• 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?

I have seen more than one Sci Fi fan, including writers, want to cling to the idea of hard-sf as if it is some gold standard. When Benford called non-hard SF "playing tennis with the net down" he was just voicing what a lot of people were thinking at the time. There was some backlash in SF to the stream-of consciousness New Wave taken to its excess. Certainly there's enough market for it to keep Analog alive over the years, but there isn't some excessive push towards hard-sf purity. But just like the number of writers in the late 60's and 70's that suddenly added a lot of Jungian hodge-podge and skin-crawlingly awkard sex scenes into their books to be seen as edgy as anything in a Dangerous Visions collection, there have been writers wanting to get that Hard-SF appellation when no amount of little blue pills will firm their central premise to the goal.

Hard-SF of late like SevenEves can work, but it can also be dry and tedious. Even that one required some deus-ex-machina to get the ball rolling, some mysterious "Thing" that cracks the moon apart, as the late Douglas Adams would put it "For no adequately explored reason." The mentioned Expanse likewise relies on "protomatter" to bend all the laws of physics to make the story work. Mr Tennis Net, Benford used the unfathomable alien tech plenty of times too. This has been going on at least since Wells came up with phlogiston when science wasn't on his side.

All Sci-Fi is fantasy with some kind of scientific or futuristic purpose included. Sometimes it strays more to the fantastic or weird than science fiction, and that's fine. No one has to have their work blessed by St Hugo and Father Campbell. as far as divisions in the genre, of course the exist, and hopefully new-subgenres will continue to emerge and make it more vibrant.

None of this changes the fact that Andromeda isn't very good after the first couple of seasons. If you watch it, don't expect much past that point, you won't be disappointed.


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..
Click to expand...

giphy.webp
 
XmasCV330 said:
I have seen more than one Sci Fi fan, including writers, want to cling to the idea of hard-sf as if it is some gold standard.
Click to expand...

Which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I like a bunch of different genres myself and I'm glad there's a diversity of options. There's room for all kinds of different tastes and approaches, and it's good if they're all represented fairly so there's something for everyone. My problem is simply that hard SF has been woefully underrepresented on film and television, in contrast to its robust presence in prose. I just want it to be present in TV and film, instead of virtually nonexistent. That's all. I'm glad there's been an increase in the representation of (relatively) hard-SF films in recent years, such as Gravity, Interstellar, Europa Report, The Martian, Life, etc., and I'm glad we have The Expanse on TV. I hope the trend continues.


None of this changes the fact that Andromeda isn't very good after the first couple of seasons. If you watch it, don't expect much past that point, you won't be disappointed.
Click to expand...

Just as I've been saying all along. As far as I'm concerned, the "real" Andromeda is seasons 1-2 and the Stentz/Miller episodes of season 3, while the rest is a completely different show, a pale imitation of the original.
 
Christopher said:
I'm glad there's been an increase in the representation of (relatively) hard-SF films in recent years, such as Gravity, Interstellar, Europa Report, The Martian, Life, etc., and I'm glad we have The Expanse on TV. I hope the trend continues.
Click to expand...

And so say we all.
 
We rarely give artificial gravity generators/fields a second thought, but that particular breakthrough clearly isn't "hard" science-fiction.
 
Ragitsu said:
We rarely give artificial gravity generators/fields a second thought, but that particular breakthrough clearly isn't "hard" science-fiction.
Click to expand...

Hard SF doesn't have to be limited to currently known science. Indeed, it's a given that future science will discover principles we're unaware of today, so it would be unrealistic not to have some conjectural future science and technology, as long as it's consistent with the physical laws we know.

Heck, there's already one theoretical way to achieve artificial gravity using known physics, the Forward catapult, or the similar principle proposed by Martin Tajmar in this 2009 paper. I used those as the basis of an artificial gravity system in my Analog story "Hubpoint of No Return"; Forward envisioned his as a spaceship launch system, but I realized it utilized the same physics as Tajmar's proposed AG system and was mechanically simpler. It's rather cumbersome and not easily adaptable to a starship, but it shows that there can be a physically plausible way to pull it off. And if that method exists, there could be others.

The thing you have to keep in mind is that science is not just a list of rules, it's a process of formulating and testing new ideas. So hard science fiction is not about limiting yourself to known science; it's about conducting literary thought experiments. As with physics thought experiments, you propose hypotheses that extrapolate beyond current knowledge, then apply physical laws and scientific thinking to predict what would happen if those hypotheses were true.
 
Maurice said:
Star Trek was, at its hardest, only ever semi-hard.
Click to expand...

Which still massively surpassed any of its TV contemporaries and most of its successors. Heck, in '60s and '70s TV, simply recognizing that the speed of light was a thing, that you couldn't get to other star systems with just rockets or a drifting moon, was exceptional. Just knowing what the word "galaxy" meant was exceptional. Roddenberry may not have always listened to his science and technology consultants, but he was one of the very, very few TV producers of his era who even bothered to consult scientists in the first place. TOS and TNG deserve credit for at least trying when no one else did.

And early TNG had some pretty good, science-literate stuff alongside the more fanciful stuff like Q. The portrayal of a periodic nova star in "Evolution" is so accurate you could use it in a classroom. And the explanation of the time warp in "Yesterday's Enterprise" as "a Kerr loop of superstring material" is far more science-literate than the later made-up crap about "chronitons" and whatnot. It misused the word "superstring" (they meant cosmic string), but otherwise it was pretty sensible. A Kerr ring is the ring singularity of a rotating black hole, and a rotating loop of cosmic string material, if such a thing could exist, would have comparable properties. So that was a case where they really did their homework, which was refreshing to see on TV.
 
Christopher said:
Hard SF doesn't have to be limited to currently known science. Indeed, it's a given that future science will discover principles we're unaware of today, so it would be unrealistic not to have some conjectural future science and technology, as long as it's consistent with the physical laws we know.
Click to expand...

That is simply a nonsensical rationalization offered to justify calling sheer fantasy "hard science fiction."

IOW, "it doesn't have to be science, just stuff we wanna make up that sounds sciency to us."

Star Trek has always been chock full of stuff that is not "consistent with the physical laws we know."

Words have meanings.
 
So we have the sci-fi authors and screenwriters arguing about levels in science fiction and science fantasy.

Good job, Andromeda.
 
I now intimately understand the development that people cautioned me about: there have been at least two episodes where characters were ready to take care of personal business/pursue an interest, but, thanks to the power of the script, Dylan just so happened to insinuate himself into what could have been interesting stories focused on character development independent from the Andromeda Ascendant.
 
Last edited:
Ragitsu said:
I now intimately understand the development that people cautioned me about: there have been at least two episodes where characters were ready to take care of personal business/pursue an interest, but, thanks to the power of the script, Dylan just so happened to insinuate himself into what could have been interesting stories focused on character development independent from the Andromeda Ascendant.
Click to expand...

What season?
 
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