Discovery prequel novel: Desperate Hours

[Timo]

That was just lazy painters - most ships in ENT didn't even have names let alone registries on. But those hard-working Starfleet archivists kept things straight nevertheless, as shown on computer readouts depicting the close rendezvous of USS Enterprise with USS Columbia...

Anyway, intent in a sack is worth the sack. Trek may have tried to be many things, but usually it really didn't - it just pretended it did, for sheer shit and giggles. Say, when utilizing "scientific consultants" for ST:TMP. Beyond that, it simply failed. Except perhaps by the standards of the day, but who cares? That day was decades ago.

What survives, in endless reruns, is what was good about it all. It drags along little of the "intent" ballast.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

Whatever the original intent might have been, 50 years of goofy plots later I find it hard to view Trek as any more plausible than Doctor Who.

That's not a knock against it.

To be fair, watching the last season of Doctor Who, it has attempted to be naturalistic, in it's own way.

The TARDIS is basically now seen as a biological starship like Moya from Farscape, with some sort of ability to tunnel through Einsteinian or Quantum based ideas of spacetime.

However....

While I respect Doctor Who, so this isn't a knock, what I'm objecting to is the notion that Trek is just as soft sci-fi, not so much making a negative value judgement comparison with Doctor Who itself. In context Trek, SG1 and B5 are far harder than most things that have appeared on television. Even when Doctor Who pays some respect to naturalism it often contains plot elements that are extremely statistically unlikely and does not even attempt to avoid small universe syndrome. Occam's Razor may be sometimes ignored in Trek, but is not even factored in within most Doctor Who stories - the taller the tale, the better.

What has to be understood is that naturalism speaks unsaid volumes about philosophy - it is a statement about what is real, how to determine real from unreal, how societies rise and fall, how humans can adapt to the natural world - even when only displayed in intent - that's why saying Star Trek is akin to some tall tale anthology show is getting the point so so wrong.

Are people seriously going to argue that the existence of FTL (based on actual physics) is on the same level of natural plausibility as the UK enslaving a space whale and migrating it's entire population into space on a single spaceship pulled by this space whale are on the same plain of believability - please! I would doubt the sanity of such a person.

Just say it aloud and hear yourself - space whale pulling the UK into orbit vs NASA like Alcubierre FTL produced by a team of thousands of researchers and engineers.

Star Trek, Stargate SG1, Babylon 5 and the like are in the same category - medium hard sci-fi - not Alastair Reynolds / Arthur C Clarke hard but leaning in that direction - things like Doctor Who and superhero fiction like Smallville and Flash are in the soft end.

 

[The Wormhole]

Are people seriously going to argue that the existence of FTL (based on actual physics) is on the same level as the UK enslaving a space whale and migrating it's entire population into space on a single spaceship pulled by this space whale are on the same plain of believability - please! I would doubt the sanity of such a person.

The point of The Beast Below wasn't plausible scientific concepts so much as it was commentary on what a race of douchebags humanity is. The space whale was willing to help them of its own accord and they chose to enslave and torture it instead, because that's human nature.

Star Trek, Stargate SG1, Babylon 5 and the like are in the same category - medium hard sci-fi - not Alastair Reynolds / Arthur C Clarke hard but leaning in that direction - things like Doctor Who and superhero fiction like Smallville and Flash are in the soft end.

It's interesting you consider Alistair Reynolds hard sci-fi, given he wrote a Doctor Who novel a few years ago.

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

@The Wormhole - I know the point of the story in context, and that it's plausibility wasn't important.

 

[Ithekro]

The NX-01 did not have USS on it, and neither did Columbia.

OF course they didn't. They weren't Federation starships. Christopher writes the Rise of the Federation novels which take place in the decade following the birth of the Federation and during the first decade of the Federation Starfleet which used ships from the ENT era from all the races in the Federation at that time. Be they Earth, Vulcan, Andorian, Tellarite or otherwise. All of which have the "USS *shipname*" pattern still. Is there a reason given for that in Archer's Starfleet?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Christopher writes the Rise of the Federation novels which take place in the decade following the birth of the Federation and during the first decade of the Federation Starfleet which used ships from the ENT era from all the races in the Federation at that time. Be they Earth, Vulcan, Andorian, Tellarite or otherwise. All of which have the "USS *shipname*" pattern still. Is there a reason given for that in Archer's Starfleet?

It's the Federation. The Federation has always used USS as the prefix for its military fleet. Seems fairly straightforward.

In the early days of the Federation Starfleet, the ships that drew the bulk of its individual member fleets (Vulcan, Andorian, Tellarite, Earth, Alpha Centauri) all became Starfleet vessels, and thus all got USS prefixes. Why is this a problem?

