Funny, but I ignored BSG until the continued rave reviews (about halfway through S1) drew me in BECAUSE of the old series.
It was bad. All these nerds screaming about Starbuck being a woman? All the changes the evil Ron Moore was making to the canon? Who cares? The original show SUCKED ASS.
-Joe
Yes, many science fiction novelests do it all the time. The problem is in getting the 'tards that run the studios to go for the idea. One thing that could work (if done properly) and AFAIK, hasn’t been really done in a series format is humans tearing around the solar system. Keep the tech fairly simple (say 10+ years more advanced than what we have now), hire decent writers and actors and go for it.
Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as “Wagon Train in space,” there’s no reason we couldn’t do that in the solar system. Sure, you’re not going to have aliens as a source of conflict, but there’s plenty of human conflict that can be exploited. You can have nations vying for resources in space against one another, or you can put a multi-national crew on the same ship/base/station and hash out the conflicts which would naturally occur when you cram wildly different people into a small space. Add a dash of technical problems every now and then, and you’ve got drama.
My apologies, Tuckerfan, but your story holds absolutely no interest for me. If I wanted to hear about humans interacting with humans…there’s a gazillion stories out there. I want aliens and really wild unusual things or no go.
The 2001 series degenerated, IMO, into exactly this - a bunch of disgustingly annoying humans who couldn’t put aside their personal and selfish issues for three seconds in order to get something done. I am still disgusted when I think back to that series and how mad it made me.
The Babylon 5 spinoff, Crusade was sort-of like that. Rather glum, though. And swiftly canceled, of course.
It all comes from a reaction to Star Trek. The idea of the producers is: “Hey! You know how in Star Trek the Federation is everywhere, but benevolent? In our show, why don’t we have an eeeeeeevil government that wants to oppress our heroes, and we can make all these points about the abuse of authority in government, and it’ll be awesome…”
It makes sci-fi on TV a little monotonous, though.
Yes, well, most of 2010 was just a set up for the deux ex machina (or should that be E.T. ex machina?) at the end.
Remember, the aliens in the original Trek were just a candy shell to disguise the serious social issues of the day that Trek was addressing. Dealing with things like racism/sexism/etc. on prime TV back in the 60s was pretty risky. Trek allowed people to think about it, without actually thinking about it, if you know what I mean.
One of the ways you could structure the show is to have various groups leaving Earth and settling on Mars, the Moon and various asteriods for their own reasons. Some could be members of a religious sect, others could be out there for political reasons, still more could be scientific researchers, and another military forces. Interacting with all these groups could be traders, who are amoral wretches simply out to make a buck and having to get along with everyone and work out deals when Group A refuses to deal with Group B, but the only way the traders can make a profit is by selling what Group A produces to Group B.
You get diversity, conflict, and you don’t necessarily have to have everyone acting like jackasses all the time. Done one way, you could simply file the serial numbers off of an episode of a TV show like Law & Order one week, the next week file them off of a MASH** episode, then a Tour of Duty episode, or a Desperate Housewives, or what have you. Done another way, you could have it be like Wall Street and corporate greed. A third way (and one that would be the most difficult to keep it interesting, but would be utterly unique in TV, I think) would be to make it a faux-reality show. Sort of like World’s Deadliest Catch (or whatever that show about Alaskan fishermen is called) in space.
I don’t know… sounds good. How 'bout we put the main character in some sort of freeze/hibernation for a while, and when he wakes up, have it be just him, some artificial intelligences, maybe some distant offspring of a lost character that has evolved far beyond recognition. Maybe a robot, too. They could be flying around with some sort of ramjet/ion propulsion system to keep things from getting too science-fictiony. Oh, and lots of vindaloo.
Vindaloo?! I hope that isn’t a reference to my ethnicity. :dubious: I could never eat vindaloo anyway, we say in my family that’s for crazy white people.
It’s a joke, people, relax.
Tucker I read your description with great care and while I admit your further exposition does make it more interesting, I can’t say it makes it perfect. Hmm.
