Star Wars, Star Trek and other Sci-Fi

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So, having seen the trailers for Foundation, has anyone noticed that the imperial starships look like they could have decently-sized centrifuges instead of 'gravity plates' or whatever?
 

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So, having seen the trailers for Foundation, has anyone noticed that the imperial starships look like they could have decently-sized centrifuges instead of 'gravity plates' or whatever?
I would suggest not: in those images, all of the ships show that the rings are all clocked to the same positions, indicating that they're not spinning.

"Foundation" is kinda like "Dune" (also "Jupiter Ascending") in that both posit a humanity so old and powerful that what dominates the design of spacecraft isn't engineering, but art.
 
I don't have English language television here so I haven't followed modern trek plotlines. It appears to me that plotlines are still classical instead of working on modern themes.

Some ideas for "modernist" space opera scifi: (some of it for shock factor, some for "fun", played straight of course)

1. Transpecism, polyspecism and alternative mophological diversity. Genestealers are people too! The idea that mono-planetary lineage society is clearly wrong, and campaigns of freedom fighting is supported to facilitate mixing of galactic biological stock. Technological research spend significant resource on how to break barriers on feasible combinations and transformations.

2. Conflict over reproduction, now possible with any number of parents and "genders" and many arguments of proper behavior of all, with differing level of genetic and social information transfer. There is also the horror of binary fission, which is a sign for aggressive homogenization swarms that unchecked will destroy everything.

3. The strict enforcement of quarantine of "zones of prejudice" where self booting evilist memes (think: A Fire Upon the Deep) have infected the residents in which all vehicles, artifacts and communications passing through is to be to reduced to maximum entropy state in which no information can pass. The potential for items to pass the zone can be a constant source of drama and tension.

4. Drama over holographic agents from look, skin, clothing nonbiological accessories, language to behavior to best represent the evolving galactic polity.

5. Education reforms to ensure equity of all, spanning six order of magnitude in mass, energy consumption, force generation, required life support systems, rate of communication and computative capacity.

6. Preemptive ant-imperialist defensive warfare.

7. Conflicts over symbolic communications, the typical of which will involve hours of gestures to right past wrongs. (considered to be deeply inadequate given dyson swarm scales of wrongs in the past: never forget)

8. Personal growth into persistently correct thinking and expressions.

9. Explaining an intelligent ant hive the importance of color representation in high prestige activities.

10. Fight for credit when something good happens, using different interpretation of transpecist categorization theory

11. Genetic theft/mis-representation trauma. To think, up 6th chromosome parent misrepresented xir life history, imagine the life long damage inflicted in this reproduction attempt.

12. Oppression from autoprejudiced AI and the unending war to root out such threats.

13. Oppression from biological-to-Computer uploads of the wrong visual-genetic lineage

14. Oppression from computer-to-biological systems of autoprejudiced systems

15. Oppression from wrong history data samples, resulting grand plan of time travel to solve the problem once for all

16. Time travel campaigns are eliminating evilist thinking (also: multiple overlapping campaigns within the same spacetime)

17. Space bureaucracy fight over proper communication autofilter systems

18. Construction of "be aware of evil" beacons for trans-galatic communications

19. Fights over official histories, given dyson swarms of wrongdoing to be remembered

20. Point of "start of right of citizen" versus 'parent' for new bio/program growth fights. Note polyparent multistage complex life cycles, some of which may involve being 'virtualized' inside computronium.

21. Fights over properly evaluating attractiveness of potential parents.

22. The thankless fight of sustaining civilization against self developing memetic hazards.

23. Fights over compression algorithm standard, as some ideas can be compressed more and thus easier to communicated, resulting in furthering of inequality.

.......... and so on. (that is a just a one 30minute brainstorm) There is much to be done here.

....The audience is unlikely to comprehend the scale of a civilization like this, and it needs to be set at some far flung luddite outpost from the core of the civilization to scale it back a bit.
 
