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 [scalzi.com] 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. "
So essentially, he should repeat to himself "It's just a show, I should really just relax"?
I think the point was "It's a TV show about something besides the daily life of being a writer for a TV show: odds are it's going to get nearly everything wrong, it's nothing specific to science." Look at CSI: anything. The science AND the justice system in that show only vaguely resemble real forensic science or our real justice system. Or how our cops actually look or act for that matter.
To get even more ridiculous, look at MTV's "real world" and tell me that anything in the actual real world (outside of wherever they're filming) shares anything in common with it.
Anyway, of course the science is going to be an absurd prop in star trek. That said, star trek did often take even bigger liberties with reality than most other shows. I occasionally watched episodes of various star trek series until I saw on Voyager an episode where a virus takes up Klingon growth hormones and suddenly the things are the size of flies flying around, infecting all species with stingers. That oddly was a line too far.
The problem isn't the weakness of the science, actually. It's the weakness of the sociology! It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the transporter wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable. There are technologies of bio-technological intervention that get trotted out regularly, yet we still are told that people would be quite satisfied with a 100-year life span, more or less. I won't even mention time-travel.
An interesting speculation about an improbable or even impossible technology is more compelling to me than cliches and failures of conjecture wrapped around sound technologies.
As Scott Adams says; "The Holodeck will be mankind's last great invention". I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out why we'd never ever want to leave.
Star Trek wasn't really about science, imo, so much as about society. Most episodes were about taking some modern social issue and turning it on its head to illustrate a point.
Star Trek did a good job on a few modern issues but the society portrayed in Star Trek is really hard to swallow. No greed, no economy, no (or few, depending on which show/episode you watch) enlisted personnel, etc, etc. I rather liked when Eddington ripped the Federation apart: "I know you. I was like you once, but then I opened my eyes. Open your eyes, Captain. Why is the Federation so obsessed about the Maquis? We've never harmed you. And yet we're constantly arrested and charged with terrorism. Starships chase us through the Badlands, and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You're only sending them replicators so that one day they can take their rightful place on the Federation Council. You know, in some ways you're worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious... you assimilate people and they don't even know it. "
The thing is that popular TV is not designed to make you think. It is designed to entertain the masses who generally just want a bit of light bubbly stuff with some flesh and a bit of drama/action. That's why a great film like Bladerunner never really made it at the box office. It actually makes you think.
In the book world it's the same. Ask the general public if they've ever heard of Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle or Ray Bradbury. Outside of Sci-Fi, ask them about Rudyard Kipling or even Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Negative again. Dan Brown? Yeah they know him. Badly researched badly written brainless rubbish, but he sells books in the millions. That is the way of the world.
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.
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.
The "red matter" schmaltz was the absolute worst part of what wasn't all that bad a film. Couldn't they have come up with something better than that? In a movie that was trying explicitely to move away from the way Trek had been treated since ST:TNG, it went an invoked the absolute worst aspects of the later TV series and movies. As technobabble BS goes, "red matter" may actually have been the very worst.
The "red matter" schmaltz was the absolute worst part of what wasn't all that bad a film.
You thought that was the worst part? I thought the worst part was the cliched "Give us the secret defense codes that render Earth completely helpless" subplot after Pike gets captured. I would have stood up and cheered if he had spit in Nero's face and said something along the lines of "Do you really think Starfleet is stupid enough to entrust that sort of information to a mere Captain?"
Just consider the idea of capturing a O-6 from the US Military. Do you really think he has information on the arming codes for all our nuclear weapons? The disposition of all forces deployed to defend CONUS? Not very likely.
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.
Yes, anti-plot. Very dangerous stuff. It's red and even though it only takes a few drops of anti-plot to take out an entire world, Spock flew around in a ship with enough of it to take out just about every populated planet of significance. 'Cause you just never know when you'll need more anti-plot.
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.