 

[Timo]

The United Earth would also rather obviously be entitled to using USS for its ships (as it indeed does with NX-01 and NX-02 at least). If we already accept that USS is fine and well for two distinct entities, the United States and the United Federation of Planets, then the United Earth should certainly be allowed to slip into the pattern.

And the pattern is probably there in-universe: no matter what transparent excuses be made, USS for the latter two entities would have been chosen because some influential American character did the choosing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BillJ]

Star Trek was made with the intention of making a space opera that was as believable as a serious police procedural...

Yet dumped that out the window almost immediately. Roddenberry wanted to tell stories that were hard to get away with on contemporary shows - drugs and fucking.

As much as I love the original Star Trek, it at times was tough to take seriously as soft sci-fi.

 

[jaime]

The point of The Beast Below wasn't plausible scientific concepts so much as it was commentary on what a race of douchebags humanity is. The space whale was willing to help them of its own accord and they chose to enslave and torture it instead, because that's human nature.


It's interesting you consider Alistair Reynolds hard sci-fi, given he wrote a Doctor Who novel a few years ago.

Reynolds was hard sf first, then approached to write a Who novel as part of an attempt to get 'mainstream' writers to do a Who novel. Michale Moorcock did one too.

 

[Christopher]

Whatever the original intent might have been, 50 years of goofy plots later I find it hard to view Trek as any more plausible than Doctor Who.

That's not a knock against it.

But that's the result of later creators falling short of the original intent. Roddenberry's goal was always to make it plausible, and the fact that it was more plausible than the likes of Lost in Space and Space: 1999 was critical to its popularity. TNG was more plausible than its near-contemporaries too, thanks to the efforts of folks like Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda, and that helped pave the way for the other, relatively plausible SFTV that we take for granted today. (The most hard-SF show on the air right now, The Expanse, is show-run by Naren Shankar, who got his start in the business as TNG's scientific advisor.) Later showrunners and especially filmmakers have been more lax, but the foundational intent of Star Trek has always been to keep one foot in reality, and that's important to its basic character and influence as a franchise, no matter how badly it may have eroded over the decades.

So it's overly simplistic to reduce ST's scientific accuracy to a single unchanging value. There's always been a back-and-forth between those Trek creators who cared about science and those who didn't. Even in the Kelvin films, Roberto Orci was concerned with scientific plausibility and did his research to try to get things right, even if he was overridden by J.J. Abrams's preference for a more fanciful approach. And I know that my friend and colleague Kirsten Beyer is doing her part on the Discovery writing staff to keep the show's science grounded and logical, because she understands that that's a fundamental part of Trek's creative philosophy, what it has always aspired to even though it's often fallen short in practice.

The only times in its history that Doctor Who ever aspired to anything of the sort were in its very early years. It started out as an educational show meant to teach science and history to young viewers, but it was always better with the history than the science, and its SF episodes were highly fanciful, their science lessons cursory and flawed at best and undermined by the microscopic budget. In 1966-7, they brought in Dr. Kit Pedler as a scientific advisor and tried to make the science more grounded and authentic for a while -- "The Moonbase" is a pretty good example of a story where they made a decent effort to get the science right, though the budget still got in the way and some aspects (such as a gravity beam on the Moon used for weather control on the Earth) were still highly fanciful. And it was still a show about a guy whose spaceship could travel anywhere in time and space at the touch of a button and was bigger on the inside, so it was never going to be all that grounded. The era of concern for science only lasted for a couple of years at best, and has been over for just about 50 years now. And the modern series under Steven Moffat has treated the show as a straight-up fairy tale.

While I respect Doctor Who, so this isn't a knock, what I'm objecting to is the notion that Trek is just as soft sci-fi, not so much making a negative value judgement comparison with Doctor Who itself. In context Trek, SG1 and B5 are far harder than most things that have appeared on television. Even when Doctor Who pays some respect to naturalism it often contains plot elements that are extremely statistically unlikely and does not even attempt to avoid small universe syndrome. Occam's Razor may be sometimes ignored in Trek, but is not even factored in within most Doctor Who stories - the taller the tale, the better.

Right. They're radically different shows and always has been. It's bizarre to pair them as if they were equivalent in any way besides their iconic status relative to their countries of origin. It's like having a discussion of police procedurals and comparing Law & Order to The Flash (although at least those have Jesse L. Martin in common).

