I was under the impression that before Star Trek, it was pretty much a given in SF that humans would be traveling the galaxy in chromed-over V2 rockets, while aliens would favor saucer-shaped craft. Earth would be covered in Art Deco skyscrapers, while domed structures would be considered more fashionable on the Moon and Mars. In fact I have several coffee-table books’ worth of SF art that appear to falsify the argument that there was no unified “look” for the future before Star Trek. If you’re looking for a scapegoat for lack of originality in SF design, you probably need to make Alex Raymond your whipping boy.
Yeah, the OP’s statements about Dune and Hyperion botherd me all night, and I got up early today (but apparently not early enough!) to post about it. These books go out of their way to describe how religion is a tool for the elite to control the masses. Not exactly cheerleading Catholic or Islamic ideals, there.
But the primary objective about fiction is for entertainment, and if the OP is put off by reading about religious people, then that’s his decision.
I’m a fairly religious guy myself, and if someone were to go on a diatribe about how my religion is bogus and constructed to keep the sheep in line, I’d shut them out pretty quick. But put it in fiction, and I’ll happily indulge in it, along with silvery spaceships and green-skinned women. IOW, let me pick the message I take with me.
BTW, both Dune and Hyperion Cantos (comprising both Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion) are permanant hardcover fixtures in my library at home. Excellent stuff, and I get something new out of them every time.
Blade Runner had a visual influence all right – filmmakers realized that if you kept things dark and dingy in your film, you didn’t need to spend so much on sets and special effects. A lot of cheap SF movies got made that way. Everybody else went with the ST/SW look. Espeically TV. Battlestar Galactica (all iterations). Buck Rogers. And especially the Star Trek TV series … shameless imitators of themselves, every one.
I agree that Princess of Mars had a huge influence on the SF of the day, especially the visual stuff – it’s obvious that the folks who made Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers glommed on to Burroughs’ fantastic adventure concept big time, not to mention the makers of those relatively obscure Republic serials like Radio Men from the Moon.
I mean it has religious themes. But it’s mostly the medieval Arab culture in space that I dislike. I read it all the way through, and thought medieval Arab culture in space was an original idea, especially as opposed to medieval European culture in space that’s way too commonplace but as for sequels, pfui. One medieval culture – whether European, Arabic or Japanese – is about as stupid as another.
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I suspect that EC suscribes to the very Trekkie belief that religion will no longer exist in The Future.
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No, I’m just a hardcore atheist. I have no idea whether religion will survive in the future, though I hope it doesn’t. If it does, I’d hope it would be something a lot less obviously stupid than the current batch of Great Sky Fairies. But I don’t hold it as an article of faith that any such thing will happen. So long as you have ignorant people, you’ll probably have religion.
You don’t have to be pro-religious to suffuse your stuff with religious influence. There are a lot of lapsed Catholic writers whose worldview is profoundly Catholic. It’s boring to me. I mean, imagine that you’re a rational atheist and you lived in a world where everyone believed the universe was carried on the back of the Green Dinosaur who Knows All, and that all wisdom derived from that Green Dinosaur and was carried into the world by the Great Parrot (i.e, it’s really obvious bullshit) and even people who professed not to believe in them wrote in metaphors about the Great Parrot and the Green Dinosaur and their many homilies and sayings that unites them. After awhile, you’d be sick of it, if you didn’t share their beliefs. So while Hyperion isn’t exactly a clarion call to Catholic faith, it’s so full of the Green Dinosaur and so forth that … ech.
Brin’s a weak writer. Banks is as good as they come. Has had considerable success in the mainstream as well as SF.
The starships we see in ST and SW are variations of the ships we saw for decades before that, going back at least to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic books. Beasts with some sense of a direction of “down” for which there has been no excuse for about a half-century now, at least where long-term interstellar travel is concerned.
As far as huge metropolises on the ground with cheap air travel, have you seen, oh, I don’t know, Metropolis?
