when people say TNG was just a space soap operate. It wasn't just a soap opera for geeks. The poster's point is that TNG was more than a setting or a soap operate. It was a canvas on which to casually explore fascinating social and philosophical ideas that couldn't be and weren't done anywhere else, brought home by two excellent actors and characters.
Actually, they often wouldn't even bother with consultants. I got to tour the set of Voyager while it was shooting (S01E13, "Cathexis"), and many of the shooting scripts would simply says [TECH] instead of the technical term, and it was up to the ACTORS to fill in the blank. For example, you'd see a line like: "We've got to [TECH] the [TECH] before the [TECH] [TECHS]". They just relied on the actors using a consistent set of gibberish to fill in the blanks.
Agreed. Star Wars very well could have had a medieval setting and it would have made no real difference to the plot..
I think that movie was called Willow
Or "Lord of the Rings"
I am anarch of all I survey.
There was the one howler onetime however where 3 earth-ships, sections rotating, turned on a dime and ran.
JMS got so much hell from the fans over that on.
Test your net with Netalyzr
And Charles Stross' little diatribe isn't narcissistic projection?
The whole thing is all about his his own writing process is superior!
Great example. I think it's a lousy episode, but it's pure Science Fiction and as direct result a not-fill-in-the-blank tech, but a very specific tech (AI). Go on, Stross, explain about how a trial to decide whether an android is a person or not, can happen in the 18th century.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It would all be software. If you wanted the latest iPod you would need to buy the appropriate information required to make your replicator pump out the iPod. There would be open source designs, but many of the latest and greatest things would not be open source (the same situation as we have with software today).
You would still need to employ engineers to design new things. You would still need business people, sales people, etc., to market the software products.
You would still need people to make music and tv shows (or holo shows or whatever) which means you'd need actors or people who programmed fake actors.
If they don't have roving nanobots (nanobots that could function outside of a replicator) then they would still need to employ construction workers to put large things together unless someone made a replicator the size of a starship (or a house) or robots good enough to do the work for them.
Many service jobs would still need to exist. If you need a new paint job on a house it's probably easier to just repaint it rather than replicate the parts and put a new one together again.
Granted, some services wouldn't be necessary anymore. Prostitutes would be out of a job. In their place would be programmers who wrote holodeck sex programs. Holodecks would require a lot of space. Land would still cost a lot of money. So, you might need communal holodecks for people who can't afford large parcels of land.
Some forms of mining might still be necessary. You need raw materials for all this replication (although you might be able to just reuse old stuff).
Seems to me that capitalism would work just fine in that sort of environment.
Cow Cube
There's no money in them.
If you literally weren't paid that's one thing. Otherwise it should be a matter of professionalism that you don't publicly denounce work you're actively still doing.
I do them because, as Gore Vidal said: "Never pass up an opportunity for sex or to be on TV."
Ah, in that case you have no professionalism or credibility. Are you married? Do you ever plan to be? I hope your current or future wife realises you plan to have sex with whomsoever provides the opportunity.
You're the sort of person that can't tell the difference between Myth Buster's and good science television.
Seriously, go read the book - The Elegant Universe, then watch the video again. You'll see the difference.
I have read the book you arrogant little man. Have you? I've also got a masters degree in astronomy, which didn't come from watching documentaries, and which I did for myself without intention of making it my career.
The point is it takes 3 hours to see the documentary, and longer to properly read and digest the book. The visuals in the TV program complimented the understanding I gained from the book very nicely. It also allows me to share the information with anyone willing to give me 3 hours, but who might not want to spend significant time reading. Still neither the book nor the documentary will make you a Quantum Dynamacist or an expert in String Theory. For that you need several years at University and an aptitude for higher level math and physics.
Each level of education has it's place.
Get some self respect and credibility, stop behaving opportunistically and then you might not be so cynical.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've been watching a lot of "Outer Limits" on Hulu of late (some of the best episodes aren't available there or on Netflix - only on DVD. What gives?!?).
Personally, I feel some of the best episodes aren't available on DVD either. Seriously, WTF haven't they released the entire series on DVD yet? Just those silly "collections" of themed episodes, leaving most of it out.
It's people like you who make TV Science Fiction unintellectual pap.
