I have a question: How would Scifi look in the Star Trek (24th century) universe. If you would be an Scifi Autor and you live 2375 what about would you write your scifi storys/holostorys?
Lobo
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
I think the alternative-history and fantasy subgenres would remain much as they are, only enriched by the mythologies of all the nonhuman cultures. Stories about the ancestral past of humans (and of other species and cultures) would gain in prominence since so much new material would be available and so many new questions would be raised.
Space adventures would no longer count as sci-fi, but would be more comparable to militaria novels and general action-adventures. Still, a saga like Star Trek would probably still be a popular form of sci-fi - an encounter with Andorians or Klingons would be dull politics or diplomacy, but an encounter with the fictional Higacho would still fascinate the readers, as long as the Higacho were portrayed as interesting enough a species.
Just like Star Trek portrays human issues through aliens, the future sagas could continue to portray real human/alien issues through fictional aliens. But perhaps a reverse form of storytelling would also emerge, one where entire alien species would be allegorically described through the use of fictional human characters!
Techno-oriented sci-fi would of course continue much as it is. The invention of things much more wondrous than those imagined by Jules Verne has not stopped sci-fi writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. And generally, Trek characters seem just as fascinated by technology and gadgetry as today's people are.
Medical science fiction and body transformations might lose some of their fascination when medicine already is capable of fulfilling the wildest dreams of mankind, probably up to and including eternal life and eternal youth (it's just that people aren't interested in those any more, or so some Crusher dialogue in 1st season TNG suggests).
And surely there would be some completely new venues of speculation as well. I just can't imagine what those would be. But new types of literature do keep emerging even today - not everything was invented by the ancient Greeks.
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by Lobo (Member # 669) on :
Thanks a lot Timo it's a good answer!
Lobo
Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :
Reading interests should stay as varied antime in the future as they are now....
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Although they don't have TV, so there might have been a similar reduction in other sorts of entertainment. There have been comments I believe about "how can you just WATCH something and not interact", but by Harry, and he's a silly person.
Posted by Free ThoughtCrime America (Member # 480) on :
In Alan Moore's Watchmen, there were no comics about superheroes because the world the story was set in actually had them. Instead, pirate comics became big.
I don't know if this extends in a similar fashion to the Star Trek universe, but I do know that it seems that people don't read SF. Look at all of their Holodeck programs. With the exception of Tom Paris and his Chaotica game, all of the shown progs are based on "historical" fictions, period pieces, or combat.
Personally, I wonder where all the hackers and computer programmers and so on are at. In Star Trek only hardware engineers seem to have any work.
Maybe the fact that there is no sci-fi means nobody is interested in computers anymore.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
I've managed to go 22 years without ever bumping into a programmer or hacker in real life, so it's not that surprising that they're never seen in Trek, especially if the hackers are as anoraky as they are today.
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
I don't think that in Trek they'd be employed by the government, like SW's "slicers" Posted by Free ThoughtCrime America (Member # 480) on :
Right. But on a starship where everything from the toliets on up is run by computers, you would expect them to have something like a programming specialist onboard.
Probably more than one, actually. And probably, considering how sophisticated the computers are, there would be an entire branch of Starfleet devoted to it. They'd be in the Engineering department, but still, they'd be there.
Unless we are to believe that the computer OS's of the future are completely bug free, that is.
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
Or that they're smart enough to rewrite theirselves...
Posted by EdipisReks (Member # 510) on :
uh oh, computer rewriting themselves. getting a little too close to the singularity, aren't we? Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Computer programmers... I reckon Reg Barclay might fall into that catagory somewhere. And possibly Dr. Lewis Zimmerman.
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
Well, the reason we probably didn't see any in TNG was because Data could do it all by himself. Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
Just watching the TNG episode with Dr. Stubbs and "The Egg".. Crusher orders "Computer, fix foodslot". Seems like Starfleet computers can do at least some reprogramming by themselves.
Edit: Data even says the computer can fix (don't remember if he literally said 'rewrite') itself. "There hasn't been a system-wide failure in 97 years".
Posted by Capped In Mic (Member # 709) on :
if the computer rewrites and fixes itself, does that invalidate the warranty?
'fix foodslot' was probably a command to 'wipe this foodslot's programming and replaced it with an unmodified archive version'.. or maybe a physical maintenance/diagnostic request.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
The only real example we have of science fiction within Trek is actually the "Captain Proton" game. And from the various ways in which the Voyager people treated it, it seemed to me as if science fiction was basically a dead genre in the 24th century.
Now, in "real" life, I suppose it's possible to believe that humans of the 24th century will imagine even more fantastic things than what they actually have.
One could argue that science fiction is a way for human imagination to consider ideas and situations that are otherwise impossible. Consider: hundreds of years ago, there were stories about flight -- like flying dragons, witches on brooms, and so on. (Yeah, that's not scientific, but it's imaginative.) In the 1890's with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells we got into the idea of mechanical flight, and then space flight, and all sorts of other technological ideas.
Today, we have the idea of traveling to distant stars in weeks or hours, sentient robots that are built to look like humans, and so on. But a LOT of these ideas have been realized in some form or other. Computers are already faster and more "streamlined" than people in the sixties imagined... remember the classic "clakety-clack" interface with Majel's monotone "Working..."? How about Kirk's handheld communicator, or the Day-Glo removable media disks?
The fact is, that in some ways we're reaching the limits of imagination for now. I'm not saying that imagination has reached a brick wall, of course. But consider that we've got ideas of traveling across the galaxy... what after that? The main premise of sci-fi is (in a way) space travel -- what would happen when humans actually ACHIEVE space travel? If we meet intelligent extraterrestrial life? If space is "the final frontier," and in Trek's case specifically, there's plenty of unknown -- the frontier is virtually infinite. So the unknown then involves meeting strange, new lifeforms, etc. But technology will have caught up to expansion.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I think that is very unfair. Science fiction is, among other things, simply a story set in some place that is decidedly not here. It's also, or so I will be quick to argue, a story in some way dependant upon science. And since everything is science...
Posted by Free ThoughtCrime America (Member # 480) on :
Speculative fiction is how I choose to think of it.
For me, the best SF is that which deals with "Mad Ideas" (quoted from a certain British writer who seems to demand it be quoted as such.)
The last bit of good original SF I read was Baxter's Manifold Time...wherein the best parts for me were the descriptions of life for a genetically enhanced squid culture living on an asteroid in NEO.
The book ended (SPOILER WARNING, I guess) with the squid running away from a new big bang created by super smart kids on earth...
I would argue that it's pretty unlikely that that sort of thing will ever occur, but it was fascinating nontheless.
Speculative fiction is like that. It doesn't necessarily have to have events init that are possible. It simply has to have a logic to it that hold consistant.
The internal logic of Speculative Fiction is what separates it from fantasy, where Magic can do anything as long as you get the spell right...fantasy is guided by a logically inconsistant Deux ex machina.
Eh...I had a point I was going for, but I lost it. *tsk*
Oh, I have it: If there is still speculative fiction in the Star Trek universe, it would be as alien to us today as cyberpunk would be to Jules Verne...it would still be logically consistant, but it would have issues in it that would be near incomprehensible to us.
Posted by Nimpim (Member # 205) on :
There are plenty of Sci-fi genres that doesn't necessarily involve warped technology (no pun intended). Utopias and dystopias are sometimes created through technology (apocalypses, golden ages), but science does not always equal tech.
"Anoraky", Liam, were you thinking of little Kenny, pulling his straps? Sounds like a new entry for Oxford. We got "d'oh" past their goalkeepers, now they've been softened up!
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