Thursday 3 December 2015

The Need to Delegate Imagination

There is a new TV series of Star Trek coming out, in case you've been living under a rock. I'm not quite sure what to feel about it. I am pleased in principle; I am not a boxed-set watcher at all (my TV watching is limited mostly to Match of the Day, live sport, and the odd quiz show or wildlife documentary) but I do own the complete series of Next Gen and DS9 on DVD. I don't do visual SF or fantasy, really, in other words, except for Star Trek.

And yet on the other hand there is so much that could go wrong. Everything in popular 'geek' culture at the moment seems (from my limited experience, anyway), to be dark - not to say grimdark. If the producers of this new series think that dark is the way to go for Trek, it will be a gargantuan error. Star Trek is and always has been fundamentally optimistic. It is not childishly or unrelentingly so, but the core message of each series has always been: humans (and aliens too, for that matter) can surmount problems if they work together. That USP shouldn't be sacrificed.

I'm also terrified that the "let's all have fun blowing things up in space and not think about anything too much" approach of the JJ Abrams films will bleed into this new series. There has always been derring-do in Star Trek but there has also always been contemplation. Its traditions are thoughtful. And promoting the idea that being thoughtful about things is good is so counter-cultural nowadays that sticking to its roots could really make the new Trek stand out.

All of that said, however, I do wonder why it is that I care. What is it about fans of a series, or book, that makes us so passive? We start off watching a TV programme or reading a book, and we start to enjoy it, so we keep doing so. We follow along. At some point, though, our attitude changes: we become in a strange way dependent on the writers. I care about what the new Star Trek series is like because I am sure I'll end up watching it and I want it to conform to my expectations. I am worried about what the producers might do to it. But why?

I still have my old Star Trek episodes. That won't change. And nobody will force me to watch the new series. Moreover, if the new series isn't to my taste, there is nothing to stop me imagining my own version of it - where a plucky kid from Merseyside captains the Enterprise and gets to shag Counselor Troi while exploring the Delta Quadrant or whatever. I can even write fan fic if I want. (Just to be clear on this: I don't.) I can play RPGs in the Star Trek universe with my mates or people on G+. Why do I delegate the imagination of future Star Trek series to a handful of writers and producers somewhere in LA, now that I know what Star Trek is and can think up my own version of it?

11 comments:

  1. Good old Plinkett, the voice of the Red Letter Media reviews, once said (and I paraphrase) that he likes his sci-fi either fast and dumb or slow and smart. Movies, and shows, that try to produce fast and smart sci-fi almost always fail to do either. As a ten year old, I wasn't eloquent enough to put that idea into words, but that didn't stop me from experiencing it on a visceral level. I always loved Star Wars because it was big and dumb and goofy, *and* Star Trek because it was slow and thoughtful and didn't talk down to me. The more Trek speeded up, the less interested I became. The more Star Wars became about ideas bigger than space knights and wizards and an orphan looking for his father, the less interested I became. The trends don't look good do they?

    Oh, and don't get me started on the idea that "adult" has to mean "dark," "nihilistic," or filled with puerile sex references. Making something not suitable for children doesn't necessarily make it any less juvenile.

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    1. The trends don't look good, although I do think JJ Abrams will do a decent job with Star Wars. The whole time I was watching the new Star Trek films I was thinking that I could really be watching a Star Wars film, except featuring Kirk and Spock.

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  2. Perhaps because it is not "yours" in the way that other worlds are? You expect a certain authority to present this universe to you, rather than present you with tools to explore it on your own (in a show ostensibly about exploring!).

    I too have pretty much the same worries that you do, with the added burden of wanting the show to conform to what I want to show my young son more than what I myself might enjoy (TNG trek vs. a Ronald Moore trek).

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  3. In answer to your final and titular question:

    At first I was going to say, we "delegate imagination" for the same reason that sometimes we go out and delegate our cooking at a restaurant: it's quick, easy, and sometimes a specialist can simply produce things better than we could ourselves, because they have access to more training, better materials, and specialized tools.

    But I'm not sure that that's the whole story. I want to add that it's also kind of for the same reason we delegate our shopping during birthdays and holidays: yes, I know better than most people what I think I want... but sometimes I'll be pleasantly surprised by something I never would have thought of on my own, you know? And sometimes someone will get me something that I was aware of but hadn't known I would enjoy, or that I didn't have the capacity to ask for.

    The new show may or may not be worth watching on its own merits, but "delegating imagination" is overall probably a good thing, made all the better by being, in most cases, completely optional.

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  4. I think the primary medium of experience is also important. For example, one can declare oxygen to be diet coke. The imagination is powerful enough to convince oneself of that, I have no doubt. But there's an objective reality to it (although the edges of that reality are blurred). Art, despite its transcendental qualities, becomes entangled in this perception like everything else.
    Whilst I'm floating out of the airlock, perhaps this is where culture comes from. Calcified art/imagination, objectified by society. It's a theory.