Also, it's wrong to mistake labeling for analysis. Placing shows on some kind of linear spectrum between "hard" and "soft" SF, as if they were minerals on the Mohs scale, is not truly understanding them. Those words are overly simplistic generalizations, and at best are descriptions rather than definitions. A single four-letter word won't tell you anything worthwhile about the specific thinking and goals of a show's creators, the perspective they had on the universe they were trying to build, the multiple parameters they were considering, the constraints they were placed under in their efforts to achieve that goal. Too many people treat sticking a label on a thing (like "hard/soft" or "canon" or "Mary Sue") as if it were the end of the discussion. No. It's barely the beginning. It's the initial thesis that needs to be justified and fleshed out by an analysis of the individual details -- which often reveal that the differences outweigh the similarities.

Not to mention that there isn't really a universal consensus on how "hard" and "soft" SF are even defined. The usual assumption is that it's about scientific accuracy, but that's not the way I learned it. What I'd call the Analog definition of hard SF (based on the submission guidelines of the magazine known for its hard-SF sensibilities) is that it refers to stories where the science is an integral element of the plot, the source of the story's problems and solutions; whereas soft SF is something where the speculative elements could be removed without altering the basic storyline, because they're just part of the setting or are one-to-one substitutions for elements from a more standard story (e.g. doing a Western but replacing the six-shooters with ray guns, or doing a samurai movie but replacing the katanas with lightsabers). Hard SF is driven by exploring the human consequences of a scientific or technological advance, while soft SF is driven by the same elements that drive mainstream fiction -- character, social commentary, or simply action -- while using the SF concepts as symbolic or allegorical elements or merely background trappings. So in theory, one could have a soft SF story where the science is entirely accurate but just not particularly relevant or heavily explored. That's pretty much what Star Trek always aspired to be -- a show driven by character and philosophy rather than just technical problems, a show that told the same kind of character-based drama you'd find in other genres, but getting the science at least relatively right in the process.

Here's a column where a number of SF authors discuss the "hard/soft" scale and the various different ways of defining them: https://www.tor.com/2016/01/21/how-...tion-ten-authors-weigh-in-on-hard-vs-soft-sf/

OF course they didn't. They weren't Federation starships. Christopher writes the Rise of the Federation novels which take place in the decade following the birth of the Federation and during the first decade of the Federation Starfleet which used ships from the ENT era from all the races in the Federation at that time. Be they Earth, Vulcan, Andorian, Tellarite or otherwise. All of which have the "USS *shipname*" pattern still. Is there a reason given for that in Archer's Starfleet?

In-story, I go with the assumption that it stands for "United [Federation] Star Ship." As a tie-in writer, I'm constrained to remain consistent with the established facts of the universe. As a fan and a viewer, though, I'm entitled to say when I think they're silly.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I admit I was confused as to why Earth Starfleet vessels didn't have some other prefix, such as UES (United Earth Ship).

 

[Eric Cheung]

I kind of thought the big parallels between Who and Trek were that both dealt with the dilemma of whether or not to interfere with other cultures. Both had a people representing the Establishment that put forth a non-interference directive, and both had leaders that generally dismissed it when necessary, save for situations like Tom Baker mulling over the decision to destroy the Daleks in their infancy.

The other big parallel is their respective philosophies of non-violence as a preferred method of conflict resolution. Doctor Who has a the sonic screwdriver and a phone box, and is sometimes a literal doctor, all signifiers of helping people rather than fighting them. Trek has replicators, sensors, communicators, tricorders, dermal regenerators, and the like, also to help people. Trek also places a value on the profession of the diplomat.

They're also both shows that love to use allegory to tell stories about social issues of the day, particularly in Who's Pertwee era, and throughout Trek history.

As far as the science, yeah, Trek's always been far more plausible, even with the most far out concepts. They also always had a higher budget than Who. While Who generally had pretty great sets and costumes, their makeup, cinematography, and opticals were usually pretty far behind Trek.

 

[Christopher]

I kind of thought the big parallels between Who and Trek were that both dealt with the dilemma of whether or not to interfere with other cultures. Both had a people representing the Establishment that put forth a non-interference directive, and both had leaders that generally dismissed it when necessary, save for situations like Tom Baker mulling over the decision to destroy the Daleks in their infancy.

That's one element of Star Trek, and it's occasionally been a question in some Doctor Who stories, but it's just one broadly similar aspect of two shows that are radically different on the whole. And of course the two take entirely opposite views: ST's heroes strive to preserve the policy of non-intervention whenever possible, while the Doctor's whole journey has been in defiance of his people's non-intervention policy. (The belief that Kirk "generally dismissed" the PD is dead wrong, based on improperly back-projecting the rigid TNG-era version of the Directive onto the TOS era. The TOS Directive was more activist; it constrained Starfleet officers from interfering on their own, but it compelled them to take action to stop others from interfering. It required protecting cultures from all forms of interference, both your own and others'. Kirk's interventions were almost always to remove other sources of interference or artificially arrested development, so he was fulfilling the Prime Directive as it was defined by TOS's writers, not violating it.)

