Do you wish there was a bit more science fiction in Star Trek?
- Thread starter JoeZhang
- Start date
Perhaps you'd like to clarify your statement through the lense of my two favourite series, Titan and Vanguard. How do they tell the same exo-political story every time? And what is raygun scifi?
Star Trek has evolved since its 1960s beginnings and the current crop of writers are the best there have ever been. We have Treklit series that explore the following:
A lighter side of the universe (NF)
A pure exploration series (TTN),
A look into Klingon Defence Force (GKN/KE)
A look at an ancient civilisation come back to life (VGD)
A look at a galaxy devastated by a force of nature (TNG)
A look at sentient holograms and travel into uncharted territory (VOY)
A look into the lives of a deeply spiritual people and their fight against those who have similar yet twisted beliefs (DS9)
An exploration of the very beginning of the Federation (ENT)
Tell me how all these are raygun scifi and the same exo-political story? This is a varied but simplistic list of what Star Trek is today...very different to the simple tropes of the 1960s.
It's always annoyed me that no one's ever come across an alien spiecies that doesn't use warp drive (or a derivative like transwarp or slipstream). No other FTL ideas seem to come up, and we never find a ship at high relativistic sublight speeds on an epic quest between stars.
Imagine trying to communicate with people on such a ship, where time is running at a different rate!
Don't get me wrong: I know relativity and all that are ignored in TV/film Trek for reasons of simplicity, but novels can get away with going a little deeper.
In other news: Impulse engines are the sublight drive of everyone. Why?
Imagine trying to communicate with people on such a ship, where time is running at a different rate!
Don't get me wrong: I know relativity and all that are ignored in TV/film Trek for reasons of simplicity, but novels can get away with going a little deeper.
In other news: Impulse engines are the sublight drive of everyone. Why?
I prefer crazy complex things and ideas sci-fi stories to political dramas. At least TMP and TWOK tried. 'A Private Little War' also had future technology (to them) flintlocks introduced to the villagers and how it changed them. Unfortunately TWOK had nothing to do with the genisis device. TMP was the God thing. IMO metaphysical concepts float the boat. We don't need another Captain Ahab story.
I've always had the feeling that technology in Star Trek, for pretty much everyone our hero characters interact with, reaches a certain plateau -- and then doesn't go anywhere. There's no real feeling of difference, technologically, between the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th centuries. The difference is one of size. Trip Tucker may not understand Geordi La Forge's engine room intuitively, but I've no doubt he'd be up to speed within a month.
I'm reminded of something that was in Yvonne Fern's Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation. Roddenberry was quoted (assuming you think the long interview happened) as saying something to the effect of, "If I made Star Trek reflect the way the future really will be, no one would like it. It wouldn't be commercial." Roddenberry wasn't opposed to transhumanism; he discusses it (though not by name) in the Star Trek: The Motion Picture novelization, and his "New Humans" remind me of Asimov's Gaia/Galaxy from the revival Foundation novels.
I'm also reminded of something from Lawrence Miles' The Book of the War. Hold on, let me see if I can find the entry...
Miles is writing here of the Doctor Who universe, trying to rationalize the developments of the past twenty-odd years and the theories of Moravec against the reality of a Doctor Who universe that depicts humanity existing as humanity even as late as the Big Crunch. But this whole article from The Book of the War is just as applicable to the Star Trek universe. The 24th-century is a period of technological stagnation. The transhuman impulse has been short-circuited. The question for the Star Trek universe is why that is. The Eugenics Wars are a good explanation for humanity's stagnation, but it doesn't explain why the Vulcans, the Romulans, the Klingons, et al haven't hit the Singularity.
You could argue that the Borg represent the worst case scenario that Verner Vinge described in the 1980s -- the hunter/prey imperatives are hardwired into the biological computer, and if transitioned into a silicon computer they would create a very dangerous machine. The experience of the Borg could make the people of the 24th-century less likely to develop in a transhuman direction out of fear. However, I could also see the Borg making transhumanism more likely, beginning with military applications to combat the Borg both on a grunt-level and on a macro-level to better understand the way a Collective could work.
