Post-Romulan Galaxy

[Christopher]

Like it or not, Trek is fantasy dressed up in sci-fi colours. It has been from the very start.

No, it hasn't. Gene Roddenberry's goal from the very start was to make an SFTV series that was as grounded and plausible as any mainstream adult drama of its era, as a deliberate counterpoint to the usual fantasies aimed at children. He consulted extensively with real scientists, engineers, researchers, think tanks, etc. and strove to make ST the most plausible SF show that had ever been made for television. Sure, he took artistic license here and there, but it's a complete falsehood to say he was making a fantasy. The incarnations of ST that Roddenberry had direct supervision over -- TOS seasons 1-2, TMP, TNG's early seasons -- are the most scientifically literate and grounded of the bunch. It's true that many of his successors have approached things more fancifully, but that doesn't mean it's always been a fantasy. The documented history of Star Trek's creative process proves otherwise.

As for the rest, I'm not going to argue with you. We're both basing our arguments on the premise that it's a mind meld and nothing in it is unambiguously true. That's all I'm saying to begin with -- that you can't assume any of the dialogue from that sequence is literally true. And since it would not make sense if taken literally, I don't see why it's remotely desirable to do so.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Will it be covered, though? Cause if a post-Romulan galaxy is explored, that'll be the first indication that the Prime Universe had survived Nero's incursion to the past, and didn't dissolve because of it.

Picard and Data exist to ponder about Spock's fate at the end of "Countdown", so yeah, it's all still there as we knew it, just without Ambassador Spock and Nero and his crew.

 

[JoeZhang]

This is a bit of a spoiler but the following is being released in 2012:

Star Trek - spiliting hairs.

Seven years have passed since a catastrophic explosion in the Romulan Star Empire touched off a chain of events that would result in the lose of the ancient techniques to make the perfect bowl cut. As the Vulcan people experiment with a range of trendy yet stylish haircuts, Mr. Mott is sent on a desperate mission to recover this ancient art.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

This is a bit of a spoiler but the following is being released in 2012:

Star Trek - spiliting hairs.

Seven years have passed since a catastrophic explosion in the Romulan Star Empire touched off a chain of events that would result in the lose of the ancient techniques to make the perfect bowl cut. As the Vulcan people experiment with a range of trendy yet stylish haircuts, Mr. Mott is sent on a desperate mission to recover this ancient art.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Mr. Mott is sent on a desperate mission to recover this ancient art.

Mot by Therin of Andor, on Flickr

 

[NSTrekfan]

Like it or not, Trek is fantasy dressed up in sci-fi colours. It has been from the very start.

No, it hasn't. Gene Roddenberry's goal from the very start was to make an SFTV series that was as grounded and plausible as any mainstream adult drama of its era, as a deliberate counterpoint to the usual fantasies aimed at children. He consulted extensively with real scientists, engineers, researchers, think tanks, etc. and strove to make ST the most plausible SF show that had ever been made for television. Sure, he took artistic license here and there, but it's a complete falsehood to say he was making a fantasy. The incarnations of ST that Roddenberry had direct supervision over -- TOS seasons 1-2, TMP, TNG's early seasons -- are the most scientifically literate and grounded of the bunch. It's true that many of his successors have approached things more fancifully, but that doesn't mean it's always been a fantasy. The documented history of Star Trek's creative process proves otherwise.

As for the rest, I'm not going to argue with you. We're both basing our arguments on the premise that it's a mind meld and nothing in it is unambiguously true. That's all I'm saying to begin with -- that you can't assume any of the dialogue from that sequence is literally true. And since it would not make sense if taken literally, I don't see why it's remotely desirable to do so.

I'll have to disagree with you Christopher. Trek was better that the SF that was on TV at the time but that's not really saying a lot. Beating Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is hardly leaping a high set bar.

In the first pilot we have telepathy and mental illusions. Hardly grounded in reality. Second pilot we have much the same except the mental powers are because of a swirly pink thing at the edge of the galaxy that turned peoples eyes silver and their hair gray.