Also, Starfleet's non-intervention policy was established less than a year into the series, while the Time Lords' policy was not established until the end of DW's sixth season and only infrequently came up thereafter. It's not even remotely as central a theme in DW as it is in ST. The Doctor has spent most of his career glibly meddling wherever he goes, and it's only in the past few years (e.g. "Kill the Moon" and "Thin Ice") that the Doctor's started stressing the importance of his companions making the decisions on behalf of humanity. When he argued against Barbara interfering with Aztec culture in "The Aztecs," he wasn't saying that she shouldn't intervene so much as that she couldn't successfully change anything, both due to social pressures and due to the immutability of the timeline (though that latter assumption was discarded the following season).

 

[Tuskin38]

as shown on computer readouts depicting the close rendezvous of USS Enterprise with USS Columbia...

The United Earth would also rather obviously be entitled to using USS for its ships (as it indeed does with NX-01 and NX-02 at least).

That was an error on the part of the graphic artists. It is safe to ignore since it shows up nowhere else in the series.

 

[jaime]

But that's the result of later creators falling short of the original intent. Roddenberry's goal was always to make it plausible, and the fact that it was more plausible than the likes of Lost in Space and Space: 1999 was critical to its popularity. TNG was more plausible than its near-contemporaries too, thanks to the efforts of folks like Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda, and that helped pave the way for the other, relatively plausible SFTV that we take for granted today. (The most hard-SF show on the air right now, The Expanse, is show-run by Naren Shankar, who got his start in the business as TNG's scientific advisor.) Later showrunners and especially filmmakers have been more lax, but the foundational intent of Star Trek has always been to keep one foot in reality, and that's important to its basic character and influence as a franchise, no matter how badly it may have eroded over the decades.

So it's overly simplistic to reduce ST's scientific accuracy to a single unchanging value. There's always been a back-and-forth between those Trek creators who cared about science and those who didn't. Even in the Kelvin films, Roberto Orci was concerned with scientific plausibility and did his research to try to get things right, even if he was overridden by J.J. Abrams's preference for a more fanciful approach. And I know that my friend and colleague Kirsten Beyer is doing her part on the Discovery writing staff to keep the show's science grounded and logical, because she understands that that's a fundamental part of Trek's creative philosophy, what it has always aspired to even though it's often fallen short in practice.

The only times in its history that Doctor Who ever aspired to anything of the sort were in its very early years. It started out as an educational show meant to teach science and history to young viewers, but it was always better with the history than the science, and its SF episodes were highly fanciful, their science lessons cursory and flawed at best and undermined by the microscopic budget. In 1966-7, they brought in Dr. Kit Pedler as a scientific advisor and tried to make the science more grounded and authentic for a while -- "The Moonbase" is a pretty good example of a story where they made a decent effort to get the science right, though the budget still got in the way and some aspects (such as a gravity beam on the Moon used for weather control on the Earth) were still highly fanciful. And it was still a show about a guy whose spaceship could travel anywhere in time and space at the touch of a button and was bigger on the inside, so it was never going to be all that grounded. The era of concern for science only lasted for a couple of years at best, and has been over for just about 50 years now. And the modern series under Steven Moffat has treated the show as a straight-up fairy tale.




Right. They're radically different shows and always has been. It's bizarre to pair them as if they were equivalent in any way besides their iconic status relative to their countries of origin. It's like having a discussion of police procedurals and comparing Law & Order to The Flash (although at least those have Jesse L. Martin in common).

Also, it's wrong to mistake labeling for analysis. Placing shows on some kind of linear spectrum between "hard" and "soft" SF, as if they were minerals on the Mohs scale, is not truly understanding them. Those words are overly simplistic generalizations, and at best are descriptions rather than definitions. A single four-letter word won't tell you anything worthwhile about the specific thinking and goals of a show's creators, the perspective they had on the universe they were trying to build, the multiple parameters they were considering, the constraints they were placed under in their efforts to achieve that goal. Too many people treat sticking a label on a thing (like "hard/soft" or "canon" or "Mary Sue") as if it were the end of the discussion. No. It's barely the beginning. It's the initial thesis that needs to be justified and fleshed out by an analysis of the individual details -- which often reveal that the differences outweigh the similarities.

