Why I Hate Star Trek (2009)
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Sure it helps that the setting is futuristic, I wonder if I'd still like it if it were set on a seaship in the 1700's or something... But that would rule out time travel for example, which I also always enjoy. Sure, Janeway will rotate the shield frequency and sure the Burg will adapt in 3 shots (there’s room for a lot of automation in the captains commands in response to threats ;)), but it's just what they do, like Harry Potter will try Expelliarmus every time. Things get more interesting when a species joins the scene that easily wipes out the Borg (8472) and they have to decide if they want to wipe them out. They always wanted to... but what do you do when you actually can?
In the end, the tech the tech with the tech is just a side effect if you ask me. Same as magic the magic beam with magic. But it's the setting that make Data possible, and time travel, and godlike powers in the face of primitive cultures, and interesting dilemma's for cultures that don't exist on earth (but arguably could very well and one could write a story around that).
I think the main reason Trek could be set on an Earth is the exact reason it shouldn’t be: at it’s best, it is an allegory for our world, with just enough latex to pretend that the Klingons aren’t the Russians (Rura Penthe being Siberia, Praxis being Chernobyl); that the Romulans aren’t the Chinese; that the Cardassians aren’t the Old World imperial powers retreating from their colonies, and so on.
Put it back on Earth, and it will all be too on-the-nose.
That said, I do share Stross’ annoyance with the use of tech as a magic wand, though in my case my problem is with the inconsistency. For example, in Voyager in particular, in the pilot episode they say the ship has a maximum cruising speed of warp 9.975, not only do they never ever go that fast in the show, if you look up how fast that’s supposed to be, it would get them home in 7 years without any shortcuts or shenanigans, not the 70 years they say at the end of the episode.
Plus, they have time travel and stasis and Voyager could therefore get home in zero subjective time.
And every episode involving time travel in all seasons of all series, they always use the same mechanism for going backwards and forwards in time, sometimes even using the difficulties of this as a challenge to be overcome in the plot even though the show has had the go-fast-around-a-star method on record since TOS.
Sounds a lot like my American culture to me!
The fascism of Cardassia and cooperative structure of the Federation both ring more corporate than the Ferengi, most of the time.
Good to know they give a reason why it’s hardly ever used.
https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/treknology/timetravel-tos...
The veneer of the transporter and the rubber foreheads provide just enough distance for these things to be portray-able without everyone having an immediate hot take reaction and turning their brains off. They wouldn't work if they were put in an Earthbound setting: they'd be too real, too inflammatory.
I agree that the technobabble can be annoying, and there's certainly fluff in there. But Roddenberry wanted to tell stories about us as we are, and as we could be, just as much as Stross: he just approached it from a different angle.
/r/DaystromInstitute
Can I interest you in a tale about a federation, a ship on a mission of peace equipped with heavy weapons, a man of science, and his struggles to become more human, of a captain who solves ethical dilemmas?*
* Disclaimer: may be set in the 1800s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey%E2%80%93Maturin_serie...
Star Trek recognize some other countries like Vulcanians that probably are Europeans, more advanced in tech and civil terms but subject of the newly born "federation" and the Klingon who are probably the Russians, sometimes enemies sometimes friends. The Borg represent the USA ruling class hate and fear of socialism because just before the absurd choice of representing a Borg Queen the Borg are a perfect society where all decisions are made by the people (the collective) and all citizens are really equal. They are represented as powerful, because conservative élites know that a social society is far more innovative than any others, but as terrible enemies, so terrible that federation officers can board their cubes without being assaulted, free to move and look around just until they do something against the Borg, while a stranger boarding the Enterprise is an intruder, need to be contained and questioned etc.
Not only: see how clean, aseptic, against sexuality, rigid federation officers appear, that's a classic USA and even more British characteristic like when at international sport events you see athletes from all around the world in casual dress and those from USA (a bit) and UK (much more) move in suit and tie regardless of the climate, or how USA and UK lay out their dream homes, or how sexuality is (obviously) present but is a kind of tabu in social talks respect of west Europe for instance.