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    2. Ironic that you speak of air being declared diet coke, given a restaurant in China is charging it's clients for fresh air. Sometimes an imagined idiocy becomes reality. The purpose of Trek could be sacrificed for profit. And then the message it relays becomes something you need to pass to the next generation by word of mouth and parent to child like some obscure religion whose members grow fewer with each generation. How many will care that you weep for the flower from which the final petal falls a hundred years from now?

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  5. You are not passive: you're blogging about it! It feels passive because there is nothing you can really do to control it. You could write your own stories, but then it's not really trek. It's not canon.

    Rom 14:16 "Do not allow what seems good to you to be spoken of as evil."

    You don't want to see a good thing slandered by an unworthy portrayal. You are afraid the caretakers do not understand it. You want people to understand and appreciate it as you do, and poor handling will make that less likely. You'd have to disclaim it as not "real" star trek but people won't care, they'll chalk it up to nerd rage and laugh at you or pity you or ignore you. Only a few will get it.

    Trek has been a point of reference: a thing you can talk to others about, share with them. But you can't control it. If someone screws it up, you lose that point of reference. The only people who want to talk about old episodes are those that watched them. Nobody buys an old box and becomes a fan, they buy a box because they are already a fan. A bad series will attract the wrong kind of fans. The shared context becomes polluted and trampled.

    New D&D was like that. New fans don't like the old games. Who will I play with? When I say D&D people have a different mental image. I can't communicate. For me it is real loss. But I can't stop it. I have to accept that D&D is no longer what I know, the game I love is now called OSR. D&D is dead, now a historical footnote in the development of OSR. The public will not understand me, they only know this new thing that now misrepresents me. I have to distance myself from a thing I loved. Passive? What can I do? I can't write my own game and call it D&D.

    It's not passive, it's lack of control. It's not passivity to have a rug jerked out under your feet. And you are not delegating. It is not yours to delegate. It is an unfortunate fact that people have the ability to redefine names and symbols.

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  6. You are not passive: you're blogging about it! It feels passive because there is nothing you can really do to control it. You could write your own stories, but then it's not really trek. It's not canon.

    Rom 14:16 "Do not allow what seems good to you to be spoken of as evil."

    You don't want to see a good thing slandered by an unworthy portrayal. You are afraid the caretakers do not understand it. You want people to understand and appreciate it as you do, and poor handling will make that less likely. You'd have to disclaim it as not "real" star trek but people won't care, they'll chalk it up to nerd rage and laugh at you or pity you or ignore you. Only a few will get it.

    Trek has been a point of reference: a thing you can talk to others about, share with them. But you can't control it. If someone screws it up, you lose that point of reference. The only people who want to talk about old episodes are those that watched them. Nobody buys an old box and becomes a fan, they buy a box because they are already a fan. A bad series will attract the wrong kind of fans. The shared context becomes polluted and trampled.

    New D&D was like that. New fans don't like the old games. Who will I play with? When I say D&D people have a different mental image. I can't communicate. For me it is real loss. But I can't stop it. I have to accept that D&D is no longer what I know, the game I love is now called OSR. D&D is dead, now a historical footnote in the development of OSR. The public will not understand me, they only know this new thing that now misrepresents me. I have to distance myself from a thing I loved. Passive? What can I do? I can't write my own game and call it D&D.

    It's not passive, it's lack of control. It's not passivity to have a rug jerked out under your feet. And you are not delegating. It is not yours to delegate. It is an unfortunate fact that people have the ability to redefine names and symbols.

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    1. Yes, I think that's quite perceptive. Having to distance yourself from something you loved is not pleasant. But I feel in my bones that I'll have to do it when the new Star Trek series comes out.

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  7. Good to see warrenabox still canoeing up mist choked streams in search of obscure lore...

    I must say the second short fiction I ever wrote (back in 1998) involved the destruction of the federation at the hands of some civilization from subspace...and troi and Barclay use his wormhole transmitter to transport to voyager just as earth is destroyed. And tuvok turns out to be Romulan agent, stealing the secret of omega molecule and transwarp leaving voyager and crew stranded on a moon...

    The point of trek was it looked at how things were and offered what people thought was better. It wasn't better though. Trek was about a military elite who decided for the many and enjoyed an unequal share of resources. It was how people thought things would function. There would always be a military and that military needed to be accommodated as an authority.
    We now live in a future where the many object to being decided for by the few. Where humanity is fractured along lines of political inequality, religion, skin colour, education, wealth.
    New trek would need to depict that reality and show the struggle to achieve the unity vital to the federation utopia. That means we are faced with a trek where the freedoms have been sacrificed for the pseudo protection of tyranny only to find even Tyranny failed.

    I think that spock's the use of the black hole to save Romulus was fatal to the federation. The reality where the Borg occupy earth in it's past succeeds as a consequence of the changes rippling through space time, and the new series begins with the sudden ceasing of the Borg government of pretty much everyone.
    When a diverse collection of Aliens emerge from being Borg, they don't know what year it is or where they are. It's far in the future and the federation is long gone. And now with some ancient ship built from pieces of ships, they latch on to the idea of the federation as something to keep them together and bring together all the ex borg and go boldly where no one has gone before...to rebuild the federation. They need to live in a world of inequality and build better, or realise the federation wasn't what they were looking for.

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