You're thinking of 'deus ex machina' [wikipedia.org], which is a plot device along the lines of "and suddenly a god-like being appeared and fixed everything". It's the fate of all lazy fiction and, sadly, it's not restricted to sci-fi - although the opportunity to invent suitable technobabble does make it rather easier.
I know. That was the part that I found most compelling about All Good Things. I think whoever came up with that plot is a genius because he found a way of having Q simultaneously destroy and save the entire universe through the actions of Picard. It was extremely clever along with the added bonus of the whole "How all of the characters drifted apart in the future." arc.
> 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.
"contrived" is probably the word you're looking for.
However, how contrived the plot is isn't really the point; the real question is whether or not it makes good TV, and the proof is in the pudding (especially for TNG). TV shows are, after all, entertainment and not great literary works. (Indeed, the two don't frequently go hand-in-hand...)
Regardless, sci-fi generally means made-up technology, and made-up technology problems. Sometimes these can be/are solved by going back to human ingenuity or 'old-school' tech, but sometimes they need to be solved with more made-up technology. That's just kinda how things go. For example, if you had someone hacking your critical (pulling the plug isn't an option) system, you may have to, say, "reconfigure the firewall". If this were the 1920's and computers were made-up technology, then the whole situation would appear contrived, though from our perspective it's not.
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.
Oh TNG did that sort of plot resolution, too. As exciting as the original Borg episodes were (before they became THE Star Trek cliche), they were ultimately beaten by technobabble.
I happened to watch the ST:TOS episode "The Doomsday Machine" a couple of months ago, and was struck by how the technological solution wasn't some sort of "We'll rephase or photon torpedoes to use Delta Wave Radiation, which will cause a photonic shift that will destabilize its neutronic shields!" It was a good old fashioned (and reasonably plausible) matter-anti-matter explosion.
While TOS went off on some weird tangents at times, a lot of the writing seemed more grounded in 1950s-1960s hard SF than the later series were. The later seasons of TNG, after Roddenberry's influence decreased, began tending towards these sort of technobabble solutions to technobabble problems. DS9 didn't have too much of it, but Voyager and Enterprise used it to the point of insanity.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say Mr. Stross is the one who seems to be missing the point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday October 13, @04:29PM (#29737501)
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.
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.
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.
How does BSG not use plot devices? They resurrect characters (Starbuck), do a one shot "stealth" viper to fill a plot hole which is destroyed and never duplicated, Cylon resurrection ship etc.
I still remember the "motivational" speech Adama made when they started their exodus. That they all deserved to die. I was like WTF?! Is this what a motivational speech from a military commander passes for these days?
Then he disses B5. Just all the possibilities, socio-political effects B5 introduced from having telepaths was pretty amazing in of itself. Not to mention motivational speeches actually are motivational in B5...
The problem with the truly advanced technologies that science-fiction stories like to use is that their REAL effects on the world would be so transformative, that the characters in the story would be so different us that the reader wouldn't be able to relate to them at all.
An "accurate" Star Trek story would have people lying in bed all day, being fed through a tube, while they lived out their fantasies in the holodeck. Robotic mining ships would troll the galaxy for dilithium to power everything. Gee, that's interesting.
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.
The best of the modern hard SF writers is Larry Niven, but he, like all aging SF writers, has fallen off the bandwagon. By the second Ringworld book, he was more obssessed with various humanoids fucking than with a storyline, and the last Ringworld book was just unreadable garbage.
But stuff like the Neutron Star stories, those are damned good hard (or at least semi-hard) SF with interesting characters and at least half-believable solutions.
He's so right. He references the Turkey City Lexicon [sfwa.org], which lists most of the things that make bad SF. Also worth reading is the Evil Overlord List. [eviloverlord.com] (" 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. [army.mil]) 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.
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.
