Captain's Log: Old Frontiers

From the beginning many if not most of the elements in the Star Trek universe were from what was then the 70 year tradition of science fiction in literature and film.  Trek honored that part of the tradition that favored scientific plausibility, especially in the technological foundations of its universe: warp drive, phasers, transporters etc. Many such elements were either projections based on new but existing technology (so that doors that swoosh open automatically would be in supermarkets in twenty or thirty years)  or fairly daring and imaginative extrapolations from scientific theories.

But as a television show, Star Trek was unique in using the latest scientific findings or theories as elements in stories or even as springboards for stories.  I think this much is generally acknowledged.  But in reading a few stories about recent scientific findings and controversies, especially regarding space and physics, I was struck by the realization that this adventurousness in using the latest science has been gone for a long time--perhaps since the later Berman era, but more surely in the Abrams era.

I felt the plausibility slipping away towards the end of Voyager, though there were of course lapses before that.  (I think the armor on Voyager did it for me finally.)  The writers for the first Star Trek JJA movie justified their new timeline reality with certain theories derived from quantum physics, but these theories weren't at all new.  I've noted that more scientifically literate fans than I have pointed out a number of plausibility lapses in the second movie.

Contrast this with the relatively new and very popular TV genre of the forensic science crime shows.  Producers for the one that some science publication judged the most scientifically accurate (Bones) embrace the idea of using the science and keeping up with new discoveries as a way to build stories.  There are staff members responsible for providing this information.

Though in some ways science is still catching up to Star Trek (and will for awhile longer), it sobering to realize that its essentials were established almost a half century ago.  Plate tectonics, for example, which is an axiom in earth sciences, was not even yet an established theory when Star Trek went on the air.

Black holes were such a new idea that there wasn't yet an established name for them. (A Trek episode referred to a "dark star.")  The term "black hole" was first used in 1967.  That was also the year that pulsars were first discovered.  The thermodynamics of black holes weren't mathematically described until the 1970s.

Just recently however an entirely new theory is being applied to how black holes behave internally, because neither general relativity nor quantum physics seem to work there.  New research is applying something called loop quantum gravity to the problem, and coming up with brand new theories involving fundamental questions about the universe.

Could this be used in a Star Trek story?  Could it even be the basis for one?  I don't know.  But recent experience suggests that it won't be, maybe not even in Star Trek novels anymore.

 Similarly, there are stories to be told that center on the vitally important and still evolving dynamics of Earth's climate crisis--not the science alone but the human responses.  But the Trek imagination seems stuck on wars and war metaphors, revenge drama and mostly on re-telling old stories with bigger visuals.  There's simply too much money at stake.  The tent pole must never shake.

Meanwhile, one basis for Star Trek from the beginning is accumulating more evidence: the existence of many worlds where life should be possible.  Applying the number of extra-solar planets already "found," the math suggests there are, yes, billions and billions of theoretically habitable planets. Geoffrey Marcy, a professor of astronomy at Berkeley, extrapolated the findings across the open void of space, adding: "With tens of billions of Earth-like planets in each galaxy, our entire universe must contain billions of billions of Earth-like planets." 

Other recent discoveries should spark all kinds of stories.  Scientists are realizing that the universe is even bigger than believed.  A galaxy has recently been found that is thirty billion light years away.

Or recent discoveries about Mars suggests that it not only once had water--it was once a watery world.  NASA has a video suggesting what it was like, and the project to study the Mars environment--launching tomorrow (Nov. 18)  is explained by LeVar Burton in this video:

[Update: This spacecraft was successfully launched. ]Which might remind us that how scientists believe the Earth obtained water and even how life may have started has completely changed since the 1960s.

Even something like the Cassini photo of Saturn with the Earth a distant dot (at the top of this column--click on it to see it much bigger) inspires not only wonder but recalls the wonder that Star Trek represents, as in this story.  Although I feel existing Trek stories still have much to suggest in other ways, it does seem that new science and its implications has dropped out of new Trek.

R.I.P. Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing died last week at the age of 94.  Famous for pioneering realistic fiction, she is quite possibly the only Nobel Prize for Literature winner to have written science fiction novels. When she did so she was criticized both by science fiction fans and guardians of literature.  Even as her first book in her Canopus in Argos series was published, she was defending herself against criticism from the literature side.  She said that "space fiction, with science fiction, makes up the most original branch of literature now...I do think there is something very wrong with an attitude that puts a 'serious' novel on one shelf and, let's say, First and Last Men on another."

She meant Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, who was also the author of The Star Maker, which Brian Aldiss in The Billion Year Spree calls "magnificent...the one great grey holy book of science fiction."  There are of course a number of very good science fiction writers as well as many bad ones.  But there is definitely a line of writers who combine literary quality with science fiction, beginning with H.G. Wells and Stapledon, and continuing through Kim Stanley Robinson.  That line runs through Doris Lessing as well.

