Charles Stross
British sci-fi author Charles Stross has confessed that he has long hated the Star Trek franchise for its relegation of technology as irrelevant to plot and character development, as well as similar shows like Babylon Five.
On his blog Stross writes:
“I have a confession to make: I hate Star Trek. Let me clarify: when I was young — I’m dating myself here — I quite liked the original TV series. But when the movie-length trailer for ST:TNG first aired in the UK in the late eighties? It was hate on first sight. And since then, it’s also been hate on sight between me and just about every space operatic show on television. ST:Voyager and whatever the space station opera; check. Babylon Five? Ditto. Battlestar Galactica? Didn’t even bother turning on the TV. I hate them all.”
The problem, according to Stross, is that as Battlestar Galactica creator Ron Moore has described in a recent speech, the writers of Star Trek would simply “insert” technology or science into the script whenever needed, without any real regard to its significance.
Stross argues that the writers of Star Trek and its compatriots have “thrown away the key tool” that makes science fiction interesting and useful in the first place”.
Stross is perhaps best known for his sci-fi novels Accelerando, Glasshouse, Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise and Saturn’s Children, all of which earned him nominations for the genre’s biggest accolade, the Hugo Award. However he also has a bigger bibliography; for example half a dozen books in the Merchant Prince series in which humans have an ability to travel between parallel versions of Earth, which all have a different level of technology.
He is known for frequently expressing his strong opinions on his blog; for example in late August he used it to launch an attack on American political culture, describing it as bereft of mercy and suffering from a taint across every area of public discussion.
Commentary
I wholeheartedly agree with Stross (with one caveat). The Star Trek, Stargate, Star-whatever series have been ignoring the true science and technology at the heart of their created universes for decades. The aliens are human-like, the technology is mostly just a metaphor for tools and materials we had several centuries ago, and the shows have certainly not gone far enough to examine its impact on our humanity.
This is something that sci-fi writers have always done extremely well. Perhaps the best examples I can think of right now (it’s 6:13AM in the morning!) come from the books of Robert Heinlein.
Heinlein’s gender-bending, age-bending, Martian-bending books have done much to show us how changing our level of technology would go far to changing the way we think, and by proxy, who we are as a species. Can anyone truly say they came away from Stranger in a Strange Land not the least bit discomfited?
Stross’s books themselves do much to address the problems he is complaining about. To take one example, in Accelerando I remember one of the main characters, Manfred Macx, had lost his glasses – and temporarily had much of his personality removed due to the fact that they are also the storage device for much of his mind due to the ongoing integration of human consciousness with the online digital environment.
It’s a lot different than having Wikipedia on your iPhone.
However I will call Stross up on one area. He appears to have missed the point about why Moore was telling that story in his speech about the poor speechwriting practices in Star Trek.
In Battlestar Galactica, Moore attacked exactly that problem that you’re complaining about, Charles, as a direct attempt to reform the stale sci-fi genre. The show is worth watching precisely because it is a glorious and award-winning contemplation of the relationship between man and machine. It’s spectacular, and I commend it to you.
You simply cannot put Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek in the same box. If you do, you’re missing probably the greatest sci-fi masterpiece in the televisual medium for the past decade.
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heinlein’s stranger may be thought provoking, tho i am not sure how much had to do with scifi and how much simply used scifi as a metaphor for different upbringings, but his later starship troopers had the scifi as window dressing to a rant presenting heinlein’s view of a perfect society…
loved accelerando btw, even tho past the first third things got “weird”…
Hmm yeah now looking back upon this post maybe Heinlein wasn’t the best example, but I think there are plenty of others out there in the sci-fi world. Some of the other Heinlein books (for example I Will Fear No Evil) go more into the technology side.
Asimov was always great at this, and later Phillip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury etc. Even Robert Silverberg, a lot of his novels looked at the relationship between technology and how it changes humanity, as well as its relationships and the plot of any particular story.
BSG started off strong, but past the first two seasons, descended into a morass of actor indulgence (“hey, let’s give Eddie Olmos yet another reason to flail about and break something”), mysticism (“yep, I actually am an angel”), awkward ret-conning (“God has a plan for you … er, you have to walk through that door over there”) and creator indulgence (“All Along the WatchTower is crucial to the plot because … I’ve always wanted to use the song in a TV series”).
“a glorious and award-winning contemplation of the relationship between man and machine”
I’m not sure that “they’re just like us, really” is an insight I hadn’t already gleaned from any number of episodes of Star Trek (amongst countless others). I’d be interested to hear what you thought BSG had to say that was so new … or even insightful.
“probably the greatest sci-fi masterpiece in the televisual medium for the past decade”
I wasn’t a Babylon 5 fan, but even I would argue for it deserving more plaudits than BSG, if you hadn’t specified the last decade. If BSG is a (flawed, fatally flawed) masterpiece, it’s only for the lack of recent competition. I’m sorry to be so negative: fiction it was, but the plot was scientifically illiterate.
I would agree that season 4 of Battlestar Galactica was a little weaker than the rest, but I thought the first three seasons were amazing. The Watchtower stuff was a little out of left field, I’ll admit :)
I thought BSG did a really good job of bringing in religion into the relationship between man and machine, and also that it was a much closer examination of the self and what it means to be human than we’ve seen in most Star Trek stuff (and the clones). Similar themes, but taken much deeper, and grittier, more realistic.
I’ve heard a lot about Babylon 5, and watched a few episodes, but it never really seemed to do it for me. BSG still remains the critically applauded king :)
(Guilty confession time: I had an intense Vorlon fetish for a while.)
Haven’t read any Stross, actually. Book synopses just never grabbed me enough to warrant the plunge.
Charles Stross’ rant is very bizarre: “I don’t want TVSF, I haven’t watched it for 30 years, but it’s all crap, I hate it all and this is why.”
It’s an instantaneous form of logical self-contradiction. He also seems to get confused about his point: ‘teching the tech’ is unacceptable because it’s using (if at times highly questionable) science to avoid telling human and dramatic stories. But than that is also unacceptable because TVSF needs to have harder science in it. Oh, and the fact that TV SF needs to be slightly more open to a mainstream audience (because it costs tens of millions of dollars a year to keep even a modest SF series on air) than a novel (which can afford to only sell a few thousand copies) isn’t germane. Apparently. Or something.
And Neo-BSG did disintegrate under the weight of its writers’ egos at the end. The lesson I take away from the series is that it is perfectly acceptable to create huge, series-spanning mysteries and not come up with reasonable answers to them, and when people call you on it you can just say, “But IT’S ART!”
Yeap, he clearly needs to make more of an effort to check out what’s happening on TV before criticising it.
I do think the new BSG did suffer some problems towards the end … but even a TV show with those sorts of problems is so much better than most of the crud that is on TV ;)
I had similar thoughts about his injunction of BSG along with the rest. Yes, it got messy at the end, but on one level it was a very cogent discussion of how people might struggle with the various spooky facets of a “posthuman” society-cloned, genetically upgraded people, uploaded and downloaded minds, sharable memories, robotics, etc., without the run-to-completion fallacies and histrionics of the Singularians.
And in general, I think the next step on the annoyance scale down from incessant Treknobabble is the techno-expository vomit some of the harder writers lean towards- thanks for the ten-page exposition on the workings of your hypothetical nanite swarms, but really, I could have stood to hear about, oh, anything else for five of those.
Hehe yeap I personally *hate* exposition with a passion :)