Why Charles Stross Hates Star Trek 809
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.'"
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.
Science Fiction focuses on the fiction (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Uh, yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
agreed (Score:3, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Deux ex machina? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Given the enduring popularity of Star Trek, et. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Stross who? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ok.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
There have been occasional exceptions. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:And ST is being picked on.... (Score:1, Interesting)
...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.
...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.
His complaint isn't that Star Trek has bad science. His complaint is that Star Trek science is inconsistent. New technology pops out of the void to solve any plot problem, and is never seen again.
In Firefly, by contrast, every episode uses the same basic level of technology. The only really fantastic "technologies" are propulsion systems, artificial gravity, and terraforming, which obey the same rules through the entire show.
Re:Charles Stross is trolling (Score:3, Interesting)
Dude, if you, for a single moment, believe that ending was made up on the spot, you weren't paying any fucking attention. The religious overtones were evident from day one, and the ending of the series was hardly a surprise. I mean, for fuck sake, Starbuck basically pulls a zombie Jesus! If you didn't see where the show was going at that point, you're too dumb to live.
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ok.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:utopian socialism (Score:3, Interesting)
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:utopian socialism (Score:3, Interesting)
How could anyone know this. The only series that didn't take place inside a naval battleship was DS9, and there was at least one for-profit business there. Come to think of it, there was a bar in the third ST movie (though whether it was private enterprise or not isn't quite clear, what with Star Fleet Gestap...security officers hanging around).
That, perhaps, is one of the worst parts about Star Trek, and the one Roddenberry did his best to not over-emphasize, and that's the militaristic nature of the show. Apparently he was deeply dissatisfied with the TOS-based movies after the Motionless Picture, in particular Wrath of Khan and Search For Spock, and that was story lines very much more concerned with the military nature of Star Fleet itself. I know that DS9 was meant to be part of a major story arc about how the Federation is undermined, and it's a pity Berman and Braga so thoroughly wasted what might have been an exceedingly interesting idea of a truly authoritarian Federation.
Re:Uh, yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually Firefly is post civil war in space.
While ST was described as a western in space in order to sell it, it doesn't really follow the western tv style of the time.
Old Man's War (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the magic ingredient (Score:3, Interesting)
Television has any number of tropes.
One of them is the idea that human nature doesn't change over time. You get the same basic plotlines in pro wrestling, daytime soap operas, evening emo teenybopper soaps (buffy, angel, etc), scifi series... the only difference is the trappings of the medium.
Of course, the same has been said about literature. People argue about the number of basic plots [straightdope.com], but the theory - that if you look long enough, you'll find something that you are repeating "close enough". The same is also true in music [everything2.com], especially since the nonmusical fools involved in US judicial decisions and copyright law have made decisions that make the number of possible melodies extremely limited (and most of those mathematical possibilities also happen to be atonal shit that would make a Yoko Ono concert sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in comparison).
You want to attack Star Trek for "not focusing on" the technology? TV shows sell themselves on the actors, pure and simple. Without characters, you don't have story, and at best you get rotten shit like Star Wars Episode 1.
Re:Deux ex machina? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:3, Interesting)
"The problem isn't the weakness of the science, actually. It's the weakness of the sociology! It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the automobile wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable. There are technologies of great medical intervention that get trotted out regularly, yet we still are told that people would be quite satisfied with a 70-year life span, more or less. I won't even mention computers."
I wonder if we can really call the sociology weak. It's true that they have great technological advances, but would that really change human nature that much? I leave it to the reader to figure out for themselves whether or not there have actually been major sociological changes over the past few thousand years that were driven solely by technological advancement. And since Star Trek is only a few hundred years in the future, compare today's society with that of the 18th century. Are the changes really that pronounced? Would today's human culture be unrecognizable to someone living in 1709?
The more technology advances, the more people stay the same.
charles stross should learn (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:3, Interesting)
And the Internet has dramatically changed the way we interact with the people in our lives. Twenty years ago, if you moved thousands of miles from home, you would see those folks at your 20 year class reunion. Now, I'm talking with folks I haven't seen in over a decade on Facebook like I saw them yesterday. It has changed the dynamics of human relationships in ways that are rather profound.
However, you could also argue that human nature hasn't really changed at all at a fundamental level. We still care about our friends and families, still depend on the acceptance of others for some portion of our self esteem, etc. What has dramatically changed is the scale of interaction, the ease of interaction, and to some extent, the degree to which we take that interaction for granted. That's why some of the best science fiction is post-apocalyptic, showing how people get along after their technology has failed them.
Maybe when he can WRITE sci-fi (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:3, Interesting)
I really think Star Trek took it much, much farther than most shows.