Trekville News

In Star Trek news, there's an interview in which Bob Orci expresses some regret for his outbursts insulting fans (see previous Captain's Log) though I'm not sure his logic would pass the Spock test.  And I don't see  he understands that he began it by abusing the writer of a legitimate and composed critique, not a rant in a fan comment.

And there's this from Patrick Stewart.  Though I question the premise--nobody listens to old men of any race if they're not famous--he's still making us proud.

Why didn't Patrick Stewart--

currently acclaimed for his

stage portrayal of MacBeth--

get an Emmy in 7 seasons

on TNG?

More on Lessing

Star Trek fans know that science fiction on television and often in movies gets little respect from guardians of the establishment, especially the ones who give the awards. How else can the failure to give even an Emmy nomination to Patrick Stewart in seven years on Star Trek: The Next Generation be explained?

Like a lot about sci-fi on screens, the same is generally true in the literary world. It has perhaps changed somewhat in both worlds, as partly evidenced by Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. But in 1978, when she was a noted realist writer with literary standing, and she began her "Canopus in Argos" series of what she called "space fiction," it was scandalous.

So she prefaced that novel, Shikasta, with "Some Remarks." She wrote:

"The old 'realistic' novel is being changed, too, because of influences from that genre loosely described as space fiction. Some people regret this. I was in the States, giving a talk, and the professor who was acting as chairwoman, and whose only fault was that perhaps she had fed too long on the pieties of academia, interrupted me with: 'If I had you in my class you'd never get away with that!' (Of course it is not everyone who finds this funny.) I had been saying that space fiction, with science fiction, makes up the most original branch of literature now; it is inventive and witty; it has already enlivened all kinds of writing, and that literary academics and pundits are much to blame for patronizing or ignoring it...

"Patronizing it or ignoring it" are also common responses to Star Trek and other space fiction on screens as well as on pages. I expect we all know that there are certain people we can talk to about Star Trek, or even about Star Trek actors, writers, etc. and our Star Trek experiences--and a lot of people we can't talk to about any of this without risking ridicule and/or incomprehension. Most often the establishment media can't cover Star Trek or other space fiction without being patronizing--it always has to make fun of it. The main exceptions are stories about how much money it makes.

Here's more of what Lessing wrote: "What a phenomenon it's been--- science fiction, space fiction--exploding out of nowhere, unexpectedly of course, as always happens when the human mind is forced to expand: this time starwards, galaxy-wise and who know where next. These dazzlers have mapped our world, our worlds, for us, has told us what is going on and in ways no one else has done, have described our nasty present long ago, when it was still the future and the official scientific spokesmen were saying that all manner of things now happening were impossible--who have played the indispensable and (at least at the start) thankless role of the despised illegitimate son who can afford to tell the truths the respectable siblings do not dare, or, more likely, do not notice because of their respectability."

With the metaphor of the illegitimate son, Lessing is saying that not only is space fiction an outsider genre, and those who love it are outsiders, but it is most often created by outsiders, by those who are different. And that maybe it is because they are outsiders and different that they can see things in this insightful way.

Lessing now makes another point that pertains to her own space fiction, as well as an often disregarded or misunderstood aspect of the space/science fiction of others. She writes: "They have also explored the sacred literatures of the world in the same bold way they take scientific and social possibilities to their logical conclusions so that we may examine them. How very much we do all owe them!" To this I would add that they have expanded beyond the recognized "sacred literatures" to the traditional knowledge and beliefs of Indigenous peoples, for their insights into our world, or worlds.

Earlier in this note, Lessing observes, "I do think there is something wrong with an attitude that puts a 'serious' novel on one shelf and, let's say, First and Last Men on another."

The book she means is actually titled Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future, written by Olaf Stapledon, and published in 1930. A British writer, and a long-distance disciple of H.G. Wells, Stapledon is not well known except among serious science fiction aficionados. One person who did know his work was Gene Roddenberry, who read and re-read it before starting both Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Last and First Men is also known as the first 'galactic empire' novel, one of the few science fiction forms H.G. Wells didn't invent. Before Asimov or Star Trek and Star Wars, there was Stapledon. Not coincidentally, Lessing's Shikasta and the other Canopus books involve galactic empires.

But this isn't even his greatest achievement--that would be Star Maker, which sci-fi novelist and chronicler Brian Aldiss called "really the one great grey holy book of science fiction." He also wrote that "This is a new--and so far unsurpassed--version of the spiritual voyage." A theme that's found in (for example) Arthur C. Clarke, George Zebrowski, and Lessing's Canopus books, and, arguably also in Star Trek.