Roddenberry may have wanted to avoid some of the more obvious mistakes of the day but he wasn`t scientifically literate in any way, shape or form. Warp drive and the transporter being two obvious examples.

The stories often were mature but the science wasn`t.

 

[Therin of Andor]

In the first pilot we have telepathy and mental illusions. Hardly grounded in reality.

Well, not grounded in reality if you dismiss telepathy as feasible or possible, but many scientists of the day were (and are) studying the phenomenon. Police still use people with supposed ESP to assist in crime-solving.

Second pilot we have much the same except the mental powers are because of a swirly pink thing at the edge of the galaxy that turned peoples eyes silver and their hair gray.

And scientists of the day were speculating whether our galaxy had an defined "edge" to it, or if it just petered out. And what such a barrier might do to human evolution.

Roddenberry may have wanted to avoid some of the more obvious mistakes of the day but he wasn`t scientifically literate in any way, shape or form. Warp drive and the transporter being two obvious examples.

Which again are both still under scientific scrutiny. Didn't scientists learn to transport a particle of light a few years ago, and suddenly everyone was celebrating that transporter technology might be possible?

The stories often were mature but the science wasn`t.

KingDaniel's supposition was that ST was "fantasy dressed up in sci-fi colours" but, if they were going for fantasy, why even bother with science advisors? And all that consulting with science fiction authors and scientists?

 

[Christopher]

Roddenberry may have wanted to avoid some of the more obvious mistakes of the day but he wasn`t scientifically literate in any way, shape or form. Warp drive and the transporter being two obvious examples.

Which is why he consulted with people who were scientifically literate. That was Roddenberry's strength: calling on people who knew more about his subject than he did. He consulted extensively with all sorts of scientific advisors, and he hired a lot of genuine SF writers to contribute to the show. True, he freely took poetic license with the technical advice he was given, and he didn't always apply it correctly, but he was the first SFTV producer to even try for accuracy to any degree at all. Whatever you may feel about the results, it is provably false to claim that the intention was to make a fantasy show.

And warp drive is hardly fantasy. It's grounded in the equations of the General Theory of Relativity, and there's a lot of hard science backing it up as a theoretical possibility, even if it's probably unattainable in practical terms. Hell, it's impressive that Roddenberry even acknowledged that there is such a thing as a speed-of-light limit that requires a form of space-warping technology to achieve interstellar travel. Most SFTV before ST, and a lot of it afterward, just ignored that and assumed you could get to other star systems via conventional rockets. (The original Battlestar Galactica was horrible about this, claiming that the fleet's maximum velocity was lightspeed and that it almost always travelled below that, while still having it reach a different star system virtually every week and pass through multiple so-called galaxies.)

As for transporters, those are more of a stretch, but teleportation was an accepted premise in science fiction literature long before Roddenberry adopted it, and at least the concept is grounded in some genuine scientific concepts such as matter-energy equivalence and atomic theory. It's not "fantasy" to portray improbable technologies or to take poetic license with real science. Teleportation has been a staple of a number of well-regarded works of science fiction such as The Stars My Destination and a couple of Larry Niven's universes.

That's what Roddenberry did. No, he wasn't a science fiction innovator, but he was an effective SF popularizer. He brought together writers and consultants who knew their stuff and built an SFTV universe that synthesized and distilled a lot of concepts that were well-established in literary science fiction. Science fiction, not fantasy. Maybe most of the authors he hired (Matheson, Sturgeon, Ellison, Spinrad, etc.) were known more for "soft" science fiction than the hard, technical stuff, but confusing soft SF with fantasy is highly erroneous.

In the first pilot we have telepathy and mental illusions. Hardly grounded in reality.

Well, not grounded in reality if you dismiss telepathy as feasible or possible, but many scientists of the day were (and are) studying the phenomenon. Police still use people with supposed ESP to assist in crime-solving.

