Why I Hate Star Trek (2009)
Wow this author is so wrong it hurts....<p>&quot;Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it&#x27;s background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast. You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech — make the Enterprise a man o&#x27;war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail — without changing the scripts significantly.&quot;<p>This is the central lesson of humanity, it is the core nut of storytelling and why when we tell stories it brings us together. It doesn&#x27;t matter if humans are sailing around in 18th century sailing ships (also a show about a man o&#x27;war would be unlike star trek, it would have to be about a frigate) or warping around in starships,  the human condition is universal and the backdrop is always just that, a backdrop. This is really the origin point of empathy from an intellectual standpoint and why experiencing fiction can help you become more empathetic and emotionally intelligent.<p>&quot;The scriptwriters and producers have thrown away the key tool that makes SF interesting and useful in the first place, by relegating &quot;tech&quot; to a token afterthought rather than an integral part of plot and characterization.&quot;<p>The reason scifi writing so often sucks is that many scifi writers think this way. I also think part of the reason silicon valley, techbro culture can be so toxic and short sighted is because these people grew up reading scifi writers that think this way. They put this near religious power in technology to utterly transcend societal realities and simplify messy human problems into abstracted tech problems while unconsciously fawning over dystopian futures just because they have hovercars. It is a tragic failure of storytelling that we told children stories that encouraged them to see the world this way.<p>If you want to predict the future, to predict what humans will be like in far different circumstances, focusing on your invariably terrible prediction of how tech will change is <i>the worst basis</i> since you are probably going to be terribly wrong. If instead you focus on the ways in which humanity will always be humanity than your scifi writing will reach far into the future and will resist becoming dated no matter how absurd your technological predictions look in retrospect.<p>Also focusing on technology in scifi in the way so many scifi writers do participates in a process of othering ourselves from other humans in imagined futures and different present realities. If we tell stories about the future that overly focus on the different tools and resources the humans in those stories have, we inveitably send the message that having those tools and resources (or not having them) makes these humans fundamentally different than us, and that is an awful, misguided use of storytelling. It is akin to the way fantasy sometimes creates a sentient species (usually green skinned people like orcs) and just labels them &quot;evil&quot; and doesn&#x27;t examine that any further.<p>These reasons are why Ray Bradbury is both one of the best scifi writers of all time and also barely a scifi writer. It is also one of the reasons that as wildly inconsistent as Star Trek&#x27;s writing is, as silly as some of the tech is, and as much as rick berman was unfortunately a part of so much of Star Trek, Star Trek is by far and away the best scifi tv&#x2F;movie series ever made and it isn&#x27;t even close.