The cake is a pie
Jews in Space
Would like to point out to a really good science fiction movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/
You'll probably want to watch it two times.
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
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
mod parent up. funny is hell. (although I'm not sure if it is true)
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
"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.'"
"the writers of Super Mario Bros. would simply 'insert' mario star or shroom into W4-1 whenever needed, without any real regard to its significance; 'then they'd gamers fill in the appropriate game guides later.'"
"the writers of Symphony No. 9 in E Minor would simply 'insert' triangles or cymbals into the score whenever needed, without any real regard to its significance; 'then they'd have conductors fill in the appropriate mood later.'"
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
As a philosopher, I know that a computer will never be self-aware.
But how do you know that?
I can't see any fundamental difference between an organic brain and an inorganic brain that is built on the same model and to the same level of complexity.
Why should one be self-aware and the other not?
An Outer Limits or Twilight Zone might ask, "what if we were the aliens?" and play out the consequences, or "What if all disease were cured?".
Done and done.
I know that wasn't your point, and technobabble episodes bit early and hard. But sometimes Star Trek really does act as a vehicle for alegory. And sometimes they beat the Twilight Zone at their own game. (And sometimes they don't.)
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
You're saying what I would be saying if I had time to be in this discussion.
Science fiction starts with an unreal premise. Which is why I don't make a lot of distinction between fantasy and sci-fi.
Sometimes the unrealness of this premise is 'We invented a time machine or discovered telepathy' and that's the only change. Sometime it's 'we're in the future or another universe with magic'. Whatever.
But this can never solve the plot's conflict, unless the unreal is very carefully explained in the first place. (Harry Potter attempted to do this, incidentally, in the climax to the series, and opinions are divided on whether or not it worked. As those specific rule of magic was repeatedly drilled into my head, I'll give them a pass.)
Note sometimes it can be hard to figure what the 'conflict' is, often people mistake the problem driving the episode as the conflict, but it does not have to be.
For example, if a dozen people get locked in a house and people start going crazy, someone starts killing the others, the 'problem' is the weather...but no one's going to 'solve' that.
But here's a sci-fi example on how to do it right, strangely from Star Trek: Bashir and Garak are on the holodeck, and something goes wrong with the transporter, and most of the remaining main character's bodies are dumped into the holodeck program.
Now, if we had had an episode about trying to get people out of the holodeck, that would be exceptionally lame. But we didn't get that...we got a few status updates on how close the solution was, but we didn't really care about. It was some random timelimit, like the storm outside, and we knew it would magically go away when the story was over, probably in the nick of time.
Instead of caring about the 'problem', we instead had a rather surreal roleplaying session, where Bashir attempted to play a pre-scripted Bond-like story in a totally crazy way so that no one got killed. (Even people who were supposed to.)
We all understood the rules straight off the bat, and there was no techobabble to save him. If he 'died', he was fine (For once, the safeties weren't broken.), the game was over, and everyone else died. If he got anyone else's body killed, they were dead.
This resulted in an absolutely hilarious episode, as Bashir's 'spy character' made increasingly strange (For people actually playing the hologame) decisions, helped along by Bashir's genre savviness, and all the silly cliches lampshaded by the actual spy Garak.
In the end, Bashir attempted to throw his lot in with the supervillian and he actually 'destroyed the earth'. At which point the villain still tried to kill him, despite all logic...probably due the programmer never even considering anyone would reach the end of a game with the goal to save the world...and then deliberately destroy it.
No techno-babble solution. Not even any actual sci-fi in the story itself, just sci-fi to *set up* the story with a crazy premise 'A guy is role playing a (lawyer-friendly) James Bond movie, and suddenly he has to make sure that, under no circumstances, do specific characters get killed...or that he gets killed...or that he leaves the games.'
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Come find out why I hate Charles Stross at nobodygivesafuckwhatsomeirrelevantidiothates.com. His opinion on Star Trek, or anything else, is no more important than my opinion on him or on fried bologna sandwiches on white bread. Seriously, nothing to see here, move along. I'm not even going to RTFA or look at more than the first two comments.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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."
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
He must absolutely Loathe Blakes' 7. All that cardboard and wobbly sets must give him a coronary....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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..)