Which proves nothing except the gullibility of certain police departments. Most "scientific" studies seeming to support psi powers actually have deeply flawed methodologies, and when well-designed, fraud-proof tests are proposed, psychics seem reluctant to participate. And the success rate of police psychic consultants is no better than chance.

Still, you're right that there have been some who've believed that psi powers might have some legitimate basis behind them. Telepathy has long been an accepted premise within science fiction, and a very common one, which is why Roddenberry made it part of ST, his distillation of common prose-SF concepts and themes. At least, it was a more respectable SF conceit back in the '50s and '60s than I think it is today.

Second pilot we have much the same except the mental powers are because of a swirly pink thing at the edge of the galaxy that turned peoples eyes silver and their hair gray.

And scientists of the day were speculating whether our galaxy had an defined "edge" to it, or if it just petered out. And what such a barrier might do to human evolution.

Err, no, they were doing nothing of the sort. Even if there were such questions about an edge to the galaxy (which is something I've never heard suggested in all my years reading about astronomy), how do you get from "edge" to "barrier," and what could it possibly have to do with human evolution?

 

[NSTrekfan]

Roddenberry may have acknowledged that the light-speed barrier existed and he need some way around it but he didn`t sit down and work out exactly how it would work. He simply used the biggest bag for the buck that he could find (matteréanti-matter) and married it to some handwavium crystals and let it go at that.

He changed lasers to phasers because he wanted the guns to do things that lasers couldn`t. More handwavium later and he had what he wanted because phasers were an unknown. He didn`t pretend to explain HOW they worked or even if the could. They simply were a type of energy weapon we don`t have or could even begin to design.

He was primarily concerned with telling stories about people, not about the technology. His tech is better than the rest of televised SF but, as I said, that`s not saying much.

 

[Steve Roby]

Still, you're right that there have been some who've believed that psi powers might have some legitimate basis behind them. Telepathy has long been an accepted premise within science fiction, and a very common one, which is why Roddenberry made it part of ST, his distillation of common prose-SF concepts and themes. At least, it was a more respectable SF conceit back in the '50s and '60s than I think it is today.

Many years ago J. Michael Straczynski was promoting the yet-to-be-aired Babylon 5 online, making a lot of noise about how it would be the most scientifically accurate space-based TV series ever. And then he mentioned the telepaths. When called on that, he blustered about how lots of important classic science fiction had telepaths. Yeah, sure, stuff from the 1950s and '60s, when there might still have been a faint glimmer of hope that science would find something to that ESP stuff, as Christopher mentions (but, more importantly, because influential SF editor John W. Campbell, who helped L. Ron Hubbard get Dianetics off the ground, was fascinated by "psionics"). But the fact that other SF writers did it doesn't make something scientifically accurate or even plausible.

 

[Christopher]

Roddenberry may have acknowledged that the light-speed barrier existed and he need some way around it but he didn`t sit down and work out exactly how it would work.

No, he asked real scientists and engineers to do that for him. Star Trek was never a one-man show. Roddenberry was the creator and producer, but he brought together a lot of other talented people who made valuable contributions.

He simply used the biggest bag for the buck that he could find (matteréanti-matter) and married it to some handwavium crystals and let it go at that.

Yes, and it was good, informed advice from the experts he consulted that told him that matter-antimatter annihilation was the only plausible energy source powerful enough to sustain a warp drive. That's good research. It's nonsense to claim it was "fantasy" just because its creator didn't have a physics degree. Employing the services of expert consultants is a perfectly legitimate way to approach a work of science fiction.

He changed lasers to phasers because he wanted the guns to do things that lasers couldn`t. More handwavium later and he had what he wanted because phasers were an unknown.

