The Messages In Scifi

[Spacescifi]

 

It is true that scifi often carries messages of some kind.

Usually a character which may or may not be the protagonist represents the moral center of the story (supporting whatever view that is shared as 'good') with the audience.

The villain or villains are often opposed to that view and also the character or characters that support it.

Which in conclusion basically seems to make the point that the conflict is often idealogy based, assuming it's not over survival itself for resources.

It is also true that some well known scifi promote philosphies and certain theories, some of which will undoubtedly date them as obsolete one day.

I think even if one tries to avoid sending philosophy messages into their fiction, at least SOME of the author's views will creep in.

At the very least their preferences will creep in.

Want an example?

When men write female characters they may emphasize how they look a lot and how they act... because guys often do check that IRL.

When some women write men... haha, I have seen them write them emotional, and introspective, since women definitely have feelings that burn a bit hotter than men's.

Either way no matter the sex I have seen both write well. Females can excel at character feelings and drama between them. Whereas men excel at writing men from literal experience and also from writing based on observation.

 

Star Trek is amusingly absurd at times.

TOS: Messages: The American way. Evolution. Atheism. Acting like Captain Kirk toward the ladies was probably based on the 'free love' movement of the 60-70's era.

TNG: Evolution. Social justice to some degree but not quite like later series.

DS9: Religion is scifi... which was a different view for Trek to take, but it kinda confirms it's connection to it's B5 predecessor, which implied all religion was a mere ploy by powerful not totally altruistic aliens called Vorlons. War is sometimes necessary was another message, also taken from B5.

Enterprise: Did not watch it so dont know.

STD: Ditto.

Picard: Nihilism more or less, and social justice heavily.

The rest: No comment barely watched them.

 

You can add to this if you like.

 

What are your thoughts?

 

Edited September 22, 2020 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

I wanr to read sci-fi written by the cats about the humans.

[DDE]

10 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

When men write female characters they may emphasize how they look a lot and how they act... because guys often do check that IRL.

When some women write men... haha, I have seen them write them emotional, and introspective, since women definitely have feelings that burn a bit hotter than men's.

Oh, it can be a lot worse. One of the interesting bits of writing advice I've came across described the trap for female authors in writing a strong female character. The trap went like this: (a) strong = masculine and (b) masculine = violent, anti-social, et cetera. Obviously, the product of such gross misunderstandings of humans cannot be a pleasant character, not to mention thay (a) is essentially a form of perverted self-hatred (corollary: feminine = weak).

And yet misguided charecter-building, of the (a) variety particularly, has become a scourge in pop culture because of the mandate to churn out 'stronk wahmen'. Combine that with the Galbrush Paradox, where you can't subject a female to certain hardships that male characters are mundanely subjected to, and the spectre of Ensign Mary Sue appears.

 

Anyway, back to sci-fi. One of the worst implications of misguided writing comes from the Mass Effect series. The Bathanian Hegemony and the various independent planets use chattel slavery... and this is treated as superior to automation. Citadel governments set up offshore special economic zones like Illium that permit indentured servitude just to be able to compete.

[Okhin]

Every bits of media produced and relayed exist in a complex world (ours), and as such come with context and refers to this context. As such, every bits of media is political, whether it's intentional or not. It's especially true in fiction (not only science), because the author wants you to see a world that is more or less different than ours and making you dream about those differences and makes you build the gap between those worlds and yours (because we all perceive the world in different ways, we don't understand it the same way, and so we live in different worlds).

Heck, even advertisement is political. The existence of it, but also the messages they convey. There's nothing that do not carry a political meaning. The questions, if any, are more about discussing and dissecting those messages, how we relate to them, how much do we agree to them and how can we use those views in our worlds.

And yes, every bits of media reflects the world views of the authors, even if they know their own biases, acknowledges them and tries to work around them, the fact that their trying to work around their bias (or not) will be seen into their works and it is political.

Does it change the global quality of stuff being written ? I think it's not related. A highly political work can be badly written. This is an issue I have with a lot of essay, I tend to find them boring or unreadable, except for some exceptions, and I prefer my political messages being carried by fiction. But that's because having to work through a linear argumentation from point A to Z is painful, that's not how I think.

[Lewie]

@Spacescifi, you do make a good point. When you really do examine it, the actions of the Enterprise’s crew can be fairly questionable. It all depends on your point of view, of course. I’m not entirely sure of the atheistic morale, there are multiple times throughout Tos where religion is mentioned. (By crew members of the Enterprise) but I dunno...still, very interesting to think about. History’s written by the winners, y’know? 