I'm sorry you don't like the fact that Mythbusters isn't science. It's the kind of "entertainment" the GP was talking about - completely unscientific trash. What they do to the scientific method, most wouldn't do to their worst enemy. They aren't teaching anyone the scientific method - they're teaching people that controls in an experiment are optional, and that you can generalise from a tiny data sample. Learning science from the Mythbusters shows is like learning gourmet cooking from a burger flipper at MacDonalds.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Aw geez. Looks like I've struck a nerve.
Oh absolutely. Telling people they can't learn science from television is awful. It discourages them from learning while simultaneously giving the big tick to garbage programming which you say they should expect.
You're right, I admit it, I'm a hack. And my lack of credentials is exactly my point.
And my point is that one hack doesn't mean every documentary is made by hacks. You can turn on Discovery channel and sometimes see garbage about ghosts and UFOs - that doesn't mean every documentary on the discovery channel is of similar quality.
And my lack of credentials is exactly my point. In television, visibility equals credibility, regardless of actual expertise. I can say that because, at one time, I had a career in television and film production. Trust me, I know how the medium works. I have friends who work on "respectable" shows like Nova and the BBC documentaries, you know, David Attenborough's old gang. Same story there. Truly.
Total nonsense. There's commercial reality, but that does not mean everything is rubbish. When someone goes on one of these shows and is a full time professional scientist they are sticking their neck out. Their colleagues know about and see these shows too. Without some of these programs how much would most adults know about dinosaurs, astronomy, wildlife, weather science, physics, archaeology etc. etc.? Most people know Einstein as that weird mad scientist. Get them to watch a snippet about time dialation and provided you hold their interest you've actually accomplished something.
The secret to successful documentaries *and game shows* is to make the audience *feel* as smart, or smarter than the people they're watching. It's all a big psych job
Cynical nonsense. But even so if you make people feel smarter because you've informed them or taught them a new concept that's not such a bad thing.
I dunno about you, but I got a whole lot more out of the book than I ever did from the movie. I stand by my original statement. If you really want to learn something, read the book. If you want to be entertained, watch TV.
For most people it's not either/or. I'm not saying don't read. I'm just saying documentaries have their place. I'm much more likely to watch a documentary while I'm exhausted than to dig into a book, and I'll still absorb it if it's interesting. However if you REALLY want to get to know something, do a course somewhere credible. Although if you see some of the lecture series I've been talking about it's _almost_ as good as doing a course. A popular book fits somewhere in between the TV documentary and the course.
And for those people too lazy to read a book, I've found that by the next day, they've forgotten everything in the TV show anyway. It's really amusing and disgusting at the same time. One of my shows will come on, and the next day someone will stop me - "Hey! I saw your show!" then they proceed to retell the whole thing back to me, and they never, ever get it right. Usually, not even close.
So you're criticising your friends for not understanding an in depth topic from a half hour or one hour show. Brilliant. Let me suggest two things. Your shows might stink - not explain things well, and allow misunderstandings. Since you're a hack and proud of it that's quite likely. Or your friends aren't very intelligent, in which case get new friends.
Insult me all you wish. I'm made of tougher stuff than you know. And I won't respond again.
It's not about hurling insults at some random stranger. It's about diffusing such blatantly cynical misinformation. I've learnt plenty from documentaries. I choose what I watch. If it's repedative, treats me like an idiot, is boring, or mundane I'll move on. But even having done an astronomy degree I've picked up new insights from Universe and I've always loved Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I've watched lectures on the train on Dark Matter and Dark Energy that were full of information I hadn
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Some dialog was strange, but there are hell of a lot of priceless quotes
"It's getting faster. I swear they are evolving right before my eyes. If you see something this big with eight legs coming your way, let me know. I have to kill it before it develops language skills."
or
"I want to live just long enough to be there when they cut your head off and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next 10 generations that some favours come at too high a price. I want to look up into your lifeless eyes and wave, like this. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It was AFAIR the Lexington, a Hyperion-class cruiser. No rotating sections on this class of ships.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
As I understand it the whole "Jedis make their own lightsabers" bit is quite well established in Star Wars canon or at least that's what one of my cow-orkers who is obsessed with Star Wars says, I've never really had much interest in Star Wars myself as it always seemed to me that while Star Trek often plays it fast and loose with tech and science in order to advance the story Star Wars just turns it up to eleven by using the "Lucas got high and just made a bunch of shit up" method of fitting technobabble into the storyline (and it would be a little easier to at least attempt to excuse this if it wasn't for the fact that the plots in the Star Wars universe are often completely insane and senseless as well).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
It is true that Star Trek is an appalling load of nonse, when it comes to just about anything related to technology and science. Others with more knowledge about this have elaborated on this already.
