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TO BOLDLY BLOW: Writing in the L.A. Times, science fiction writer Orson Scott Card says "it's about time" that the Star Trek franchise went into eclipse, with the imminent finale of Enterprise, the fifth and apparently last iteration of the TV space opera that began with Bill Shatner's Captain Kirk snogging green chicks in front of cardboard sets almost 40 years ago.

"The original Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad," Card wrote. "As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s — a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. It was sci-fi as seen by Hollywood: all spectacle, no substance."

As Card sees it, Trek was big with people who didn't know anything about sci-fi, giving them their fix of ray guns and weird aliens while the literature was evolving rapidly under the pens of writers like Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Ursula LeGuin, Brian Aldiss and Arthur C. Clarke, among others. While later Trek spinoffs "were much better performed ... the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut."

It took the better part of four decades, according to Card, but the fans finally caught up with the genre, and really innovative sci-fi and fantasy-themed shows — like Buffy, Smallville, Lost and Firefly, along with movies like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind — made the shortcomings of Trek finally, painfully obvious.

It's an intriguing theory, but it ignores something important: people like space operas, as much as geeks like hot chicks in tight uniforms battling aliens. Neither of these facts, especially the geeks, will go away, even if a sci-fi writer wins a Nobel Prize and the genre finally loses its lingering image as revenge fantasies for ectomorphs with poor hygiene.

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Posts: 1996 | Registered: Feb 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Also, that anyone in Canada besides me and my mom actually have heard about OSC.

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And, you know, other Canadian Hatrackers.

Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003  |  IP: Logged |