That's dos not make ST a bad series, I like it, I have seen most of it many times, but when you see it take into account not just special effect and formal "good points" shown, see the others elements, look under the trees :-)
BTW personally I'd like much more to be a Borg on a cube, of course without any Borg Queen, than being framed by a fleet who put appearance before the substance... And I like the idea of exploring around with a moving house, armed enough to defend myself but not (really) to offend.
Time travel is no more plausible in the 1700s than the 2700s. Just have the negative space wedgies be in the water, like the Bermuda Triangle or something.
In all honesty, a lot of Trek is pretty bad for exactly the reason the OP states: it's all deus ex machina. And that's boring and lazy. ST:TOS wasn't terrific at this, but ST:TNG took it to new lows.
But the above quote is wrong. When Trek shines it does so by forcing the viewer to confront our pre-existing prejudices by placing them in different contexts. Let THis Be Your Last Battlefield is a good example of this; the second season of Picard is as well. There are people who claim to be Trek fans who are actively objecting to "being preached to" by Picard season 2. To which I say: you never understood Trek at all if you object to it being a bit preachy.
ST does this most effectively by placing current social debates into a context where the sides are unfamiliar, and in doing so lets us see them in a fresh light. Want to think about the Cold War? Let's talk about the Klingon Empire. Want to talk about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or colonialism in general? Let's talk about Cardassians and Bajorans.
Which is actually where Picard season 2 falls down: by placing the debates in 2024 America, they're arguably too close to home to pull the trick off. Picard season 2 is almost exactly what you would get if you placed the series in the 18th century instead of the 25th.
Yeah, there are a lot of valid complaints that can be made about "New Trek," but this is manifestly not one of them. :)
(There is an article I have in my head that I will probably never bother trying to get out on paper, er, screen, defending New Trek against dismissals of it as dark and dystopian and "not Trek at all". I think there is a different take on it, but the take isn't "utopia is a lie," it's "utopia is not a steady state": you don't get to say "Federation achieved, everyone, we're now in a post-scarcity society and the only possible threats can come from outside." Many of New Trek's biggest problems, I suspect, come from trying to adapt our current model of short, heavily-serialized seasons, which all but requires ramping the stakes up through the season to ever more absurd levels -- and requires them to be way better at pacing than they've demonstrably been.)
> Which is actually where Picard season 2 falls down: by placing the debates in 2024 America, they're arguably too close to home to pull the trick off.
Hmm. I can see that, although I'm pretty sure that they've picked 2024 because it's apparently a very important year in prior Trek canon. (Relentlessly burrowing into canon is, if not always a problem, definitely a quirk of all of the new shows so far.)
And hey, we've already got a billionaire wanting to build a massive ill-considered housing project right in the middle of SF...
Also, having the main characters prison break an ICE bus was fantastic, I don't care if it is "too close to home". ICE is a fascist organization and it should absolutely be directly shamed by american art as much as possible, the more blatant the better.
Picard is a character study of Jean-Luc Picard. It's about him, his motivations, his trauma, his coming to terms with his legacy, etc. They literally named the series after him. The 'debates' about fascism and destiny and whatever the hell is up with Q are just a dark mirror of whatever Picard has to realize about himself and move on from this season.
Are there interpersonal relationships? Sure. You could put those on any sailing vessel. However, Trek still presents us with "Okay, but what if ..." situations that people can mull over.
The fusion of Tuvok and Neelix into a singular entity, Tuvix, who was his own person and wanted to exist on his own rather than being split up again ... that won't happen on your Wagon Train to the Stars. Similarly, in some pirate television show, we are not going to find discussions of whether or not a thinking machine in a humanoid form can be considered mere property of the Fleet. What if that android wanted to reproduce? We explore alternate chains of ethnical decisions as well: while most people would kill out of rage and vengeance over a person being slowly and agonizingly disintegrated by a war-crimes-level Varon-T disruptor, we see a being devoid of emotion come to a similar conclusion as to what must be done, but in a way that is just not human.