Of course, from an "out of the box" perspective, the reason why Star Trek hasn't developed in a transhumanistic direction is simple -- in the 60s, transhumanism wasn't even thought of, and while transhumanistic thought was beginning to surface in the late-80s in time for Star Trek: The Next Generation the mainstream audience that the shows were trying to capture would have been unable to relate to a post-Singularity 24th-century. The very people who made TNG the most popular of the series would have turned out in a heartbeat by a series populated with post-human characters who simply aren't relatable.
The episode about the collapse of warp subspace would be interesting to follow up in a situation centuries hence. What if subspace does collapse and warp drive no longer works? Are there other FTL methods that work? Hyperspace jumps? Wormhole networks? Maybe warp drive is easier to control. Maybe it requires less energy. But it's clearly not the only FTL method in the Star Trek universe, even though everyone uses it.
I was always disappointed that there was never any follow-up to "The nth Degree"; Barclay turned the Enterprise's warp drive into an Asimovian point-to-point hyperspace jump -- and nobody ever thinks that this is useful and important?
Some of my early Strange New Worlds submissions were science-heavy, because I was heavily influenced by Larry Niven's work. One involved Dyson Trees, another involved high-c kinetic weapons.
Good question. Where are the Orions? Where are the Bussard Ramscoops?
That's like complaining that every culture in historical fiction uses sails for their ships. Maybe all FTL is warp or warp-like because that's the only way to do it, or the best way.
Then again, "transwarp" means "beyond warp," so it doesn't necessarily refer to a derivative of warp drive. For that matter, quantum slipstream doesn't strike me as a warp derivative. I'd say it's a pretty dissimilar propulsion method, as evidenced by the fact that the slipstream is generated from the deflector dish or equivalent emitter rather than the warp engines.
But anyway, looking at it from a storytelling perspective, it doesn't matter what label you stick on a propulsion method, since they're all just means of getting the characters from place to place. VGR gave us all sorts of gibberish drives like quantum slipstream and coaxial warp and so on, but they were all just plot devices and were never actually explored in any meaningful way. So varying the types of FTL used doesn't really count as a broader approach to SF. Exploring the social or economic or other consequences of FTL could be, though. For instance, if "Force of Nature" and the idea of an environmental cost to warp travel had been developed further.
See the Bantam Trek novel The Galactic Whirlpool by David Gerrold.
See above re: sails. "Impulse drive" just means a drive that works by impulse, i.e. an impelling force. It's really just a fancy way of saying "rocket" or "thruster." It's a generic label for any reaction-based drive.
There are actually several SCE stories where they come across cultures that have developed differently; just off the top of my head, Enigma Ship involves a race that never developed warp drive but went crazy with holography, and Aftermath involves a race that never used warp fields for propulsion but did end up exploring the universe in other ways (it's kind of complicated).
When I said "warp derivatives" I meant story-wise. Slipstream, despite different technobabble and effects, works exactly the same as warp drive does (albiet allowing our crew to go further, faster). Same for hyperdrive in Stargate or Babylon 5, FTL in Universe etc. BSG's FTL drive was different and more like teleportation. The film Supernova needed everyone in pods during warp.
As for "Impulse" engines, what about the gravity-based propulsion in Larry Niven's books? You can't tell me that Trek tweak gravity fields to their whim.
I read Whirlpool years ago. I remember thinking it was allright. Excellent cover art.
I'm slowly getting though SCE. I'm looking forward to Enigma Ship and the rest
As for "Impulse" engines, what about the gravity-based propulsion in Larry Niven's books? You can't tell me that Trek tweak gravity fields to their whim.
I read Whirlpool years ago. I remember thinking it was allright. Excellent cover art.
I'm slowly getting though SCE. I'm looking forward to Enigma Ship and the rest
A gravity drive might be useful for surface-to-orbit, but in interstellar space, what are you going to pull yourself toward or push away from? Besides, a warp drive is a gravity drive by definition; gravitation is a distortion (warping) of the geometry of spacetime. And the mass-reduction aspect of impulse drive, as postulated in the TNG Technical Manual, would also be based on a gravitational/spatial-distortion principle, since gravitation and mass are kind of inseparable concepts.
