• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Andromeda: worth the time?

Serveaux said:
No it wasn't. It was no more hard SF than Star Trek or The Orville or the original BSG.
Click to expand...

It started out as a hard-SF series. You can see that in the worldbuilding notes the developers posted online. But when the original showrunner Robert Hewitt Wolfe was fired halfway through season 2, his successors didn't care as much about science and the hard-SF elements were increasingly abandoned. In season 3, only the episodes by Zack Stentz & Ashley Edward Miller maintained the original hard-SF sensibilities, and once they left at the end of that season, there was no longer any effort at scientific credibility.

It's a profound mistake to generalize about all of Andromeda as if it were a single uniform thing. The show it ended up being was totally different in conception and execution than the show it started out as in its first season and a half. It's the same thing I said about Earth: Final Conflict above -- the plan that Rick Okie developed for the show at the start was completely abandoned after season 1.

The problem was that Majel Roddenberry went with the wrong studio. She wanted to make intelligent, plausible, sophisticated and thoughtful science fiction of the sort that Gene R. had aspired to; but the studio she ended up with, Tribune Entertainment, wanted inexpensive, lowest-common-denominator action adventure, something that could be made on the cheap and was simplistic and flashy enough that it could be easily translated for lucrative overseas markets. So both Roddenberry shows started out as two of the most intelligent SF shows of their era, but tragically ended up transformed into two of the dumbest. For E:FC, only season 1 was true to the original intent, yet signs of the decline began to appear in its second half. For Andromeda, the first season and most of season 2 were true to the original hard-SF vision, within the bounds of what the low budget and limited production values permitted, but late season 2 and the final three seasons (aside from the Stentz-Miller episodes) abandoned that and became a completely different, far worse show.
 
I'm sure it's different for everyone, but I'm curious where you draw lines on something being hard sci-fi. With Andromeda, just the concept of Trance alone puts it out of hard sci-fi range for me.
 
Should anyone bring up the original ideas and revelations that Robert Hewitt Wolfe would've done about Trance's people and the Spirit of the Abyss/Magog God?
 
Atrili said:
I'm sure it's different for everyone, but I'm curious where you draw lines on something being hard sci-fi. With Andromeda, just the concept of Trance alone puts it out of hard sci-fi range for me.
Click to expand...

There are no "lines." Where's the "line" between red and orange in a rainbow? Science fiction "hardness" is a spectrum, a continuum, and every work is at a different point on that spectrum, some closer to the hard end than others. It's not a yes-or-no question, it's a matter of degree. Even the hardest hard SF usually has one or two ideas that are fanciful or implausible. The goal is not to be absolutely accurate, the goal is to create a convincing illusion of plausibility. Like the old joke says, the key is sincerity -- if you can fake that, you've got it made.

And when it comes to TV and movies, we're grading on a curve. Most SF in film and TV is totally fanciful, as "soft" as you can get. So anything that makes a reasonable attempt to get its science right is more toward the hard end of the spectrum than most. Yes, Andromeda had one or two implausible conjectures, but for the most part it was more grounded in believability than most screen sci-fi. It had JPL propulsion engineer Paul Woodmansee on board as a science consultant, and unlike most TV producers, the original staff actually listened to their consultant. The starship operations and battles were the most plausible we'd ever seen on TV. They didn't have FTL sensors or communications, so lightspeed lag was a major factor in space battle mechanics. They didn't have deflector shields, but relied on point defense countermeasures. Missiles and ballistic projectiles traveled at relativistic speeds and would punch right through the ship on impact, so the bulk of the ship's interior was vented to vacuum so the atmosphere wouldn't propagate heat and blast effects. And so on. The fact that there were one or two fanciful elements, like Trance and slipstream drive, didn't meant that the rest wasn't carefully thought out.
 
Ragitsu said:
There are more defensible hills on which to make a stand.
Click to expand...

