Which bugs you more--New and Improved

[Brutal Strudel]

Just like the poll I erroneously posted over in Trek XI, which gets under your skin more, the "civilian" who hates all Trek or the NuTrek Trekkie who hates TOS. But this time, I'll ask a bonus question: which bugs you more, the "civilian" who hates science fiction or the SF fan who hates Star Trek (like Tom Disch or Harlan Ellison)?

 

[LiChiu]

TOS haters and Trek hating SF fans.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

I voted with you on one but against you on two--although I obviously do not agree with them, I find the criticisms of Trek hating SF fans to be bracing and illuminating a good portion of the time. People who hate SF as a whole I generally find to be rather stupid or, at the very least, unimaginative.

 

[PowderedToastMan]

none of the above bug me. everyone is welcome to their opinion. why should i care if someone doesnt like something I like or vice versa

 

[sbk1234]

I can't stand people who say "I don't like sci-fi." To me, that's just completely closed-minded. If you watch something and don't like it, okay. You gave it a shot, and we all have different likes and dislikes. To say you don't like all sci-fi is just a bad attitude and closed mind. It's like when a child doesn't like some food before tasting it. Or perhaps it's like saying "I don't like any Italian food," Just because you ate tortellini once, and didn't like that particular meal.

 

[Lord Garth]

Trek Fans who dislike TOS becuase they're part of the way there, they already like the concept of Star Trek.

and

SF fan who hates Star Trek. If we say outright hate as opposed to simply critical (please bear this distinction in mind), they're far more vitriolic and there's usually something personal there. They might be talking about Star Trek on the surface but I think there's something else, something more basic and general, underneath.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

PowderedToastMan said:
none of the above bug me. everyone is welcome to their opinion. why should i care if someone doesnt like something I like or vice versa

Because people can be very obnoxious in their dislike of what one likes or loves. And because people are people and tend to be attached to those things that matter to them and resentful of those who are contemptuous of said things.

Oh. That was rhetorical question. Never mind.

sbk1234 said:
I can't stand people who say "I don't like sci-fi." To me, that's just completely closed-minded. If you watch something and don't like it, okay. You gave it a shot, and we all have different likes and dislikes. To say you don't like all sci-fi is just a bad attitude and closed mind. It's like when a child doesn't like some food before tasting it. Or perhaps it's like saying "I don't like any Italian food," Just because you ate tortellini once, and didn't like that particular meal.

I'd like to agree but I find I can't without being a hypocrite. I pretty much hate epic fanatsy--elves and wizards leave me cold as a rune stone. Wave a wand and I'm out of the room.

 

[Outpost4]

Neither?

I left both poll questions blank.

 

[Jack Bauer]

I find it difficult to comprehend why a Trek fan would not like TOS. But it preplexes me instead of bugging me. What does bug me are the SF fans and professionals that hate Star Trek. They treat it with contempt even though there's many Trek fans who are fans of science fiction because of Trek. It seems to me that would turn off Trek fans to non Trek SF.

 

[M'Sharak]

Outpost4 said:
Neither?

I left both poll questions blank.

Same here. None of the options provided really fit me at all.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

To be more complete, I have to say none of these opinions bug me so long as the holder of said opinions is not obnoxious about it. I can remember an afternoon spent at Borders with a young woman I was somewhat interested in. Things were going great until she saw fit to castigate me for looking at The Star Trek Encyclopedia (to her, it was a case of arrested development--she said it was as if she were still a Partridge Family fan because the two shows are roughly equivalent in intellectual heft). Then she bitched me out for loving Philip K. Dick, one of the 20th century's premiere post-modernists as well as an idiosyncratically brilliant SF writer. That got under my skin. Lucky for my brain but not so much my penis, the relationship went nowhere. Funny thing is, she was a talented poet with good taste in mainstream literature.

Likewise, when a Modern Trek Trekkie pisses all over TOS on the board (rather than shrugging and saying "not really my thing"), I get annoyed.

Conversely, when a science fiction luminary like Tom Disch cuts Trek to bits in a book like The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, I find myself almost pleased--it offers me another perspective onto Trek. Likewise with John Clute's lukewarm-to-tepid opinion of it. Ellison, otoh, amuses me simply because no one does a better job of making a show of vitriol than he does.

(I was thrilled to discover Dick loved Trek, though. Not so much to discover he beat his wife on at least one occasion...)