It bothers me because all of that stuff is happening, in real life. Why would I want to watch a TV show about it? I can already look around me and see people arguing over things like religion, trade, commerce, etc. What I want is the added element of the exotic. It’s hard to pin down, but let’s put it this way - if there isn’t magic I don’t really want any of it. Magic can mean robots, aliens, paranormal activity - what-have-you.
The shows you listed; I don’t watch any of them.
Buuuuuut…if you could somehow structure the show so people were neither jackasses nor stupid, then I might like it better.
Surely there’s no reason why that all can’t happen inside the solar system. It may sound like limited horizons compared to Star Trek, but consider the potential of diverse space stations; terraformed planets; asteroid mining; several dozen moons around Jupiter alone. Paranormal activity? Clarke’s Law comes to mind.
Humanity, too, will diversify along with technology. It’s been a common complaint that aliens on TV series are too humanoid-- but what if they were all human to begin with, and diversified through genetic engineering, cybernetics, etc.? It actually makes a lot more sense that way.
And of course, there’s no reason why there can’t be robots. Frankly that was one of my sore spots with Star Trek: too few robots. How are we supposed to know it’s the future if there are no robots?
True, Khan was human, just genetically modified, and in the movie at least he was one of the most interesting characters. (He was just smarmy in the TV episode.)
Clarke’s Law? Please remind me of what you speak.
As for robots, I want my robot butler already. :mad: Not a monkey butler though.
Sounds like “Blake’s Seven”. I always liked that show. Sure the SFX were pathetic, but I liked the character interaction.
Any technology sufficiently advanced will be indistinguishable from magic.
I didn’t know that had an official title! I use it all the time.
Yes, so was the remark…it was a refernce to one of my faves, *Red *Dwarf. Good one.
Yes, robot butlers, I think they’d be a great addition!
(someone help me out here)
ETA: thanks Jolly Roger!
As for things already happening around us so there’s no need for SciFi, I think that, IMHO, is at the foundation of good science fiction. That is, through contrivances and situations that are difficult to arrange in mundane reality, certain aspects of humanity can be isolated, refined, and explicitly examined. In some ways it’s like setting up an experiment; you can hold many things the same and just change one element. Of course, a good writer can do so in any setting, but there are certain areas where good scifi can go with much greater ease and clarity.
Never even heard of it.
Well then, the next time you’re struggling with the latest technological leap forward that seems to cause more trouble than it solves, remember Terrifel’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law: “In real life, magic doesn’t work.”
You and I clearly watched different versions of TOS…
The one I watched, less than 20 of the 80 episodes are ‘exploration for exploration’s sake’ - and most of them, the exploration is nothing but a macguffin to kick off a fight with a monster.
A slightly larger number have them entering uncharted space for some other reason - answering a distress call, chasing an enemy that attacked a Federation ship or outpost, looking for a lost Federation ship, forced there by aliens, etc.
Being generous, there are 2 other episodes that can be called ‘exploration for exploration’s sake’, if you’re willing to stretch ‘exploration’ to include ‘scientific experimentation’ - the Changling and The Ultimate Computer, both of which involve the Enterprise taking part in an experiment involving a new computer.
Even combining all of these gives less than half the series taking them out of known space - the other episodes are all dealing with problems within Federation (or Klingon, or Romulan, or non-aligned, but known) space.
Opening voice-over notwithstanding, Star Trek, as a series, was never about exploration for exploration sake.
I charitably attribute this to Clarke’s increasing age. But the real problem I think was a failure of nerve. When Moonwatcher learned how to kill, the entire world changed. The book ends with Bowman as the Starchild echoing Moonwatcher’s thoughts after he understood that he and his tribe were now masters of the world. But the Solar System of the sequels, except for Europa, is the same as it would have been if the events of 2001 never had happened. And 3001 was a total copout - maybe Gentry Lee gave Clarke a sleeping pill and wrote it himself.
