posted
O.S. card is one of those "Babe Ruth Authors"- guys that write so much that people only recall the large number of good stories. Though only about half are really good.
He's kinda sci-fi's Stephen King.
...still, I'd rather hear his perspective than that bitter old shitheels fuck Harlan Ellison.
I think a long-range exploration/colonization mission might be workable- something far outside the Federation, with no familliar raced that are not brought along, and lots of non-humanoid (CGI) inteligences. I'd use the sci-fi writing community to create the plots and have the established scripters (familliar with Trek and it's moral limits) do the dialogue.
Dan Simmons got apporached by Voyager's produced to write, but the produced did not go for Simmons' concept (citing that the CGI would be too costly), and did not know what a binary star was when Simons' did his phone-pitch.
Little things like that disheaten a sci-fi writer.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Lost is one hundred percent science fiction.
Or, if you prefer, is probably as science fictional as The X-Files, though potentially slightly more so, since the producers have claimed that there is a moderately realistic explanation behind such things as: the invisible monster that kills people, the young boy with the apparent ability to wish things into existence (such as polar bears on a tropical island), a sequence of numbers that have very strange effects when, for instance, used on a lottery ticket (or to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar), and I don't know what all else.
I mean, ultimately it might prove to be more fantasy than science fiction, but it is squarely within the unified sf genre.
Part of the classification problem comes from the causes of most of these mysterious things being hidden, with only their effects visible.
It's also the best show on TV. SAYS ME.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Teh PW
Self Impossed Exile (This Space for rent)
Member # 1203
posted
quote: I freely admit it was inspired by the clans from Mechwarrior, the human offspring of Korenski who preached 'the rights of the traveller and the reasons for exodus' and were intent on reclaiming earth. [/QB]
*grins* Ah, Kerensky's Clans. how fucked up they are in the current era of Dorkage. but that is entirely a different sort of rant meant for DropShipCommand.com...
I've read many arguments abot the clans, how in some cases their society shouldn't be able to function the way it does, or what not.
doesn't matter. the next sci-fi series SHOULD be battletech related. with 30 plus novels, 400 years of battles across the inner sphere, the question simply begs...
where to begin? My money would the start of the 4th succession war. to see someone speak with eliquence the words "My love... i give you... The Capallion Confederation!" and watching who ever plays Max Liao shit himself at the table....
quote: and watching who ever plays Max Liao shit himself at the table....
would be a dream cometh true. [/QB]
Somewhere...there's a fetish website for even you.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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Teh PW
Self Impossed Exile (This Space for rent)
Member # 1203
posted
quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon:
quote: and watching who ever plays Max Liao shit himself at the table....
would be a dream cometh true.
Somewhere...there's a fetish website for even you. [/QB]
you don't understand. it's not meant as a scat joke per se. it's simply like... well, say you have a BIG party, invite all your friends and assholes you hate and you tell them, yesterday, you went and fucked all their parents, the grandparents and the family dog and the parents LIKED IT. That kinda of WTF? reaction to learn your greatest enemy is currently fucking 3/4 of your realm and succeding!
posted
Yah. I figured (though I have not read Mechwarrior). I think Gundam would be a better live-action series (if they can resolve which version history they would use).
I'd kill to see some real sci-fi books made into faithful miniseries- Eon, Hyperion, etc. or some of Lovecraft's works made into an ongoing series- it'd be like X-Files in the 1800s...except the main characters regularly die....horribly
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
I have to admit that mister Card did come off in the article as someone who just didn't like Trek and I have to say I found his argument just a little bit patronising, not to mention slightly stereotypical.
If you don't like it, don't watch it. Simple solution. Just don't rail against and have a go at people who do.
quote:They started making costumes and wearing pointy ears. They wrote messages in Klingon, they wrote their own stories about the characters, filling in what was left out � including, in one truly specialized subgenre, the "Kirk-Spock" stories in which their relationship was not as platonic and emotionless as the TV show depicted it.
