May the Giant Green Space Hand guide you to your Philosophical Naturalism atop mount Seleya where Vulcan dude's souls are stored in terracotta pots. Amen.
Spoilers Yeah... I give up - Star Trek has abandoned philosophical naturalism - it's depressing/juvenile
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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May the Giant Green Space Hand guide you to your Philosophical Naturalism atop mount Seleya where Vulcan dude's souls are stored in terracotta pots. Amen.
Hardness is of course a relative scale. Back in those days probably the "hardest" writer would have been...I dunno...Hal Clement? Today maybe Greg Egan. My point was merely that the root of Star Trek was not simply "pulphouse" science-fiction. They were aiming for something a little bit higher than that.
Frankly I've never understood... Vulcan mysticism.
Harlan Ellison was a pulphouse writer.
Not that that tells us much, because technically so was Arthur C. Clarke. Again, alot of this happened before the big transformative moment in the science fiction genre that was the release of "Space Odyssey." Most people forget that it was one of the first (if not THE first) scifi novel to get a major motion picture based on it. Written science fiction was more of a niche genre before that.
Let's also not forget that that was fifty years ago. Star Trek is to modern audiences what "War of the Worlds" was to Star Trek audiences. There have been a half dozen paradigm shifts since then, and trying to judge TOS by modern standards is an exercise in irrelevance.
Yes, they were aiming to clear a relatively low bar. And they'd been off the air for maybe a year before the bar got raised ten more notches. So when TMP came out, they aimed higher to clear THAT bar... and audiences hated it.
I mean, don't get me wrong, TMP is easily one of my favorite Star Trek films, for that very reason. But it's not something Star Trek is broadly remembered or celebrated for. Among the most iconic Star Trek moments are bar fights with Klingons, roomfuls of tribbles, Kirk and Spock trying to kill each other with giant axes (that fight music, tho!) and Kirk fighting a giant lizard monster on a desert planet. And also occasional space battles.
One of the most imaginative science fiction concepts we've ever seen was the Dyson Sphere from "Relics," a construct which -- while scientifically totally implausible in execution (a solid sphere would be less than useless for the people living in it) was also a highly forgettable episode except for the fact that Scotty was on it.
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I feel like that was big wasted opportunity. I like those concepts of giant artificial habitats in space and I would love to see more about Dyson sphere. They could show us more about who built it, how etc...
Everyone wrote for the magazines back then but not all of them were pulps. The pulps had mostly ended by the mid fifties and went digest sized. Not all of the writing quality changed, but there were magazines like New Worlds, F&SF, "Worlds of If" and Galaxy that were producing literature oriented science fiction. It was really during that period that at the New Wave came about. Harlan Ellison did not invent it but he was certainly in the vanguard of New Wave SF, having produced the Dangerous Visions anthologies. I find a lot of the new wave from that time virtually unreadable now, but some of it is very good. Arther C Clarke was more of a hard-sf writer, and I doubt Harlan Ellison would ever be categorized as such, even though his works have just as much mysticsm in them. At the same time, I can't recall many times except perhaps when he is writing horror, that he "plays with the net down.
I dunno. I grade TV/movie science fiction on a bit of a curve, because almost all of it dumb action-adventure - much, much less interesting than my favorite genre books. I can only think of a handful of well-produced, smart science-fiction movies, like 2001, Solaris, Contact, Europa Report, and Arrival. In terms of TV series, it's much more difficult. Most of them are much, much dumber than Trek. The Expanse is doing a good job to date, but the book series it's based on is just a bunch of page turners, not the apex of the genre by any means.
Liam Neeson
A very particular set of welding skills.
Also, Dyson Spheres are actually a thing.
Also, Dyson Spheres are actually a thing.
And yet The Expanse novels are more grounded science fiction than anything Star Trek has ever produced, and the same can be said of the series.
More to the point, we've reached a period in history where movies about space ships, space stations and astronauts are not necessarily science fiction. "Gravity" for example could be considered a straight up disaster movie since none of its settings are actually fictional, and "Space Cowboys" is science fiction only in that the specific space shuttle they launched and the satellite they intercepted do not technically exist. This trend will only continue moving forward, the more things we start doing in space.
Seen against that backdrop, it becomes easier to judge the "hardness" of science fiction by comparing non-fictional space shows/movies to fictional ones. Here, again, we have series like "The Expanse" being significantly ahead of the curve (thrust/spin gravity, newtonian physics, projectile weapons, quasi-realistic economics, etc). If they ever do a movie version of, say, "Pushing Ice" or Ben Bova's "Grand Tour" novels, those same expectations will come into play.
I don't understand
Very funny. Did it take very long to come up with that?
there is another, inoffical, Star Trek show out there on TV at the moment where a similar concept was explored and your question answered
Well, you pay to watch it.
Ah yes, I saw it. The orville right? That was a good episode.
Yes, but not necessarily in terms of the science. Trek has served many purposes in terms it's allegorical approach to the real world, approaching a broad range of social topics from a variety of angles, some obvious, others far more subtle. It definitely has cerebral content and that is arguably what makes it iconic far more so than the shape of the Enterprise or Spocks' ears. What it hasn't done so well, (or frankly particularly ever tried to do) is educate us about science.
Yeah...they were out there, you know, exploring space and stuff. And being interesting about it.
About nine minutes.
Star Trek has educated us about a great many things, Spot, but the one thing it has NOT educated us about is science. It has, for sure, inspired alot of us to try and learn more about science, but the science behind Star Trek is about as realistic as the martial arts technique in "power rangers."
Yeah...they were out there, you know, exploring space and stuff. And being interesting about it.
Dude, you don't even watch this show. Why are you even here?
wait, the martial arts in Power Rangers is not real? My whole life is built on a lie!
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