Romantic as opposed to Enlightenment/Rationalist, that’s how.
Would getting rid of either get me more Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers?
The number of qualifiers you need to add to Star Trek in order to arrive at a claim of novelty rather undercuts your argument.
Star Trek has influenced technological development.
Bye, Prof. T. 
Well said. I’ve been a Trek fan much longer than a Tolkien fan (I only read LotR after the first movie came out, whereas thanks to syndication I probably watched Trek from kindergarten on), but it’s nowhere near as seminal in its genre as LoTR is.
Get rid of Star Trek and something else would come along eventually. There was already a ton of space-oriented Sci-Fi film and literature to build on before TOS.
Get rid of Tolkien and you hamstring an entire genre, possibly even deal it a mortal blow. I suppose the Euro mythology was already there inviting something, but for many hundreds of years that something never really developed until Tolkien (& CS Lewis).
So my preference is for keeping Middle Earth. My wife would disagree, of course. I introduced her to TOS so she would get more laughs out of The Big Bang Theory and she couldn’t stop watching. Evidently Shattner’s sex appeal spans generations as well as species.
Noreascon in '71 I think was fairly large, and Boskone in '70 was a bit larger than a few dozen. Not that bigger is always better. The hypothetical would still have Star Wars to push attendance in any case.
If the genre is all sf, true. If the genre was sf TV, no. I watched ST from the first show, which started when I was in high school, and no non-anthology sf show came even close to creating a believable world with some reasonable underlying technology. TOS was much lighter on the pull it out of your ass tech babble than the later shows.
Those are not qualifiers, they are the defining traits. Read again. And I needn’t even have included “high-quality” or “interstellar,” any space opera (as a series, I don’t mean Twilight Zone episodes) was practically new to the little screen. (Lost in Space was space opera and interstellar, if not high-quality; but it was of origin contemporaneous with ST, and it was not seminal.)
Weellll . . . at least it rates a 2 on the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.
It was just a link to a YouTube video, done by the animator Harry Partridge.
But the fact that it crashed your browser does suggest interference from the Elder Gods.
This thread saddens me. Not so much the choice of Star Trek over Middle Earth, but the number of people saying “I’ve never read LotR and have no interest in doing so.”
I can understand not loving it. I can understand intending to read it but never getting to it. But to have no interest whatsoever is just… wrong.
I’m not a big Tolkien nerd. I’m not even a big book nerd. But there are some things that have had such a big impact on our culture that to ignore them entirely seems almost perverse. I’d gladly read every book on some decent “top 100 ever” kind of list (I don’t have one in mind). I might not especially enjoy all of them, or even most of them. With some I’ll probably wonder what the fuss is about and call them overrated. I might not read 90 of them again. But at least I’d have given them a chance and experienced an important little slice of our culture.
Incidentally, I find LotR quite difficult to put down, once you get a few chapters in. It’s not quite the slow and difficult read many seem to imagine it to be.
Oh, and in case it wasn’t obvious, I chose the second option, although I did recently return from watching Into Darkness and found it to be quite enjoyable. Not as good as the previous film though.
I love LOTR. Adore the world of Middle Earth. My life would be and would have been much poorer without it. I would miss Star Trek’s 2nd movie “The Wrath of Khan”. but I could live without it.
Started to type stuff but they pretty much expressed all my thoughts on the subject. As much as I loved Star Trek, it was Tolkien’s work that really set off my love of fantasy which then led me to Science Fiction. Something else Trek-like would have taken its place … maybe some kind of war in the stars?
I’ve spent way more happy hours playing games with a group of humans, elves and dwarves going on quests than I have playing games with a space captain, a space scientist and a space doctor flying from planet to planet. Sorry, Star Trek.
Looking around, I’ve found that one of Roddenberry’s main inspirations for Star Trek was Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which was also a significant influence on J.R.R. So, take out Jonathan Swift and modern imaginative storytelling gets seriously Lilliputted.
What definition of “fiction” do you subscribe to?
If scientific fact is your measuring stick, you’ve discounted almost every book by every SF author.
ETA: ninja’d, I see
I’m just glad that Skald was kind enough to add the ‘Why isn’t erasing LucasFilm an option?’ option. This is a very difficult decision to make. I have been a proponent of the “Star Trek inspired an entire generation of engineers and scientists” school of thought, if only to justify my fanboy tendencies. However, this was also the same generation that grew up watching the space race and knowing the names of all of the original Seven astronauts. So, it is possible that some other SF series would have come into existence sans Star Trek. Whether it would be virtually immortal in terms of TV/Movie franchises and still be an active property in the 2nd decade of the 21st century is hard to imagine. Star Trek filled a special place in many people’s hearts and minds of that era. We saw a future world that was beyond the nuclear spectre of death. An entire interstellar Federation comprised of multiple alien species who cooperated to create something that one species could not do so alone. During a time of bleak despair (and I do not overstate this, as I was there and at the age of 8 was pretty much ready for those darned Russians to H-bomb Atlanta any minute now) Star Trek gave us a hope that things might work out eventually.
I read Professor Tolkien’s works when I was in my early teens. I learned how to write in Elvish runes and by that improved my penmanship. Even now, when people want something calligraphed, I can do so rather effortlessly. The study of those fictional languages also directed my course towards linguistics and the subsequent studies led to my degrees. That was what the professor wanted when he created these tales. They weren’t written for profit as much as they were born of Professor Tolkien’s desire to create a truly ‘English’ mythos. One based upon Scandinavian roots, apparently, but English nevertheless. And he did so spectacularly well.
I would be a much different man without the influence of both of these mythoi. So, again, I thank Skald the Rhymer for the option to potentially remove the disease that is Lucas from our consensual reality.
Again, that settles it. See post #19.
Sorry if I sound bitter, but, you know what really makes me mad? When I go to the public library, and I browse in the “New Books” section looking specifically for those books with the “SF” label on their spines, and every single one I find there so labeled is fantasy! :mad:
Some librarians (probably not the majority, though) claim SF is an abbreviation for “Speculative Fiction”, hoping to mitigate this inconsistancy.