Not to mention that there isn't really a universal consensus on how "hard" and "soft" SF are even defined. The usual assumption is that it's about scientific accuracy, but that's not the way I learned it. What I'd call the Analog definition of hard SF (based on the submission guidelines of the magazine known for its hard-SF sensibilities) is that it refers to stories where the science is an integral element of the plot, the source of the story's problems and solutions; whereas soft SF is something where the speculative elements could be removed without altering the basic storyline, because they're just part of the setting or are one-to-one substitutions for elements from a more standard story (e.g. doing a Western but replacing the six-shooters with ray guns, or doing a samurai movie but replacing the katanas with lightsabers). Hard SF is driven by exploring the human consequences of a scientific or technological advance, while soft SF is driven by the same elements that drive mainstream fiction -- character, social commentary, or simply action -- while using the SF concepts as symbolic or allegorical elements or merely background trappings. So in theory, one could have a soft SF story where the science is entirely accurate but just not particularly relevant or heavily explored. That's pretty much what Star Trek always aspired to be -- a show driven by character and philosophy rather than just technical problems, a show that told the same kind of character-based drama you'd find in other genres, but getting the science at least relatively right in the process.

Here's a column where a number of SF authors discuss the "hard/soft" scale and the various different ways of defining them: https://www.tor.com/2016/01/21/how-...tion-ten-authors-weigh-in-on-hard-vs-soft-sf/




In-story, I go with the assumption that it stands for "United [Federation] Star Ship." As a tie-in writer, I'm constrained to remain consistent with the established facts of the universe. As a fan and a viewer, though, I'm entitled to say when I think they're silly.

Nice...but Who wavers....Bidmead was more a hard science guy...or at least theoretical science...in the late seventies early eighties. Like Trek, who also dabbles in soft science hard sf....social sciences, political sciences (won't go into whether or not any of that is actually a science mind you...)
Trek too also uses that lense, beyond pure allegory for instance...deep space nine deals with theological debate on occasion, looking at a situation with very real god figures more than the other series did. Speculative Fiction. Handmaids Tale stuff.

 

[Noname Given]

But that's the result of later creators falling short of the original intent. Roddenberry's goal was always to make it plausible, and the fact that it was more plausible than the likes of Lost in Space and Space: 1999 was critical to its popularity. TNG was more plausible than its near-contemporaries too, thanks to the efforts of folks like Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda, and that helped pave the way for the other, relatively plausible SFTV that we take for granted today. (The most hard-SF show on the air right now, The Expanse, is show-run by Naren Shankar, who got his start in the business as TNG's scientific advisor.) Later showrunners and especially filmmakers have been more lax, but the foundational intent of Star Trek has always been to keep one foot in reality, and that's important to its basic character and influence as a franchise, no matter how badly it may have eroded over the decades.

So it's overly simplistic to reduce ST's scientific accuracy to a single unchanging value. There's always been a back-and-forth between those Trek creators who cared about science and those who didn't. Even in the Kelvin films, Roberto Orci was concerned with scientific plausibility and did his research to try to get things right, even if he was overridden by J.J. Abrams's preference for a more fanciful approach. And I know that my friend and colleague Kirsten Beyer is doing her part on the Discovery writing staff to keep the show's science grounded and logical, because she understands that that's a fundamental part of Trek's creative philosophy, what it has always aspired to even though it's often fallen short in practice.

The only times in its history that Doctor Who ever aspired to anything of the sort were in its very early years. It started out as an educational show meant to teach science and history to young viewers, but it was always better with the history than the science, and its SF episodes were highly fanciful, their science lessons cursory and flawed at best and undermined by the microscopic budget. In 1966-7, they brought in Dr. Kit Pedler as a scientific advisor and tried to make the science more grounded and authentic for a while -- "The Moonbase" is a pretty good example of a story where they made a decent effort to get the science right, though the budget still got in the way and some aspects (such as a gravity beam on the Moon used for weather control on the Earth) were still highly fanciful. And it was still a show about a guy whose spaceship could travel anywhere in time and space at the touch of a button and was bigger on the inside, so it was never going to be all that grounded. The era of concern for science only lasted for a couple of years at best, and has been over for just about 50 years now. And the modern series under Steven Moffat has treated the show as a straight-up fairy tale.




Right. They're radically different shows and always has been. It's bizarre to pair them as if they were equivalent in any way besides their iconic status relative to their countries of origin. It's like having a discussion of police procedurals and comparing Law & Order to The Flash (although at least those have Jesse L. Martin in common).

Also, it's wrong to mistake labeling for analysis. Placing shows on some kind of linear spectrum between "hard" and "soft" SF, as if they were minerals on the Mohs scale, is not truly understanding them. Those words are overly simplistic generalizations, and at best are descriptions rather than definitions. A single four-letter word won't tell you anything worthwhile about the specific thinking and goals of a show's creators, the perspective they had on the universe they were trying to build, the multiple parameters they were considering, the constraints they were placed under in their efforts to achieve that goal. Too many people treat sticking a label on a thing (like "hard/soft" or "canon" or "Mary Sue") as if it were the end of the discussion. No. It's barely the beginning. It's the initial thesis that needs to be justified and fleshed out by an analysis of the individual details -- which often reveal that the differences outweigh the similarities.

