In which I diss Star Wars AND Star Trek

Cafe Society
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And diss them both for doing something, not badly, but well.

What Star Wars and Star Trek have done is combined to give the future a “look and feel.” They’ve actually formatted our vision of the future. We “know” what starships will look like. We “know” what settlements on othe worlds will look like. And it’s all very much the same – wealthy interstellar societies will have huge megastructures in space (the Death Star, the space dockyards in Trek I) huge metropolises on the ground, and plenty of cheap air transportation (Lucas’ vision is arguably well ahead of everyone else’s in this regard).

To understand what I’m talking about, take a look at an SF series or SF movies that predate them: there just is no unified vision of the future, or what the future might be. “The Outer Limits” anthology TV series is what got me thinking about this: their eps are often more powerful because they have no fixed vision of what the future might be, what aliens might be like, what other planets might be like. They have that “sense of wonder” to a much greater degree than ST or SW because you have the sense that the aliens might turn out to be anything, the monsters might be anything (in this respect, Outer Limits was far ahead of movie SF with its endless parade of big radioactive thisnthats) and a strange new planet is exactly that, rather than just another iteration on a familiar pattern of colonies/alien empires/primitive planets, etc.

Written SF presents the same problem because modern stories rely on familiar “furniture” established by SF tradition. It’s harder and harder to get to the mind-bursting explosions of wonder created by stories like “Microcosmic God” and “Nightfall.”

Don’t get me wrong. A lot of the written SF of that era, and some Outer Limits episodes, were crap, pure and simple. But mixed in with that crap was a suprisingly high number of stories where the writer had snagged on to a chunk of the Unknown, had had a vision that significantly altered the sense of what the universe might be like, or what being human might actually mean, or some combination of the two that really gave you the viewer (or reader) a sense of wonder. I think that’s what gave SF its incredible energy as a genre from the 30s through the 60s.

You still see flashes of the original sense of wonder in some writers. I think William Gibson captured some of it in his stories. Vernor Vinge, too. And maybe John Varley more than the others, especially in his story “Persistence of Vision.”

But I think the familiarity of the future as portrayed on SW and ST mitigates against that. I suspect that if you want to recapture the old sense of wonder, you have to either explore some new and little known tech’s possibilities, and follow them to the logical conclusions (Greg Bear did this with nanotech) rather than think along conventional lines, or perhaps go back to the old stories and see if you can use them to spark some entirely new line of thought that will produce a new wonder.

That’d be worth doing.

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Try Hyperion by Dan Simmons (and at least its first sequel),
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge,
And the Dune books contain the kind of thing you’re looking for, as well, I believe.
The movie “The American Astronaut” presents a very “different” vision of the future in several senses. Though it is probably self-consciously responding to the cookie-cutter vision of the future which you’ve referenced. It’s really not at all what you’re looking for, now that I think of it. Still, watch the movie: it’s fun. :slight_smile:

-FrL-

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FWIW, George Lucas weaseled around this by setting Star Wars “Long ago in a galaxy far, far away.” I do see your point, though.

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I love Varley, but I don’t consider that story to be science fiction.

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I think landing on the moon had about the same effect - it both broadened our horizons while tightly defining what technological progress meant. Ditto for the Space Shuttle, cloning, personal computers and bionic implants.

Regarding Star Wars and Star Trek - aside from the setting and the hardware, I don’t think they present much actual science fiction (though ST has done some marvelous stuff from time to time.) Change the backdrops and props and the names, and suddenly you’re watching a Tom Clancy movie. Sheer escapist fantasy (though often better made than Clancy can do IMHO.)

This may sound obvious, but for the classic “sense of wonder” feeling, you really need to go back to the early stuff by the masters: Niven and Heinlein, Asimov, some others. I’ve found that a lot of it is still quite current.

I also think that, for exploring really new modern themes, you can’t beat short fiction. The books that tend to stay on my shelf are the sci-fi anthologies. The Full Specrum series is still a favorite, as are many of the World’s Best Science Fiction volumes (edited by Gardner Dozois). There have been some other anthologies edited by Orson Scott Card that have been good, but the titles escape me.

I also agree with the OP, there are just a few modern sci-fi authors who can capture that feeling - Vernor Vinge and Greg Bear are among them, as are Terry Bisson, Greg Benford, David Brin and a few others. (Why yes, I do find myself in the “B” section more often than not.)

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Never liked Dune or Hyperion. Tried 'em both of course, but I was turned off big time by their rampant religiosity. Also, I extremely disliked Arab culture, even before 9/11, and since Dune is heavily based on Arab culture, I found myself snorting and rolling my eyes a LOT when I read it. Not too crazy about Catholicism either, and there’s a LOT of that underneath Hyperion. So it’s prolly just me on those scores.

I didn’t feel either story brought anything new to SF in the area of sense of wonder, would be interested to know your thoughts on the topic. Could be I missed something.

Completely with you on Vinge though.

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I think what makes it science fiction is that it takes a science fictional approach to its subject. Varley has imagined what we all think of as a disability and reimagined it as a different but still powerful way of experiencing the universe. I would consider it the pure-dee, full-strength, balls-to-the-walls sense of wonder SF stuff. None better. And some of his stories in “Steel Beach” come close to it.

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Yes, knowing how things actually look in space gave the moviemakers the chance to create more “realistic” spacecraft on the one hand, and limited them in terms of how they’d imagine spacecraft on the other hand (though it’s not too hard to come up with original ideas if you put even a LITTLE effort into it – in my novel Karg I have a spaceship shaped like a child’s bead bracelet, with the ion drive supsended in the middle. I have other spaceships built by AIs devised by humans but far beyond human intelligence, that look like nothing a human would or could device. But so many spaceships in the movies look like boxy things cobbled from model kits.)