But that is really beside the point - Star Trek is first and foremost a fairy tale, a story about magic vaguely disgused as 'Science Fiction', because at the time that was the mainstream in fantasy. To compare it to real SF, like 2001, is as reasonable as comparing it to "War and Peace" or "Oliver Twist". Star Trek is just an easily digested, light-hearted fantasy, and as such it works very well.
That was one of my biggest gripes about BSG in that it became the anti-Star Trek with its characters. Everyone was so flawed to such a ludicrous degree that it was just as hard to identify with any of them as with the Star Trek "everyone is a model of perfection" characters.
IIRC, when jms started the show, he ran everything he could past the JPL (who were big fans) to get their take on things.
I can confirm this. I was one of the people contacted by the Bablyon 5 production team. It's also true that there were a lot of fans up at JPL. When the call came in, I thought it was just one of my friends goofing me. After a few seconds, I realized it was legit. Basically it was 'twenty questions'. I long for the days when my e-mail address always ilicited a reply.
I find some television to be educational. Granted, it isn't discovery, it tends to be the BBC (or made for BBC shows aired on PBS back when I lived in the States), but things like Sir David Attenborough's works are highly educational--if a little "bloody" at times. Watching 3 big cats bring down an Ostrich is high-def may be quite dramatic, and more than a little disturbing, but coupled with his eloquent narration and explanation, it is most definitely educational.
Now maybe an expert biologist would disagree, but for those of us not an expert in the field, it does provide a basic understanding of that particular area of science. Ditto for some of the shows on Discover, though your point is well taken: it can be difficult to pick the educational out of the hysterical at times. Super-volcanoes and meteor impacts are interesting, but "OMG we're overdue for the Apocalypse!!!" fearmongering tends to dilute the scientific and educational value of any such show. But then, my recollection of US television is that fearmongering permeates just about everything, from so-called news to so-called educational television. Even sit-coms don't seem to have escaped that particular malaise entirely...but that's a rant for another day.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Hey, we've got exactly that going on right now!
What we've got is the first generation of the Replicator! Now look at the thrashing wounded Beast of Olde Music struggling and failing to adapt!
We're caught with the ease of the actual tech, and a serious unease about what level of quality of entertainment we'll get if the performers didn't get paid.
But someone in a scary meeting about 2000 in the dank dark Room 401 decided that *Music* would be the posterboy of the copyright wars. After all, one track of music is some 5 performers, 6ish minutes long, needing about 10 hours of mastering. All in all, that's really pretty easy. There's so much music(including bad) we're nearly swamped by it.
Look at movies. A CHEAP movie is ...
(Dr. Evil) "One Hundred Million Dollars!!!" (/Dr. Evil)
Being generous, there's only about 25 watchable movies per year, and perhaps another 25 of various bad unwatchable varities.
Except you could copy the entire suite in a day if you had discs, and maybe a week on FIOS.
Replicator. Then agency meanness aside, that's a SERIOUS crash of the economy. "Eh, Musicians can do shows, they'll make ten grand..."
We all know what happens when movies cut money... our *effects greed* tells. Hence the jokes about the effects in Star Trek TOS.
It's here all right. And we haven't found an answer.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It is quite immature to judge a book by its cover.
Yes, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise were quite space-operatic. But not TOS and TNG (at least until Rodenberry died). A space opera show contains lots of interpersonal conflicts and emotions. TNG is especially criticized by fans of TOS/DS9/BSG/B5 (check out the StarTrek.com forums if you don't believe me) as containing little material on interpersonal relations.
Bullshit. Such a thing would be obvious if it was as Ron Moore describes. There is a lot of technobabble in TNG, especially in the later years, but Star Trek was never strictly about technology and its consequences.