Why must everything on the Internet be turned into a battle? Why can't we just listen to each other and try to learn from other perspectives, rather than trying to shoot holes in them? All I'm saying is that life is a continuum rather than a binary choice. The terms "hard" and "soft" science fiction are often treated as analogous to the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, a spectrum encompassing all possible degrees of hardness. So it's misunderstanding the terminology to think it's an all-or-nothing choice. It's a scale, and all I'm saying is that it's rare for anything on television to even attempt to be as close to the hard end of the scale as the first season and a half of Andromeda were. The Expanse is the only American show I can think of that surpasses it, certainly the only successful one.
 
Hardly any SF on TV or in movies is what I'd term hard. You've really got to turn to SF literature for that fix. Some people get sniffy and try to make a distinction between hard SF and space opera being soft but I don't think there is a sharp boundary between the two. Much modern space opera is actually quite hard IMO (such as that written by Alastair Reynolds or Stephen Baxter). Perhaps space opera and hard SF were easier to distinguish once but I don't know exactly when that was - around the time of the first golden age perhaps (1936-46). I do know there is stuff I like and there's stuff I avoid. My main criterion is how much I wish I were watching or reading something else after 60 minutes or 60 pages.
 
Those Swiss Army weapons - High Guard force lances - are pretty soft. Also, there was that monomolecular whip used by a Nietzschean assassin. How about fully volitional artificial intelligences running on computers compact enough to fit inside an android frame?
 
Christopher said:
Why must everything on the Internet be turned into a battle? Why can't we just listen to each other and try to learn from other perspectives, rather than trying to shoot holes in them? All I'm saying is that life is a continuum rather than a binary choice. The terms "hard" and "soft" science fiction are often treated as analogous to the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, a spectrum encompassing all possible degrees of hardness. So it's misunderstanding the terminology to think it's an all-or-nothing choice. It's a scale, and all I'm saying is that it's rare for anything on television to even attempt to be as close to the hard end of the scale as the first season and a half of Andromeda were. The Expanse is the only American show I can think of that surpasses it, certainly the only successful one.
Click to expand...
I certainly wasn't trying to turn anything into a battle, but I 100% see why it came across that way because it was just a short reply that looks like a quip. I should have probably expanded my own thoughts, to be fair.

When I think of hard sci-fi, the first thing that pops to mind to me is generally stuff that's far more grounded. I'm thinking The Martian or For All Mankind here. I think the reason we don't see as much hard sci-fi is by nature it tends to be more limiting. Andromeda definitely has elements of following physics models and the like that put it somewhere in a gray area, but for me a bit out of reach of being in a "hard sci-fi" bubble. But like I said, it's different for everyone.

I appreciate the feedback and thoughts, either way.
 
Elf and Safety said:
Hardly any SF on TV or in movies is what I'd term hard.
Click to expand...

Which is exactly my point! We're grading on a severe curve here. No, Andromeda wasn't as hard SF as something like a Robert L. Forward or Greg Egan novel, but compared to most of the nonsensical sci-fi in film and television, it was remarkably hard, at least in the first season and a half.

Although I think part of the problem is that much of the hard-SF worldbuilding that Robert Wolfe, Zack Stentz, and Ashley Miller put into developing the show never actually made it onto the screen, because of the limitations on the show's budget and the makeup department's inexperience and limited competence at creating alien prosthetics. If you read the AllSystems website I linked to, you see a rich, detailed SF universe worthy of prose, but hardly any of that cool stuff ever actually made it into the show proper, because they just couldn't afford to show it.
 
That's why I said Season 1. :p

As I recall Season 2 had Poseidon/Medusa/Atlantis, time travel, "psychic battles," and, of course, an alien war eventually.
 
Thestral said:
I'll put seaQuest Season 1 up there above Andromeda in terms of "hardness" if we're making a competition of it.
Click to expand...