Well, with ST you’re all over the map, but Star Wars while it has some original ideas, is basically medieval fantasy set in space.

Actually, some of the stuff dating from 1910-1950 is full of sense of wonder, even if the understanding of science is a little vague. OK, in many instances, a LOT vague. 1919’s The Girl In the Golden Atom is a great example. A little handwaving about the infinite nature of space, and pretty soon you have scientists finding tiny, very pretty girls taking showers inside scratches on their wedding bands. The City of the Singing Flame has a similar wild “anything could happen” feel to it.

You are problably right, though I haven’t been keeping up with short stories for a long time. Last one I read was Aldiss’ “Galactic Empires” volumes 1 and 2, which were great fun, but not a lot of modern stuff in them.

Add Iain Banks to that “B” list of writers. Kinda interesting … I’ve noticed the same clustering. Wonder what’s up with that.

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Evil, I recommend you check out Robert Charles Wilson. Read his latest novel Spin and it’ll dump a truckload of sense of wonder on your head.

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Well, his last name starts with “W” not “B” but I’m broad-minded about this sort of thing.

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While I think that your argument does have some merit, I think that the situation isn’t quite as cut and dried as you make it out to be. Star Trek has always presented us with a clean and rather sterile vision of the future. Star Wars has a slightly grubbier look to it (which is one of it’s selling points, IMHO), but even then, it’s morality is clear-cut. Contrast that with a film like Blade Runner where the future’s dirty and one’s moral actions aren’t quite so clear-cut. Mind you, I haven’t read much science fiction since Robert Heinlein died and then what I’ve read has been primarily Philip K. Dick, but I don’t think that Star Wars and Star Trek have any greater impact on things that some of the stuff which appeared in the past.

When A Princess of Mars and The Skylark of Space first appeared in print, both of them had a huge impact on the science fiction of the day, some of which can still be seen today. Eventually, though, the influence faded, and we saw a flurishing of other forms of science fiction.

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His friends call him Bob.

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Yeah… I’d say you’re missing something, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to “get it” when it comes to these books if you couldn’t get past the fact that there are groups in these books which subscribe to cultural systems you don’t like.

When you talk about Dune’s “rampant religiosity,” do you mean to say it seems to you that the book is fundamentally religious? Or rather, do you mean to say it deals with religious themes? The latter I would agree with, but would not be able to understand how this constitutes a criticism. The former I would disagree with.

-FrL-

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I’d also suggest that Dune, which was published forty-one years ago, is hardly an example of a recent work of science fiction. Hyperion, for that matter, was published seventeen years ago.

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I wasn’t trying to give examples of recent science fiction.

-FrL-

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I suspect that EC suscribes to the very Trekkie belief that religion will no longer exist in The Future. Simmons and Herbert take a different view on the matter; to say, however, that the writers are themselves pro-religion (at least in an orthodox sense) indicates a lack of familiarity with the material - for instance, the idea that Dan Simmons is in any way a fan of the Catholic church is patently absurd.

Anyway to each his own. I find Ian Banks and David Brin practically unreadable, myself. A science fiction writer is first and foremost a writer, and if he or she can’t write prose, characters or plot, I don’t care how good their ideas are.

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Star Wars and Star Trek are two very specific types of sf. Star Wars is a great cinematic version of '40s science fiction. It’s no accident that Lucas got Leigh Brackett to work on Empire - the monster in the asteroid sequence is just right out of '40s space opera.

Star Trek was as close to Analog style hard sf as TV would allow. Analog ran a very complimentary article on it while TOS was still running. TOS was the first sf series to have anything like a believable universe. It was the first sf series you could live in, which I think explains fandom. I like Outer Limits when it was on, but they were short stories and not a novel - and TOS was more like a novel, or a continuing series, where you could get into the characters.

So, neither were particularly original, but gave viewers the kind of experience we got from the Lensmen series of Heinlein’s future history, or Foundation. I don’t think they block other universes, except for taking up a godawful amount of space on the shelves.

BTW, I never much liked Dune either, and relgion had nothing to do with it. I’ve found Herbert an awful writer, even for sf.

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Religion exist in the Trekverse so long as you’re not talking about mainstream western religions like Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. They devoted at least one episode of Voyager to Chacotay’s proselytizing of his animist beliefs as well as many episodes that featured alien religions some of which even showed those religions to be based on fact (ie. worm hole aliens and Kahless the Klingon).

Marc

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Ture. However, in the examples given, Simmons portrays a future in which Catholicism, Judaism and Islam still exist, albeit as minority religions alongside invented faiths, while Herbert deals extensively with a belief system clearly based on Sufi Islam.

Incidentally, the series’ approach to religion is one of the reasons I loved Babylon 5. Does anyone remember the episode in the first season where each culture on the station was supposed to give a presentation of its religious beliefs - and how Earth handled the obvious problems?

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I’ll just make the observation that some great SF is set in cultures that no reader from our era could possibly like. It makes for some interesting stories. A lot of good litterature is set in cultures whose values we can’t possibly agree with - you don’t need to go any further back than to the 19th century, or even the 1950s for some of us - but that doesn’t automatically make these works any less enjoyable.

If you only read books about agreeable characters and cultures, there isn’t exactly a great deal to chose from. Dystopias in SF outnumber utopias and it’s not hard to see why. They’re simply more interesting.

Besides, Dune and Hyperion are not religious books. They contain religious characters and cultures, but the message is not a pious one. You’ll find a more religious message in the works of C.S. Lewis, for instance. And how could you possibly write an epic story without touching on these subjects in any way? Even in contemporary American society religion is extremely important for many.