Star Trek, Forbidden Planet and classic space opera....

[Warped9]

The '50s era film Forbidden Planet is often cited as the most direct inspiration for what GR brought to Star Trek. And yet while reading an anthology The Space Opera Renaissance I came across some short fiction from the late 1920s and early '30s that already had much of what is familiar in Star Trek.

- interstellar Federations
- FTL starships on missions of exploration and defending against alien threats
- mixed gender crews and even a female second-in-command
- exploring strange new worlds

And so as forward thinking as Star Trek was to the television audiences of the 1960s many of its ideas were already old hat to fans of SF literature long before Forbidden Planet came along in the mid '50s.

Interesting to know...

On the flip side I look at how space adventure (or space opera if you like) has evolved since TOS and I think it really hasn't changed much at all, particularly in the ideas it plays with. Stargate using a wormhole is about the most distinct contemporary difference, and even the Stargate shows have parachuted in pretty much all the same things TOS made commonplace to the television audience.

I recall when TNG had its first nanite episode in its third season, and nanotech was treated as the whole new field of study for the 24th century. I laughed then because something like nanotech should have already been old hat for a universe like Star Trek even in the 23rd century.

For all the polish of contemporary sci-fi on film and TV I think space adventure is still stuck in the l950s if not the 1920s.

Something to think about...

 

[CaptJimboJones]

I've always thought that EE "Doc" Smith's Galactic Patrol from the Lensmen novels was clearly an early version of Roddenberry's Starfleet. GR obviously borrowed from multiple sources when he created Star Trek.

Trek was certainly groundbreaking sci-fi for television at the time, but I agree that readers of literary SF of the era wouldn't have been surprised by any of his ideas. In fact, even back then lots of the elements of Trek were cliches that had been retread in science ficition writing for decades.

 

[22 Stars]

I think the fact that Trek distilled all these sources and brought it to the masses is what made and makes Trek the enormous phenomenon it is. As with many other things in entertainment and life, it borrows from other places, adds to it and then the final product is 'greater' than the elements that came before. Not greater in quality, certainly, those other stories and films are great on their own, but in scope and impact on the cultural zeitgeist.

It's the same kind of thing that happened with Star Wars, and Raiders and countless other 'franchises'.

 

[Warped9]

TOS made many elements of SF lit accessible to the broader audience via the power and reach of television. But Trek and pretty much all of space adventure since has mostly ignored much of what's been going on in SF lit since.

Contemporary sci-fi on film and tv largely continues to portray future humanity as we are today and with little exception doesn't offer that much futuristic science and technology beyond FTL starflight and teleportation. Occasionally some other ideas are thrown in yet rarely as commonplace elements of a far future setting which by all rights and credibility they should be a part of.

Mind you TV and film sci-fi aren't alone in this. There's still a lot of adventure flavoured stuff in SF lit that's very much like Trek or B5 or Stargate. The really forward thinking stuff is often served up in near future stories (where the tech is just being introduced) or far futures (on the order of thousands of years) where it's already well established.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately while trying to write my own far future space adventure story, on the heels of reading novels by Robert Reed, Wil McCarthy and others as well as nonfiction work like The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), Physics Of The Impossible (Michio Kaku), Hacking Matter (Wil McCarthy) and Beyond Human (Gregory Benford).

 

[Christopher]

I think the fact that Trek distilled all these sources and brought it to the masses is what made and makes Trek the enormous phenomenon it is. As with many other things in entertainment and life, it borrows from other places, adds to it and then the final product is 'greater' than the elements that came before. Not greater in quality, certainly, those other stories and films are great on their own, but in scope and impact on the cultural zeitgeist.

Right. ST is important not because it created any new tropes, but because it popularized many SF tropes and concepts, taking what had hitherto been familiar to a niche audience and introducing it to the broader world in an accessible way.

 

[Captain Robert April]

I need to get cracking on transcribing Roddenberry's chat with Isaac Asimov on the "Inside Star Trek" album...

 

[xortex]

Trek and Star Wars are also two titans that will devour anything similar to them - like 'The Osiris Chronicles' though future people in colonial garb went out with Galactica. I think there is room for other things but they must have a very unique premise. Galactica (the upcoming Singer production) to me is and was a reworking of the Dune concept. Man against machines, now taken over by the Terminator franchise which by the way was only an episode of Buck Rogers.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, The Osiris Chronicles was directly inspired by Trek, in a way. It was Caleb Carr's attempt to do a "what if the Federation fell?" story -- something Majel Roddenberry and Robert Hewitt Wolfe attempted a few years later with Andromeda.

 

[Chrisisall]

Buck Rogers with buster Crabbe started it all. But where was Twiki back then?

 

[xortex]

^Well, The Osiris Chronicles was directly inspired by Trek, in a way. It was Caleb Carr's attempt to do a "what if the Federation fell?" story -- something Majel Roddenberry and Robert Hewitt Wolfe attempted a few years later with Andromeda.

and was devoured.

