Unhelpful

It’s a complete shame what Star Trek has done to the genre of science fiction. I grew up a fan of Star Trek, and for the longest time I could not understand why traditional fantasy a la Dungeons & Dragons was grouped together with science fiction. After all, the settings for each are radically different. Abusing Tolkien as the canonical example of fantasy, it simply doesn’t compare to any thing in Star Trek, so how the hell did those to areas get put together?

I found the answer recently, in the writings of Asimov and Heinlein, probably two of the greatest science fiction authors to have ever lived (and I’ll admit, who wrote in English. I’m sure there are some good ones who wrote in languages I don’t know). Compared to those two, Star Trek is complete and total crap, especially as incarnated since (and including) the first movie. I haven’t viewed any of the original series lately, and frankly don’t intend to.

Star Trek, as TNG, as DS9, and as Voyager, are incredibly loaded with technology. Star Tech is completely in your face for the entire 42 minutes of the episode; virtually every problem is created by, or solved by, the application of some futuristic technology. I won’t name any specifics as I’m not interested in being sued byParamount for even mentioning something in their intellectual property catalog, and I’m fairly certain either them or Roddenberry’s estate is poring over copyright and patent law in an effort to find a way to sue Motorola, Nokia, andevery one else associated with the cellphone industry and get even richer. And if they aren’t, it was my idea, I want a cut. But I’m digressing.

Back to the point: Star Trek is all about the tech. The lives of the characters all center around the tech. In contrast, the writings of Asimov and Heinlein use a futuristic / fantastic setting in which to place very human stories. Heinlein’s classic”Starship Troopers“is an outstanding example, ignore the movie. The setting is a future world with marvelous and interesting tech, but the story itself is very, very human. The reader isn’t being fed, nor needs to be fed, a “future physics theory” course to understand the story, the kind of fantastic explanations normal of Star Trek are rarely hinted about - I’ve yet to find the explanation of Heinlein’s “ship stones” although I admit I’m nowhere near through all of his material quite yet. Asimov did write a short story about his method of space travel, but that story itself was merely a short fiction of humans outsmarting their equipment.

Short version: Neither Asimov nor Heinlein overload you on tech, and in some ways, I suppose I’m glad Star Trek is around: it keeps the scores of people with no lives out of the good stuff. The world that Asimov wrote his stories in is not really a “science fiction” world as a Trekkie would understand it. Nor is Heinlein’s world. Both of their respective worlds are science-fiction in setting, those worlds are not necessarily (only rarely) what their stories are about. Like Tolkien, they built their world and threw a bunch of people in them to see what they did, then wrote about what happened. Tolkien never explains how magic works, he never explains in great genetic detail how orcs were created, likewise Asimov never goes into highly technical detail about how robot’s positronic brains are built, and Heinlein… well, I’m not sure he ever talks about tech, it’s just there for the characters to make use of.

Star Trek focused on the “science” part in “science fiction”; Asimov and Heinlein focused on the “fiction” part. I’ve decided which one I think is more interesting.

(in the course of writing this, I discovered that there is going to be a “Trekkies 2″. Someone let Charlie out to stop this man, please!)