14 KiB
[HSF][D] Why Charlie Stross hates Star Trek and other space operas
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Author: u/None *
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URL: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/why_i_hate_star_trek.html
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Score: 10
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Created: 2014-08-30T22:32:37
Post:
Comments:
u/Geminii27 [+12] (5 hours later)
Ehh... with all due respect to CS (and I do like his books more than I like Star Trek), Trek and what he writes are vastly different genres aimed at different audiences.
Stross writes sharp, witty, smart-assed, self-aware stories with deep SF roots. Trek is weekly action-drama IN SPACE aimed at a much more general audience, and its everything-wrapped-up-by-the-end-of-the-hour formula is written to the same tune as a thousand other TV programs which have to pump out 26 to 52 stories a year.
Really, there's no reason for Stross to hate on Trek - it's so far removed from hard SF that any attempt to take a swing at it would need a parsec-length baseball bat. It's like hating on Spaceman Spiff or crummy space-alien comic books from the middle of the last century.
u/ItsaMe_Rapio [+1] (18 hours later)
I do like his books more than I like Star Trek
That's a hell of a statement. I'd never heard of the guy before; if I wanted to check out his stuff, where would you recommend I start?
u/dysfunctionz [+4] (19 hours later)
You can read one of my favorite shorter works of his free here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
u/Geminii27 [+3] (a day later)
He's got a website, or just start with the Atrocity Archive novel at your local library/bookstore.
u/benthor [+2] Concent of Saunt Edhar (a day later)
Also check out http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html Convenient as PDF, ePub or what have you.
Fun fact: Accelerando made me a fan after falling through the Stross rabbit-hole that began in the form of the very article linked.
u/comport [+9] (13 hours later)
In defense of Star Trek TNG...
Charlie Stross seems to be saying that TNG wasn't a science fiction, just an interpersonal drama set in space.
He can't have watched much of it.
TNG did have its problems, technobabble, deus ex data, last minute narrative ass-pulls, and a number of questionable episode plots.
And, it wasn't hard sci fi by any stretch. We're dumped into a universe where somehow humanity has just stumbled its way into a post-scarcity, post-economics world, and questions about how that happened and what problems it caused are left as an exercise for the viewer.
But, to say that "you could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech" is utterly untrue. Many of the episode plots are based around concepts that are pureblood scifi.
What if the transporter malfunctions and created two copies of you? Second Chances raises all the issues of what it means to have an identity and what we lose when we're no longer unique which you'd expect to come up when dealing with duplicating teleporter. This is a plot where technological teleportation is integral, not an afterthought or part of the background.
What if there were a computer game that was so addictive it stopped you functioning properly? In The Game such a video game arrives on the Enterprise. It's very addictive and encourages people to share it with others, sometimes by force. It eventually turns out that the main intention of the game is to be used as a form of mind control. Here we have an episode of a tv show where concepts relating to technological superstimulus and memetic hazards are the driving force in the plot, this isn't an example of a space opera.
What if a trickster god appears and forces you to re-live the events of Robin Hood? Okay.. lets skip this one. Let's just skip all Q episodes.
What if you have the technology to wipe out an irredeemable enemy? In I, Borg the crew debate the ethics vs the necessity of wiping out the Borg by sending a captured drone back carrying a highly destructive memetic hazard.
Sure there are episodes such as The Measure of a Man which deals merely with the issues of whether or not a sentient robot can be considered property, a topic which could have been dealt with as easily, if not as effectively in a slave-trade era setting.
And there are episodes such as The Best of Both Worlds which only deals with the loss of your individual consciousness, and the concept of humans-as-wetware. You could do that in an 18th century setting, right?
TLDR
Had its writing problems, casting problems, production problems, many kinds of problems. Had moments of genius, prescience and was often thought provoking, and must certainly be counted as sci fi.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+2] Utopian Smut Peddler (14 hours later)
What if a trickster god appears and forces you to re-live the events of Robin Hood? Okay.. lets skip this one. Let's just skip all Q episodes.
A shame, because in real hard sci-fi, that would be closest to what encountering an alien species would be like. Without some woo-woo excuse, what are the chances you'll be nearly exactly the same technology level, such that you can interact as peers?
Either they are just figuring out banging rocks together, or they are totally, unbeatably better than you to the point where any interactions at all are just for their own amusement.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Or you're the advanced one and they're the ones with only semi-advanced tech. Which is actually sorta the point of Stark Trek. In LW-ian terms, it's supposed to be a series about what we get out and do when humanity has its shit together.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+2] Utopian Smut Peddler (a day later)
Or you're the advanced one and they're the ones with only semi-advanced tech.
That sort of timing would be really suspicious. I'd start calling intelligently directed Drake-equation shenanigans (given life-bearing planets being rare at all).
Extremes are much more statistically likely, given the age of our galaxy and stars like ours, and how long it took us to go from zero to hero (or at least this far). And given the lack of evidence for seriously high-level civilizations, even in the 'Trek 'verse with their Dyson's spheres and all, everyone else being somewhere between advanced rock-banging and one-celled life would be the logical expectation.
But once you've met the same-levels, like the Vulcans, Klingons, etc, and then the Q, things start coming together. 'Trek 'verse is clearly full of seeded races, all done at the same time by a FTL species.
