Crap… posted too soon. I meant to add “if that is what you’re getting at” to my last paragraph.
ARGH! You post too fast, Fibber McGee! I keep responding to your posts only to find that you slipped another one in before I even finished. Gah.
Anyway, can you explain what you’re trying to get at? I don’t understand what the number of Trek books has to do with SW books possibly being canon.
It’s all about sex.
Trek has James T’s space-studliness, green chicks, Vulcan finger sex, fully functional androids and klingon mating rituals.
SW has sibling attraction, Solos tight pants, kissing wookies, gay robots and Leia’s slave chick look.
All the prattle about technology and mythology is just sublimated sex drive fantasies.
What makes a better interstellar f*ck-pad? The Falcon or the Enterprise?
Make your pick and get shaggin’
Read “The Physics of Star Trek”, by Lawrence M. Krauss. Sure Star Trek stuff is made up, but it’s not just gibberish; it’s actually based on science. Star Wars, on the other hand…
Poof! I am summoned!
Lucasfilms considers the novels - or EU - to be “quasi-canon”, or “official,” and Lucas is on record as describing the EU as an “alternate universe” unless it doesn’t interfere with the information he puts in his movies. In other words, the Star Wars books and novels are just as good as canon… as long as they don’t contradict the movies (or the novelisations or scripts of the movies, or the radio dramas). In that case, that particular piece of information from the EU is ignored.
Blowero…
Sorry, sir, but I scoff. There is no scientific basis for phasers, there is no scientific basis for Trek’s depiction of “warp drive” (current models require exotic matter and “negative mass”… Trek’s model simply requires a large power source and “subspace”), there is no scientific basis for Trek’s depiction of energy shields, there is no scientific basis for Trek’s depiction of force fields, there is no scientific basis for such remarkably craptacular technobabble fantasies such as “thalaron radiation” or “energy beings” (that, despite being composed of energy, move slower than light…).
In other words, “The Physics of Star Trek” is a Trekkie wankfest.
An addendum to the issue of canonicity above…
Paramount, in stark contrast to Lucasfilm, does not consider ANY of the Trek novels (with two exceptions) to have ANY canon status whatsoever. Only what is shown onscreen in the TV shows (and those two novels, and a short excerpt from the animated cartoon) are canon.
Krauss points out that much of the “technology” in Star Trek is impossible, and explains how different much of the rest of the ideas would actually look. He doesn’t, of course, address such absurd ideas as phasers that sometimes evaporate people without any trace (or damage to surrounding props), and sometimes aren’t fatal.
SPOOFE, the book mentioned does explain why warp drives and transporters could never work. Off-hand, I can’t remember specifically what he says about shields (that can be penetrated if you just turn your weapon the right way) and forcefields.
My own personal interpretation of “canon” as it relates to SW and Trek (and to a lesser extent other long-running series or franchises, like Babylon 5 or Doctor Who) is it’s just the people who own the whole show saying, “Within this entirely fictional universe, this is what ‘really happened’ and the rest are just ‘imaginary stories’*.”
But “imaginary” or not, those stories are still out there and follow most or all of the same basic prinicples as the tv shows/movies they’re based on.
This all seems to have started when someone said, basically, “The only reason ST has more psuedo-science crap in it than SW is because ST’s canon consists of more material.”
If someone wants to determine how much crap has come about as a result of the existence of Star Wars, they shouldn’t ignore something - the video games, the novels, the comic books, the Droids and Ewoks cartoons, that mind-numbingly bad Ewoks tv-movie from about a decade ago - just because it isn’t “canon”. None of these things would exist without the movies, and surely there’s enough psuedo-science mystical mumbo jumbo technobabble within these “non-canon” materials for them not to be simply ignored when it comes time to score up Star Wars’ crimes against good sense and taste.
I guess the problem here is that canon in relation to ST and SW just doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to me. If I read a good story set in the ST universe, I’m not gonna somehow think less of it than I would a good episode of a Trek series just because some producer or studio executive says is isn’t “canon”.
