It occurs to me, as I map out the rough road map for Jupiter's Ghost going forward, that Star Trek is a real weird piece of fiction.
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I can't think of another science fiction property with that kind of large ensemble cast and character driven story telling.
Well no. That's not fair.
I need a keyboard.
I'll finish this thought in a few minutes.
@ajroach42 The Expanse?
@LJ in some ways, absolutely.
Alright, so Star Trek is weird.
There aren't a lot of examples of literature or film that follow the basic Star Trek formula, and those that appear to ... don't actually?
There are lots of TV shows, many of them directly inspired by Star Trek.
But a lot of those TV shows aren't actually very Star Trek-y. Babylon 5 is DS9 (and/or vice versa) and The Orville is TNG, but Farscape isn't Star Trek, the crew's too small and the stakes are too high and ... I'm getting ahead of myself and not talking about the thing I want to talk about.
Hold on.
@ajroach42 DS9 being a ripoff of B5 is my “Han shot first” line in the sand. I was reading JMS’s posts on rec.arts.sf.tv.b5 or whatever it was back then. Also b5 was way darker than any trek before DS9 went to war with the cardassians or whoever.
![unlofl [Promoted Toot]](https://media.mstdn.social/accounts/avatars/109/139/379/925/966/320/original/e28a291a31f5844b.png "unlofl [Promoted Toot]")
@ajroach42 bookmarking this for your later thoughts...
Also an interesting comparison: bsg has several of the elements, harder sci-fi feel but with the supernatural, ensemble cast, dramatic bridge scenes, themes around the meaning of being human
And even when TNG is doing prophecy about ancient civilizations and origins of all humanoids, or when bsg is doing cool exploration mystery stuff, they've got almost opposite vibes.
@unlofl Absolutely.
I said BSG, I meant Babylon 5. I'll edit.
@unlofl Oh no, I said it right. You were making a separate point. My bad.
@unlofl BSG, especially 70s BSG was Star Wars.
Star Trek was a soap opera. BSG was a story about refugees, you know?
@ajroach42 all good.
Also, I'm a huge fan of dramatic bridge scenes, the bsg assault on new caprica is probably my favorite sci-fi battle because of the part on the bridge as they jump the Galactica into the atmosphere.
And then there's master and commander... Do we only do this stuff with 2 specific eras?
Star Trek doesn't feel like a lot of other Science fiction programs because it is descended from soap operas.
Star Trek (like Space Patrol before it) took the large ensemble cast Soap Opera and stuck it in outer space.
This might feel untrue, because Star Trek:TOS is obviously not a soap opera, right?
But it has soap opera in it's DNA, because it is descended from Space Patrol and Tom Corbett Space Cadet which were absolutely Soap Operas.
Star Trek owes a ton of it's structure and setup to Space Patrol (etc) and from those roots it picked up a bunch of Soap Opera.
TNG was especially adept at doing character driven soap opera stuff while also doing SPACE Stuff, by often elevating the character driven stuff that would otherwise be the B plot to A plot status, and relegating the big SPACE stuff to the B plot.
@ajroach42 The problem is, TOS & TAS were largely written by real science fiction writers, from the pulps, mostly singular writers then edited a bit (or a lot, as Harlan Ellison complained). It can be, as Gene Roddenberry put it, "Wagon Train to the stars", but it wasn't just a dumb western repeated.
TNG, DS9, VGR, etc. were almost entirely written by TV show writers rooms. They have no idea what SF is, no ideas except recycled other TV shows. So better "character drama" but worse SF.
#startrek
@ajroach42 and Wagon Train, of course, famously.
@fishidwardrobe sure, but less so than it might seem. There are Wagon Train episodes, but the show never really felt like Roddenberry's wagon train to the stars.
@ajroach42 You have a compelling theory for why DS9 is the best Trek right here.
@ieure DS9 is the best star trek, yeah.
@ajroach42 It's also the most soap opera-y of all Treks. Staying closer to the source material!
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I was looking for Fiction that felt like Star Trek earlier, and I came up with very little.
Because Star Trek is a synthesis of serious War sci-fi with a bunch of soap opera conventions.
The things that have the big ship with the large crew and the hyper-competence tend to be barely disguised fascist propaganda.
The fiction that does the most character driven stuff, tend to feature very small crews of people who are just barely scraping by. Sometimes this is really lovely (The Wayfarer's series, for example) but it is also very different.
@ajroach42 It is not a large crew but I've always felt Mass Effect passes very well for Star Trek in a fair number of these veins. (A lot of focus on individual character stories, a fair number of moral/ethical choices, etc.)
@ajroach42 Wolf359's popping to mind as a recent example! Of the "character driven stuff".
I'm going to be relistening to it some more tonight...
@alcinnz Wolf359 is a great example, I'm just surprised there aren't more.
I'm thinking about this, of course, because I'm writing for Jupiter's Ghost.
Jupiter's Ghost is a big spaceship with a few hundred people on it, and I've been trying to find other examples of stories about big crews in space that are largely about the people.
What I'm finding, mostly, are stories about a single person or a very small group, or about war.
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@ajroach42 It's quite silly comedy, and different - but I'm finding myself reminded of the large Red Dwarf crew - before a disaster happens, and we end up with the 4 main characters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf:_Infinity_Welcomes_Careful_Drivers
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@ajroach42
I'm interested in this. Are you looking for contributors?
I'm interested in this. Are you looking for contributors?
@ajroach42 I'd add that for the most part, Trek also doesn't borrow its war plots from the barely-disguised propaganda side of sci-fi.
Like DS9 is about the recovery from technically a victory and what that means for the survivors. That's a bit that's generally left to the ride into the sunset.
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@ajroach42 Battlestar Galactica has a large crew in space.
And yes, a lot about war. It's in the title...
And of course this weird... "main characters are stand-ins to discuss/exemplify larger problems" (is this what makes it soap opera?)
For me, it feels not too dissimilar to TNG, except the technology is "pseudo-harder".
@ajroach42 star trek discovery s3 and s4 could be thought of as a more trek reinterpretation of andromeda s1 and s2. seeing how each group took gene roddenberry's unfinished work in different directions is interesting to look at.