Should Discovery hire acclaimed hard SF authors like Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan, Andy Weir, etc?

Hard SF doesn't translate well to Star Trek.

"On next week's episode of Star Trek: Discovery Discovery cannot go to warp because barring an amount of negative mass greater than the universe itself, it's not possible, and so the crew, suddenly floating all over the place, watch out for Tilly's hair, because grav plating can't possibly work, launch a desperarate gamble to use stationkeeping thrusters to get them to the nearest supply cache. "

 

They ought to get someone who knows what they're doing and has some interest in science fiction, yeah.

They should get a lot of someones like that. The one who demonstrably is capable of the job should be the new showrunner.

 

I'm pretty sure Gene Coon played a much larger role in being a "fixer" of scripts than Roddenberry.

 

Not in the first season.

 

Well, Matheson and Ellison and some of the others had previously written for TWILIGHT ZONE and THE OUTER LIMITS, so they had plenty of TV experience by the time they did STAR TREK.

I once asked Matheson why he had only done one STAR TREK episode. As I recall, he said that he preferred writing for anthology series like TWILIGHT ZONE where he could make up his own stories and characters instead of, say, having to write for Kirk and Spock or whomever.

 

Trek is not hard Sci-fi. Never has been, so hard sci-fi is a bad fit for Trek

 

We've tried to get some interviews with trek authors on our show. Pretty hard to nail down. We've gotten actors who've done smaller roles like Grace Lynn Kung, and bigger ones like Tim Russ and in betweenies like Manu Intiraymi, we've gotten nibbles from indie film sci fi creators. But authors? Been kinda rough to even get a bite. And not just book writers but show writers too
But I'd love to get the authors... there are lots of questions I'd like to ask about how book ideas translate into script ones, I think the creative perspective from the people who watch the shows and write the books is so unique.

Id not mind them hiring or consulting the writers of the novels. I know the process ain't the same and that tv shows and books take different avenues but I think Disco could use some different creative perspective

 

Don't you think that it will cause a Nerd rage from the fans if it happen?

 

Peeve: "High concept" doesn't mean intellectual; it's the exact opposite. Michael Eisner coined the term to describe TV shows that focused on a central concept that could be pitched in a single sentence. Like "Wagon Train to the stars."

You make it sound like Reynolds and Weir aren't adventure writers.

 

There are different concepts of what hard sci-fi is floating around the internet, and public conscious.

My own conception, that I stick to, is that hard sci-fi means any sci-fi where science is more or less adhered to (except with a couple of concessions like FTL, or telepathy, maybe), so adventures like The Expanse and so on count in my own subjective system, and I don't care too much for official definitions. We don't know that anything like an "Epstein Drive" will ever be discovered, but the setting is rigorously grounded in reality, in terms of Newtonian motion and near future colonisation of the solar system. The idea that hard sci-fi has to actually be driven by the exploration of a concept from science as a subject matter, for example, I utterly reject, I see it more as what type of worldbuilding a setting engages in; based in plausible ideas, even if the reality of FTL or something is not currently thought to be feasible, our concepts have been overturned in the past.

In my mind, there is a sliding scale from like "soft" on one end, to Revelation Space on the other.

That also means Star Trek is slightly on the harder side of television sci-fi's scale, for me at least.

It is a franchise that has stretched the believability of what is possible, judiciously hiding concepts behind a fig leaf (i.e. "Heisenberg compensator" being named, but judiciously we are not told how it works), but crucially, has always presented it's phenomena as having an origin in scientific concepts, and built a world that is plausible aside from a few judiciously chosen concepts like near-omnipotent aliens, telepathy and FTL. There are no ghosts or afterlives, nothing supernatural or paranormal. Stargate SG-1 would also be on the harder end of the TV scale, with Babylon 5 and The Expanse perhaps being harder SF still, for using Newtonian spaceflight, etc.

What would be soft sci-fi?

Less than I perhaps might have thought. Superhero shows, I guess, where having a certain gene can somehow open portals (because thats how proteins work lol).... they barely count as science fiction, but claim that their powers are "genetic". Some Doctor Who stories are soft SF (while others are fairly hard SF). Some people would say Star Wars, for having "The Force", but actually, the naturalistic quality of The Force is open to debate (it might be a mere philosophy, projected onto a natural phenomenon), and Star Wars's actual engineering ideas are no less believable than other space operas, as Isaac Arthur has noted on his YouTube channel... so I have my doubts about applying the term "space fantasy" to it, despite it's mythic topics.

A space fantasy, to my mind, is something like Saga, or Spelljammer; something out of "Heavy Metal" where people have spaceships and magic spells, and there is no attempt to claim natural origins of it's powers. As I say, not everyone is going to like this definition, but it's the one I live by, and I think it makes sense.

I think when statistical unlikelihood starts happening, that pushes a work closer to fantasy.

 

If they were doing a full reboot and re-imagining of the Trekverse and how it works, maybe. But I don't see many wanting to work in this current Trek's weirdly continuity-obsessed-even-though-theyre-disregarding-tons-of-it sandbox.

 

Here are a few examples of what wikipedia considers very hard sci-fi, that I'm familiar with:

Novels

• Stanisław Lem, Solaris (1961)
• Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (1972)
• Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain (1969)
• Poul Anderson, Tau Zero (1970)
• Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1974)
• Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park (1990)
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars trilogy (1992-1996)
• Greg Egan, Schild's Ladder (2002)
• Alastair Reynolds, Pushing Ice (2005)
• Andy Weir, The Martian (2011)
• Neal Stephenson, Seveneves (2015)

Films

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• The Andromeda Strain (1971)
• Solaris (1972)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• Contact (1997)
• Gattaca (1997)
• Moon (2009)
• Europa Report (2013)

Television

• The Expanse (2015–present)
• Westworld (2016–present)

 

Let it be noted that DISCO did hire a Trek novelist: Kirsten Beyer, who is currently a full-time member of DISCO's writing staff. She is also the author of numerous TREK novels.

 

Seveneves has some hard sf elements but the basic premise is about as hard-sf as a Norse myth.

 

Some nerds will rage anyway.

Spock could raise an eyebrow out of character and someone would complain.

But if it works, who would care?

 

Should have hired you too

 

Yeah, but there needs to be a real author, obviously... /s

*sighs*

 

Or look at the Larry Niven episode of TAS. It was good, but it was a naked adaption of one of his Known Space stories to fit within Trek canon.

Indeed, generally it seems like there is a big division between science-fiction authors who do "serious work" and those that will do media tie-in work, like Trek novels. Though there are exceptions of course, like Alan Dean Foster. Still, it almost seems like a lot of authors in science fiction take the perpetual criticism of the genre by literary critics to heart, and stay away from anything fannish.

 

Or, more freedom to explore and not risk backlash for getting something "wrong."