Could I possibly move for a Trek amendment to Godwin's law, whereby anyone who brings up the old, tired, hackneyed and pretty much just shite "a tiny percentage of Trek fans dress as Klingons/wear Spock ears, therefore every single Trek fan is a wanker of the highest order." argument is deemed to have immediately lost the plot?
:-) And yes, you may have noticed that this has touched a slight nerve with me.
FD
-------------------- Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Simon touched on why I think a reboot wouldn't work...because it would ultimately be pointless. The Marvel Ultimate Line is doing this at the moment, starting from the beginning and retelling the story. So we've got a new version of Spidey's black suit, a new version of the Dark Pheonix storyline, and stuff like that. This creates two problems:
1/ The appeal is in redoing old stories and doing them better. However, that's also the reason why it fails. So they reboot Star Trek. We get to meet the Borg for the first time and the continuity is not messed up. Woo, and indeed pee. What have we gained? Not much.
2/ Once they've told all the classic Marvel stories, the universe line will end up exactly where the current line is. With the same problems of hideous amounts of backstory. So do we then reboot it again?
The mainstreem Marvel universe has gone on for (essentially) 40 solid years without a reboot. DC has. And you wouldn't pick up a Superman comic and say "thank god this is all much less confusing that the Fantastic 4". Rebooting strikes me as a lazy cop out, and a chance of trying to recapture past glories without actually doing anything new. Sure, we get 300 years of history that are consistent, but that doesn't mean we get good stories.
(Besides, wasn't TNG pretty much a reboot anyway? They changed the status quo fairly drastically [the Klingons], originally refused to use lots of TOS aliens [Romulans and Vulcans], intentionally made Picard completely different from Kirk, and set the whole thing 100 years in the future where the basic groundwork was the same but many of the details had changed.)
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Here's the thing, though: The Ultimate line has outsold regular Marvel titles by a wide margin. There's more to it than just retelling stories; it lets you change characters and situations in fairly substantial ways. And apparently in ways that appeal to a lot of people.
I should note that I've never read any. And that the relative sales have started to slip, I believe.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
The ideal solution is to keep all that backstory (because fans like me really hate when they "reboot" a timeline and all my favorite stories no longer mean shit) and move on with fresh characters/new situations.
It both keeps the background and lets new viewers in as a starting point.
The problem with comic books is that they cant leave their staple characters behind, yet they also cant explain why Peter Parker is not pushing sixty.
Trek can -and has- leave estabished characters behind (though with varing degrees of success).
Either they need to take another jump forward timewise or a jump away distance-wise so that the same tired storylines are avoided.
Some exploring would be nice as well- getting back to the original "wagontrain to the stars" premise.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
The very first response on this says something along the lines of "yes because of course we know more than the people who actually produce it" Yes we do, because we're fans just like Ira behr amd Rodenberry were and not money men hooked up to the execs. There's no point wiping the slate but a new arc driven show would be better. Dealing with a cataclysmic event and its aftermath. The idea of a 'Dark Federation' still gives me a bone. Dozens of black galaxy-class starships emerging form a wormhole staffed by alien hating human fascists who are in service to a Khan-like genetically engineered Emperor. The real federation forced to defend the Alien races of the alpha quadrent against these spawn of a Dominion war fleeing fleet. Rodenberry's humans vs the ones we will probably become...
-------------------- The disappearance of Donald Love
Registered: Jan 2005
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OnToMars
Now on to the making of films!
Member # 621
posted
I don't consider a reboot to be that big of a deal. If you consider that Star Trek is one of the great stories, mythos if you prefer, or our time, one of the great works of art or literature or whatever you want to call it, than different interpretations that are mutually exclusive aren't such a big deal. Art history is littered with the same few collection of stories told over and over again in different ways. Nobody ever said, "Well, gee, I'd really like to paint the Annunciation or Christ on the Cross or such and such instance from Greek mythology, but son of a bitch, Michelangelo, David, Caravaggio, or whoever already beat me to it."