Firefly was awesome. The first televised episode when Mal kicked a guy through the intake of the ships engine I knew that it was going to be substantially different than any sci-fi I'd seen on t.v. in some time. They also did some cool things to help suspend disbelief, which were picked up by BSG. Fortunately BSG for BSG fans, the show got more viewers and lasted longer than Firefly - though I think it owed Firefly a huge debt for the look, tone, etc.
...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.
Young man, you will bite your tongue after speaking of Firefly with such disrespect!
Compare the technobabble of TNG to Firefly. How many times did the tachyon thing have to get reversed, repolarized, resynchronized or whatever in order to solve some time spacial anomaly?
Firefly ep Out of Gas:
Kaylee: Catalyzer on the port compression coil blew. It's where the trouble started.
Mal: Okay, I need that in captain dummy-talk, Kaylee.
Kaylee: We're dead in the water.
And that's about as "technobabble to assist the plot" as Firefly got.
Totally. I'd much rather watch the episode where the Enterprise was reposessed due to the military cuts in spending, but because the construction was contracted to several different manufacturers (who then sub-contracted) and nobody really owned the thing, and because thousands of shares of it were sold off, making out who actually owned the thing an impossibility, and nobody knew who to serve the intergalactic summons to.
Oh, and the Klingons were waiting outside of spaceport cloaked the entire episode... waiting for a fair battle.. Good times.
OK, let's look at the effect of technology on a society.
The star trek universe has:
1) Replicators capable of creating any material object except gold pressed latinum.
2) Holodecks (presumably a replicated product) that can create any imaginable experience.
3) A seemingly unlimited number of colony worlds where any group can migrate via the magic of ships with warp drive (created via the replicator)
4) Unlimited energy using matter-antimatter.
OK, so in that environment, a capitalistic society is nearly impossible. There's nothing to buy or sell. As replicators themselves are replicated, anything of "value" can be had for virtually nothing. Acquisition, per se, now means nothing. Experiences themselves are similarly cheap, or free. If your neighbors complain, you leave and join the anarcho-syndicalist collective colony on Kaka 4. Where does capitalism fit in with this technology?
Some have accused the portrayal of the Ferengi of being antisemitic. In the book Religions of Star Trek, Ross S. Kraemer wrote that "Ferengi religion seems almost a parody of traditional Judaism... Critics have pointed out a disturbing correlation between Ferengi attributes (love of profit that overrides communal decency; the large, sexualized head feature, in this case ears) and negative Jewish stereotypes." Commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote that Ferengi were portrayed in The Next Generation as "runaway capitalists with bullwhips who looked like a mix between Nazi caricatures of Jews and the original Nosferatu." The fact that the four most notable Ferengi characters, Quark, Nog, Rom and Zek, are played by Jewish actors Armin Shimerman, Aron Eisenberg, Max Grodénchik and Wallace Shawn contributes to this theory.
Actually the first episode [wikipedia.org] I saw them in the first thing that popped in my mind was that they were bashing republicans or capitalists in general. I guess I wasn't too far off.
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.
Reminds me too of that Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man." "The rest of the book...it's a COOKBOOK!!"
Star Wars isn't any better, btw.
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.
One reason to critique stupid media is that it contributes to a culture of stupidity. When people who congratulate themselves on their intelligence are often devoted to work that fails on so many levels, it's symptomatic of other problems.
I think that your "leave it alone, it's just entertainment" is also myopic, in that I bet you don't feel any compunctions about feeling superior to those who like professional wrestling and monster truck rallies.
Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Scalzi was spot on [scalzi.com] 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. "
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Insightful)
So essentially, he should repeat to himself "It's just a show, I should really just relax"?
I think the point was "It's a TV show about something besides the daily life of being a writer for a TV show: odds are it's going to get nearly everything wrong, it's nothing specific to science." Look at CSI: anything. The science AND the justice system in that show only vaguely resemble real forensic science or our real justice system. Or how our cops actually look or act for that matter.
