Exposing the Grift: Go Woke Go Broke

[Ruprecht]

I don't really care about all that. Star wars is objectively silly and bad. I just ignore all that and try to be entertained. If I'm entertained it's ok-good. Bad batch was entertaining, ymmv.

I watched the original trilogy and was impressed, but I thought the Return of the Jedi dropped off pretty badly.
More noticeable when I tried to rewatch it later. Which was when I also watched the Phantom Menace on DVD (or most of it anyway). I wrote Star Wars off after that.
I actually like THX1138 a lot more, as it's my sort of Scifi, although I had no idea Star Wars was supposed to be an analogy for the Vietnam war and broader imperialism when I watched it as a kid. Always thought it was just a soft-scifi space opera.

 

[GtehMVP]

I'm not really big on character driven serials. I mostly like hard scifi which focuses on specific aspects of technological development and the sort of social changes it could bring.
I don't mind space operas, but the closer it gets to fantasy with psychic powers and/or neofeudalism, the less interesting I tend to find it. More so as I've gotten older (I read some fantasy novels as a kid).
I'm also not a big fan of the Guardians of the Galaxy or Firefly style of "band of space misfits" and flippant dialogue, and I've definitely outgrown Young Adult fiction and coming of age novels.

Even as an 8 year old I rolled my eyes at Star Trek IV. Still enjoyed it, but "The Future" coming back to tell us how stupid we were about whales, money and medicine was still pretty corny compared to what I was reading at the time (mostly Gibson's Neuromancer and Count Zero, Vinges' The Peace War, Asimov's Foundation and Earth and Hughes' Devil On My Back). Although that was generally the case with movies versus novels, and it was better than D.A.R.Y.L. about on par with Flight of the Navigator, but not as fun as Short Circuit.

You'd probably like the Expanse then. It's too bad it ended when it did, and a major character had to get written off for being a dirt bag IRL, but the first 3 seasons are a masterpiece. I hope they get to finish it properly, still more books to adapt.

 

[filthybliss]

And no one wants to see fat ugly people as stars on TV.

Speak for yourself. Fat Jonah Hill was the man.

 

[Ruprecht]

You'd probably like the Expanse then. It's too bad it ended when it did, and a major character had to get written off for being a dirt bag IRL, but the first 3 seasons are a masterpiece. I hope they get to finish it properly, still more books to adapt.

Haven't seen the series, but I've read the books, and it's definitely more my style of scifi.
I'm a little loathe to watch series I've read, as it tends to distort the way I imagine them for the worse.

 

[Nizam al-Mulk]

Idk if it's complete. I think it is. The story feels very similar to original Star wars trilogy stories. Good pacing for an action show, decent overarching storyline, individual episodes have pretty good stories.

What you described is far from excellent. That is what you initially said.

I thought the post-scarcity communist technotopia was pretty front and center in Star Trek, if somewhat inconsistent with the apparent military hierarchy of the fleet.
The "save the whales" message in Star Trek IV was also extremely preachy if you love whaling and hate biodiversity.

There was bad in it and it got worse after Discovery ep 1.

He came out of the closet in 2005. It wasn't widely known that he was gay in the 60s.

But yes, Star Trek was very loud about its politics unless you're too dense to realize that an episode about an alien species that hates each other over minor physical differences is an allegory about the stupidity of racism. But to be fair, you probably would be too stupid to realize that based on your posts in this thread.

It handled the politics better in the past even if there was a lot of bad stuff. Also the cultural atmosphere was different.

 

[GtehMVP]

Haven't seen the series, but I've read the books, and it's definitely more my style of scifi.
I'm a little loathe to watch series I've read, as it tends to distort the way I imagine them for the worse.

I read them too, up until Persepolis rising (the show stops before that). This one of the few occasions where I preferred the adaption. Sounds like it's right up your alley.

There are some changes for the better and worse, but it's very well done, I just didn't care about the Belter war. There's merging of two characters (great decision in this case).

I was hoping for the show to continue, as I liked reading the books to coincide with each season, but I guess I'll have to read the read the rest as it's not looking good.

 

[Ruprecht]

There was bad in it and it got worse after Discovery ep 1.

