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Star Trek feels like 1960s scifi. I want to see 2010s scifi

15 points by vtempest ↗ HN
While I love sci-fi featuring white male protagonists, the positive is it is the most far reaching stretch of the human imagination; the negative is I am sad it focused on space exploration and failed to incorporate the most recent futurist ideas like transhumanist consciousnesses, world libertarianism, and AI hive minds. We need more sci-fi featuring the kinds of things we can get done in the next 30 years.

24 comments

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qznc
Video games like Mass Effect have quite modern SciFi stories. However, it is far future, not "next 30 years".
buster
You mean.. hive minds.. like the Borg?
pan69
You mean.. like.. 15 years ago?
qbrass
Like 20-25 years ago. TNG covered the rest of the things mentioned as "the most recent futurist ideas".

It sounds like we need to think of better ideas for the future.

jere
>While I love sci-fi featuring white male protagonists

It's interesting that Star Trek was actually quite progressive:

>Beyond Star Trek's fictional innovations, its contributions to TV history included a multicultural and multiracial cast. While more common in subsequent years, in the 1960s it was controversial to feature an Enterprise crew that included a Japanese helmsman, a Russian navigator, a black female communications officer, and a Vulcan-Terran first officer.

You would expect a little bit more now. The latest Star Trek film is basically about two white dudes battling two other white dudes plus "hey let's find an excuse to get this blonde chick in her underwear."

pushinglimits
Yes much of what made star trek interesting was how every week it would present some interesting cultural challenge. They were always stumbling into odd parallel societies, often rational but different in an interesting way, and more often than not they would escape a difficult situation by applying moral principles (e.g. the prime directive).

I'd love to see more of this adapted to challenge the modern mainstream. Why can't we have an openly gay muslim chinese captain and his southern white baptist communications officer all journey to some previously unexplored world of H1B immigrants who modeled their society based on the works of Ann Rand?

some_googler
Muslim? Baptist? If there's one thing that SF always got right, is getting rid of religion, projecting a future of increasing secularism/agnosticism. Star Trek is a good example, Gene Roddenberry was an atheist and he made ST as much agnostic/atheistic as he could get away with.
mhd
"world libertarianism" isn't 60s sci-fi?
vtempest
The Seasteading institute / Bioshock are quite recent alternative communities. 1960s libertarians were just anti-Stalinist.

The borg are definitely interesting, but they're portrayed as some machine like force. I mean why can't the crew of the Enterprise communicate with telepathic brain chips? Better way to transfer information.

mhd
Bioshock is basically a parody of Rand, and didn't Atlas Shrugged come out in the late 50s? Heinleins more political works are early 60s, too. Honestly, TV/movie sci-fi really never was that good and only rarely picked up the more philosophical themes. Rarely surpassing pulp. And quite often it's just another genre in a sci-fi shell (fantasy, horror, crime).

(Never mind a more literal interpretation of my previous post...)

gte910h
Movies a pretty horrible places to get philosophy across: Dry diatribes and overmuch dialog at times. E. G. the man from earth, etc
dragonwriter
> Movies a pretty horrible places to get philosophy across: Dry diatribes and overmuch dialog at times.

Movies are a horrible medium for describing philosophy. Their a great medium for demonstrating the ideas of a philosophy.

People who don't know how to make movies make movies with dry diatribes and overmuch dialog, whether the focus is philosophy or, well, anything else. But that's not a problem with the intersection of philosophy and film, that's a problem with the intersection of film and people who don't know how to make films.

vtempest
what's wrong with The man from earth? It's by the same authors as star trek. Seems like it was engaging intellectually to describe that unique idea of immortality
gte910h
While I enjoyed the movie, it was just a bunch of people sitting around talking. This was too much for many people to get over.
pwim
Read books. There is plenty of sci-fi that deals with exploring the intersection of computers and consciousness. Authors like Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross, and Vernor Vinge are well known in this area.

A great novel that came out recently about transhumanism is Nexus: transhumanism: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0857662937/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

samuli
Seconded. For example Stanisław Lems The Futurological Congress was written in 1970s and is quite refreshing read.
mikerg87
Star Trek is about nastalgia not about innovation. We don't need any more inspiration we need people rolling up their sleeves and actually doing something. Anything.
gte910h
You have to look at TV. The lead time for movies are so slow, you only get about 5 year old scifi.
sentenza
Interesting science fiction will not be available at the cinema in the forseeable future. The reason is that it doesn't pay at the box office. If you wonder why so few big action movies have an engaging sci-fi script, then the answer is: Because studios can get away with having bad scripts.

For more on the topic, I recommend: http://redlettermedia.com/half-in-the-bag-star-trek-into-dar...

pan69
I recently went to see that new JJ Abrams monstrosity which apparently has something to do with Star Trek. Other than the reuse of the characters it really didn't have anything really to do with Star Trek whatsoever. It was simply a "catch the terrorist, we're so awesome", cheap, special effect heavy, action flick. What a disappointment.

It's the same dissapoitment I had after I saw Prometheus: http://www.lukeschreur.com/posts/prometheus