To get even more ridiculous, look at MTV's "real world" and tell me that anything in the actual real world (outside of wherever they're filming) shares anything in common with it.
Anyway, of course the science is going to be an absurd prop in star trek. That said, star trek did often take even bigger liberties with reality than most other shows. I occasionally watched episodes of various star trek series until I saw on Voyager an episode where a virus takes up Klingon growth hormones and suddenly the things are the size of flies flying around, infecting all species with stingers. That oddly was a line too far.
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't the weakness of the science, actually. It's the weakness of the sociology! It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the transporter wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable. There are technologies of bio-technological intervention that get trotted out regularly, yet we still are told that people would be quite satisfied with a 100-year life span, more or less. I won't even mention time-travel.
An interesting speculation about an improbable or even impossible technology is more compelling to me than cliches and failures of conjecture wrapped around sound technologies.
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Insightful)
As Scott Adams says; "The Holodeck will be mankind's last great invention". I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out why we'd never ever want to leave.
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Insightful)
Star Trek wasn't really about science, imo, so much as about society. Most episodes were about taking some modern social issue and turning it on its head to illustrate a point.
Star Trek did a good job on a few modern issues but the society portrayed in Star Trek is really hard to swallow. No greed, no economy, no (or few, depending on which show/episode you watch) enlisted personnel, etc, etc. I rather liked when Eddington ripped the Federation apart: "I know you. I was like you once, but then I opened my eyes. Open your eyes, Captain. Why is the Federation so obsessed about the Maquis? We've never harmed you. And yet we're constantly arrested and charged with terrorism. Starships chase us through the Badlands, and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You're only sending them replicators so that one day they can take their rightful place on the Federation Council. You know, in some ways you're worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious... you assimilate people and they don't even know it. "
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Interesting)
To distill his point into two words "NERD RAGE!!!!"
He says that he doesn't like Star Trek, and gives reasons why.
Star Trek fans interpret his words as a hostile attack on their beloved icon, no matter what his intent.
Similarly:
Someone claims they don't like Christianity and gives examples of why.
Christians (especially fanatics) interpret his words as a hostile attack on their beloved icon, no matter what his intent.
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Funny)
Ob. Futurama reference:
And so, the Trek fans were killed in the manner most befitting virgins.
[Guy on mountain throws a Trek fan into a volcano.]
He's dead, Jim.
[Repeat]
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is that popular TV is not designed to make you think. It is designed to entertain the masses who generally just want a bit of light bubbly stuff with some flesh and a bit of drama/action. That's why a great film like Bladerunner never really made it at the box office. It actually makes you think.
In the book world it's the same. Ask the general public if they've ever heard of Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle or Ray Bradbury. Outside of Sci-Fi, ask them about Rudyard Kipling or even Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Negative again. Dan Brown? Yeah they know him. Badly researched badly written brainless rubbish, but he sells books in the millions. That is the way of the world.
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
the magic ingredient (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:the magic ingredient (Score:5, Funny)
..and if they had McGuyver it'd be sorted in 10 minutes with his bootlaces.
Parent
"Why Charles Stross Hates Star Trek" (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Insightful)
The "red matter" schmaltz was the absolute worst part of what wasn't all that bad a film. Couldn't they have come up with something better than that? In a movie that was trying explicitely to move away from the way Trek had been treated since ST:TNG, it went an invoked the absolute worst aspects of the later TV series and movies. As technobabble BS goes, "red matter" may actually have been the very worst.
Parent
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:5, Insightful)
The "red matter" schmaltz was the absolute worst part of what wasn't all that bad a film.
You thought that was the worst part? I thought the worst part was the cliched "Give us the secret defense codes that render Earth completely helpless" subplot after Pike gets captured. I would have stood up and cheered if he had spit in Nero's face and said something along the lines of "Do you really think Starfleet is stupid enough to entrust that sort of information to a mere Captain?"