[kerbiloid]

Despite of naive girlish fantasies, the matriarchy is just when a she-boss gives commands to men  how to subjugate weaker women, and she doesn't take into account the naive girlish tricks.

[SOXBLOX]

If you want to write deep characters, read the guy who did it best. (Fyodor Dostoevsky.) Esp. The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment.

I usually laugh when sci-fi, or any modern media, tries to convey a moral message. Usually it is so watered down and divorced from reality and truth that it becomes meaningless, or worse, wrong. DS9 was pretty good, though, and I enjoy the nihilistic character struggles. So very futile...

On 9/22/2020 at 6:37 AM, DDE said:

spectre of Ensign Mary Sue 

Did she ever die?  I think she's named Burnham, or something.

Or Rey.

[DDE]

3 hours ago, SOXBLOX said:

Or Rey.

Spoiler

...poor Finn, the most wasted character in the ST

 

[Nuke]

there's a huge difference from presenting an idea or argument and letting you make up your own mind and being told that you are guilty of wrongthink. this is why tng is a million times better than discovery or picard (and nu-trek isnt even the worst offender, look at nu-starwars). 

the difference is when you let people make up their own mind, you respect their freedom of though. you will get your message across a lot better doing this than you would by informing the audience that they are some kind of ignorant savage if they believe anything but the message you present. you simply have to acknowledge that there are other people and they might have different ideas and opinions. the last thing you want to do is run those people off by forcing an ideology down their throats, because they are the ones you have to convince. preaching to the choir gets you nowhere.

even if they disagree with your message they can still be entertained because you aren't constantly insisting that they are wrong (thats what killed ad astra for me, i mean the movie had great visuals but damn if the plot was going anywhere, lets bring a bunch of outward looking people to a movie about exploring space just to tell them they should be introspective instead). you might even throw them a bone by having main characters who support an opposing view to the message being presented and avoid portraying those contrarian characters in an exclusively negative light. the expanse did this pretty well in season 3.5. 

 

 

Edited September 24, 2020 by Nuke

[KSK]

My thoughts?

Bluntly, I think your example comes out of the south end of a northbound cow.

On 9/22/2020 at 1:13 AM, Spacescifi said:

When men write female characters they may emphasize how they look a lot and how they act... because guys often do check that IRL.

When some women write men... haha, I have seen them write them emotional, and introspective, since women definitely have feelings that burn a bit hotter than men's.

Either way no matter the sex I have seen both write well. Females can excel at character feelings and drama between them. Whereas men excel at writing men from literal experience and also from writing based on observation.

For openers you're conflating emotional and introspective - which is ridiculous because 'emotional' covers any and all emotions. Similarly, 'feelings that burn a bit hotter than men's' - what does that even mean?

Next, you're laughing at male characters who are emotional or introspective. Your tone suggests that you see this as flaw in women's writing of male characters. You cap it all off with some meaningless pop psychology explanation. This entire line is dismissive, shows a very limited viewpoint of what a male character can or should be and doesn't seem to consider that male writers are also capable of writing male characters with emotional depth to them.

Finally, I see nothing in your third line that is gender specific. Excelling at writing about character feelings and inter-character drama or  writing from experience and/or observation are not skills that are unique to either male or female authors. 

Oh - and you‘ll find plenty of female authors writing male characters with an emphasis on how they look and act, although it’ll be more obvious in certain genres. Amazingly enough, women check out how men look and act too.

On 9/22/2020 at 1:13 AM, Spacescifi said:

TOS: Messages: The American way. Evolution. Atheism. Acting like Captain Kirk toward the ladies was probably based on the 'free love' movement of the 60-70's era.

The United Federation of Planets. A setting in which humanity has eradicated poverty, hunger and war (between humans at any rate) and famously, does not use money. People are no longer motivated by acquisition of riches and personal possessions, instead by learning and betterment of humanity as a whole.  That sounds pretty socialist, verging on communist to me, albeit in a heavily idealized form. It's still pretty radical today, would have even more so when TOS originally aired, and doesn't seem to square with the focus on individualism which underpins the American Dream. 

