Do you wish there was a bit more science fiction in Star Trek?

[BrotherBenny]

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.

That is how navies operate today, with a battlegroup of ships with different strengths surrounding a capital ship...sounds like a good idea for Starfleet to move in that direction after recent losses. The smaller ships in the fleet can be swapped in and out per mission-specific specs.

 

[Christopher]

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.

Yes, the TNGTM retcon is that the impulse engines use a subspace field to reduce the ship's effective mass, which is necessary to explain the otherwise untenable idea that a rocket thruster could accelerate a mass as huge as the Enterprise to the kind of high velocities it's shown to be capable of without needing weeks of acceleration and prohibitive amounts of fuel. But fundamentally it still uses reaction thrust, i.e. impulse, to push the ship. That's why it's called an impulse engine in the first place. That's why they called it that in 1966, twenty-odd years before Sternbach and Okuda came up with their space-bending retcon. To quote from the TOS writers' bible:

The Enterprise has a secondary propulsion system. These are impulse power engines (same principle as rocket power), located at the rear of the "saucer section".

 

[xortex]

I'd rather see things the way they could be rather than how they are now, albeit in a new way. I'm sick of the way things are today.

 

[JarodRussell]

I also think science fiction should be showing how things could be, instead of being a fable without animals.

 

[TerraUnam]

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.

That is how navies operate today, with a battlegroup of ships with different strengths surrounding a capital ship...sounds like a good idea for Starfleet to move in that direction after recent losses. The smaller ships in the fleet can be swapped in and out per mission-specific specs.

But this directly contradicts the Hornblower paradigm that Roddenberry based the Enterprise and Kirk on. I've read that series, their similar but not so Romantic-view-of-history like as the Aubrey/Maturin series. Both authors found that the genre works best when focused on a single ship on a single mission. It allows for better drama and character focus.

Trek explicitly rejects the battlegroup tactics that evolved from the US Navy in WWII. We never get to see Federation space fighters like B5.

 

[Thrawn]

^ Fair enough. But just because it's been rejected so far doesn't mean it has to be now. With novels, you can more easily accommodate a wider focus on a larger cast. I for one am looking forward to some Voyager novels that might feature some of the other ships in the fleet.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

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.

That is how navies operate today, with a battlegroup of ships with different strengths surrounding a capital ship...sounds like a good idea for Starfleet to move in that direction after recent losses. The smaller ships in the fleet can be swapped in and out per mission-specific specs.

But this directly contradicts the Hornblower paradigm that Roddenberry based the Enterprise and Kirk on.

Not really. Just because Kirk's era is modeled on the ship-to-ship combat of the time of Horatio, Lord Nelson, it doesn't follow that starship combat will always be like that. If the 23rd-century is 18th-century ship combat, there's no reason that the 25th-century couldn't be World War II-era ship combat. Indeed, TerraUnam, you've touched on the very point that some, like Thrawn, have made in this thread; why have things reached a certain point... and then gone no further? By saying that Star Trek has to be based on the Hornblower model, you're acknowledging the statis in Star Trek.

Trek explicitly rejects the battlegroup tactics that evolved from the US Navy in WWII.

Do you have a reference for the "explicit reject[ion]"? We've clearly seen battlegroup tactics in Deep Space Nine. I'd say that maybe the 24th-century reached Jutland. We're just waiting for the conceptual breakthrough to reach Midway.

We never get to see Federation space fighters like B5.

Canonically, no. However, video and computer games have given us a wealth of space fighters for all of the major powers. Starfleet Command II, Invasion, Shattered Universe. And in the novels, Final Frontier shows the Romulans using singleship fighters.

Realistically, singleship fighters don't make a lick of sense. I think about the smallest practical ship would be the Defiant.

 

[TerraUnam]

Every sci-fi series has to have its regular bits, the old reliables that identify the series. Changing ship design changes Trek. The Defiant pushed about as far as it could in that direction, but its still a bridge-n-phasers deal.

The DS9 fleet shots were like Jutland or Tsushima. Trek has never shown the equivalent of aircraft carriers with the rest of the fleet relegated to screening them. Trek still likes space battleships.

 

[Arpy]

1) The aliens all look the same because as TNG told us someone did that on purpose.

That was an after-the-fact idea that the writers thought would be fun to throw at the audience who already knew it was due to budgetary reasons.

I don't want to hear DS9 or VOY fans blaming TNG (and TOS) for their own lack of creativity. The proto-humanoids basically seeded the "local" space*, so the Gamma and Delta quadrants could have been all non-humanoids all the time if they wanted to.