Just consider the idea of capturing a O-6 from the US Military. Do you really think he has information on the arming codes for all our nuclear weapons? The disposition of all forces deployed to defend CONUS? Not very likely.
Parent
Looking good in those tights (Score:5, Funny)
hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, anti-plot. Very dangerous stuff. It's red and even though it only takes a few drops of anti-plot to take out an entire world, Spock flew around in a ship with enough of it to take out just about every populated planet of significance. 'Cause you just never know when you'll need more anti-plot.
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Re:hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
You're thinking of 'deus ex machina' [wikipedia.org], which is a plot device along the lines of "and suddenly a god-like being appeared and fixed everything". It's the fate of all lazy fiction and, sadly, it's not restricted to sci-fi - although the opportunity to invent suitable technobabble does make it rather easier.
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Re:Deux ex machina? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
"contrived" is probably the word you're looking for.
However, how contrived the plot is isn't really the point; the real question is whether or not it makes good TV, and the proof is in the pudding (especially for TNG). TV shows are, after all, entertainment and not great literary works. (Indeed, the two don't frequently go hand-in-hand...)
Regardless, sci-fi generally means made-up technology, and made-up technology problems. Sometimes these can be/are solved by going back to human ingenuity or 'old-school' tech, but sometimes they need to be solved with more made-up technology. That's just kinda how things go. For example, if you had someone hacking your critical (pulling the plug isn't an option) system, you may have to, say, "reconfigure the firewall". If this were the 1920's and computers were made-up technology, then the whole situation would appear contrived, though from our perspective it's not.
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The ST bible (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:The ST bible (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh TNG did that sort of plot resolution, too. As exciting as the original Borg episodes were (before they became THE Star Trek cliche), they were ultimately beaten by technobabble.
I happened to watch the ST:TOS episode "The Doomsday Machine" a couple of months ago, and was struck by how the technological solution wasn't some sort of "We'll rephase or photon torpedoes to use Delta Wave Radiation, which will cause a photonic shift that will destabilize its neutronic shields!" It was a good old fashioned (and reasonably plausible) matter-anti-matter explosion.
While TOS went off on some weird tangents at times, a lot of the writing seemed more grounded in 1950s-1960s hard SF than the later series were. The later seasons of TNG, after Roddenberry's influence decreased, began tending towards these sort of technobabble solutions to technobabble problems. DS9 didn't have too much of it, but Voyager and Enterprise used it to the point of insanity.
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Re:hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
What happens if you mix plot and anti-plot together?!
Battlefield Earth.
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Uh oh, trolls dead ahead... (Score:4, Funny)
Cmdr Taco, more apply more tech to the tech!
Given the enduring popularity of Star Trek, et. al (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Try again. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Let me get this straight (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Uh, B5 "technobabble"? Hardly... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Uh, B5 "technobabble"? Hardly... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Uh, B5 "technobabble"? Hardly... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Uh, B5 "technobabble"? Hardly... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Novel not equal TV (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Charles Stross is trolling (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
He's right, but so what? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Quid Pro Quo (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Quid Pro Quo (Score:5, Informative)
The best of the modern hard SF writers is Larry Niven, but he, like all aging SF writers, has fallen off the bandwagon. By the second Ringworld book, he was more obssessed with various humanoids fucking than with a storyline, and the last Ringworld book was just unreadable garbage.
But stuff like the Neutron Star stories, those are damned good hard (or at least semi-hard) SF with interesting characters and at least half-believable solutions.
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Sadly, he's right. (Score:5, Interesting)
He's so right. He references the Turkey City Lexicon [sfwa.org], which lists most of the things that make bad SF. Also worth reading is the Evil Overlord List. [eviloverlord.com] (" 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. [army.mil]) 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.
