Steven L. wrote:
> Jaxtraw wrote:
>> Snake wrote:
>>> "Jaxtraw"
knickersjaxtrawstudios.com> wrote in message
>>> news:4788672b$0$21101$da0feed9@news.zen.co.uk...>>>> That's a good exposition of that POV. I'd suggest though that it's
>>>> also an argument in favour of choosing either (a) end the franchise
>>>> forever or (b) reboot it. And by reboot I mean a complete retool
>>>> from the ground up, starting with the basic premise of the series
>>>> and deliberately abolishing all the "history"- the canon.
>>>>
>>>> I'm reminded of something Douglas Hofstadter wrote in his "Godel
>>>> Escher Bach". He'd written a computer program which took english
>>>> words and made amusing sentences out of them. At first he found it
>>>> entertaining as it produced these odd, grammatically correct, but
>>>> meaningless or surreal statements, and found the printouts amusing
>>>> (bear in mind this book was written during a time when computers
>>>> were still rare research machines and ELIZA was cutting edge :) But
>>>> he found that the experience quickly palled, even though there were
>>>> millions more statements of equal humour value in the
>>>> program. His conclusion, which I agree with, was that we lose
>>>> interest in something not when we've seen every permutation, but
>>>> when we've mapped its "behavioural space". That is, we build a
>>>> mental model of what it can do, it
>>>> then becomes predictable. It can no longer surprise us. When we've
>>>> mapped the behavioural space, we seek something new and refreshing.
>>>> (Perhaps this is why we generally don't get bored with other
>>>> humans, or pets, they always
>>>> have the potential to surprise us- even then, we can become bored
>>>> with other
>>>> people if their behavioural space becomes too well mapped "Goddamn
>>>> it Abner,
>>>> you've farted after dinner every darned day of the 50 years we've
>>>> been married!").
>>>>
>>>> When we start watching a new TV show, reading a new comic book, a
>>>> new series
>>>> of novels, the behavioural space is a tabula rasa. Gradually, we
>>>> fill it in
>>>> as time goes by- a detail here, a broad stroke there. Eventually, a
>>>> canon builds up. What were just stories become part of the
>>>> contstructed fictional
>>>> universe. But we're also mapping its behavioural space. At some
>>>> point, we end up with a marvellously detailed *setting* for
>>>> stories, but we have a similarly detailed *behavioural space*. We
>>>> know everything this thing can do. We get bored. We move onto
>>>> something else. The mapping of the behavioural space occurs long
>>>> before every possible story in the ficitonal universe can be told.
>>>> We simply can't be surprised any more.
>>>>
>>>> I think this is the state Trek has reached. THere are still lots of
>>>> stories
>>>> that could be told in this detailed universe, but really most
>>>> people just aren't that interested in them any more, because they
>>>> have such a clear model of what "Star Trek" is that there's no
>>>> capacity for much change. The behavioural space is too well
>>>> mapped. You just end up with permuations of the same old same
>>>> olds- "hey, waht if the Klingons attack the Romulans and then
>>>> shields drop to 60%% and the transporters malfunction?" kind of
>>>> plots. The *conventions* of this universe's storytelling are
>>>> fixed. We simply know
>>>> too much. And I think that's why the franchise has had steadily
>>>> dropping viewing figures and interest for so long. It's an
>>>> inevitable consequence of
>>>> the mapping of the behavioural space.
>>>>
>>>> So the only way to revitalise it is to scrub the map. Go back to
>>>> the basic premise of the show, but open up every option again. Do a
>>>> reboot. It won't please Anybody, but it might please somebody and
>>>> might be appealing to almost everybody. Without doing that, the
>>>> chances of a rebirth of Trek are nil, because the behavioural space
>>>> is mapped.
>>>>
>>>> Which is why I was hoping for a real fresh start; a reboot. It may
>>>> have been
>>>> carp, but it may have worked. The more I hear about the kobayashi
>>>> maru, and
>>>> Pike, and Spock's mother and so on, the more gloomy I become. It
>>>> appears they're trying to stay in the same behavioural space and,
>>>> as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt.
>>> Very well explained. IMHO that is why they need to go *forward*, a
>>> la TNG, and not backward - we already have Kirk, Spock et al. mapped
>>> in the behavioral space. TNG was a smashing success - it was able
>>> to create a new behavioral space and was tremendously accepted by
>>> the viewers. DS9 and Voyager extended that space yet played within
>>> it, but like you said it started to become stale - how much can you
>>> extend a space yet still have it interesting?
>>
>> I think maybe the problem is that even the future behavioural space
>> is too mapped. Another generation on, how different will things be
>> from TNG?
>
> I agree.
> The problem is that, after over 40 years of Star Trek stories dealing
> with space travel, space itself is running out of conceptual space.