Not to mention that there isn't really a universal consensus on how "hard" and "soft" SF are even defined. The usual assumption is that it's about scientific accuracy, but that's not the way I learned it. What I'd call the Analog definition of hard SF (based on the submission guidelines of the magazine known for its hard-SF sensibilities) is that it refers to stories where the science is an integral element of the plot, the source of the story's problems and solutions; whereas soft SF is something where the speculative elements could be removed without altering the basic storyline, because they're just part of the setting or are one-to-one substitutions for elements from a more standard story (e.g. doing a Western but replacing the six-shooters with ray guns, or doing a samurai movie but replacing the katanas with lightsabers). Hard SF is driven by exploring the human consequences of a scientific or technological advance, while soft SF is driven by the same elements that drive mainstream fiction -- character, social commentary, or simply action -- while using the SF concepts as symbolic or allegorical elements or merely background trappings. So in theory, one could have a soft SF story where the science is entirely accurate but just not particularly relevant or heavily explored. That's pretty much what Star Trek always aspired to be -- a show driven by character and philosophy rather than just technical problems, a show that told the same kind of character-based drama you'd find in other genres, but getting the science at least relatively right in the process.

Here's a column where a number of SF authors discuss the "hard/soft" scale and the various different ways of defining them: https://www.tor.com/2016/01/21/how-...tion-ten-authors-weigh-in-on-hard-vs-soft-sf/




In-story, I go with the assumption that it stands for "United [Federation] Star Ship." As a tie-in writer, I'm constrained to remain consistent with the established facts of the universe. As a fan and a viewer, though, I'm entitled to say when I think they're silly.

I'm sorry but given that GR first conceived of Mr. Spock as a MARTIAN - had Lasers in the early prep scripts 'stunning' people, etc. It's pretty clear that overall plausibility wasn't a big issue for GR. (Vulcan was conceived as Spock's homeworld because the scientific adviser told GR that there was most likely no life on Mars; and 'Phasers' were born because the same advisor said 'Lasers can't do what you're writing' - and 'Phasers' sounded close was 100% made up, and thus could be defined to have whatever properties GR wanted.

GR wanted an adult action/adventure show with a space science basis. That still doesn't make the result 'Hard' Sci-Fi. And again, this isn't at all a knock against the show as I LOVE TOS.

 

[Christopher]

I'm sorry but given that GR first conceived of Mr. Spock as a MARTIAN - had Lasers in the early prep scripts 'stunning' people, etc. It's pretty clear that overall plausibility wasn't a big issue for GR. (Vulcan was conceived as Spock's homeworld because the scientific adviser told GR that there was most likely no life on Mars; and 'Phasers' were born because the same advisor said 'Lasers can't do what you're writing' - and 'Phasers' sounded close was 100% made up, and thus could be defined to have whatever properties GR wanted.

You're completely contradicting yourself here. The fact that he consulted scientific advisors at all is proof that he did care about plausibility, not that he didn't. It's not like someone forced those advisors on him. TV shows consulting scientific advisors was practically unheard of at the time -- only a couple of '50s kids' shows, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet and Men Into Space, had ever really done that before. Roddenberry himself sought out those advisors because he wanted the show to be more accurate than he could make it by himself. That's what you do when you want to write believably about a subject you're not an expert in -- you ask other people who are experts. And that's what Roddenberry did, while other SFTV producers like Irwin Allen and Glen Larson just made up whatever random crap they wanted.

GR wanted an adult action/adventure show with a space science basis. That still doesn't make the result 'Hard' Sci-Fi.

How many times do I have to repeat the obvious? THIS IS NOT A BINARY QUESTION. There aren't just two choices here. It's a whole continuum of different degrees of "hardness." No, Trek is not strictly "hard science fiction," but it's a damn sight less "soft" than the other SFTV of its era. It'll never be in the same league of hardness as Clarke or Niven or Reynolds or Egan, no, but it's about a million times more plausible than Lost in Space or Space: 1999 or the original Battlestar Galactica or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, let alone Star Wars or The Fifth Element or The Chronicles of Riddick, say. Most film and television SF in history has incredibly awful, painfully idiotic science. Trek just has mediocre and inconsistent science with occasional good science in the mix. That's a vast improvement.

Here are some examples of good, solid science in Trek history:

"Tomorrow is Yesterday." The idea of a slingshot around a "black star" creating a time warp anticipated Frank Tipler's seminal paper "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" by seven years.