*They wanted their children to one-day come together to learn of their common origin. But their children don't stretch too far beyond then known space in the Alpha and Beta quadrants.

 

[Arpy]

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.

I don't know there aren't transhumanists in the Federation or anywhere else. I like to think we don't see much of them for the same budgetary reasons we don't see more non-humanoids. Trek is not adverse to new ideas, as evidenced by the success of TNG so long after and different from TOS. Unfortunately, we also get the same rationalizing against transhumanism that we get against there being more non-humanoids in the galaxy. If you believe in virtue of realism, if you want Trek to have staying power, I think you need to scoff at lazy writing.

The reason Riker wasn't genetically altered to have zebra stripes or Gowron didn't have steel ridges is because they both look better naturally. Plus, there's no sport in Klingon head-bashing if it's as easy as stopping by Sears to purchase the latest upgrade every week regardless of your actual bravery, strength, or skill.

Now why manufactured soldiers like the Jem'Hadar aren't duranium-shelled cyborgs, I don't know. It's more the tail wagging the dog here where lazy writers thought rhino-people would be tough enough.

 

[TerraUnam]

Interstingly, while Trek has come down hard on cybernetics (with the Borg) and genetic engineering (with the genetic engineering ban), it really likes telepathy. Witness the Vulcans, Betazoids, and a good deal of random aliens-of-the-week. Conceptually I can't see why Betazed can't have the kind of gestalt-thing going like the Caeliar do, or even the Borg, but while the Borg/Caeliar were heavily criticized, the Betazoids are a mainstay of the Federation and of Starfleet.

 

[Geoff Thorne]

I think, after the traumatic contact with the Borg, certainly humans (being the emotional things we are) would back up a good distance from any sort of transhuman activity.

They didn't make it look fun, y'know?

 

[TerraUnam]

Yet with the number of Vulcan and Betazoid genes that are kicking around humanity's gene pool in the 24th Century, telepathic abilities are likely not uncommon in your average human community.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

a bit more science fiction in Star Trek?

I think our expectations have changed over the past few decades. There was a time that FTL starships, transporter beams, ray guns and androids were sci fi. Now we want more, as if we've recognised these building blocks of the Star Trek universe as just that, building blocks, not concepts.

Part of that has to be down to technobabble, where a particle of the week, or another deflector dish get out of jail free card seemed to cheapen the whole thing.

But there are novels that play with sci-fi concepts in Trek Lit, and do approach hard sci-fi.

I came across this thread in a New Posts search. I'm going to address it from canon TV Trek.
This is some interesting stuff. I agree that the technobabble was getting a little out of control in VOY.

as if we've recognised these building blocks of the Star Trek universe as just that, building blocks, not concepts.

There was a time that FTL starships, transporter beams, ray guns and androids were sci fi.

A transporter is still very much science fiction. The very idea behind it is pretty complex. Forget about the metaphysical debate just the idea of biological transport is still pretty cool to me.
That technology has yet to invented and is still science fiction.

For the purpose of telling a 42 minute Trek TV episode these scifi concepts have been used and built upon to tell stories.
Would you prefer a 101 that talks about the concepts?
The technobabble discussions are when any of the transporter system components do not work properly and a problem has to be solved but it's not dumbed down to tell the audience how it works before first dissecting the problem. Trek figures the audience just knows how it works in general.

I really never liked site-to-site transporters and missed the transporter room from TOS in the VOY series.
Glad to see it return of sorts in ENT.
It signified that the technology required a machine with a dedicated transporter room with transporter pads.

FTL spaceship travel is still science fiction. It's been seen regularly in science fiction ever since 1966 when TOS was first broadcast. Again Trek TV doesn't need to dumb down the technology unless something is broken.

 

[Christopher]

Re: a bit more science fiction in Star Trek?

^I think TLV's point is that in the past, these concepts were more novel to the viewing audience and could be the focus of stories in their own right. But now that they've become so familiar, they're just plot devices, rather than the concepts that actually drive the story. So to capture the audience's imagination and generate a sense of wonder, it's necessary to deliver fresher concepts which can be the basis of the stories.

In other words, I think he wasn't using the term "science fiction" in the sense of "something that hasn't been invented yet," but in a more literary sense of a speculative concept that can, by itself, drive a story in the science fiction genre.

And FTL spaceship travel has been seen regularly in science fiction since at least the 1930s. Television is not the only science fiction out there. It's a tiny, limited fraction of the genre, and it's usually decades behind the prose literature. Even in film and television, FTL travel was seen in productions that predated TOS by many years, from Forbidden Planet to This Island Earth to The Outer Limits.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

Re: a bit more science fiction in Star Trek?

