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.

Charles Stross

British science fiction author Charles Stross has published an extraordinary attack on American political culture on his blog, describing it as bereft of mercy and suffering from a taint across every area of public discussion.

Using the examples of the protests of the USA administration about the release from Scottish prison of terrorist Abdelbaset Al Megrahi on compassionate grounds because of his terminal cancer, and the ongoing debate about healthcare reform, Stross attacked the entire American political establishment in a blog entry posted yesterday:

There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board.

In a side note, Stross tells members of the far-right British Nationalist Party to just “fuck off right now”, noting there are “some folks I can do without”.

It’s not the first time that Stross has aired his political views in public; just days ago the author wrote a lengthy piece about privacy issues surrounding the United Kingdom’s National DNA Database, describing one of the practices around it as “merely a steaming turd in the punchbowl of the right to privacy”.

Interestingly, sci-fi blog io9 directly questioned Stross in January 2008 on the topic of when science fiction itself becomes a form of political intervention.

Stross answered that fiction is usually used as an entertainment medium; as such, political fiction is “at its best precisely when it doesn’t preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.”

Commentary
Sorry Charles, but I’m going to call bullshit on this one. You’re way out of line with your attacks on American society, which paint all participants in the political process, even the self-sacrificing ones with everyone’s interests at heart, as cynical, cold-hearted and without mercy.

If you spend any time in America or with Americans, I think you’ll find plenty of people who believe that Texas’ record on capital punishment is appalling, that the healthcare system needs to be basically rebuilt from scratch, and even that the Second Amendment should be repealed so that everyone and their dog can’t just go around carrying an Uzi.

Sure, there are a stack of problems with the US political establishment. But there are just as many dedicated and hardworking people who are devoting their lives to fixing those problems, and to have any sort of credibility as a political pundit, you need to acknowledge that. The landslide election of the inspirational figure of Barack Obama – for all his flaws – is the tip of the iceberg consisting of a revolution going on right now in American political thought.

Frankly, your attack on the US political establishment comes across as just the sort of crass and arrogant generalisation and preaching from the pulpit that many accuse Americans of.

I’m an Australian, and I know plenty of great people on both sides of the Atlantic. So let’s get this pissing contest over and just get on with the job of creating great science fiction; maybe even science fiction that will inspire people to think outside the box and make fundamental changes in the way so many human societies desperately need.

Jeez. Looks like I’m not going to be interviewing Charles Stross any time soon!