"Return to Tomorrow": Dr. Mulhall makes a point of stating that Sargon's people cannot have seeded humans on Earth, because the evidence that humans evolved on Earth is overwhelming. Which puts TOS well ahead of other franchises like Stargate and Galactica.

TMP: Technical advisor Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer (a literal NASA rocket scientist) wrote technical notes offering an explanation of warp drive that anticipated Miguel Alcubierre's seminal "warp drive" solution of General Relativity by sixteen years, basically proposing the same idea but lacking the specific math. Note that Alcubierre was directly inspired by Star Trek, as many scientists and inventors over the decades have been.

Also TMP: The wormhole concept was a little-known solution of General Relativity at the time, rarely explored in either physics or science fiction. TMP was, as far as I know, the first work of mass-media SF to use the concept of a wormhole (at least under that name -- the idea of a black hole functioning like a wormhole had been used). This was several years before physicist Kip Thorne revitalized wormhole theory in order to provide Carl Sagan with a plausible FTL method for his 1985 novel Contact. TNG's reintroduction of the wormhole concept in 1989's "The Price" was one of its first uses in mainstream media, predating its use in other franchises like Stargate, Sliders, Farscape, etc.

"Evolution": The episode's portrayal of a periodic nova star is so scientifically sound that you could practically use it to illustrate an astronomy lecture. The same episode was also possibly the first work of mass-media science fiction revolving around the concept of nanotechnology, which had been popularized only three years earlier by K. Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation. The episode also coined the term "nanite," which has gone on to become a common alternative term for nanobots in other science fiction.

"Yesterday's Enterprise": The time warp was explained as a "Kerr loop of superstring material." While this phrase incorrectly used "superstring" to mean "cosmic string," the idea is otherwise sound physics. A Kerr ring, such as the ring singularity of a rotating black hole, could indeed produce a time warp (using similar physics to a Tipler cylinder), and a cosmic string would be sufficiently hyperdense that a rotating loop of such material would function as a Kerr warp.

Granted, all of this was alongside a fair amount of bad and fanciful science. But that's what makes it different from most other SFTV -- that there was any good science in the mix at all. Most other shows would've just had the fanciful stuff. (Sadly, though, the ratio of good science to bad was at its highest in the early seasons of TNG. It went progressively downhill over time.)

 

[Noname Given]

You're completely contradicting yourself here. The fact that he consulted scientific advisors at all is proof that he did care about plausibility, not that he didn't. It's not like someone forced those advisors on him. TV shows consulting scientific advisors was practically unheard of at the time -- only a couple of '50s kids' shows, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet and Men Into Space, had ever really done that before. Roddenberry himself sought out those advisors because he wanted the show to be more accurate than he could make it by himself. That's what you do when you want to write believably about a subject you're not an expert in -- you ask other people who are experts. And that's what Roddenberry did, while other SFTV producers like Irwin Allen and Glen Larson just made up whatever random crap they wanted.



How many times do I have to repeat the obvious? THIS IS NOT A BINARY QUESTION. There aren't just two choices here. It's a whole continuum of different degrees of "hardness." No, Trek is not strictly "hard science fiction," but it's a damn sight less "soft" than the other SFTV of its era. It'll never be in the same league of hardness as Clarke or Niven or Reynolds or Egan, no, but it's about a million times more plausible than Lost in Space or Space: 1999 or the original Battlestar Galactica or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, let alone Star Wars or The Fifth Element or The Chronicles of Riddick, say. Most film and television SF in history has incredibly awful, painfully idiotic science. Trek just has mediocre and inconsistent science with occasional good science in the mix. That's a vast improvement.

Here are some examples of good, solid science in Trek history:

"Tomorrow is Yesterday." The idea of a slingshot around a "black star" creating a time warp anticipated Frank Tipler's seminal paper "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" by seven years.

"Return to Tomorrow": Dr. Mulhall makes a point of stating that Sargon's people cannot have seeded humans on Earth, because the evidence that humans evolved on Earth is overwhelming. Which puts TOS well ahead of other franchises like Stargate and Galactica.

TMP: Technical advisor Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer (a literal NASA rocket scientist) wrote technical notes offering an explanation of warp drive that anticipated Miguel Alcubierre's seminal "warp drive" solution of General Relativity by sixteen years, basically proposing the same idea but lacking the specific math. Note that Alcubierre was directly inspired by Star Trek, as many scientists and inventors over the decades have been.

Also TMP: The wormhole concept was a little-known solution of General Relativity at the time, rarely explored in either physics or science fiction. TMP was, as far as I know, the first work of mass-media SF to use the concept of a wormhole (at least under that name -- the idea of a black hole functioning like a wormhole had been used). This was several years before physicist Kip Thorne revitalized wormhole theory in order to provide Carl Sagan with a plausible FTL method for his 1985 novel Contact. TNG's reintroduction of the wormhole concept in 1989's "The Price" was one of its first uses in mainstream media, predating its use in other franchises like Stargate, Sliders, Farscape, etc.