On Babylon Five, it got convenient to have artificial gravity, but they did show spin based pseudo-gravity quite a bit, the station itself always ran on it, and they had an explanation of why the advanced aliens shared the AG tech big enough for the change over to make sense when Sheridan's bunch started flying Whitestars.
On original series Star Trek, there's at least Four different ways to travel in time! In only three seasons! Before you get to the episodes where everyone is dressed like a Nazi, an Armageddon survivor, or a Gangster! Two of those ways are invented by cultures which evidently couldn't leave their home planets yet!
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, the thing is, "human nature" gets redefined as whatever *hasn't* changed. It's a moving target. Slavery used to be considered part of "human nature." So was hunting and gathering. Egalitarian societies were also thought of as "human nature" by the people who lived in them (and the people who idealized them) - but then social hierarchies are called "human nature" by people who haven't experienced anything but. Violence is often described as part of "human nature," yet many people in many times have lived lives without violence.
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:utopian socialism (Score:1, Interesting)
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?
Simply, you are ignorant and have confused business with capitalism. All societies engage in business. All societies have politics and the use of force - even hippie colonies. The essense of capitalism is an economic system noted for the lack of force (as in "give me all your money or else). It doesn't matter how cheap something gets. Raw materials will still have a value. Real estate would be limited. Energy may be cheap but I doubt it is limitless. TNG sold you a fiction - not everyone had a starship to captain. Not everyone grew up on a secluded vineyard and just beamed to wherever the hell they wanted to visit.
The first lesson in economics is always this: needs are unlimited. There is also no distinction between needs and desires. From an economic perspective, they are same (even if different politically, socially, personally). Needs are never satisfied and no economic system can change this as it is fundamental to the nature of economics itself. NOW, it may be you don't want everyone running around halfcocked with a replicator. So maybe the technologies are state controlled or socialist. Fine, whatever, you're a prisoner of Jean Claude Picard and his leather-bound vision of the future. It is not freedom and it is not limitless resources and you are never without your needs, Ensign Pissant (assuming you even passed the Academy entrance exam).
Re:utopian socialism (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Warning: May contain traces of science. (Score:4, Interesting)
There are certainly authors that just make stuff up. No question about that. And some of them are pretty good and even good to read. They have something to say well beyond the made-up science.
However, you are missing quite a bit if you stop there. Heinlein was first and formost an engineer and didn't just make stuff up. Some of what he wrote before 1960 certainly shows its age because virtually nobody could have foreseen the changes inspired by VLSI integrated circuits. And the role of technology is very clear in that it is something that people can rely on and use to improve their situation - it doesn't rescue them, though.
Larry Niven is another hard science fiction writer where the technology is well researched, thought out and described in significant detail. There are very few situations in his books where something drops in out of the sky and saves the day. Again, technology is there to be used but people are using their own skills to interact with it and win in the end.
Now today these sorts of writers aren't very popular because we have pretty much lost faith with both clever humans and technology. Instead of James Kirk we have George W. Bush as a leader. Instead of Colossus, we have Windows Vista. People have taken this to heart and figured out there isn't really any point to counting on people or technology as both are going to let them down.
This is the principle reason why we aren't going to be returning to the Moon or going to Mars anytime soon and why a few astronauts dying convince everyone that manned space flight is too dangerous. Ask any 15 year old boy in 1950 if going to space was a good idea, and then ask if it was a good idea even if his friend in the seat next to him died. In 1950 the answer would be yes without question - today the answer is "Of course not." There is clearly a message there.
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>if it got the science 100% right, then we too would already be in The Future (tm).
Um yeah..... except even though we may not know the future, we still know there are certain things that are simply impossible. Giant viruses can't exist because the sheer weight of their internal liquid would make them either collapse flat to the ground, or burst open like a water balloon. Same applies to those movies which show ants scaled to the size of a house - they would suffocate (no lungs to circulate the air internally). In another example Babylon 5 described Jupiter's temperature as about -400 degrees Celsius. Too bad that's impossible since it's below absolute zero (-273 celsius).
Re:Millions of fans disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score:3, Interesting)
Charles Stross is selling tons of books so I don't think the problem is envy. How many time have I seen articles on Slashdot deploring the use of time warps and "reversing the polarity" as deus ex machina to get out of a tight spots on Star Trek? A lot, and I agree it diminishes the show.
The most interesting part of Star Trek, and one that is rarely directly explored, but simply hinted at, is how would a society be if almost all physical needs can be supplied almost for free? The society of Trek can't churn out star ships for free, but it is hinted that there is no money, and it is personal fulfilment and a quest for the admiration of your peers that is driving human achievement. Not amassing personal wealth or power. Instead of exploring this rich vein of inquiry we mainly get standard space opera.
Re:Uh, B5 "technobabble"? Hardly... (Score:3, Interesting)
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?"