 

[Christopher]

^If you mean The Osiris Chronicles was "devoured" by the Trek franchise in some way, I'm not sure what you're basing that on. It just plain never got anywhere. It was a failed backdoor-pilot movie, one of countless pilots that fail every year. Hell, it fared so poorly that it didn't even get broadcast under its own name. It was produced in 1995, but turned out to be so disappointing that Paramount just stuck it on a shelf for three years and finally burned it off on UPN under the schlocktastic title The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy. It didn't get "devoured," because it never had a chance in the first place.

Not to mention: How could one Paramount property "devour" another? They weren't in competition; if Osiris Chronicles had gone anywhere, the bulk of the profits would've gone to the same people who got rich off of Star Trek. Surely they would've had a vested interest in seeing both properties succeed.

 

[xortex]

Yes, it did survive being totally devoured and saw the light of day or night, but where anything is possible on Star Trek, who needs anything else that's not sufficiantly different.

 

[Neopeius]

For all the polish of contemporary sci-fi on film and TV I think space adventure is still stuck in the l950s if not the 1920s.

Space Combat still looks like WW2.. or maybe WW1.

It's been a long time since we've had a thriving Science Fiction tradition in print, let alone on screen.

 

[Warped9]

When I read SF lit I often see things that could and perhaps should show up in TV and film space adventure. Sometimes they do yet it's usually a minor one time story element rather than part of the whole.

It isn't just the ideas in visual medium SF that's become conventional and ingrained it's also the general look of sci-fi that's become "established." Recently I saw the James Cameron's Avatar trailer and in large part I thought, "Big deal." It looks very much like everything else we've been getting for at least thirty or more years. What I got out of it was that Avatar seems to be trying to appeal to fans of Halo as well as Lord Of The Rings. Granted in fairness I really have to see more to get a clearer picture of what Avatar will be all about.

It might be hard to appreciate this now but in its day TOS (and to some extent TMP) genuinely seemed to try looking forward and depict something beyond the conventionally accepted. The Enterprise herself was really counter-interuitive to what was and is understood about space travel and strongly implys truly advanced science, technology, materials and engineering. The ship's design also conveyed something about the culture that envisioned, built and crewed the ship. This was something subtly powerful in trying to depict a far future with a measure of credibility--using the visual to effectively communicate an idea rather than employing words alone.

But after the Star Trek and Star Wars of the '60s and '70s I really feel space adventure and SF generally has gotten in a serious rut both in its ideas and visual style.

 

[Basil]

Part of it, I think, is an assumption that the audience has an aesthetic desire for "realism," which is translated into a gritty, wrinkly future that essentially looks like the present, but I also think it's because of budget. It's certainly easier to recycle props and clothing by giving the future a contemporary look--machineguns and coveralls--than it is to create from whole cloth a very different aesthetic that must be realized.

 

[Warped9]

^^ I think your point ties in to a measure of cynicism that has become ingrained in society in general. However, I must point out that in the real world new tech and hardware generally progresses to cleaner and more streamlined forms that are also easier to use (usually and supposedly). In that respect then contemporary SF may not be depicting a more believable hardware reality.

Many of the things we take for granted today would seem and appear as exotic and highly unlikely to people of the past. To me it makes more sense that a far future seems more believable if it evokes that similar idea.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

It's certainly easier to recycle props and clothing by giving the future a contemporary look--machineguns and coveralls--than it is to create from whole cloth a very different aesthetic that must be realized.

It's not only easier, but advantageous because people in the main do have a preference for things which appear real. The answer to "what do we buy ourselves by creating a futuristic or alien aesthetic" is usually "hopefully a more devoted audience, but almost certainly a smaller one."

To build a world from scratch but do it plausibly enough to reduce the "gimme a break" factor - for want of a more elegant term - for many in the potential audience requires a huge financial investment. Lucas can do it, Cameron can do it, Abrams did it for his Star Trek movie where it made sense to him to do so...but it carries a price tag in the hundreds of millions.

One reason among many that Babylon 5 may not have reached a larger audience is that the producers seemed to reason that given a certain level of creative effort in the visualization of their universe - something on a par with Trek TOS, in most respects, falling short of that in some and exceeding it in others - that skiffy fans would make the imaginative leap, the commitment to fill in the blanks for themselves that they had made with Trek. Only that assumption made the idea of doing B5 on a limited TV budget plausible at all, and it did work - just for not an enormous number of people. The folks that like such things like them a lot, but most people change the channel.

 

[Warped9]

^^ I don't agree and I think that's more an assumption than factual. If true then large segments of the audience should've tuned out TOS and TNG. But they didn't and they remain among the most successful of sci-fi properties.

My reading is that if folks are tuning SF out then it's much more to do with storytelling than visual attributes.

 

[Captain Robert April]

B5's problems had more to do with erratic scheduling than an audience with limited imagination.

 

[number6]

B5's problems had more to do with erratic scheduling than an audience with limited imagination.

It also sucked donkey balls.