> :-)
>
> Going on our past discussion, we could probably make a list of
> standard Star Trek story types: First Contact, Getting Around the
> Prime Directive, Solving a Scientific/Technical Problem, Alien
> Invasions, Alien Politics, etc. And with hundreds of Star Trek
> episodes, not to mention countless other SF stories and novels, we've
> probably explored all of those, each many times over by now.
>
> And it's not just Star Trek, but SF generally, that is feeling it.
>
> If you look at the winners of the Hugo Award in the last decade or so,
> you see a definite trend toward fantasy (e.g. Lord of the Rings, The
> Incredibles, magic and mysticism, etc.) rather than the "hard" space
> travel SF of the past (2001, Star Trek, etc.). Science fiction
> writers in general seem to be moving away from stories involving
> space ships traveling to distant places.
>
> Perhaps these days, Western culture is just not as interested in space
> travel as we used to be, and creative writers are thinking about other
> things.
It may be that we're running out of things to imagine. Sci-fi by its nature
requires a gee-whiz element. Just about the only feasible future technology
that hasn't yet been realised in our real world is artificial intelligence.
Robots, sort of; but we do have robots, even uncannily human ones like
Sony's ASIMO. You don't need a guy in a robot suit any more- we have the
real thing!
So a genre predicated on that gee-whiz element is bound to run into trouble.
The other original gee-whiz magic technologies are now standard across the
genre; my own humble little comic strip Lucy Lastique uses beam energy
weapons, energy shields and energy damping fields, a quasi-scientific super
energy source for starship (now a standard term itself) power (in my case,
controlled singularities) and, of course, the inevitable transporters. It's
interesting that we now have genres like steampunk that try to create
alternative gee-whizzery and its noticable that Battlestar Galactica, aside
from the spaceships, is low tech- the guns fire bullets for instance.
We seem to have converged on a solution- the standard "future" technologies
described in the above paragraph are now the convention because they've
turned out over thousands of stories by many authors to be those which best
facilitate futuristic fiction. Most obviously transporters allow rapid
shifts between location at the author's whim without boring shuttle journeys
and so on.
But it's difficult to evolve this standard future further. What technologies
will the Enterprise Z carry that will make the Enterprise E look obsolete?
Can we think of any? Our heroes are powerful enough as is; indeed half the
time the writers have to somehow hobble the technologies to make a
reasonable story ("Captain, we can't use the transporters because of an ion
storm or something"). Again just from my perspective, I gave Lucy a giant
starship with a symbiotic super-powerful alien attached, who should be able
to solve any problem in a few seconds; in the last major Lucy tail I had to
get the cast into peril and thus had to put the starship/symbiote entirely
out of action with an "energy damping field" thang. Any more power would
make things even worse.
So going into the future from TNG is likely to look very much like TNG with
a new coat of paint. Trek has offered some views of this future with routine
time travel, IIRC, but that just makes things even worse. It's not really a
power we want to give a regular show because the more godlike our
protagonists are, the harder it is to challenge them and create tension. Who
can threaten the hero who can destroy a solar system at the flick of a
switch?
I'm rambling here, not sure what point I'm making. I think it might be not
that we've lost interest in space so much as our real world has caught up
with much of what used to be wildly futuristic in science fiction and all
that's left is magic technology which by its nature can't "develop". So it's
just harder to be impressed by it; a feeling in the viewer/reader which may
be an essential of the practical reason for the genre existing.
I think the rise of the fantasy genre may be just symptomatic of a general
fascination with rural romanticism. We're comfortable, wealthy and well fed.
Divorced from the need to struggle for survival against the random
viciousness and cruelty of nature, we can romanticise it as something
benign. We see this in real life, with millions of people believing they'd
enjoy life as primitive agrarian subsistence farmers. It may also be that
this rose-tinted view of the past is encouraged by living in grotesquely
regulated and controlled western societies; most of us struggle now with a
lack of personal freedom unimaginable to our ancestors even a century ago,
creating enormous frustrations as we just try to run our daily lives in this
constricting regulatory framework. I can't help but note that the fantasy
genre seems to be very popular among people who one might identify as
"liberal" (american usage); it's paradoxical that they are people who demand
strictly regulated real lives, but fantasise about an entirely unregulated
fantasy world without state power populated by individualistic heroes.
Considering Trek; who do the fans prefer- the self-reliant Kirk, the
"warrior culture" Worf, or the pettiflogging rules lawyer Janeway? That
suggests to me a weakness of the "Roddenberry vision"- his utopian idealism
may be a nice society for many people to imagine they want to live in (if
not me) but it may not be a terribly good millieu for storytelling. We
prefer Kirk wading in and problem solving under his own steam, not Janeway
babbling on about the Prime Directive. Good storytelling needs conflict, and
created worlds need to provide a structure in which that can occur. People
ultimately prefer tales about strong indivudualists vanquishing evil and
overcoming peril, not bureaucrats implementing rules. The stateless, chaotic
fantasy millieu provides that.
Ian