And if we meet aliens that care at all about us, technologically speaking, we should assume the same in absence of lots of other evidence.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
But once you've met the same-levels, like the Vulcans, Klingons, etc, and then the Q, things start coming together. 'Trek 'verse is clearly full of seeded races, all done at the same time by a FTL species.
Yes, that's the canon explanation, as a matter of fact. Of course, the Precursors have nothing to do with the Q Continuum, so between the Q Continuum and everyone else, your thesis actually holds.
Fortunately, most Q have laws, so instead of the entire galaxy spending its entire evolutionary history being constantly trolled by energy beings, they just evolved normally.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+9] Utopian Smut Peddler (10 hours later)
Star Trek, especially TNG, was not hard science fiction about technology.
This makes Charlie Stross mad. He seems to know why, so that's good.
But I think a point was missed about what Trek was. It wasn't about the characters' interpersonal dramas (at least, outside of late-TNG and Voyager), such that it could just as easily have been a sailing ship in space. It was about people interacting with new situations in relation to technology and new and different cultures.
Yes, with the technology abstracted into technobabble with vague rules, and sometimes the cultures oddly impractically designed. But Stross WAY oversteps by trying to analyze something he doesn't like or want to know more about. He admits as much, but still goes ahead and takes a swing at defining something of which he is intentionally ignorant. This is the worst sort of dismissive elitism from someone who should know better.
Most of Star Trek was about applied sociology. How people related to the developing dramatic situations, with lots of metaphor and quite frankly artificially constructed props. But it wasn't about realistic representation, though that got a nod, but about saying "what if?" in a series of cultural and social contexts, with the addition of technology that worked in ways that were compelling to regular viewers as well as thought provoking.
Gene Roddenberry's original vision was having stories about a future society and technology without using the classic tropes of chasing money and limited resources or inter-crew cultural infighting. And instead of being about battling aliens like in a pulp serial, what if the first move was to find out stuff about them? What if people like us in most ways had to deal with something that worked like transporters, or warp drive, or energy weapons, or micromachine plagues, or genetic super-soldiers?
That those ideas weren't chased down and given the detailed treatment hard sci-fi fans would have wanted isn't a reason to dismiss it as entertainment, even if you are personally a hard sci-fi fan. The world presented was significantly different than the one any pointy-haired boss might see at the time. This was done with a deft hand to make people think about the issues. It wasn't about future-shocking people as hard as possible. If you scratch the surface of society instead of zeroing in on characters in a story that wasn't about the characters (a stupid assumption on his part), you start to see the reason it was so groundbreaking.
There was a black woman on the bridge of a future naval vessel in the '60s! And a quirky Russian, and an alien who didn't ever turn traitor, and a gay Japanese man, and a guy from the South with a medical degree (I kid!). And it didn't matter to the plot. When Kirk kissed a black woman on camera. That fact never. Mattered. To the plot. Which was groundbreaking, and a cause of much discussion at the time.
TNG and later series were slipping into the written-by-soap-opera problem that all later sci-fi would face, but it still had interesting social situations involving technology. A blind man was different from other people, but he was simply differently abled because of advances in technology; a robot wanted to be more like us, and wasn't simply yet another mindless killing machine; and a women could serve in a combat role on a starship, and in ground combat with lasers, and even die in the line of duty to strange aliens without everyone involved instantly exploding somehow. And the A plots still weren't about those things.
But because no one decided that they should use alien medical tech to do better implants and replacement limbs after the Federation meeting the Borg, it is for stupid idiots who are dumb. Holodecks might have changed the way people looked at VR across the entire world, but they don't make scientific sense so they don't matter I guess. No one is a max-level futurist (and I am one!) or an alien beyond human keen, so it doesn't matter. Sigh.
He also needs to step off on Babylon Five, because he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about there either. Is it truly the hardest of hard sci-fi? No. Is it space opera? Uh, no.
But the Battlestar Galactica remake? Yeah, Hornblower in space. Fuck that piece of shit pretending to be sci-fi. Most disappointing bait-and-switch ever after that mini-series showed such promise. And I've been having to hear about it from my "loves Big Bag Theory, too" level fake-nerd friends for a solid decade. GRRRRAH.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (6 hours later)
This is a good critique of Star Trek, and indeed hits straight to the heart of what I dislike about it. But with that said, I do think that Star Trek is more science fictional than Stross gives it credit for, even if it only delves into actual science fiction a few times per season. You wouldn't have a story about finding a teleporter clone in a high seas adventure, for example.
Unfortunately, Star Trek doesn't have a particularly well thought out world, and most of the time the tech is just window-dressing that has no impact on the plot, which sucks. So yes, I agree, though I imagine that I've watched a lot more Star Trek than Stross has, and they do occasionally take an episode break out of the space opera.
u/None [-2] (a day later)
Ok, then: what does Charles Stross like? If it's not Eldritch and also doesn't contain Singularity, he doesn't like it?
Except, oh wait, he also wrote a whole blog post calling all that Singularity stuff worn-out and explicitly saying it's utterly unrealistic.
So does he maybe want to stop kvetching?