It wasn't the politics that turned me off Star Wars or Star Trek, just the style and quality of the Scifi.
I read through most of the Prometheus Award winners, despite rarely agreeing with American libertarians politically, and enjoy a lot of them.
Likewise, I can enjoy the straight up socialism of Edward Bellamy or Bolshevik scifi from the likes of Alexandr Bogdanov, colonial scifi from Edgar Rice-Burroughs (despite him being critical of Kipling and quite progressive for the time in terms of his views on race and colonialism) and other politically dated retrofuturism.
Even later politically preachy Scifi like 1984, Brave New World, The Forever War or Life During Wartime.
I don't have to agree with a book's politics (or even need them to be contemporarily relevant) to enjoy it.
It's only when you have extremely preachy politics and little to nothing else, such as Rand's Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, that you're only likely to enjoy it if you agree with the politics.
Of course those books are more political manifesto than scifi, hence the 2 dimensional characters, overwrought descriptions, melodramatic dialogue, extensive longwinded monologues and lack of any world building.

 

[SuperAlly]

He came out of the closet in 2005. It wasn't widely known that he was gay in the 60s.

But yes, Star Trek was very loud about its politics unless you're too dense to realize that an episode about an alien species that hates each other over minor physical differences is an allegory about the stupidity of racism. But to be fair, you probably would be too stupid to realize that based on your posts in this thread.

Post 672

Dumbass

 

[SuperAlly]

You'd probably like the Expanse then. It's too bad it ended when it did, and a major character had to get written off for being a dirt bag IRL, but the first 3 seasons are a masterpiece. I hope they get to finish it properly, still more books to adapt.

The expanse was excellent

I guess the weirdos will try and claim it as an example of woke so their world view isn't shattered

 

[Nizam al-Mulk]

It wasn't the politics that turned me off Star Wars or Star Trek, just the style and quality of the Scifi.
I read through most of the Prometheus Award winners, despite rarely agreeing with American libertarians politically, and enjoy a lot of them.
Likewise, I can enjoy the straight up socialism of Edward Bellamy or Bolshevik scifi from the like of Alexandr Bogdanov, colonial scifi from Edgar Rice-Burroughs (despite him being critical of Kipling and quite progressive for the time in terms of his views on race and colonialism) and other politically dated retrofuturism.
Even later politically preachy Scifi like 1984, Brave New World, The Forever War or Life During Wartime.
I don't have to agree with a book's politics (or even need them to be contemporarily relevant) to enjoy it.
It's only when you have extremely preachy politics and little to nothing else, such as Rand's Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, that you're only likely to enjoy it if you agree with the politics.
Of course those books are more political manifesto than scifi, hence the 2 dimensional characters, overwrought descriptions, melodramatic dialogue, extensive longwinded monologues and lack of any world building.

Forever War was preachy? I did not feel and think the same when i read it.

I see bot SW and Trek as space adventure. Never cared about the science aspect. Trek with more diplomacy which was nice.

 

[Ruprecht]

Forever War was preachy? I did not feel and think the same when i read it.

I see bot SW and Trek as space adventure. Never cared about the science aspect. Trek with more diplomacy which was nice.

Yeah, it was transparently a story about Vietnam. From massacring the non-resisting civilian aliens as a result of conditioning, through to coming home and discovering that now everyone was gay and prejudiced against him for being straight.
It was a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which he felt was too much of a glorification.

Both Star Wars and Star Trek were Soft Scifi in the sense of a scifi setting where science isn't important to the narrative.
Like HG Wells, Frank Herbert and Brian Aldiss.
I can still enjoy it, but it's less interesting to me than more Hard Scifi like Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson.

 

[GtehMVP]

The expanse was excellent

I guess the weirdos will try and claim it as an example of woke so their world view isn't shattered

You're always going to have losers across the spectrum. Lot's of shows deserve the woke trash label, like Rings of Power and Wheel of Time, but I've generally seen the Expanse claimed as diversity done right, even from the everything is woke rage baiters. The whole series is excellent, but the first three seasons are exceptional. I wish Amazon poured a billion $$ into adapting the final 3 books instead of the abomination they've created with ROP.

 

[Hog-train]

Speak for yourself. Fat Jonah Hill was the man.

She's the captain of the ship - LOL.

 

[Plissken]

This thread reads like something straight from Baghdad Bob considering all the news this year.

 

[Nizam al-Mulk]

Yeah, it was transparently a story about Vietnam. From massacring the non-resisting civilian aliens as a result of conditioning, through to coming home and discovering that now everyone was gay and prejudiced against him for being straight.

I would have to read it again an i am not going to right now.