Likewise, consider the main cast of TOS. By the standards of the time it was an astonishingly diverse group,  being mixed gender, mixed nationality (depicted if not actual) and mixed race. In terms of characters it also featured a literal half-breed human. Message - provided you were competent enough to be on a starship bridge, then gender, skin colour, ethnicity or even species were irrelevant. Even Kirk's womanizing (although not especially attractive IMO) was famously inclusive. Black, white or green - provided you were female it was all good so far as Kirk was concerned. Notoriously, this supposedly led to the first interracial kiss (Kirk & Uhuru) to be shown on TV, which was just a little bit controversial.

The whole show screams of social justice - and I use that in a positive sense not the snide and disparaging 'SJW' sense. I also think that Wikipedia puts it pretty well:

Roddenberry intended the show to have a progressive political agenda reflective of the emerging counter-culture of the youth movement, though he was not fully forthcoming to the networks about this. He wanted Star Trek to show what humanity might develop into, if it would learn from the lessons of the past, most specifically by ending violence. An extreme example is the alien species known as the Vulcans, who had a violent past but learned to control their emotions. Roddenberry also gave Star Trek an anti-war message and depicted the United Federation of Planets as an ideal, optimistic version of the United Nations. His efforts were opposed by the network because of concerns over marketability, e.g., they opposed Roddenberry's insistence that Enterprise have a racially diverse crew.

In summary, I think you managed to miss almost every message in TOS. Unless you're trying to claim that all of the above is encapsulated within the American Dream. In which case I can only respectfully disagree with your assertion.

Edited September 29, 2020 by KSK

[Spacescifi]

5 hours ago, KSK said:

My thoughts?

Bluntly, I think your example comes out of the south end of a northbound cow.

For openers you're conflating emotional and introspective - which is ridiculous because 'emotional' covers any and all emotions. Similarly, 'feelings that burn a bit hotter than men's' - what does that even mean?

Next, you're laughing at male characters who are emotional or introspective. Your tone suggests that you see this as flaw in women's writing of male characters. You cap it all off with some meaningless pop psychology explanation. This entire line is dismissive, shows a very limited viewpoint of what a male character can or should be and doesn't seem to consider that male writers are also capable of writing male characters with emotional depth to them.

Finally, I see nothing in your third line that is gender specific. Excelling at writing about character feelings and inter-character drama or  writing from experience and/or observation are not skills that are unique to either male or female authors. 

Oh - and you‘ll find plenty of female authors writing male characters with an emphasis on how they look and act, although it’ll be more obvious in certain genres. Amazingly enough, women check out how men look and act too.

The United Federation of Planets. A setting in which humanity has eradicated poverty, hunger and war (between humans at any rate) and famously, does not use money. People are no longer motivated by acquisition of riches and personal possessions, instead by learning and betterment of humanity as a whole.  That sounds pretty socialist, verging on communist to me, albeit in a heavily idealized form. It's still pretty radical today, would have even more so when TOS originally aired, and doesn't seem to square with the focus on individualism which underpins the American Dream. 

Likewise, consider the main cast of TOS. By the standards of the time it was an astonishingly diverse group,  being mixed gender, mixed nationality (depicted if not actual) and mixed race. In terms of characters it also featured a literal half-breed human. Message - provided you were competent enough to be on a starship bridge, then gender, skin colour, ethnicity or even species were irrelevant. Even Kirk's womanizing (although not especially attractive IMO) was famously inclusive. Black, white or green - provided you were female it was all good so far as Kirk was concerned. Notoriously, this supposedly led to the first interracial kiss (Kirk & Uhuru) to be shown on TV, which was just a little bit controversial.

The whole show screams of social justice - and I use that in a positive sense not the snide and disparaging 'SJW' sense. I also think that Wikipedia puts it pretty well:

Roddenberry intended the show to have a progressive political agenda reflective of the emerging counter-culture of the youth movement, though he was not fully forthcoming to the networks about this. He wanted Star Trek to show what humanity might develop into, if it would learn from the lessons of the past, most specifically by ending violence. An extreme example is the alien species known as the Vulcans, who had a violent past but learned to control their emotions. Roddenberry also gave Star Trek an anti-war message and depicted the United Federation of Planets as an ideal, optimistic version of the United Nations. His efforts were opposed by the network because of concerns over marketability, e.g., they opposed Roddenberry's insistence that Enterprise have a racially diverse crew.

In summary, I think you managed to miss almost every message in TOS. Unless you're trying to claim that all of the above is encapsulated within the American Dream. In which case I can only respectfully disagree with your assertion.

