I come not to praise Roddenbury, but to bury him...

I was talking with a friend last night about some recent "science fiction" film. I mentioned the science was horrid, and he said something to the effect of "You just have to suspend disbelief." But it wasn't always so! I thought in protest.

Today, the term "science fiction" seems to be used in a way which implies the laws of science should be fictionalized or contradicted: i.e. as a signal to the reader or viewer that they should check their brain and understanding of what they've learned in school so far at the door. "Don't remember electricity flows between two poles! Don't understand basic astronomy!"

The term "science fiction" was actually a workaround: The term "scientifiction" was already in use, so Campbell coined the alternative term "science fiction" to describe false stories told using real science. Today's science fiction is used to tell false stories which contradict known science. But we don't need the term "science fiction" for this since the term "magic" is more apt.

(Indeed, in bookstores nowadays, actual science fiction -- what little there is -- is stored amongs the magic books. Which was the chicken and which was the egg is anyone's guess.)

The writings of the "Greats" of science fiction: Asimov, Clarke, Hienlien etc. firmly reflected this tradition: the laws of science, as best as we understood them, played a starring role, or at least window dressing. Occassionally, according to the unwritten code, one rule was broken -- usually to ask: "What if?" regarding the sanctity of the presumed "law". The law was broken, but not out of ignorance. And often technology not currently known, but also not currently impossible, was assumed, such the positronic brains in Asimov's robots.

Today, "science fiction" means you pop some scantly-clad babes wearing blue makeup and a few lumps on their forehead, into a "starship", and tell a 42-minute tale which shows a profound ignorance of most things taught in an eight-grade science class.

I personally blame Roddenbury.

Which will be the theme of this essay and the next one.

Roddenbury certainly seems to have loved science fiction as a genre. It's just too bad he doesn't appear to have known too much about the universe he lives in. For example, I watched a recent Star Trek episode which was simply grotesque with basic blunders:

The Enterprise was orbiting a planet around a dying star. When a star of about our size dies, it shrinks and grows before becoming a white dwarf. But Roddenbury had the planet shrinking and growing... and on a minute-by-minute basis!

Okay, ignoring that -- Roddenbury then has the Enterprise moving closer and further from the planet in order to maintain a "stable" orbit. I guess the idea was that as the planet contracts, the Enterprise had to maintain the same distance from the surface. Of course, this is wrong again. The distance needed to stay in orbit around a planet it determined by the planet's mass (e.g. its weight) not its size! The important measure is the distance from the center of gravity, not the outer surface. The shape and distribution of the mass being orbited is irrelevant. Might as well factor in color.

Okay, ignoring that also -- next, somehow the Enterprise is "warped" to somewhere "outside our galaxy". This is shown by having random colored lights blinking on the viewscreen. We learn that "outside the galaxy" there are "no points of reference" -- it's as if they were lost in a London fog.

Really? Then how can we see other galaxies from our own? Apparently Roddenbury doesn't realize that galaxies are just celestial bodies like any other -- they can be seen among the stars. And likewise, observers in those other galaxies can see ours. There's nothing special about such a clustering of stars that would cause an observer to lose "all reference points" the minute they ventured beyond the outermost star. Light still travels. You can still "see" things.

Again, all you have to know to contradict this idiocy is that there are photographs of other galaxies. Apparently, Roddenbury either (a) didn't know that, or (b) knew that, but thought we wouldn't, and loved science so very little he didn't mind teaching us a wrong lesson in it.

Now it's also true that respected sci-fi authors were sometimes brought in to keep the "science" in line. And those episodes were a lot less bad. But my point is about Roddenbury himself: Without other lights to guide him, he himself seemed to have no clue about science. Interesting! We have a man with an apparent "deep love" of science fiction, but no love whatsoever for scientific truth. How can this be explained?

I've seen this before. Not just in other popular filmmakers, like George Lucas, but also in friends. In the case of Roddenbury, it seems he was more interested in using "sci-fi" as a veneer for imbuing his own rather unscientific, Marxist, utopian theories with a scientific sheen. And George Lucas does the same thing with Buddhism. The thinking seems to be: "If I can just project this into the future, and put it alongside other scientific achievements, people will accept my religious/philosophical beliefs as a form of science."

But more about this in the next essay in this series: Star Trek and Social Evolution.