I never understood the handwringing over the Mirror Universe. It seems to exist in a tension with the Prime universe, reflecting events in each universe as well as able to be influenced by the other.
Mirror, Mirror notes
- Thread starter ZapBrannigan
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I think it's because there's something fundamentally unscientific about it. A lot of stuff in Star Trek is scientifically questionable... The mirror Universe goes way way beyond that.
I haven't met anyone with a goatee in ages.
You can blame the pandemic for that
Indeed. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatee#History:
The god Pan was traditionally depicted with goat-like features, including a goatee. When Christianity became the dominant religion and began copying imagery from pagan myth, Satan was given the likeness of Pan,[4] leading to Satan traditionally being depicted with a goatee[5] in medieval art and Renaissance art.
[...]
4. Burton Russell, Jeffrey (1987). The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Cornell University Press. pp. 125–126. ISBN 0801494095.
5. Ferber, Michael (2017). "Goat". A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-17211-1.
[...]
4. Burton Russell, Jeffrey (1987). The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Cornell University Press. pp. 125–126. ISBN 0801494095.
5. Ferber, Michael (2017). "Goat". A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-17211-1.
See also the stub here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(god)#Identification_with_Satan.
I mean I guess. But, the more I read the less scientific Trek becomes.
Doctor Morbius from "Forbidden Planet" had a goatee and he was certainly partly evil, with an ID monster which also had a goatee.
The word "panic" comes from the god Pan because his greatest pleasure was to scare people.
Heading over to Misc. for your thread. Cheers!
Also, even as a kid, I never thought Mirror, Mirror was a clever premise but the execution is so superbly achieved, it deserves its place among the essential Trek episodes.
A god of the woods and the wild places too.
Armies steered clear of the woods as they would get disassembled and lose their formations too easy causing a mixture of confusion and fear - "panic" - so few generals would march in the forests in ancient times.
As much as I love it, and love its scientific worldview and how much it inspired future scientists/engineers/astronauts/etc. as kids, and think things like the mushroom drive in NuTrek take this trend too far...the show with Apollo, katras, people turning into space salamanders and a space ghost that lives in a candle has never been a hard sci-fi show.
"Too far" obviously is subjective, but I think katras took it too far. But, I'm totally biased. I think its an interesting exploration of an different alternative timeline.
I mean, the pilot was all about ESPers and psychic abilities.... its never been hard sci fi.....
Between the fact that they can get to various star systems within hours...
No one ever experiences any relativistic effects either at warp or at near lightspeed under impulse...
They have a transporter device that can completely break down a human body to its atomic structure converting it to energy at the same time; is able to store the exact position of said atoms In a few seconds (and we're talking billions of atoms per person); beam it hundreds of thousands of miles without losing a single atom; and reassemble it on the surface of a planet, often without any apparatus whatsoever on the planet (not to mention that technically the way it works, it violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle)...
^^^
I could continue with other examples but bottom line: While I love Star Trek and think it's wonderful science fiction; it's definitely not 'hard" science fiction, and and often has about as much fantasy in it as something like "Lord of the Rings".
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Not necessarily, Asimov's Sci. Fi. is hard enough, yet even he couldn't resist the temptation of introducing psychic powers into one of his most famous sagas, aka The Foundations, (e.g. The Mule, the second Foundation turned out to be a bunch of telepaths, and then there's Gaia a planetary superbrain)...
His robots GIskar and Daneel are telepaths, One of his first robot stories is about a telepathic robot that ends up being destroyed by his inability to enforce the laws of robotics.
Is there any official organization that categorizes Asimov as hard scifi?
Not that I know of, it's just my personal opinion, and I stand by it.
Cool. I have never considered Asimov hard scifi in the least myself. I believe his work would fail to meet the criteria set by the official SF writer's association. But I love his work and always found him eminently readable.
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