That being said, what I'd like to see is what "Enterprise" was sort of supposed to show us, though perhaps, a little earlier. What I would like to see, and I'd imagine a miniseries anthology would be the best format, is Earth's actual recovery from World War III.
Begin in a world that is more or less our own (plus a Sanctuary District or two) that undergoes a massive , devastating conflict as a result of the social ills that currently plague us and then witness - truly and rightly see - the horrors of attempting to live in a post-apocolyptic age: trying to survive in small communes, becoming nomadic in order to find enough resources to live, fighting in tremendously primitive ways over what scarce value still remains.
From there we can go to the first warp flight, James Cromwell or not, and subsequently see this shell of humanity try to regain its dignity by trying to fill the shoes of its former civilization while also attempting to live with the guilt of all of its previous ills.
Troi's line is something like, "War, poverty, disease; within fifty years those will all be gone" and Enterprise more or less picks up at the fifty year mark, skipping out on Earth's actual Reconstruction Era.
And it's not that I picture hourly episodes in which an Arab and an Isreali fight over the same old same old and by the end some kindly North American show them the virtue of getting along, or alternatively that the kindly North American very dramatically tells them that they HAVE to get along to survive. My conception is that with World War III, history and conflict would be reset in the eyes of civilization and all nations and peoples would be reduced to the same level of existence. The Isrealis are as disenfranchised from their power as the Saudis and the United States, nobody has a hold over anybody anymore, and nobody can worry about past grudges affecting today's survival anymore.
It is at this point that humanity's theme becomes that of, "Let me help."
As we watch humanity recover, we see the return of institutions, of rule of law, of the infrastructure of society and culture, and eventually, the return to space exploration and development.
And I suppose a good finishing point would be the launching of a new deep space ship tasked with true and peaceful exploration of the galaxy.
Though I'll be damned if my miniseries is going to end with Scott Bakula on the bridge of the Akiraprize.
That's what I would like to see, though I'm the kind of person that watches Lost each week hoping that they'll explore political and economic philosophy by how they organize their island society.
-------------------- If God didn't want us to fly, he wouldn't have given us Bernoulli's Principle.
Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
I'm wholly against any kind of reboot. As others have said, if you want to start over again with a clean slate then make a *new* series/franchise and don't bother slapping "Star Trek" in front of it. It would probably be more successful that way, anyway, because reboot or no reboot, people watching anything called "Star Trek" will undoubtedly hold it in comparison with what we've seen thus far.
That being said, there is a great and definite need to change things up and get new people in charge of things creatively. Berman and Braga have been running the show for nearly two decades (well, not quite that long for Braga, but still) and have gotten quite repetitive in their ideas. It can only be a good thing that they are now out. It's a shame to lose people like Manny Coto and Mike Sussman in the shuffle but, as they say on Earth, c'est la vie.
IMO, Trek's greatest asset is its history and its richly elaborate, multi-threaded universe. It should continue to be made use of. There is still history to unfold between ENT and TOS, and there is always the future after VGR. But whichever era is chosen to explore, TPTB need to not try to duplicate the style and characters of previous series. IDIC, yo.
-MMoM
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
I was doing some thinking today, and it occurred to me that it might be cool to do a series that dealt with civilians rather than Starfleet, perhaps settlers at a frontier colony. Brave, rugged people working together to build a world for themselves from the ground up. That sort of thing.
If you wanted to, you could bring some SF personnel in as colonial protection, and there could be potential dramatic conflict between colonists who embrace their presence and those that would rather go at it alone, free of governmental/military entanglements.
-MMoM
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
That certainly has potential. It might have a more Firefly feel to it. But it wouldn't really be Star Trek, even though it was set in the same universe. I'm not saying that's not a reason to do it... it would just have a comletely different dynamic to it. The exploration concept would have to be pretty much 100% planetside.
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