Except, as we know in "The nth Degree," warp drive is neither the only way nor the best way, as I talked about here, in this very thread, no less:
Do pay attention, 007.
But I do think that there are a few fundamental conceits underlying the Trek universe as presented that aren't talked about much, but do a lot of work towards making it internally consistent even if not scientifically plausible.
1) The aliens all look the same because as TNG told us someone did that on purpose. (I've often thought it'd be fun to fly off to the Andromeda galaxy, or something, and have alien life be totally different there, just to really cement that as something unusual about our particular galaxy.)
2) Scientific discoveries, by and large, happen in parallel (that is, if you discover subspace, you'll discover how to travel through it, you'll probably discover some kind of way to harness disruptive energy like phasers or disruptors, you'll discover a way to shield against them, you'll discover cloaking technology, you'll probably discover transporters, etc). This is the only reason the Prime Directive makes much sense; it has to be founded on the idea that, inevitably, every sufficiently capable culture will get there eventually.
3) The exception to #2 seems to be replicator technology; I've always gotten the impression (though Christopher may pop up here and prove me wrong) that the Federation figured this out first, no one else is very good at it, and certainly no one in the Delta Quadrant had it at all.
4) Lots of sentient species start as flesh-and-blood but somehow transcend and become energy beings, so transhumanism of some variety has been around even since TOS. I just think humanity doesn't want to go that route, for lots of reasons mentioned already. Which brings me to...
5) Humanity, as a culture, is bizarrely ambitious and persuasive. We've not seen evidence of anything like the Federation anywhere else in the galaxy; even the Dominion was very much authoritarian and not cooperative. And now with the Typhon Pact, even races that disagree with humanity are becoming locked into the humanist democratic paradigm that the Federation represents, to a certain extent.
6) Putting all that together, and indeed using the Caeliar and Christopher's large-scale archaeological descriptions from The Buried Age as well, you can posit that the next steps along the scientific development that most cultures follow are more towards transhumanism and energy-being kinds of things, but that humans philosophically have no desire to go down that path. And, as a result, no one else nearby is either. Perhaps there are tremendous enclaves of transhuman civilizations deep in the Beta Quadrant, but no one around where we are is going there any time soon.
I'm sure other interpretations from my own are possible and even likely, but that's how I see things working at the moment. Food for thought, anyway.
1) The aliens all look the same because as TNG told us someone did that on purpose. (I've often thought it'd be fun to fly off to the Andromeda galaxy, or something, and have alien life be totally different there, just to really cement that as something unusual about our particular galaxy.)
2) Scientific discoveries, by and large, happen in parallel (that is, if you discover subspace, you'll discover how to travel through it, you'll probably discover some kind of way to harness disruptive energy like phasers or disruptors, you'll discover a way to shield against them, you'll discover cloaking technology, you'll probably discover transporters, etc). This is the only reason the Prime Directive makes much sense; it has to be founded on the idea that, inevitably, every sufficiently capable culture will get there eventually.
3) The exception to #2 seems to be replicator technology; I've always gotten the impression (though Christopher may pop up here and prove me wrong) that the Federation figured this out first, no one else is very good at it, and certainly no one in the Delta Quadrant had it at all.
4) Lots of sentient species start as flesh-and-blood but somehow transcend and become energy beings, so transhumanism of some variety has been around even since TOS. I just think humanity doesn't want to go that route, for lots of reasons mentioned already. Which brings me to...
5) Humanity, as a culture, is bizarrely ambitious and persuasive. We've not seen evidence of anything like the Federation anywhere else in the galaxy; even the Dominion was very much authoritarian and not cooperative. And now with the Typhon Pact, even races that disagree with humanity are becoming locked into the humanist democratic paradigm that the Federation represents, to a certain extent.
6) Putting all that together, and indeed using the Caeliar and Christopher's large-scale archaeological descriptions from The Buried Age as well, you can posit that the next steps along the scientific development that most cultures follow are more towards transhumanism and energy-being kinds of things, but that humans philosophically have no desire to go down that path. And, as a result, no one else nearby is either. Perhaps there are tremendous enclaves of transhuman civilizations deep in the Beta Quadrant, but no one around where we are is going there any time soon.