- I use this term in the same context that it was often used to describe the wacky what-if style stories common to the Superman comics of the 1950’s and 60’s.
Dabo!
I have a similar book - “The Biology of Star Trek”. The author’s an admitted Trekker but doesn’t pull any punches on ripping the Trek universe a new hole. Anything that’s implausible and/or impossible is stated as such.
In other words, anyone picking up the book to have themselves reassured that Star Trek technology will be possible in x amount of years will be severely disillusioned.
Yeah, I know it isn’t the same book but at least this is proof that not every Trekker out there thinks Roddenberry’s future is infailable.
Actually, I think the relaunch of the DS9 series is considered canon. It’s really interesting too… pick it up.
Pick up the “Biology of Star Trek”… I’m pretty sure the author tackles this issue. She said something along the lines of it being similar to an atomic bomb going off and having the person next to it being totally unaffected.
And Fibber McGee… I see what you’re saying but I’m of a different cloth. I love reading the Trek books as much as I love watching the shows and movies but when I read the novels, I know whatever I’m reading is basically a what if story. Yes, I know the whole Trek universe is imaginary to begin with but I’m an anal retentive geek. 
That’s not the main crime. For many of the comics and such, what bothers me is the instance on taking the Star Wars universe and making it smaller. It seems that the latest trend in SW comics is to draw the names of two characters out of a hat, and then write a story about them. “This is a story about when (pull slip from hat) Bossk met (pull another slip) Aunt Beru on (pull another slip) Kamino.” I’m sure the authors think this is exceedingly pomo and clever, but to me it’s silly, and, as I said, it makes the universe smaller and less interesting.
Similar to the WEG Star Wars game. In 1977, the aliens in the cantina were a bunch of average joes having a drink. Thanks to WEG, half of them were working for the Empire, half were working for the Rebellion. That’s stupid. What was good about the universe is that it was big, and there was no reason to believe these guys were linked to the struggle at all. Having them all playing some kind of part in the main conflict is dumb, in my opinion.
Star Trek’s more recent novels are becoming more and more guilty of that as well, Legomancer. It annoys the living hell out of me… especially in the crossover books where somehow the same menace that’s affecting Kirk in the 23rd Century is also affecting Picard and Sisko in the 24th and Janeway out in the Delta Quadrant.
Now that Enterprise is added to the mix, I don’t even want to think about it… AUGH.
It’s science fiction not science fact. The point is that it’s not just gobbledygook, as you guys seem to think. Antimatter could, in theory, be used as a power source. They didn’t just say “Scotty, put some more magic juice in the thing to make the ship go faster”. And the only conceivable way to get anywhere in the galaxy is to go faster than light. Otherwise they would have been stuck in our solar system and it would have been an extremely boring show. You can’t go faster than light without warping space. They didn’t just say “Fire the super-fast rockets”. Krauss DOES explain how one might theoretically create a space warp. Obviously we don’t know how to do it, but that doesn’t make the whole idea just gibberish.
You know, the fact that some of the things depicted in Trek might be possible doesn’t change the fact that when you compare they way they’re depicted in Trek to scientific reality, they might as well say, “Scotty, put some more magic juice in the thing to make the ship go faster” or “Fire the super-fast rockets” for all the difference it makes.
That’s the problem. Many Trek fans are under the illusion that Trek is based on hard science, and that things like warp engines and transporters and phasers and replicators and holodecks are possible exactly as depicted and will one day exist.
The truth is, Trek is magic and mysticism dressed in scientific drag. Throwing in a few scientific terms and loosely basing some of your stuff on existing scientific theories doesn’t make it any less impossible, it just tricks a few overzealous geeks into thinking otherwise.
As you yourself said, it’s science fiction - heavy empasis on the fiction.
Well, if you know of a “scientifically realistic” way to travel faster than the speed of light, I’m sure there are a lot of people who would be interested in knowing about it.:rolleyes:
Well then they’re idiots. I personally don’t know anyone who believes such a thing.