And so his italicized point -- that it doesn't tell us anything interesting about the human condition under science fictional circumstances -- is completely wrong. Some people still are salty about Tuvix, some people do ask, "What does the Federation do with someone like Bashir?"
When the Trek writers penciled in “Ensign, you need to tech the tech with the other tech, and hurry!”, the details of those particular bits of “tech” didn’t matter to the plot. What was important was that a particular bit presented a specific kind of obstacle in the moment. Your phaser doesn’t work, and you need to improvise a solution, so maybe you can open the phaser and pull out the MALFUNCTIONING THING and then smash your tricorder and pull out the OTHER THING and then bend the OTHER THING’S WHATSIT into a pretzel and put it into the phaser in place of the MALFUNCTIONING THING.
Great! From a story standpoint, did you need to know what any of those things were? I’m just going to replace them with made-up words that sound like parts of an effectively magic space weapon. Does it matter if I, the script writer, make up the words or if Bob, the Senior Technobabble Consultant we have on retainer, does it? Not really. It arguably does matter that we all keep a Technobabble Dictionary so it stays consistent—it’s Bob’s job to know that MALFUNCTIONING THING is plausibly the flogiston capacitor, because an episode last season had the chief engineer mention the celebrated Dr. Flogiston—but these are, at best, little world-building bits.
What “tech goes here” is manifestly not is the “what if…” you build stories on. Trek, from its beginning through TNG and up to its present day, clearly builds stories on “what if” centered around science fiction and fantasy conceits. We can argue about whether it does a good or consistent job with that, or whether the “what if” questions it asks are ones that you or I or Stross find particularly interesting. But I don’t think we can argue that it hasn’t put in the work.
I find it interesting that Margaret Atwood’s careful branding of herself as not a science fiction author is predicated on the same argument, that she lacks the techie doodads that are the supposed hallmark of the genre. But I have always felt that was a completely self serving, not to mention ahistorical, distinction.
Each to their own, obviously. As long as you’re reading you’re winning.
> My basic theme is the cracks in Star Trek's foundations. … Yes, television is a low‐IQ medium; it's easier to rely on action and special effects than on clever plots. But that needn't stop them making the background plausible.
Of course, Stross’s article goes some way towards explaining why these foundations have so many cracks in the first place.
Gonna leave that run-on...
The tech generalization does exist in tng although it's not an absolute by any stretch. Shows like Voyager took that tech generalization and ran with and the criticism is much more apt for that series. Nu-Trek took this formula and cranked it up to 11.
I'm not a fan of DS9 but they did manage to have some good episodes.
My point is the author over generalizes and lets their bias run ramshod over reason.
I mean, some of us really enjoyed MacGyver!
One of the comments on his post protests that he's painting with too broad a brush by including BSG and B5. I never watched B5, and only watched BSG years after it aired, but I rather enjoyed BSG, the ending notwithstanding. Sure, the whole thing was an allegory for the post 9/11 war on terror, but it was well done.
"Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it's background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast. You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech — make the Enterprise a man o'war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail — without changing the scripts significantly."
This is the central lesson of humanity, it is the core nut of storytelling and why when we tell stories it brings us together. It doesn't matter if humans are sailing around in 18th century sailing ships (also a show about a man o'war would be unlike star trek, it would have to be about a frigate) or warping around in starships, the human condition is universal and the backdrop is always just that, a backdrop. This is really the origin point of empathy from an intellectual standpoint and why experiencing fiction can help you become more empathetic and emotionally intelligent.
"The scriptwriters and producers have thrown away the key tool that makes SF interesting and useful in the first place, by relegating "tech" to a token afterthought rather than an integral part of plot and characterization."
The reason scifi writing so often sucks is that many scifi writers think this way. I also think part of the reason silicon valley, techbro culture can be so toxic and short sighted is because these people grew up reading scifi writers that think this way. They put this near religious power in technology to utterly transcend societal realities and simplify messy human problems into abstracted tech problems while unconsciously fawning over dystopian futures just because they have hovercars. It is a tragic failure of storytelling that we told children stories that encouraged them to see the world this way.