Yes, and that shows exactly the opposite of what you claim it does. It shows that he was concerned enough about plausibility that he did not wish to depict lasers behaving in an unrealistic way. No, he didn't explain how phasers worked, but he didn't have to. It's a given that people centuries from now will have technology that we don't understand. It's wrong to claim that something is not science fiction if it contains ideas that aren't perfectly well-explained. Hell, if all the science were real, it wouldn't be science fiction at all. SF is about extrapolating beyond known science. Yes, sometimes the extrapolation is vaguer or more fanciful than at other times, but it is completely wrong to define that as a difference between science fiction and fantasy rather than a difference between hard SF and softer SF. Try some Bradbury, some Leinster, even some Asimov. Asimov's considered one of the quintessential hard-SF authors, but his fiction was chock-full of arbitrarily advanced technologies that he didn't even attempt to explain or justify, from positronic brains to neuronic whips to hyperdrives. He just made up stuff that sounded good and went ahead with the story, because it's a given that the future will have technologies we don't understand.

He was primarily concerned with telling stories about people, not about the technology. His tech is better than the rest of televised SF but, as I said, that`s not saying much.

I think it's saying a great deal. SFTV shows that even pay lip service to good science are depressingly thin on the ground, and ST was one of the few that even tried. And as I think I already mentioned, the portions directly overseen by Roddenberry (TOS S1-2, TMP, TNG's early seasons) tended to have more plausible science than the rest, because Roddenberry cared enough to employ technical consultants. I mean, my God, for ST:TMP, he not only consulted with his good friend Isaac Asimov, he brought in a real astronaut (Rusty Schweickart) to consult on the spacewalk scenes, making them some of the most realistic spacewalk scenes ever filmed (in terms of how the actors moved and positioned themselves "in space"), and he used an actual JPL rocket scientist, Jesco von Puttkamer, to advise him on warp drive. Puttkamer's story notes on how warp drive works were so well-thought-out that they actually anticipate the influential theoretical work that Dr. Miguel Alcubierre did 16 years later.

Bottom line, accurate or not, what Roddenberry made was science fiction, not fantasy. It was not hard SF, but it was well within the spectrum of the literary science fiction of its era and preceding eras. And it was considerably more informed by real science than most other SFTV.

Many years ago J. Michael Straczynski was promoting the yet-to-be-aired Babylon 5 online, making a lot of noise about how it would be the most scientifically accurate space-based TV series ever. And then he mentioned the telepaths. When called on that, he blustered about how lots of important classic science fiction had telepaths. Yeah, sure, stuff from the 1950s and '60s, when there might still have been a faint glimmer of hope that science would find something to that ESP stuff, as Christopher mentions (but, more importantly, because influential SF editor John W. Campbell, who helped L. Ron Hubbard get Dianetics off the ground, was fascinated by "psionics").

I found that B5 was only scientifically accurate when it came to spacecraft physics and technology. They used centrifugal force for weight rather than artificial gravity. B5 itself was based on a Bernal Sphere space habitat concept. The Starfuries were very well-designed spacecraft, with the thrusters out on long arms to give increased leverage, and NASA actually looked into copying the design. And effort was put into making them move as they realistically would in space.

But other than that, it was pretty fanciful overall. There were telepaths. There were humanoid aliens without explanation. There was the hoary old cliche of increased mental ability causing a human (Jason Ironheart) to evolve into some sort of ascendant or incorporeal form. There were souls and soul-hunters. The show's grasp of medicine and biology was particularly inept, revolving around a ludicrous notion that aging is caused by running out of "life energy" and that you can increase or shorten someone's lifespan by a predictable amount by adding or removing "life energy." And then there was the one where a Starfury pilot was accelerated in time and died of old age within minutes -- even though he had no food and water in the capsule and thus should've died of thirst or starvation long, long before he ever reached old age.

But the fact that other SF writers did it doesn't make something scientifically accurate or even plausible.

No, but it doesn't make it fantasy either. It makes it soft SF.

 

[Idran]

Roddenberry may have wanted to avoid some of the more obvious mistakes of the day but he wasn`t scientifically literate in any way, shape or form. Warp drive and the transporter being two obvious examples.