Ok, you may not enjoy it, but thousands have enjoyed Star Trek and BSG and DS9 and all the other shows. So? is your sci-fi some how better because it focuses more on the technology?
And Star Trek does not contemplate on that at all? you might have missed mr Spock and Lt Cmdr Data then!!!! and there are lots of other examples...
Except if your civilization has developed Faster-Than-Light travel...then your problem of 'getting there' is non-existent.
Of course I hope you realize that finding a way to get to the asteroid is no more different than finding a way to avoid a supernova explosion...the technological scale is different, but the essence is the same: a group of people is trying to solve a problem.
Bullshit again. People have been playing pranks (even violent ones) on others and exchanging sex-related material for centuries.
Matter transmission (transporters). I've no beef with using transporters as a plot device, and I see why it was attractive as a way to advance the plot in a 20-minute story line; what annoys me is the total neglect of the major impacts such a technology would have on society, even on such a controlled subculture as a Star Fleet. Given the wide availability of starships and matter transmitters, what do you suppose the inevitable criminal element in a society would think to do with them? Kidnapping, art theft, bank robbery, etc, etc. would be only a few of the impacts; obsoleting most forms of transport, and even such things as outside doors, would be another (at least, as imagined by a short story I read decades ago). However, the whole Trek universe acts as though transporters were merely a fancy elevator, a situation I find rather implausible, even within the fictional context of the Trek universe. (I still enjoy the stories, but a small corner of my being still groans at the glaring oversight.)
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
And to relate to this article: the issue isn't wheter technobabble exists; the issues I read are twofold.
1) Was the impact on society of the technologies hypothisized explored?
2) Did the plpot boil down to "solve a technobabble problem with a technobabble solution".
In the case of the second, I would say it was a trap that B5 rarely fell into. Most problems were political in nature. Even their Deus Ex Mechnia moments were usually not technological and well setup.
In the case of the first? That wasn't their strongest point: though they did at least try to address the issues of telepathy and aliens on human society.
...all those shows have vessels that produce sound when moving in outer space!
So what? It's called science *fiction* for a reason. Sometimes the writer focusses more towards the "fiction" and sometimes on the "science" but in either case good writing shows through. TV shows can rarely compete with printed matter in the same genre (regardless of that genre). But good writing is about more than a good plot, the execution of that plot, the dialog, the description, the general prose all contribute and guess what, sometimes a writer doesn't get it all spot on every time.
I've not read any of Stross' stuff but his point seems moot really.
The Art of Transporter Warfare
No problem. It's just a show. And (almost) anyone knows that it is BS.
I see a much bigger problem with shows that claim to be real: Doctors, lawyers, cops, CEOs, some researchers, professors ...
- you only see how much BS it is, if you have some experience in that field. And people get their view on reality from this!
Charles Stross says "Darmok and Jelad... At Tenagra!"
And trust me, it's about as meaningful if he had said that instead of what he actually said.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
And the point of all three was to examine modern society, through the lens of fantasy. Agreed, technology wasn't the point.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Forget the actual quote, but it went something like: When observing technology of significant advancement, it can become to one that doesn't understand it as magic.
Now think about when people make fantasy movies. When something needs to makes sense, just say "Magic" and it fixes everything.
In science fiction they do the same. Because these are supposed to take place is time far far away, and the technology is advanced to such a level, it is really indiscipherable from that of magic, so the writers use it in the same way. Something doesn't make sense? Magic, or in this case red matter, or hydro spanners, or what have you.
The key to to have everything so far advanced that it doesn't really have to make sense, as really you assume your audience are comprised of primitives.
If your time line or technology is closer or more believable you also have to compensate by also tempering to what degree you use magic to fix things.
Also writers are lazy. :)
Remember when ST:TOS happened. Everything was episodic, there were few "story arcs" in prime time (that's what distinguished soap operas), and on some shows consistency was laughable. Strange, considering that "serial" storytelling had already been common on radio. On ST:TOS people discovered something and it was never heard of again; on "The Man from UNCLE" the toys worked inconsistently to satisfy the episode in ways that would never have been let slide by a potboiler writer, let alone a decent novelist. By the time B5 appeared, technology banned after one use as "too risky" (and importantly demonstrating a paladin's strength of character) was dragged out of the closet a full season later so another paladin could lay down his life for another - that is, elements had persistence in the grand saga. (using "grand saga" as a literature descriptive term, not a quality judgment, though I did enjoy it.)