 

[seigezunt]

Brutal Strudel said:
To be more complete, I have to say none of these opinions bug me so long as the holder of said opinions is not obnoxious about it. I can remember an afternoon spent at Borders with a young woman I was somewhat interested in. Things were going great until she saw fit to castigate me for looking at The Star Trek Encyclopedia (to her, it was a case of arrested development--she said it was as if she were still a Partridge Family fan because the two shows are roughly equivalent in intellectual heft). Then she bitched me out for loving Philip K. Dick, one of the 20th century's premiere post-modernists as well as an idiosyncratically brilliant SF writer. That got under my skin. Lucky for my brain but not so much my penis, the relationship went nowhere. Funny thing is, she was a talented poet with good taste in mainstream literature.

Likewise, when a Modern Trek Trekkie pisses all over TOS on the board (rather than shrugging and saying "not really my thing"), I get annoyed.

Conversely, when a science fiction luminary like Tom Disch cuts Trek to bits in a book like The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, I find myself almost pleased--it offers me another perspective onto Trek. Likewise with John Clute's lukewarm-to-tepid opinion of it. Ellison, otoh, amuses me simply because no one does a better job of making a show of vitriol than he does.

(I was thrilled to discover Dick loved Trek, though. Not so much to discover he beat his wife on at least one occasion...)

I want to change my vote...you are right about SF writers assailing Trek. Sometimes the fan-worship is more annoying.

 

[Masao]

I'm not likely to run into Trek-hating SF pros/fans or SF-hating civilians on this board, but TOS-hating trekkies are a fact of life here. I admit they annoy me sometimes, but they're mostly young and I try to be tolerant. They're entitled to their opinions. I don't think it's worth getting too upset about.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

seigezunt said:

Brutal Strudel said:

Conversely, when a science fiction luminary like Tom Disch cuts Trek to bits in a book like The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, I find myself almost pleased--it offers me another perspective onto Trek. Likewise with John Clute's lukewarm-to-tepid opinion of it. Ellison, otoh, amuses me simply because no one does a better job of making a show of vitriol than he does.

(I was thrilled to discover Dick loved Trek, though. Not so much to discover he beat his wife on at least one occasion...)

I want to change my vote...you are right about SF writers assailing Trek. Sometimes the fan-worship is more annoying.

Stanislaw Lem, one of my top five favorites in SF, wrote a piece which praised Phil Dick's Ubik while eviscerating almost all the rest of Anglo-American SF, including Dick's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In Solaris, he includes a passage which could easily be read as a damning critique of the Star Trek ethos (The God Thing made the point years ago that Fiasco could be read, in its entirety, as an even more damning critique). Now, I love Star Trek and Palmer Eldritch is one of my favorite books (and Lem's love of Ubik was based on a fundamental mis-reading of one of its key concepts) but I value his criticisms and in no way resent them.

OTOH, I do resent Kurt Vonnegut's shit talk about SF and his refusal to be classsified as an SF writer. I wrote a paper about it for grad school. Because of this, I can never truly count Vonnegut among my favorites even though I've read all of his novels and enjoyed most of them a very great deal. For me, there's no intellectual honesty in Vonnegut's protestations, just a cynical jockeying for lliterary respectability. And it's worked--a lot of people who consider themselves too smart and too cool for our silly little gutter genre just adore him.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

None of the above. A lot of TOS-Onlies are a drag, though.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

Oh, pish-posh! Without the TOS-Onlies, you'd be a Joker sans his Batman, a Moriarty sans his Holmes, a--dare I say it--Satan sans his God.



(Believe it or not, I mean all of the above in grudging admiration--switch the names around if you wish, same diff.)

 

[Brutal Strudel]

Just thought I'd put he capper on this. It seems that, the closer one is to our Trekkie views, the more confounding we find a lack of love for Star Trek itself. What I really think it shows (and it seems to have broken roughly 70/30 each time) is how we define ourselves. For example, I voted in such a way that plainly marks me as a science fiction fan first, a TOS Trekkie second and a general (franchise) Trekkie a distant third, if at all.

 

[FalTorPan]

I don't "hate" anyone based on his or her opinions about science fiction or Star Trek.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

I never suggested I did, just that the expression of certain contrary views can get under one's skin and, when coupled with condescension, really piss one off. That's all. No hate, annoyance--big difference.

Christ, my nieces (ages 18 and 21) hate Star Trek and most SF but love fanatsy, a genre I disdain mightily. I know I love them and I'm pretty sure they love me. Lighten up, folks.