I'm sure other interpretations from my own are possible and even likely, but that's how I see things working at the moment. Food for thought, anyway.
Nice list, Thrawn. 
I'd suggest a corollary:
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Kardashev Scale. I brought it up when Destiny came out; the Caeliar are Kardashev-II, the dawn-of-time-Caeliar-galaxy is Kardashev-III. I, personally, would rate the Federation at not-quite-Kardashev-II; they're on the cusp, but they're not quite there. And I'm not sure if they'll ever cross that cusp.
I'm saying this to lay the groundwork, basically, for the corollary.
The Federation encounters races that fall into three broad categories.
1) Seriously pre-warp. Outside of the episode "First Contact," I can't think of an episode where we see someone on the cusp of warp drive.
2) Exactly at the Federation's tech level.
3) Seriously beyond the Federation's tech level.
For whatever reason, the Federation's tech level (and I'm using that to broadly describe the 22nd-24th-century period) is a plateau. And the Klingons, the Romulans, the Dominion, everyone is exactly at that level. Even the Borg aren't pulling out absolutely insane technologies to take down the Federation; they're fighting with the same techs and methods as everyone else. We don't see in Star Trek a case like we may have here on Earth today, where several nations could reduce the vast majority of the planet to radioactive glass without retribution. There's no Star Trek equivalent to the technological divide between Earth's nuclear powers and the rest of the world, as the races we find at #3 on my list above have little in common with the races at #2.
It seems to me that scientific breakthroughs on multiple worlds in multiple systems and multiple quadrants must generally happen in tandem, as nonsensical as that sounds. It's the only way that Star Trek's balance of power makes sense.
(By the way, someone should add Destiny to the Wikipedia article on the Kardashev Scale in fiction. )
I'd suggest a corollary:
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Kardashev Scale. I brought it up when Destiny came out; the Caeliar are Kardashev-II, the dawn-of-time-Caeliar-galaxy is Kardashev-III. I, personally, would rate the Federation at not-quite-Kardashev-II; they're on the cusp, but they're not quite there. And I'm not sure if they'll ever cross that cusp.
I'm saying this to lay the groundwork, basically, for the corollary.
The Federation encounters races that fall into three broad categories.
1) Seriously pre-warp. Outside of the episode "First Contact," I can't think of an episode where we see someone on the cusp of warp drive.
2) Exactly at the Federation's tech level.
3) Seriously beyond the Federation's tech level.
For whatever reason, the Federation's tech level (and I'm using that to broadly describe the 22nd-24th-century period) is a plateau. And the Klingons, the Romulans, the Dominion, everyone is exactly at that level. Even the Borg aren't pulling out absolutely insane technologies to take down the Federation; they're fighting with the same techs and methods as everyone else. We don't see in Star Trek a case like we may have here on Earth today, where several nations could reduce the vast majority of the planet to radioactive glass without retribution. There's no Star Trek equivalent to the technological divide between Earth's nuclear powers and the rest of the world, as the races we find at #3 on my list above have little in common with the races at #2.
It seems to me that scientific breakthroughs on multiple worlds in multiple systems and multiple quadrants must generally happen in tandem, as nonsensical as that sounds. It's the only way that Star Trek's balance of power makes sense.
(By the way, someone should add Destiny to the Wikipedia article on the Kardashev Scale in fiction.
)
Or, alternately, that once you reach the plateau, things stay the same for a very long time with only minor variations (slipstream, replicators, etc). Technological development requires steadily greater use of resources, and becomes less and less plausible. But then something happens, and not even necessarily something technological because we saw Kes do this purely with mental power, and your culture evolves the ability to transcend. And very quickly, poof, your whole race vanishes.
If your race doesn't ever do that, though, then inevitably technological growth will continue to occur, just really slowly. The Borg use the same tricks we do, by and large, but are certainly much better at them, and getting from the 24th-century Federation to the Caeliar eventually doesn't seem so implausible.