If you want to predict the future, to predict what humans will be like in far different circumstances, focusing on your invariably terrible prediction of how tech will change is the worst basis since you are probably going to be terribly wrong. If instead you focus on the ways in which humanity will always be humanity than your scifi writing will reach far into the future and will resist becoming dated no matter how absurd your technological predictions look in retrospect.
Also focusing on technology in scifi in the way so many scifi writers do participates in a process of othering ourselves from other humans in imagined futures and different present realities. If we tell stories about the future that overly focus on the different tools and resources the humans in those stories have, we inveitably send the message that having those tools and resources (or not having them) makes these humans fundamentally different than us, and that is an awful, misguided use of storytelling. It is akin to the way fantasy sometimes creates a sentient species (usually green skinned people like orcs) and just labels them "evil" and doesn't examine that any further.
These reasons are why Ray Bradbury is both one of the best scifi writers of all time and also barely a scifi writer. It is also one of the reasons that as wildly inconsistent as Star Trek's writing is, as silly as some of the tech is, and as much as rick berman was unfortunately a part of so much of Star Trek, Star Trek is by far and away the best scifi tv/movie series ever made and it isn't even close.
But incorrect, I think. While it is true that "the human story" does endure (c.f. Shakespeare, Beowulf, 1001 nights et al.), there is nearly always a context that affects how the characters behave. Even though both the best and the worst of human behavior may never change, the range of possible actions, and their side-effects and implications, change accordingly to the technological context.
Consider a world where technology allows you travel around the planet in minutes. How does this affect the relationship between place and human activity? When you can have lunch in Paris even in you work in Tokyo, what does that mean? How does it affect the notion of communities, and in turn, child-rearing? [0]
Yes, even with that far-fetched scenario, humans will still be humans. There will be jealousy, love, murder, greed, tenderness etc. etc. But that still leaves plenty of scope for people's actions and choices to differ dramatically, even if they are driven by the same old emotions and allegiances. That's what make sci-fi interesting: what would you do if <X> was possible? what would you do if <Y> was now impossible?
Stross' objections to ST are really along the lines that these questions are meaningless in the sense that the characters' actions are essentially identical to what they would be in a time with totally different technology. Nothing about the sci-fi setting has any real impact on what choices they make. I might not agree with this entirely (transporter beams do open up some possibilities that would otherwise be unavailable), but I think Stross has a point that there's really no sense to sci-fi if it's literally just a retelling of an existing story with the tech doing the tech-tech tech thing.
[0] the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer
They aren't though? Like what about Data??
There is a fundamental issue with the logic here that Stross is equating not explaining future tech in a believable, consistent way with characters not being meaningfully changed by the technology. Fantasy could not exist as a genre if one equalled the other.
Much better Sci-Fi writers were writing basic fundamental social science fiction where sci-fi setting was just a stage.
This assumes that the major emotional and social development of the people who you deride is through fiction as opposed to interaction with your family school and community and somehow they manage to both avoid most meaningful interaction with people but also all good fiction.
It's a reductionist fanciful just so story told to justify a judgement call after the fact. Like someone discovered ice cream and decided that this and this alone is responsible for all the fat out of shape people in America.
I think you missed me saying this?
Also are you suggesting that many people in tech weren't heavily inspired by the scifi they experienced growing up? That seems like a pretty absurd claim.
I also think that there is no connection between fiction that opts to focus on technology as opposed to people and the characteristics that one would call toxic.
Both chemistry and code are about technology more than people but neither staring at test tubes nor code makes you an asshole. What normally makes people an assholes is either damage or social intellectual and cultural structures that explain ignore or justify immoral behavior and we pick that up not from science fiction which tends towards idealism but from dysfunctional cultures especially family and other groups wherein we are part of the in group and that group promotes this dysfunction.
You have noted that toxic tech bros tend to like science fiction and have other cultural characteristics often common in white middle class+ America and have decided this must be causative instead of correlated.
If you have an older relation from the era that believed rock music was destroying our morality buy them a beer or coffee and commiserate over the fact that some errors are universal and eternal.