But I still think it was different than Star Wars, which is in essence a fairy tale set in space. I don’t think it tries to be anything else. While Star Trek was certainly fast and loose with scientific realism, Star Wars didn’t even attempt any sort of scientific explanation at all. Star Wars is pure fantasy, which is why it’s so wildly popular. I don’t understand why people always want to compare the two - to me it’s apples and oranges.
Whatever. :rolleyes:
Oddly enough, I find both of the “shows” mentioned here fascinating, and fun.
However, they are fiction.
In the end, neither is any better than the other, period. No matter how much SPOOFE wants it to be, Star Wars isn’t better than Star Trek, and vice versa. They are both made up universes, with made up rules.
One takes a technophile view, the other technophobic, but other than that, there’s no real hard core difference.
To debate anything else is mental masturbation.
Yeah, pretty much, but despite the utter pointlessness of them, debates like this continue to rage and the reason is obvious: ST and SW are the pinnacle of popular Sci-Fi, each with a large and fiercely loyal fandom, and the result is the predictable back-and-forth of us vs. them when realistically, there’s no reason in the world you can’t like both.
Which means that it uses fictional science. But what if that fictional science is internally inconsistent?
It is indeed gobbledygook, as I will subsequently prove.
There’s no “in theory” about it. However, a baseball-sized chunk of antimatter, when brought in contact with a similarly-sized chunk of antimatter, will NEVER, EVER, EVER create a large enough explosion to “blow the atmosphere off a planet”, as was claimed in one TOS episode.
We know how antimatter works. We know PRECISELY how much energy you can possibly glean from an annihilatory reaction of deuterium and anti-deuterium. In Star Trek, this particular fact of science is constantly ignored, and the amount of energy available to the ship fluctuates regularly and wildly.
Right. However, the Warp system itself is internally inconsistent, which tells me that the writers put ZERO effort whatsoever into maintaining internal consistency.
For example, in Star Trek V, the Enterprise travels to the center of the galaxy, some 40000 lightyears. However, in Voyager, it was stated that it would take the ship 75 years to travel 70000 lightyears… roughly 1000 lightyears in a single year. In other words, in ST5, the movie should have taken place over the course of 4 decades, at best.
Such inconsistencies are seen throughout the series… such as in DS9, where characters routinely return to Earth for a week (the trip from the Bajorran system to the Sol system should have taken a couple years in and of itself), or when the Enterprise is depicted as travelling from the Romulan Neutral Zone to Earth (First Contact) in a matter of hours (again, it should have taken years).
When there is an inconsistency in the observations, you know that you have a bad explanation. Clearly, we have a bad explanation. This is not science, fictional or otherwise. This is bad writing. Bad writing that ruined a good series.
Beside the point. As I pointed out, ST’s depiction of how Warp works - by using “subspace” somehow - goes contrary to any real life theories of a “warp” engine.
Again, it would be good (fictional) science if it were internally consistent. It is not. Ergo, I declare it to be ludicrous.
Any “scientifically realistic” way to travel faster than light would be consistent in its observable patterns. Star Trek’s Warp travel is not.
Actually, I consider Star Trek and Star Wars to be very similar, in that both are Space Opera more than anything else. The difference is, as I pointed out earlier, that George Lucas has never put much effort into trying to make his little romp seem like it’s even TRYING to be “hard” sci-fi. It gives the audience fun little gadgets that are cool as hell, and never, EVER bothers trying to explain how they work. In my opinion, this is the best way to go about it.
Star Trek writers, on the other hand, thinks that by throwing the word “quantum” into the script at least nine times per episode, it magically becomes “realistic”.
BUT it is VERY consistent (well, the movies are, anyway). Hyperdrive is “very fast”, turbolasers do “lots of damage”, Star Destroyers are “very big”, the Force is “very powerful”. So what if we’re not told that they emit a Phase Variance in the Tachyonic Induction Grid in Starboard Manifold 5-7C, accessible from Jeffries Tube Alpha-9?
To clear up my final sentence… it’s better to give NO explanation than a BAD explanation.
May the Farce be with you.