I contend that if Space:1999 had writing on a par with its art direction, costuming, and casting, it would still be a going concern while Star Trek would be a quaintly amusing curiosity of its time like Lost In Space. Oy vey, that writing, though, especially that second season.
@rakontisto@nyrath
I can't boost this post enough. So much of the production was flat-out brilliant, and the writing was romantic, anti-intellectual, and outright contemptuous of humanism.
The second season's writing rotted away when, in an attempt to placate angry boy fans, they did it harder, making it antifeminist.
The production design—where Main Mission had everyone facing "forward" in the…building…showed small thinking rushing in.
@JoshuaACNewman@nyrath Main Mission looked a lot like NASA's control rooms, but I'll further defend that by pointing out that the main control rooms on Trek and SW are always, for some insane reason, on the outermost layer of their ships and just waiting to be shot at. I like that they were looking at a screen and not a window, which feels more modern.
@rakontisto@JoshuaACNewman@nyrath Reminds me ... I was reading about steel battleship era naval design, and basically they could never get the human crew to command warships from the heavily armored conning towers. They'd try to shrink the bridge to FORCE them into the conning tower but it would just never take for long.
The better view and situational awareness from the bridge outweighed the whole armor protection thing.
@rakontisto@nyrath
Notice how it changed between seasons. In the first one, it's like a big office in the round where everyone needs to be able to see each other.
In the second season, everyone faces the big screen like they're on the bridge of the USS The Moon.
I particularly liked I think in the first season, how the computer would spit out results or analyses in the form of a tiny sliver of paper coming out from the middle of a variable wall of computational electronics.
Also my favourite and perhaps only memory of a decent plotline was the Lagrange Earth, a second Earth almost identical to ours, but hidden from view and therefore undiscovered, as it was locked in an orbit opposite the Sun to us.
@JoshuaACNewman@DenOfEarth@nyrath That reminds me of one of my major irritations with more modern sci-fi, where the question is "Should we use slaves (robots, computers, genetically modified beings) to do our work for us?" because it seems to me that the answer should be a fairly obvious "well, no," instead of all that Westworld.
@DenOfEarth@JoshuaACNewman@nyrath I feel like somewhere down the line, a lot of sci-fi writers stopped caring about crafting a good narrative and instead just decided that their main job was to make a very important point, so good stories that carried an important message lost ground to sledgehammers cloaked in cliché.
@rakontisto@DenOfEarth@nyrath
Like, Heinlein? Or Clarke? Or Herbert? Even Bradbury’s work is very heavy in metaphor.
I feel like most science fiction authors didn’t discover characters until then 60s and it was slow to adopt them as anything more than a literary convenience. Le Guin is one of the earliest I can think of who cared about interlocking characters with plot and metaphor in ways that weren’t viewports for an idea.
@JoshuaACNewman@DenOfEarth@nyrath Bradbury, though, had a feel for language and basic human emotions, which is why (to me, at least), The Martian Chronicles holds up so well as a literary work as well as making some grim (and also optimistic) points about humanity. Clarke did great big picture stuff when he was at his best, though.
@rakontisto@DenOfEarth@nyrath …Sci fi is a genre of ethical thought experiments. Sometimes they’re brutal and cruel in ways that seem like normal ways to think because the story agrees with and approves of the brutality and cruelty of our IRL society (eg Lensman, Starship Troopers). But the approval is still a point the authors are making.
Speaking of Clarke, I really enjoyed the crisp science of Rama, in the first book. I felt as though I was exploring this wonderful world with the astronauts, who were simply being methodical in their visit.
Then the subsequent books came, co-authored by some failed soap opera hack, as the one or two chapters of scientific wonder were now surrounded by irritating characters whose sole purpose could only be to try to interest a broader range of purchasers.
@DenOfEarth@JoshuaACNewman@rakontisto@nyrath Rendzvous with Rama is characteristic of Clarke's solo work in that there's not really a lot of plot to it--there's a setting, and some characters exploring it, and what ultimately happens doesn't seem to amount to much. The characters are largely observers of events they never fully understand. The takeaway is that the universe is full of wonders and mysteries and we can sometimes survive them but we can't expect to decipher them all.