Which again are both still under scientific scrutiny. Didn't scientists learn to transport a particle of light a few years ago, and suddenly everyone was celebrating that transporter technology might be possible?

No, scientists were able to quantum teleport a particle of light, meaning entangling it simultaneously with two distinct other particles of light so that it was in some sense in two places at once (but not true teleportation in any sense, just a simple manifestation of a quantum effect), and the scientific press misinterpreted the results and the name in order to way overdramaticize things, as they tend to do every single time any result like that happens. The only thing that was transported was the photon's information. It was really cool, but it wasn't anywhere near transporter technology.

Sometimes I hate science journalism.

 

[Christopher]

Either way, it's beside the point. It's a fundamental mistake to think that science fiction requires absolutely accurate science. That's just one subset of the genre, hard SF, and even hard SF is allowed to incorporate unreal ideas so long as their consequences are examined in the context of real science. (Hal Clement liked to say that hard SF was a contest with the audience -- you try to convince a science-literate audience that the unreal things you propose are plausible while the audience tries to find the conceptual holes. And that process can actually help the fiction -- Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers came about because the fans of Ringworld had calculated that the structure would be unstable, so he wrote the sequel to explain how that instability was dealt with.)

Science fiction is about asking "What if?" and extrapolating a possible answer. What if teleportation existed? How would that affect human society, law, culture, and the like? The Stars My Destination proposes a world where humans inexplicably develop the ability to teleport at will, and examines how society is changed by the loss of privacy that results. Niven wrote a series of stories about teleportation that explored such social consequences as a spike in homicide rates because it was no longer possible to simply move away from people you hated -- and which predicted and named the concept of the flash mob, except as something facilitated by ubiquitous teleportation rather than ubiquitous cell phones. The "what if?" scenario in a science fiction story doesn't have to be genuinely possible or explained in exacting detail. After all, these are stories about hypothetical realities, not actual reality. It can be entirely invented and unexplained, so long as you examine the consequences of its hypothetical existence in a believable way, and so long as you present it as the result of a scientific or technological advance or the product of an alternate set of physical laws, rather than the result of magic or divine actions. It doesn't have to be something with a real-world explanation so long as it is understood by the science of the conjectural universe in which the story happens.

 

[NSTrekfan]

What you're talking about Christopher is Speculative Fiction, not Science Fiction. Science Fiction has a definite grounding in actual science. By your reasoning Dungeons & Drgagons could be considered Science Fiction as the magic-users understand magic.

Star Trek science is much like the styrofoam rocks they love so much. They look like rocks on the surface but they're simply for effect. That doesn't stop them from making more realistic rocks but they're still styrofoam undeneath.

That doesn't matter in the long run because Trek has never been about the science and the science has never been consistent. Just how fast is warp drive? The speed of plot.

Second Chances wasn't about the transporter, it was about seeing how your life could change dramatically with one small change. The transporter was simply a way of telling that story in the Trek setting. You could tell the same story by using a spell gone wrong. The reason there's two Riker's isn't important. What's important is what they learn.

 

[Christopher]

What you're talking about Christopher is Speculative Fiction, not Science Fiction. Science Fiction has a definite grounding in actual science. By your reasoning Dungeons & Drgagons could be considered Science Fiction as the magic-users understand magic.

I'm a professional science fiction author. Are you? I'm telling you, as a professional in the field, that you don't know what you're talking about. You're falsely equating one subset of science fiction, hard SF, with the entire genre. I've already explained why that's wrong.

That doesn't matter in the long run because Trek has never been about the science and the science has never been consistent. Just how fast is warp drive? The speed of plot.

Which has exactly nothing to do with the distinction between the genres of science fiction and fantasy. I've tried to explain that distinction to you, but you're refusing to listen.

 

[Sci]

What you're talking about Christopher is Speculative Fiction, not Science Fiction.

No, what he's talking about is science fiction, specifically "soft science fiction." What you're talking about is "hard science fiction."