I’m not trying to diss your preferences, just trying to frame the discussion here. The specific things you describe have been the trappings of immensely popular sci-fi for the better part of a century. ST and SW may have given a more solid vision to those trappings than has existed before, but they really weren’t presenting us with anything all that new.
You just don’t like the mainstream.
I don’t know what you mean by “block other universes” but I do think a lot of filmmakers looked at SW and ST and said, “I want my spaceships/future cities, etc., to look kinda like that.” And they do. Of course, some of it might be Industrial Light and Magic recycling sets and props and so forth for filmmaker clients.
the things that i disliked about st (sws didnt expect to be taken seriously on a moral level so i wont be slagging them off lol !) were firstly that even though it was set many years into the future the moral values were those totally of 20th cent american ,middle class liberals ,sickeningly naive and sentimental at times , secondly that the “aliens” ,apart from looking incredibly similar to earthlings !used the same gestures ,had the same emotional attributes as humans : laughter ,smiles , kissing,sadness etc. and those that didnt secretly aspired to having human emotions , including members of the borg !you just KNOW that spock secretly wanted a sense of humour and as for that android "uncle tom " data his ass kiss ing around humans was just nauseating ! for cliffs sake show a bit of pride in your robot heritage humanoid ! my third and second to last moan is that the "space " experience ,the boldly going into the unknown with all its dangers and hardships was totally sanitised and as a result there was very little sense of adventure ,(im excluding voyager from this particular criticism ) using the transporter to go planet side! , being able to have instantaneous face to face conversations with people back on earth(let alone other ships ) without any static,visual distortion etc. recreating anywhere in the universe in the holo deck for your entertainment ! unlimited food and drink of any kinds in the known universe available to you ! absaloutly huge suites of cabins for apparently all crew members !add to that the shirt sleeve enviroment (nary a space suit in sight ) it gives you more the impression of a cruise on a luxury liner then roughing it on a dangerous mission into the unknown ,that is if you can imagine it to be in space at all ,they certainly live a much more comfortable life style then i do back on earth ! and lastly (youll be glad to hear lol !) the way in which the senior officer after giving an ORDER is quite happy when junior crew members have a little chat about the order with him /her giving their opinion on the order .....if they approved or disaproved ,little ways it could be improved or if they were strongly against it arguing for its countermanding and sulking if it wasnt !all without any apparent fear of disciplinary action ,rightly so as they mostly didnt get any (though in very,very serious !one might say mutinous cases even ) they could be sent to their cabins for a little while . such egalitarianism seems just a wee bit out of place in a highly trained , disciplined military force ,particulary as they are operating on the frontiers of the unknown where every command has a life or death aspect to it . yep !that feels REALLY good now that ive got all that off of my chest ! yes sireeee!
Oh Evil Captor… you just need a hug.
I agree with your criticism, but it’s very hard to get too far away from the culture of your audience and still have an audience. Remember, TV is a mass medium and America is a very insular country. I do think some well-thought-out nonhuman cultures with their own sets of behaviors would have been good, but I’m not all that upset that they didn’t achieve as much there as they did in other respects.
Yeah, Pinocchio syndrome sucks. Happens almost anytime a robot character occurs in any movie or TV show. I’m with you on this one.
I’m not with you on this one. As a general rule, the tendency in ships is to be larger and have larger accommodations for the crew, including creature comforts, is the way things have happened historically. Columbus discovered America in a set of what we’d now consider three slightly oversized rowboats with sails. More advanced tech of the future may well include stuff like holo decks and food assemblers and whatnot. There’s no telling what the economics of interstellar spacecraft and habitat manufacturing will be like in the future, or what the necessities of attack and defense will lead to in terms of ship size and construction, but it seems that giant ships with plenty of room for the crew may be one valid outcome.
I’d say that might be the product of advances in social engineering in the future. Just because it worked for Rome and the armies of World War II doesn’t mean it’s the best or only way to run a military.
Gee, thanks. Sometimes you’d think the people who made TOS knew slash would happen one day.