That happens a lot in his work, and I think it came from his own worldview. His collaborations are very different in that the collaborators usually try to put a lot more plot and action into them, and it makes them much less Clarke. I think even Stanley Kubrick made "2001" (movie and novel) a more conflict-oriented story than it would have been if Clarke had been fully holding the reins.
I found Rendezvous with Rama to be similar to Niven's Ringworld. Basically both were travelogs.
I much preferred Clarke's Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, "Transience" and "The Curse".
Nobody does numinous awe and wonder like vintage Clarke.
I was also disappointed in RingWorld because perhaps I was hoping that it would be like Rama, an exploration of this mysterious yet gigantic alien engineering, how it worked, how it was assembled, etc
Instead Niven delivers the RingWorld as nothing more than a sort of exotic locale for very pedestrian conflicts between people, for example I recall vampires involved etc. Yes at one point we meet an Engineer but it's STILL conflict
@DenOfEarth@nyrath@mattmcirvin@rakontisto@FredKiesche
Conflict is interesting because it reflects the differences between what a character (even an entirely reasonable one) wants — and what is possible, given the physical and social realities of the world.
…
If it’s “How do they win?” then the author wants the audience to see why they should be like the protagonists.
If it’s “What happens when everyone tries to get what they need?” then the deeply meaningful elements of the setting can come out without fetishizing victory. You can tell an adult story.
@DenOfEarth@nyrath@mattmcirvin@JoshuaACNewman@rakontisto@FredKiesche
"Rendez-vous with Rama" also has comments on humanity, with the dynamics within the "Rama Committee", or the subplot about the paranoid Hermians and their stupid missile. There is a keen awareness of people, but they are presented as instances of typical behaviour, rather than going into unneeded personal details.
The question is not whether stories make a rhetorical point, but whose point it is. What has shifted over the last century+ of science fiction is who gets to tell the story and what their rhetorical assumptions and positions are.
@nyrath@rakontisto@mattmcirvin@DenOfEarth@JoshuaACNewman In some editions of City, Clarke talks about the evolution of one to the other including how he wrote City on a sea voyage (to Sri Lanka, IIRC). He also relates how a doctor and a patient had each read one book, but not the other, and how each was convinced the other was getting “the one book” wrong.
I am more of the same opinion as @rakontisto in that leaving the unspoken unspoken is not a failing but rather allows the reader to fill in the blanks with their own sense of wonder.
I don't mind what Kubrick might have added to 2001 which clearly was amazing,
but Clarke's collaborator on Rama II and later books, basically ordered up all the worst stereotypes from central casting and tossed them into a Cuisinart with a lot of sawdust filler.
@DenOfEarth@JoshuaACNewman@rakontisto@nyrath Kubrick if anything wanted to squelch explanation and deepen the sense of mystery--the trippy things that stayed unexplained were clearly among the things he liked the most about Clarke, and the science lectures, not so much.
@DenOfEarth@JoshuaACNewman@rakontisto@nyrath (Which I guess brings us right back to Space: 1999--because "2001: A Space Odyssey" was clearly a huge influence on that show, but what its creators didn't get was the amount of homework you had to do, building a logically constructed background, before your intrusion of the inexplicable numinous had some weight to it.)
@JoshuaACNewman@nyrath Yeah, it sucked when they went from the immense set from the first season to a much dinkier and submarinier set. I mean, to be fair, Maya's giant sideburns did arouse my adolescent interest in people with giant sideburns, but Frieberger's weird budget things and the need for rah-rah space army shenanigans (one of the things I always disliked about Trek) really sucked the Valium elegance out of the setup.
@rakontisto@nyrath
Yeah, I'm watching Voyager (we're on S04) w my partner right now and I noticed not only the parallels in premise, but also some specific ”Oh, let's try this idea again.”
The military aspects of Voyager make sense because the ship started off on a military mission, but it's not the intention. But why the fuck were there even weapons at all on Moonbase Alpha? They shoulda been jury-rigged science and industrial equipment, build into the modular Eagles.
@nyrath@WAHa_06x36@rakontisto I had an Eagle transporter toy as a kid. I'd never watched the series (I don't think it was every broadcasted in France) but I loved it.
I loved it a bit too much I think, it's in very bad shape now.
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