Re:Millions of fans disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:And ST is being picked on.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefly was awesome. The first televised episode when Mal kicked a guy through the intake of the ships engine I knew that it was going to be substantially different than any sci-fi I'd seen on t.v. in some time. They also did some cool things to help suspend disbelief, which were picked up by BSG. Fortunately BSG for BSG fans, the show got more viewers and lasted longer than Firefly - though I think it owed Firefly a huge debt for the look, tone, etc.
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Re:And ST is being picked on.... (Score:4, Informative)
Fyi, Zoic Studios [wikipedia.org] was responsible for the effects in both Firefly and BSG, which is why they both looked so good :-)
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Re:And ST is being picked on.... (Score:5, Funny)
...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.
It's simple, Stross is just annoyed that his talk at Mountain View about his book "Halting State" [youtube.com] has received a mere 6,200 views while Leonard Nimoy's toe tapping dance number "Bilbo Baggins" [youtube.com] has garnered more than a million views and taken the country by storm.
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Re:And ST is being picked on.... (Score:5, Informative)
Young man, you will bite your tongue after speaking of Firefly with such disrespect!
Compare the technobabble of TNG to Firefly. How many times did the tachyon thing have to get reversed, repolarized, resynchronized or whatever in order to solve some time spacial anomaly?
Firefly ep Out of Gas:
And that's about as "technobabble to assist the plot" as Firefly got.
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Re:utopian socialism (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and the Klingons were waiting outside of spaceport cloaked the entire episode... waiting for a fair battle.. Good times.
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Re:utopian socialism (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, let's look at the effect of technology on a society.
The star trek universe has:
1) Replicators capable of creating any material object except gold pressed latinum.
2) Holodecks (presumably a replicated product) that can create any imaginable experience.
3) A seemingly unlimited number of colony worlds where any group can migrate via the magic of ships with warp drive (created via the replicator)
4) Unlimited energy using matter-antimatter.
OK, so in that environment, a capitalistic society is nearly impossible. There's nothing to buy or sell. As replicators themselves are replicated, anything of "value" can be had for virtually nothing. Acquisition, per se, now means nothing. Experiences themselves are similarly cheap, or free. If your neighbors complain, you leave and join the anarcho-syndicalist collective colony on Kaka 4. Where does capitalism fit in with this technology?
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Re:utopian socialism (Score:5, Interesting)
Which was owned by a Ferengie [wikipedia.org] who were not part of the Federation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Reception [wikipedia.org]
Some have accused the portrayal of the Ferengi of being antisemitic. In the book Religions of Star Trek, Ross S. Kraemer wrote that "Ferengi religion seems almost a parody of traditional Judaism... Critics have pointed out a disturbing correlation between Ferengi attributes (love of profit that overrides communal decency; the large, sexualized head feature, in this case ears) and negative Jewish stereotypes." Commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote that Ferengi were portrayed in The Next Generation as "runaway capitalists with bullwhips who looked like a mix between Nazi caricatures of Jews and the original Nosferatu." The fact that the four most notable Ferengi characters, Quark, Nog, Rom and Zek, are played by Jewish actors Armin Shimerman, Aron Eisenberg, Max Grodénchik and Wallace Shawn contributes to this theory.
Actually the first episode [wikipedia.org] I saw them in the first thing that popped in my mind was that they were bashing republicans or capitalists in general. I guess I wasn't too far off.
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Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Yeah. They reversed the polarity of capitalism 300 years ago.
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Re:Ok.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Just enjoy... (Score:5, Insightful)
One reason to critique stupid media is that it contributes to a culture of stupidity. When people who congratulate themselves on their intelligence are often devoted to work that fails on so many levels, it's symptomatic of other problems.
I think that your "leave it alone, it's just entertainment" is also myopic, in that I bet you don't feel any compunctions about feeling superior to those who like professional wrestling and monster truck rallies.
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Re:As opposed to Ron Moores method? (Score:5, Funny)
You know, there's not a lot of rationale for saying someone's wrong on matters of preference, but man, you are just totally and completely wrong.
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