Stapledon's novel and H.G. Wells are the only science fiction Lessing actually names in this introductory essay, and it's easy to see that there's a pretty straight line from Wells through Stapledon to Lessing's "Canopus in Argos" cycle. Again, this is a line with many branches, and one significant one is to GR and Star Trek.

Especially early in her career, Lessing was an outsider because she was a woman writer (famous for The Golden Notebook, which struck the literary world like a feminist thunderbolt, but which Lessing said just reflected what women talk about amongst themselves), and that rarity in 1978, a woman writer of "space fiction." (Though there were others, like Ursula Le Guin--surely one of the recent space fiction writers Lessing was talking about--as well as a few women in the Golden Age of sci-fi, and of course, D.C. Fontana of Trek.)

But Lessing was an outsider in other ways, which gave her other valuable perspectives: She was born of British parents in Persia (Shikasta is said to be influenced by Sufism), and after the age of five grew up in the African nation then known as Rhodesia. But her outsider fiction has become classic, and her point of view as an outsider has been vindicated. So has her championing of "space fiction."

And Patrick Stewart, who got no respect as Captain Picard but risked his acting career in anything other than science fiction by starring in TNG for seven years on TV and several more in movies, is back on the Shakespearian stage, and enjoying more success there than ever. His title role in Macbeth is receiving the kind of establishment praise previously given to Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson, or O'Toole, Burton and McKellen. At last.

Olaf Stapledon

The Strange Story of "Star Begotten"

In a sense, this is also a version of The War of the Worlds, though relatively few people know about it, and it came about in an odd way.

By 1938, HG had finished his only two film projects, one of which was the futuristic "'>Things to Come." By then he must have realized that his early "scientific romances"---now called science fiction--- were enjoying a second wave of popularity, and might well be his most lasting works. He'd written a preface for a '>collection of seven of them, explaining his method, which was first published by Knopf in 1934.

Around this time he also met Olaf Stapledon, his most ardent admirer and the author of the stunning science fiction epic, '>Last and First Men. So it happened that for the first time in decades, HG wrote another science fiction novel, and it would be his last.

'>Star Begotten, published in 1937, is described by critic Frank McConnell as "The War of the Worlds rewritten from the vantage point of forty years later and with a startingly different conclusion."

It tells the story of a popular historian, author of books extolling the deeds of heroes, who suddenly realizes that earth is being invaded by aliens---not in spaceships or fighting machines, but by means of cosmic rays that subtly alter the characteristics of babies in the womb, so they are born different. He believes that his wife is one of those affected, as is his son.

The novel details his growing conviction---and that of others he confides in---that this invasion is taking place, and that it is the perfect way to invade a planet. Aliens don't have to conquer the planet, but simply become the inhabitants. Wells builds up the creepiness that subsequent generations would get from films like '>Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

But then the historian confronts his wife, who misunderstands him and believes he is claiming that he is one of the invaded people, the "star-begotten." And suddenly he realizes that he is. He realizes as well that it is a beneficent invasion, and the only way that humanity will go forward to its proper destiny. It is in a sense a natural mutation to a better being. So "Body Snatchers" suddenly becomes more like "'>Childhood's End" with more than a flavor of Olaf Stapledon. The new species they are becoming, as McConnell writes, "is not really a new species at all, but the human race, in process of becoming, exactly, human."

This book was Wells' last science fiction novel, and probably his least known. Yet it may have been his last word in and on the genre, in more ways than one.

'>The mything link between HG and GR

There is one final connection to make between HG and GR, and it is another writer. Although HG essentially created science fiction as we know it in the 1890s, it more or less languished until the pulps inspired its reemergence in America in the 1930s. But Wells had one prominent younger disciple: Olaf Stapledon. Not well known even by science fiction fans, he is highly praised by science fiction writers and critics, and a writer Roddenberry read and studied throughout his years working on Star Trek.

In novels like '>Last and First Men and Star Maker, Stapledon combined Darwin and Einstein in the first evolutionary histories and stories of galactic civilizations that became a staple of science fiction of all kinds. His visions were also highly spiritual and profoundly influenced by war, in ways that GR could appreciate. Like both HG and GR, Stapledon believed that humanity was still in an early stage of childhood or adolescence.

"His was the noblest and most civilized mind I have ever encountered," Arthur C. Clarke said of Stapledon. "His prose is as lucid as his imagination is huge and frightening," Brian Aldiss wrote. "Star Maker is really the one great grey holy book of science fiction." When Allan Asherman interviewed Gene Roddenberry as he was beginning production on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Roddenberry was re-reading Stapledon. Sam Peeples remembered lending a couple of Stapledon's hard-to-find novels to GR when he was conceiving Star Trek in the 1960s. Of Roddenberry's original concept for Star Trek, Sam Peeples told Asherman, "I think he] wanted to do a more realistic, a more earthy version of Olaf Stapledon's concepts that were so enormous and staggering."