Second Chances wasn't about the transporter, it was about seeing how your life could change dramatically with one small change.

Which does not make it not science fiction. It doesn't have to be about the science to be science fiction.

 

[NSTrekfan]

What you're talking about Christopher is Speculative Fiction, not Science Fiction. Science Fiction has a definite grounding in actual science. By your reasoning Dungeons & Drgagons could be considered Science Fiction as the magic-users understand magic.

I'm a professional science fiction author. Are you? I'm telling you, as a professional in the field, that you don't know what you're talking about. You're falsely equating one subset of science fiction, hard SF, with the entire genre. I've already explained why that's wrong.

That doesn't matter in the long run because Trek has never been about the science and the science has never been consistent. Just how fast is warp drive? The speed of plot.

Which has exactly nothing to do with the distinction between the genres of science fiction and fantasy. I've tried to explain that distinction to you, but you're refusing to listen.

As there's no legal definition I'll keep to mine and you can have yours. My definition of hard and soft science fiction differ from yours. Star Trek is a series of morality plays in SF wrappings. That doesn't make it better or worse than hard or soft SF. It just makes it Star Trek. There's elements of science in Trek but there's no way that actual science is driving it. The science is way beyond soft. Call it Science Fantasy. Doesn't matter. It's just a label. The final result, the word on the page or the scene on the screen is what's important.

However, don't expect to get any sort of actual science education from watching Trrek. You can be inspired to persure real science or medicine or whatever but you'll soon see just how removed from reality Trek science is. That's not a bad thing. They're in the business of entertaining not educating.

 

[Christopher]

^You keep dumbing this down to a choice between absolute opposites -- either it's perfectly scientifically accurate or it's pure fantasy. That is not the way real life works. There is a very broad, diverse continuum between those extremes. Defining things only in terms of absolutes and extremes blinds you to most of reality, since reality is all about nuances.

And the fact is, while Star Trek is nowhere near the hard-SF end of the spectrum compared to the work of, say, Gregory Benford or Charles Sheffield, it's much closer to that end of the spectrum than most SF in film and television. Everything is relative.

And "don't expect a science education" is a straw-man argument. It's got nothing to do with what science fiction is. SF isn't required to give a science education. Its purpose is to tell entertaining stories about conjectural possibilities beyond known science and technology. If those possibilities are grounded in real theory, that's hard science fiction, but that is hardly the only form of SF. If a work of fiction points the way toward greater scientific insights in its readers, that's a bonus. It's certainly something I try to achieve in my own SF writing. But I recognize that it's not some kind of requirement of the genre. Even the hardest SF usually contains some unrealities and impossibilities, because the needs of the story come first. Only fools look to fiction to provide them with strictly accurate information. At most, fiction can inspire its audience to become curious about a subject and then learn more about it from nonfictional sources. And SF can do that even if it contains fanciful or unexplained science. For instance, a book that has its characters using completely imaginary FTL technology to reach realistically portrayed alien star systems can help get readers interested in learning about astronomy. The rational reader understands that the FTL is being used merely as a literary device to facilitate the story, a story which is nonetheless informative about other aspects of science.

 

[NSTrekfan]

I don't think we're disagreeing as much as you seem to think we are Christopher. SF & fanatsy are both broad in scope. What we seem to disagree with is where Trek would be placed along that line. Me, more toward fantasy (with a dash of science for flavour and apperance) and you, more in the science end of things.

It's heavier on the fiction than on the science.

From your previous example, I wouldn't consider the X-Men as science fiction even with Nightcrawler being able to teleport. Trek's transporter or Stars my Destination both make as much sense from a scienticfic standpont.

Pick ten titles and ten readers at random and ask them to place them along the line between fantasy and science fiction and you'd end up with them in 100 different positions. We're just putting Trek on different parts of the line.

 

[Christopher]

^No, you're saying that if a story doesn't have perfectly accurate and thoroughly explained science, then it's outright fantasy, and that is just plain nonsense.