Spoiler

 

 

 

Well... you may respectfully disagree. My opinion was based on observation.

United States Ship (USS) Enterprise is rather telling I think. Instead of USSR Enterprise, and Kirk is honoring a flag that is known rather well worldwide.

We know what Roddenberry wanted America to be. We even now what Martin Luther King wanted.

Are we there yet?

Yes and no.

Yes: The laws were changed and are being so.

No: Changing people is something that you cannot do simply by throwing money around and establishing laws. That is why media propaganda is so important to those in positions of influence... because that actually can.

Religion, nationalism and books used to be the chief influencers, but with the advent of the internet and big media, anyone can jump on any babd wagon they wish.

Edited September 29, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Bill Phil]

I’m pretty sure USS in Trek is for United Space Ship or United Star Ship.

[kerbiloid]

Where, in its turn, the "United Space" sounds like there is no space in the space allowed to be not united.
Say, Klingons. They think that they are an empire, but they are just separatists.

Edited September 29, 2020 by kerbiloid

[KSK]

2 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

Well... you may respectfully disagree. My opinion was based on observation.

United States Ship (USS) Enterprise is rather telling I think. Instead of USSR Enterprise, and Kirk is honoring a flag that is known rather well worldwide.

We know what Roddenberry wanted America to be. We even now what Martin Luther King wanted.

Are we there yet?

Yes and no.

Yes: The laws were changed and are being so.

No: Changing people is something that you cannot do simply by throwing money around and establishing laws. That is why media propaganda is so important to those in positions of influence... because that actually can.

Religion, nationalism and books used to be the chief influencers, but with the advent of the internet and big media, anyone can jump on any babd wagon they wish.

As was mine. When TOS first aired in 1966, the US was in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement with everything that goes with that. Communism was worse than a dirty word with the Cold War in full swing and socialism wasn't far behind it.

Fast forward to 2020 and you've got Black Lives Matter, a significant chunk of a population voting for a border wall with Mexico and a population and leadership so wrapped up in the ideals of individual liberty that both are seriously hindering efforts to deal with a pandemic. (Not that my own country is doing much better in that regard so I can hardly throw shade at the US). Oh - and communism and socialism are still dirty words. Also you've got the antivaxxers - so much for the Star Trek message of technology being a positive force.

The future depicted by Star Trek TOS wasn't part of the American Dream in 1966 and it's not looking much closer to being part of it in 2020. 

Edit: You absolutely can change behavior by establishing laws. Three UK examples that immediately spring to mind are wearing seatbelts when driving, smoking in public and drink driving. And, slightly depressingly, they all followed much the same social pattern as I recall. Much grumbling about 'the nanny state' and suchlike to start with, followed by reluctant compliance followed by the new behavior becoming socially acceptable and then the social norm. 

Whether, and to what extent, the state should do this sort of thing is a matter of healthy debate, which I don't propose to get into here in deference to forum rules. But it does work and sometimes its the only way that seems to work.

Edited September 29, 2020 by KSK

[Spacescifi]

3 hours ago, KSK said:

As was mine. When TOS first aired in 1966, the US was in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement with everything that goes with that. Communism was worse than a dirty word with the Cold War in full swing and socialism wasn't far behind it.

Fast forward to 2020 and you've got Black Lives Matter, a significant chunk of a population voting for a border wall with Mexico and a population and leadership so wrapped up in the ideals of individual liberty that both are seriously hindering efforts to deal with a pandemic. (Not that my own country is doing much better in that regard so I can hardly throw shade at the US). Oh - and communism and socialism are still dirty words. Also you've got the antivaxxers - so much for the Star Trek message of technology being a positive force.

The future depicted by Star Trek TOS wasn't part of the American Dream in 1966 and it's not looking much closer to being part of it in 2020. 

Edit: You absolutely can change behavior by establishing laws. Three UK examples that immediately spring to mind are wearing seatbelts when driving, smoking in public and drink driving. And, slightly depressingly, they all followed much the same social pattern as I recall. Much grumbling about 'the nanny state' and suchlike to start with, followed by reluctant compliance followed by the new behavior becoming socially acceptable and then the social norm. 

Whether, and to what extent, the state should do this sort of thing is a matter of healthy debate, which I don't propose to get into here in deference to forum rules. But it does work and sometimes its the only way that seems to work.

Check your mail I cannot post it here.

A question.

Edited September 29, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Vanamonde]

Stay away from politics, please. It just never ends well.