I only mentioned my reply would focus on television television as I haven't read Trek Literature.

So to capture the audience's imagination and generate a sense of wonder, it's necessary to deliver fresher concepts which can be the basis of the stories.

I'd say most of the newer scifi concepts in Trek are more of science discoveries rather than technology science fiction building blocks except when in VOY the mobile emitter from the future 29th century was changed to be used for The Doctor to be able to get around the ship and do away missions.
Call it a building block or a scifi concept but that changed his character for the rest of the VOY series.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

And FTL spaceship travel has been seen regularly in science fiction since at least the 1930s. Television is not the only science fiction out there. It's a tiny, limited fraction of the genre, and it's usually decades behind the prose literature. Even in film and television, FTL travel was seen in productions that predated TOS by many years, from Forbidden Planet to This Island Earth to The Outer Limits.

A trend in recent sf prose is using near-light-speed travel and exploring its ramifications.

For one, relativistic effects make for very ineresting concepts and strong plot elements.

And travelling only NLS evidentiates how big space actually is, gives a Hornbloweresque sense of being alone, of having to rely on one's own resourcefulness to prevail.
By contrast, FTL sometimes makes interstellar space travel seem like a plane trip from one city (planet) to another - the wonder is lost for mundanity.

 

[flemm]

Trek has mostly used exploring space as a means of exploring what it means to be human. It's a pretty effective storytelling device, and it's one of the reasons, I think, that Trek can drift pretty far in the direction of fantasy without really damaging the basic premise. Everything ends up coming back to humanity in the end: Spock is the most human soul Kirk has ever known, Data is on a quest to be more fully human, the characters are always stumbling back in time to our own era or some historical period of interest to us, alien races are caricatures of humanity, Sisko's a baseball fan, Janeway drinks coffee, and on and on.

It's pretty light as far as the science is concerned, though maybe moreso now than when the original series aired. It's also pretty depressing in a sense, at least to the extent that we actually approach the Trek universe as a vision of the future (which I confess I really don't). Humanity puts its internal struggles behind it to explore the galaxy, and the galaxy just ends up being full of the same kind of centuries-old hereditary conflicts, cynical political manipulation and senseless bloodshed that dominate earth's history? What a downer! It's just like earth, really, but you need warp drive to get from one place to another.

To the extent that Trek is about the future at all, it strikes me that it's built on the basic idea that in the future, despite whatever technological advances may take place, humanity as we know it will still have meaning and still be significant. That's why everything turns out to be human basically, in a sense, whether it's the rock-chewing lava monster or the sentient holograms or the subspace-dwelling creatures or whatever. That point of view makes notions like transhumanism problematic: the idea that humanity will have fundamentally changed in the future is threatening to the Trek universe. In Trek, being human has inherent value. Even genetic enhancement is treated as suspicious and dangerous, because the idea of "building a better human" seems to devalue things like effort, individuality, self-reliance, etc. Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't, I'm not really sure. But in Trek it turns out to be a bad idea. You can't really improve on a person in Trek. People improve themselves in Trek.

There are many beings more powerful or more technologically advanced than humans, in fact there seems to be an entity or civilization of this type hiding in every other star system, but in the end humanity is the measuring stick, the reference point. Star Trek is oddly geocentric, really. In a sense, it provides a vision of the universe that really does revolve around us after all. Not literally around our planet, but around our notion of self. Even omnipotent beings like Q find humanity endlessly fascinating. The Borg are threatening at first because they seem to represent a negation of humanity's pre-eminence, but in fact we can turn them back into humans: we assimilate them.

Now, I'm a big fan of Trek. I just like it. Intellectually speaking, I'm not quite sure what to make of it, though. Is it naive? Vaguely sinister in a way? DS9 sometimes toyed with that idea. Is it just wrong in the sense that humanity as we know it may no longer exist long before we develop the technology to travel across interstellar distances? Or maybe not. Maybe Trek is right and there is something important about our experience of individuality, our silly games of darts and poker, our search for meaning. Maybe it will last longer than we think.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

^ Great post, flemm.

 

[Christopher]

I only mentioned my reply would focus on television television as I haven't read Trek Literature.

Uhh, I'm not talking about Trek literature, I'm talking about the vast tradition of prose science fiction that predates Star Trek by generations and is the true original source of the SF ideas that Trek merely distilled and popularized for mass audiences. The fact that I mentioned the 1930s should've been a clue.