It's just that, either for reasons presented in The Buried Age or by pure chance, we just haven't met all that many cultures in the not-transcended but also-not-millions-of-years-older range. Perhaps, in the intervening period, there just weren't that many sentient species in the galaxy at all, or perhaps most of them transcended.
It would account pretty well for the huge gap between 2 and 3 in your list.
If your race doesn't ever do that, though, then inevitably technological growth will continue to occur, just really slowly. The Borg use the same tricks we do, by and large, but are certainly much better at them, and getting from the 24th-century Federation to the Caeliar eventually doesn't seem so implausible.
It's just that, either for reasons presented in The Buried Age or by pure chance, we just haven't met all that many cultures in the not-transcended but also-not-millions-of-years-older range. Perhaps, in the intervening period, there just weren't that many sentient species in the galaxy at all, or perhaps most of them transcended.
It would account pretty well for the huge gap between 2 and 3 in your list.
Technological evolution generally occurs when something upsets the status quo and there becomes a need to reach another status quo, such as the development of the atomic bomb or the space race. Both of which are now readily available to those with the money and the need.
For the primary political entities of the 24th century, there is now such a need. The Borg upset the status quo by trying to eliminate all sentient life in the alpha/beta quadrants. Though the Federation ultimately tried to develop new technology to reach that new status quo, it was the Caeliar who helped everyone by getting rid of the Borg. Has that new status quo been reached? The political entities have had their lives almost snuffed out and will undoubtedly enter a new technological arms race to build bigger and better weapons so that doesn't happen again.
For the primary political entities of the 24th century, there is now such a need. The Borg upset the status quo by trying to eliminate all sentient life in the alpha/beta quadrants. Though the Federation ultimately tried to develop new technology to reach that new status quo, it was the Caeliar who helped everyone by getting rid of the Borg. Has that new status quo been reached? The political entities have had their lives almost snuffed out and will undoubtedly enter a new technological arms race to build bigger and better weapons so that doesn't happen again.
Actually, my understanding of the maneuvering systems of Star Trek runs like this. The only "reaction" thrusters on must ships seen are those used for close maneuvering and repositioning the ship. For major sublight travel, the IMPULSE engine is a far more powerful system that also does a local "bending" of local spacetime, and the ship rides on that. It's not nearly powerful enough to envelope the ship in a warp space bubble and allow it to get to warp velocities, but it allows for the extremely high sublight speeds and efficient, swift maneuvering that no kind of mere reaction thruster would allow.
^ The point still holds, though. Perhaps that's the only logical way that's energy efficient to move large, heavy objects in space, and races have developed wildly different mechanisms to do so, but all of them still rely on local bending of spacetime so all of them are called "impulse".
It doesn't have to be the name of a specific technology, just a type of thrust. There are a lot of different kinds of rocket engines.
It doesn't have to be the name of a specific technology, just a type of thrust. There are a lot of different kinds of rocket engines.
War has been a great innovator in human history. Maybe because we haven't seen a lot of wars in Star Trek, we haven't seen much of the technological innovation that war can bring.
I've argued a few times that the Dominion War didn't last long enough; the intervention of the Prophets was actually a bad thing in the long run because it short-circuited the natural innovation, both tactical and technological, that comes about because of warfare.
As I see it, the major tactical lesson not learned in the Dominion War, which proved near catastrophic in Destiny, is this: Capital ships may be big, they may dole out lots of firepower, but they are expensive to replace in both men and matériel. Had the Dominion War gone longer, I believe that Starfleet would have turned to a crash program to build lots of Defiants; very small, very powerful ships that could swarm and overwhelm an enemy. But because Starfleet didn't have to find a way to replace quickly their capital ship losses, they never made the strategic breakthrough toward smaller, faster ships, and they approached fighting the Borg in Destiny in the same way they approached fighting the Dominion, with large capital ships that can't be replaced quickly and put a serious reduction in your personnel with their loss.
Okay, okay, enough armchair admiraling from me.
I think the Voyager fleet could be a step in the direction of a new paradigm for Starfleet, and if it works, we could see fleetwide changes in the years to come.
Could be.