In brief what does it mean to be toxic? To be toxic is to have internalized and act out norms and behaviors that predictably do individual or systemic harm to other with which you interact contingent on the system. Lying to and about your coworkers and eating their lunches in secret is a toxic behavior that will damage the trust of your fellows. Toxic is culturally defined in terms of what behaviors are damaging and indeed may often be under-specified. A culture that is dominated by individuals that are misogynists or racists may actually treat tolerance as toxic and bigotry as normal even if they are on average very damaging. This behavior always has an origin story. The classic one being in group has most of the money and power and uses it to advantage members. Members justify this advantage by imagining that they are inherently superior rather than the benefactors of corruption and teach their children this fictional superiority at their knee. Source: The entity of human civilization
An adult asking another adult to prove that is akin to asking someone to prove that 2 + 2 = 4 prior to discussing an advance in mathematics.
Unlike racism and other forms of in group out group bigotry science fiction as a culturally corrupting influence doesn't have thousands of years of history in which all humanity has as part of its common heritage. It needs therefore additional justification. On average science fiction favors oft oversimplified idealistic values. It's hard to see how you could find that culturally it is the source of toxic tech bros rather than a past time. You might as well blame beer and Apple computers.
So he's comparing a TV show, to novels. I wonder if he ever read the actual original Star Trek books? They are quite different than the made for TV show. Author might be a sci-fi writer, but has he actually made anything for TV, which is a completely different beast than a book?
Another good example is something like Limitless. Not a space opera but the point is that it works because they break one or a small number of rules and then explore that. They aren't constantly saying "aha, but actually he also has the power of teleportation" or whatever.
In The Expanse, they have rockets that allow exploring the solar system. In Limitless there's a pill that makes you clever. In Star Wars (original) there's "the force" which lets you be a space ninja.
But in Star Trek they can basically do anything. Travel back in time? No problem the... err... there's a convenient Borg Queen that can do it. Need to teleport to another ship light years away in warp? No problem, Scotty can just invent it in a few seconds. Don't use it ever again though!
Same in the newer Star Wars. Leia's about to die? Aha no! She can use the force to fly! Rebel's about to die? Aha no! Hyperdrives can be weapons now too (just the once mind, and no autopilot).
The problem with Star Wars is that the fandom doesn't agree about it being campy, but at this point it's more campy than not, and similarly, I find it more enjoyable from that angle.
This was fine for late undergrad/early grad school me when it aired. Not so great now (old-fartitude setting in, getting that feeling to tell kids to get off my lawn).
FWIW, I generally like Charles Stross's work, though the recent gratuitous injection of some (current) cultural bits did turn me off on one of his novels. I'm hoping this trend is temporary. Nothing ruins a good story like injecting useless diversions that aren't relevant to the story, back stories, etc. and exist only to signal virtue.
I'm pretty sure this is one of the reasons ST is so popular with nerds. Star Trek is a nerd show that appeals to the nerdiest of nerds; me included.
I want them to tech the tech with the tech-tech, and to keep on doing so. The writer of that blog is just salty, and probably not a nerd but a creative type. He feels that the tech-tech-talk stifles his creativity. Good. This isn't a sculpture it's a techie nerd-gasm show; leave it alone.
I'm gonna go tech my tech with the tech-tech now.
Also, posts as cstross[3] here on HN and a pretty active contributor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laundry_Files [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
IIRC, the Star Trek original series was, at the time, described as “Horatio Hornblower in space”.
http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Star_Trek/1_Original_Series/St...
All I'll say is that I'm glad he didn't drag Picard into this, or else it would have gotten ugly.
I’m actually a bit surprised to see him complain about Doctor Who — I thought I saw him tweet years later than this that he didn’t know it well enough to write it, but I’d say from this that he clearly does know enough and has a much better reason for saying no.
I gave up on this rant after the second paragraph. Good job, Tomte, you troll
Guy may be a good author, I wouldn't know. Hating on all Star Trek, all Battlestar Galactica, even Babylon 5. Yeah, by the looks of it, we have much in common.
My favourite sci-fi involves aliens, robots, or alien robots. That said, I also enjoy stuff like The Man From Earth.