Spoilers Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1x02 – “Beta Test”

[Lord Garth]

You know the worst thing about this story?

The same plot could have taken place open seas in the 1600s.

Imagine it as British Fleet vs Privateers. You'd barely need any changes.

This not a sci-fi show, it's just in a sci-fi setting.

Okay, I know you're done with Star Trek, and that's fine, but this is your critique? Are you serious? Gene Roddenberry based Star Trek, in part, on Horatio Hornblower. And there's no way you don't know that.

Of all the things you could've come up with to criticize SFA, that's what you come up with? Don't take this the wrong way, but you should've followed your own advice from the previous thread when you quoted Scotty.

 

[eschaton]

Erm, unusual strong disagree here. Star Trek can do and did a lot of "real sci-fi", in TOS & TNG the most. From TNG's time-travel episodes which are really more "puzzles" dissecting specific scenarios, to TOS' civilisations being taken over by computers, from M5 to a treasure of Armageddon, and things like Prof Moriarty, the Borg, parallel universe and holodecks are not really "allegory" material, but genuine sci-fi concepts.

What Star Trek can't do any more is "hard SF". Human-like aliens, half-aliens, force-field shields were realistic at the time of their inception, but not really up to date anymore. Trek is know like a superhero universe in this regard - which also vary wildly from character-based to conceptual.

I agree that Trek did do real sci-fi for its time in the past. But the problem is it's an established setting with its own worldbuilding now, which really doesn't jibe well with most sci-fi premises. Whereas early on, there was that flexibility, as lore was thin and something new could be done in every episode. You just can't end up doing something like what Larry Niven did in TAS and just porting over an existing sci-fi short story any longer. Something has to be a Trek story, which means that most sci-fi story concepts (which are premise based) no longer work within the universe.

And I think that's 100% fine. But the more Trek lore has deepened, the easier it's been to build stories on the foundation of other Trek, rather than "what if we ported this sci-fi idea into Trek?" The last time I think Trek did this was in PIC Season 1, swiping Mass Effect's super intelligent, super-secret AI race which wanted to genocide all organics. And honestly, the less said about the end of PIC Season 1, the better.

 

[Turtletrekker]

No one asked for The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager.....

Correct. The "nobody asked for" argument is lame as hell. And I can confirm that in 1992 not a single person "asked for" a Star Trek show set on a space station, and indeed, predicted its failure before it even premiered.

All this has happened before and all this will happen again.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

[Rahul]

I agree that Trek did do real sci-fi for its time in the past. But the problem is it's an established setting with its own worldbuilding now, which really doesn't jibe well with most sci-fi premises. Whereas early on, there was that flexibility, as lore was thin and something new could be done in every episode. You just can't end up doing something like what Larry Niven did in TAS and just porting over an existing sci-fi short story any longer. Something has to be a Trek story, which means that most sci-fi story concepts (which are premise based) no longer work within the universe.

And I think that's 100% fine. But the more Trek lore has deepened, the easier it's been to build stories on the foundation of other Trek, rather than "what if we ported this sci-fi idea into Trek?" The last time I think Trek did this was in PIC Season 1, swiping Mass Effect's super intelligent, super-secret AI race which wanted to genocide all organics. And honestly, the less said about the end of PIC Season 1, the better.

I think that really depends on the writing. It's true that the current iteration of people behind the scenes don't want or can't do. They seem to be eternally trapped by canon & conventions in their storytelling, even when they try to outright run away from them.

But SNW, with it's episodic nature, is the living proof that it could be done, if anyone wanted to. Hell SNW came reasonably close to it several times (I have a soft spot for Lotus Eaters for example).

I agree Star Trek can't adapt hard-SF stories, that depend on the hard technology, or first-contact stories where humans meet aliens the first time. But they couldn't even before either. And IMO every "soft" SF story could easily be adapted into Trek. Hell, half of them might have been inspired by Trek in the first place...

 

[Nyotarules]

Tarima is at the War College, Ocam is in Starfleet.

Does Ocam have a twin named Razor?

 

[eschaton]

And IMO every "soft" SF story could easily be adapted into Trek. Hell, half of them might have been inspired by Trek in the first place...

The problem with the Trek universe is in part due to its crystallization during the TOS era, and in part due to the desire to be relatable, a lot of plausible options are just not something that will happen to humanity, though we can see them elsewhere.

• Where are the super-advanced aliens? The galaxy is over 13 billion years old, and in the Trekverse, is full of life. Surely there should be races which have been spacefaring for tens of thousands, even millions of years. Yet every race is at roughly the same tech level as the Federation - whatever the Federation's tech level is. Or else long-since dead or ascended into energy beings.
• Kardashev Type II races seem quite rare. All this time, and only one Dyson sphere we never saw again. Why aren't there planetary-scale (or larger) megastructures everywhere?
• Posthumanism is a one-off thing, but doesn't impact the mainstream of society. We've met cybernetically augmented humans, and genetic augments, but they're exceptions to the rule, with most folks ordinary, baseline humans.
• While true AI exists, it's treated again as a one-off curiosity. Humans still do not only most of the intellectual, but most of the physical labor. True super-intelligent AI seems to be rare, if not entirely absent.
• We already live in a society where technological surveillance is becoming omnipresent. Yet in the Trekverse, it seems like people can escape from brigs and pull off murders without any recordings of their behavior.

This is just off the top of my head. I know there's more out there.