I have no desire to make a competition out of it, as I've said. It's all relative. But I'll agree that SeaQuest season 1 was one of the few SFTV shows that tried to be hard SF -- for the most part. Unfortunately it did have a few fantasy episodes that broke the mold, like one about a haunted shipwreck and another about a psychic. Plus there was that episode near the end of the season where they found an alien spaceship, and I recall that getting pretty fanciful. And I recall the cataclysmic season finale being absurdly over-the-top and unbelievable, though I'm not sure whether that was the science or just the plotting. It was a nice try, but it lost its way here and there, even before the idiocy of season 2.

Still, at its best, season 1 was impressive. My favorite episode was "Bad Water," which was a marvelously clever problem-solving exercise. It was also just refreshing to see a Bermuda Triangle episode that stuck consistently with a realistic explanation rather than hedging at the end and saying "Well, maybe there is something mystical after all." (Although a more realistic take would be to acknowledge that it's a complete hoax and that disappearances in the so-called Triangle are no more common than anywhere else.) I remember "Photon Bullet" being my other favorite episode, though I don't recall why. Honestly, I found the season disappointing except for those two standouts, despite its efforts at hard SF.

But the retooling of SeaQuest in season 2 always made me mad, because it underlined how wrong and unflattering the general public's perception of science fiction was (at least at the time). In season 1, the producers said in interviews, "No, we're not doing science fiction, we're doing grounded, plausible extrapolations from real science and cultural trends!" Which is exactly what science fiction is. And then in season 2, the new producers said "Okay, now we're going to start doing science fiction," and they did random, inane fantasy nonsense that made Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea look grounded and intelligent. As an SF fan and aspiring SF writer, I was insulted that the public and Hollywood had such a low opinion of what "science fiction" meant, and didn't seem to notice that 50% of the phrase is "science."
 
Ragitsu said:
Why "unfortunately"? Do you have something against non-"hard" science-fiction?
Click to expand...

No, I just wish the mass media didn't have so much against hard SF. Hard SF is my "home" genre, both as a fan and a writer, so naturally it's disappointing to find so very, very little of it in film and TV, and refreshing on those rare occasions when it does come along. Imagine if you could rarely find your favorite food at any of the stores or restaurants you went to, and on those rare occasions when you did find it, it often got discontinued or the recipe was changed into something more ordinary. It's not about having something "against" other kinds of food (again, why the hell must everything be looked at as a conflict?), it's just about the disappointment of so rarely finding your favorite, and so often having it taken away from you when you do.

Besides, any work of fiction, whether it's hard SF or pure fantasy, should be consistent with its own worldbuilding and internal rules. If you're doing a fantasy show where magic is real, you shouldn't turn around and do an episode treating it all as a hoax, because that breaks the rules you've established. And if you're doing a show built around plausible science, you shouldn't turn around and throw in ghosts and psychics.
 
Christopher said:
It started out as a hard-SF series. You can see that in the worldbuilding notes the developers posted online.
Click to expand...

No, it didn't. It followed the same contours as any other interstellar space opera. It presented as slightly less silly than Star Trek because they disallowed one or two pieces of magic tech - specifically, teleporting the characters from place to place and instantaneous FTL communication.

The Orville does almost that much.

The fact that the producers offered up a more contemporary-sounding justification for the main bit of sorcery that interstellar space opera relies upon - interstellar travel that is effectively so much faster than the speed of light that relativistic effects are hand-waved away as negligible at most - was nothing but a different set of magic words. "Quantum this, quantum that..."

They said "no time travel" and by episode six they were doing time travel in an episode written by the guy who created the series, Robert Hewitt Wolfe.

To say that the creators claimed and publicized it as "hard sf" is not the same thing as it having been created as hard sf.

The series was as much Trek with the serial numbers filed off as Trek was Forbidden Planet - which is to say, a real whole lot.

Christopher said:
Hard SF is my "home" genre, both as a fan and a writer,
Click to expand...

Isn't most of your early work Star Trek-based? Trek's not hard science fiction. It's interstellar space opera.

Christopher said:
Why must everything on the Internet be turned into a battle?
Click to expand...

Largely because people make silly or overreaching assertions and then dig in when challenged.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top