 

[Loiosh]

Yeah, it was transparently a story about Vietnam. From massacring the non-resisting civilian aliens as a result of conditioning, through to coming home and discovering that now everyone was gay and prejudiced against him for being straight.
It was a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which he felt was too much of a glorification.

Both Star Wars and Star Trek were Soft Scifi in the sense of a scifi setting where science isn't important to the narrative.
Like HG Wells, Frank Herbert and Brian Aldiss.
I can still enjoy it, but it's less interesting to me than more Hard Scifi like Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson.

The Forever War was exactly what you'd expect from an incredibly educated veteran with his military experience. I've read it twenty or thirty times and I wouldn't consider it preachy, it explored multiple radical shifts in society from the perspective of someone blinking through the centuries.

And what makes Gibson hard science fiction? I adore Gibson but he was scientifically illiterate and his take on the net was pure fantasy. Brilliant, delicious fantasy. I will grant that his expressions on cybernetics were extremely prescient.

What do you think of Banks? I know he's really unpopular on Sherdog but he's one of my favorites.

 

[Loiosh]

Star Trek was the gold standard for progressive politics in tv/film.

The big difference with a lot of modern slop, including its own recent iterations, is that whatever message they had for the world, story, world building, and character were front and center.

I always think of Avery (Ben f'n Sisko) Brooks in this fan interaction about being a black captain.



Too many productions today are filled with writers who are either more interested in pushing their messaging first, or forced to by execs.

There's a serious lack of talent behind the cameras too. I think the streaming wars diluted the talent pool, with DEI requirements making it worse.

You know, for years I loved DS9 but when I revisited it a couple of years ago, it didn't hold up for me. I enjoyed most of it but all of Sisko's Bajoran Emmisary mysticism really deflated the show for me.

 

[Ruprecht]

The Forever War was exactly what you'd expect from an incredibly educated veteran with his military experience. I've read it twenty or thirty times and I wouldn't consider it preachy, it explored multiple radical shifts in society from the perspective of someone blinking through the centuries.

And what makes Gibson hard science fiction? I adore Gibson but he was scientifically illiterate and his take on the net was pure fantasy. Brilliant, delicious fantasy. I will grant that his expressions on cybernetics were extremely prescient.

What do you think of Banks? I know he's really unpopular on Sherdog but he's one of my favorites.

Ian M Banks is my favourite author for Space Opera. He got preachy too with novels like Surface Detail, but his sense of humour let him get away with it.

Gibson counts as hard scifi because he was explicitly imagining the future impact of the internet, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, cybernetics and cyberspace in a book he published in 1984. If you reread Neuromancer, it's hard to imagine that he finished writing this when "the internet" was 2400 baud modems and dial up bulletin boards (in ASCII). As you say, he certainly wasn't in the field of computer science.
Nonetheless he coined terms that were used when aspects of his imagining became a reality.
Similar with his predictions of online culture and fashion in the Bridge trilogy.
Sure, the Sprawl trilogy was a nerdy teenage fantasy of how things might develop, it's dystopian critiques a little too appealing, but even his anticipation of globalisation and corporate power wasn't entirely wrong.

Haldeman was in a position to write anti-war scifi from his experience more than his imagination, but that's absolutely what it was. Iconically so. He made no bones about it being an anti-war response to Heinlein's glorification, even though the two were very respectful. He said that if he hadn't actually been to Vietnam he might have ended up writing heroic fiction like Flash Gordon, but instead it became more satirical. I guess it depends how you define preachy, but all the major narrative and world building elements were aligned along that message, and it wasn't subtle.

 

[Nizam al-Mulk]

Haldeman was in a position to write anti-war scifi from his experience more than his imagination, but that's absolutely what it was. Iconically so. He made no bones about it being an anti-war response to Heinlein's glorification, even though the two were very respectful. He said that if he hadn't actually been to Vietnam he might have ended up writing heroic fiction like Flash Gordon, but instead it became more satirical. I guess it depends how you define preachy, but all the major narrative and world building elements were aligned along that message, and it wasn't subtle.

Having a pov does not equal preachy.

TNG Neutral Zone is preachy a lot other TNG is not.

 

[Ruprecht]

Having a pov does not equal preachy.

TNG Neutral Zone is preachy a lot other TNG is not.

Haven't seen it, so I can't comment.
By preachy I just mean the stories are heavily organised around conveying a moral and/or political message. I don't necessarily mean they are actually preaching, as in John Galt's 90 page monologue on "moral integrity" and self-interest in Atlas Shrugged.