"Evolution": The episode's portrayal of a periodic nova star is so scientifically sound that you could practically use it to illustrate an astronomy lecture. The same episode was also possibly the first work of mass-media science fiction revolving around the concept of nanotechnology, which had been popularized only three years earlier by K. Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation. It also coined the term "nanite," which has gone on to become a common alternative term for nanobots.

"Yesterday's Enterprise": The time warp was explained as a "Kerr loop of superstring material." While this phrase incorrectly used "superstring" to mean "cosmic string," the idea is otherwise sound physics. A Kerr ring, such as the ring singularity of a rotating black hole, could indeed produce a time warp (using similar physics to a Tipler cylinder), and a cosmic string would be sufficiently hyperdense that a rotating loop of such material would function as a Kerr warp.

Granted, all of this was alongside a fair amount of bad and fanciful science. But that's what makes it different from most other SFTV -- that there was any good science in the mix at all. Most other shows would've just had the fanciful stuff.

Here's the thing for me:
- It's clear GR wanted an action/adventure show that could be allegorical and took the template from Forbidden Planet for the base.

- IDK if it was GR who was concerned about the science aspect or Herb Solow. GR has taken credit for so many aspects of the series that were actually either requested BY the Network (read a racuially diverse cast, which WASN'T part of the first pilot, "The Cage") or added to the concept by others.

- If you really believe that Galactic star travel is Star Trek is plausible as it was presented on the show, I don't know what to say because AS PRESENTED - it wasn't. If you believe it's possible to travel across the Galaxy in hours/days and suffer no time-dilation or other effects...

Star Trek was generally consistent with it's main areas of shown technology, yes. That doesn't make such technology as present in the show plausible.

 

[Christopher]

If you really believe that Galactic star travel is Star Trek is plausible as it was presented on the show, I don't know what to say because AS PRESENTED

I have said multiple times now that this is about matters of degree along a continuum, not a black-and-white binary choice. I have said multiple times now, as explicitly as it is possible to say, that I am only saying ST was less implausible than most other SF television, not rating its plausibility on an absolute scale. The point is not to say that ST's science is perfectly believable, the point is to say that it's nowhere near as abysmally awful as most other SFTV. If you still don't understand that's what I'm saying, then I'm not sure how to make it clearer.


One more try: I write hard science fiction. I also write Star Trek tie-in fiction. In my original fiction, I strive to keep the science as plausible and convincing as I can. That's always been the way I write. In my Trek fiction, I do have to loosen my standards somewhat -- but not nearly as much as I did for the two Marvel Comics novels I wrote a decade ago, or as much as I'd have to for most other TV/movie franchises. A lot of the things in Trek that seem fanciful can actually be rationalized scientifically to a fair extent.

If Trek were as completely nonsensical and unscientific as some of you are claiming, if it were anywhere near as bad as the likes of Lost in Space or something, I wouldn't be able to adapt my writing style to it as easily as I have. As I've been saying, these things are matters of degree. Certainly a number of Trek writers and producers have approached it as sheer fantasy, and the things they add to the universe are hard for me to rationalize, but the original foundations of the universe are a lot more solid, so there's room within its context to write stories that have relatively good science, though obviously with certain licenses taken. I still feel like I'm exercising my hard-SF muscles when I write Trek fiction, even though I've read and seen a lot of Trek fiction that wasn't hard at all. That's the thing about Trek -- it's not just one flavor of science fiction. It's much more versatile than that. There's room in it for different styles of writing, some "harder" than others.

 

[Timo]

That was an error on the part of the graphic artists. It is safe to ignore since it shows up nowhere else in the series.

Why should it "show up elsewhere in the series"? ENT has precious few graphics of fellow starships, and all such depicting NX type ships (to wit, this single one) show the USS identity. In comparison, graphics on Boomer ships feature the ECS prefix - is that an "error", too? After all, the letters ECS are to be found nowhere on the actual Fortunate hull.

Much of Star Trek comes about as a series of "errors". Once on screen, they become "features". Some may be awkward features, such as a character missing a rank pip or half his fake beard. But there's no a priori reason to oppose the feature that NX class ships have an USS prefix, or that Klingons fly Warbirds - or that the rare death penalty associated in the early 2250s with General Order 7 goes away and gets replaced by another rare death penalty associated in the late 2260s with General Order 4. All of those are in fact logical and expected parts of the Trek universe, and the opposite would be unexpected and in need of explaining.

Timo Saloniemi