In an interview with the actor playing Marcus Cole, he said something about story vs. effects that I think applies to this discussion re: technology: Explosions aren't the story. People want to watch people. If they don't care about the people, they won't watch, and you can blow up what you like.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Well, sort of. That's what makes it "science fiction" or, as used in the very old days, "scientific fiction". That's why it's not "fantasy". OTOH it doesn't necessarily have to be about immediately plausible technology; it just has to be seriously scientific and rational and plausible about whatever technology it presents.
Really, though, it's about people interacting with technology, and how the technology affects people and society.
Two good essays by Larry Niven (award-winning SF author) on the Theory and Practice of Time Travel and Teleportation are instructive. He doesn't believe either will work; but ASSUMING THAT THEY DO, what happens? With teleportation, for example, how does it affect society? What happens with different constraints on the cost? Do you still have transportation hubs if long-distance is more complex than short-distance? Do heavy people have to pay more than light people, leading to discrimination? It's supposed to make you *think*.
I guess it was a combination of bad acting+bad dialog that really got to me in *some places*. There definitely WAS good acting and good dialog--I thought G'kar and Londo were real highlights.
Sinclair is an example of a character who made me wince most of the time he talked.
DNA is likewise not self-aware but merely (how did you put it) "essentially the same: they are instructions"
Using your style of logic it follows that you are not self-aware.
Somewhere in the middle of TNG, Captain Picard makes quite a few references to Homer. Anyway, at that point the legitimacy of their technology became less important to me. I see TNG as an imaginative foray into what lies throughout the galaxy. We all know that Homer's gods didn't exist, yet his works are still considered solid.
No, I will not work for your startup
Absolutely.. B5 should not be lumped into the gross violations of good storytelling that comprise much of the latter-day Star Trek. Of course, most of B5 was planned in advance by JMS, and while they did have guest writers (including one by Neil Gaiman, "Day of the Dead") and occasionally episodes that didn't really advance the story arc, most of the time, things did move forward. Start Trek's "reset button" at the start of every episode, just about anyway (as long as their nearly endless supply of redshirts held out) was fine for the 1960s, but episodic television has moved beyond that, and for the better.
And one very good thing about B5 -- strangely enough, most characters did not seem to know each and every thing about obscure or even common technology. Just like today. There might be a few experts on board a Starship or a station like B5, but most of the technology would just be used. I think, in the original Star Trek, you had Kirk for that, but I get the impression that every officer in the latter day Treks could, at least when pressed, assemble and disassemble a warp drive, even if it takes Mr. Scott or LaForge to really get it tuned up. Start Trek personnel had an improper relation to the tech behind their tools, and that lead, I suspect, to too many of those deus ex machina solutions.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Star Gate series... particularly in the early days, those guys barely understood how to control their primary chunk of tech... not much idea at all how it actually worked (in fact, pretty much no one did... it was probably made by the Heechee or some-such, they just said "the ancients"). One of the main functions of Col. Jack O'Neill was to make anyone shut up when they started babbling tech... pretty clearly aimed at latter day Trek, I think. Sure, the show had its faults, but not those of the TNG and all.
-Dave Haynie
Well, arguably, the periods of time we saw the characters were when they were exhibiting their flaws most strongly (since that's the most dramatically interesting). The rest of the time, things were relatively normal; even Starbuck was just going about her business, not being totally insane, 95% of the time.
We just "happen" to see the parts where they're being all nutso :)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
It's taken far too seriously by some fans. The Federation was enforcing its part of the peace treaty and no, the Maquis weren't all a bunch of nice guys.
Robert Forward's "Rocheworld" does the best job I've ever seen at thinking up a plausible scenario for travel to a nearby star, plus a fair attempt to weave a human plot into the timescales involved. Also excellent was Forward's "Dragon's Egg", while other books by him are not nearly so good, specifically the sequels to both of these.