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2. Conflict over reproduction, now possible with any number of parents and "genders" and many arguments of proper behavior of all, with differing level of genetic and social information transfer. There is also the horror of binary fission, which is a sign for aggressive homogenization swarms that unchecked will destroy everything.
"Lower Decks," the only Star Trek worthy of the name since season 4 of Enterprise, recently dealt with exactly that:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bWGREfpvio
 

Since this thread is nominally about science fiction and fantasy, here's a manifesto of sorts by M. John Harrison. He's acutely concerned with the given medium of storytelling as being an essential element of the story. His Viriconium stories (more influenced by Peake than Tolkein) are deliberately inconsistent, as he explains. As an example, the novel In Viriconium is a black comedy about an unrequited love affair in which one of the couple dies. In a later short story there's an offhand comment about the two having married long ago. And no, he doesn't invoke hand-waving like 'alternate universes.'


Viriconium is great, second only behind Book of the New Sun in the dying earth genre in my opinion. Although you can't go wrong with...Dying Earth.
 
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The Jedi are inappropriate mascots for social justice. Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe, the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”). Strikingly, Force-wielding talents are narratively explained in Star Wars not merely in spiritual terms but also in ableist and eugenic ones:

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Hmm, someone needs to write a story where:

Fully Automated Luxury Communism is implemented, and 100% of the population is activists because only people is capable of AUTHENTIC MORAL OUTRAGE . The last age had cyberpunk, what we need is JUSTICEPUNK~
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Normal space sci-fi is not constructed with modern sensibilities in mind. Can you imagine the diversity training for whenever a new species is added to a polity. Imagine properly identifying different facial bone structure and their historical relation to oppression and how to pronoun everything. There is then post-modern 'heroics' under equality, anti-ableism and victimhood culture.

Space drama had old morality and fits modernity as well as the telegraph:

Basically, normal SJ themed conflicts can be explored and expanded orders of magnitudes in a space setting. In some sense this is more interesting than Age of Sail, IN SPACCCCEEEE~
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The growth of social sciences have significance influence on modern culture. It is rather limiting that ideas about its application is limited to the likes of foundation.

Instead, sci-fi can focus on the central themes of social sciences:
Construction of Systems of oppression to serve the purpose of the powerful.

If one take this idea seriously, one would realize it is not so fanciful as to be unworkable. We have cults already. In the same way that sci-fi often is about expanded physical technology, social sci-fi can be expanded "social technology" with properly designed and engineered social structures to fulfill the purpose of the designers.

There is the genre of dystopia fiction about advanced means of social control, but is always in a settled state. Culture weapons without culture war is as interesting as lines of bombers sitting in a hanger: a proper conflict of rivals is really needed to demonstrate the powers involved.
 
I'm not a moderator, but it's been made quite clear in a warning by Antonio that discussion of nationality, ethnicity or social justice or macaroni cheese are not relevant to this thread in this forum.

This forum depends on people of many nations that in the past have been at war with each other being able to discuss in a reasonable manner the instruments used in those wars or proposed to have been used. Almost always, we manage it.

We've all got political opinions that we take very seriously and which are contrary to those of other individuals here. We are all free to express them elsewhere. Here, they are irrelevant. Yes, we have the 'right' to express them, but point-scoring over issues that have nothing to do with the purpose of this forum have rightfully led to moderators closing down threads.

Can we please maintain good faith? Save the absurdity for the 'This is Hilariously Funny' thread and the tinfoil-hat stuff about Boris Johnson's wicked agenda to use the BBC to undermine Western civilisation for... whatever, anywhere else?

Frankly, I think Stanislaw Lem's discussions of the efficacy of supposedly ultimate weapons in his novel Fiasco is a fascinating adjunct to Herman Kahn's own thoughts about escalation. If this thread is about SF, surely that's what's more appropriate.
 
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Foundation, the TV series has appeared. It appears that Liberties Have Been Taken. It's to be expected, and IMO, inevitable when a story is translated from one medium into another - after all, it's a dramatic presentation, not animated illustrations to some seven-decade-old short stories. I wonder how well it will present SF TV as a stage for ideas?

Anyone heard of cliodynamics? It could be thought of as the seed for psychohistory.



Fantasy is certainly not void of speculation or forensic discussion of history and tactics. A lot of historical recreation enthusiasts have revealed some interesting facts about the practicalities of historical combat. Game of Thrones was a long meditation on what it meant to be a knight and a sovereign. It had an early episode that gave me a chuckle when in it compared agility to protection - in one thread unarmoured Bronn defeated an armoured knight, while in another thread, armoured Ser Jorah defeated an unarmoured Dothraki.
 
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Marvel filed five lawsuits on Friday seeking to block the heirs of comic book creators from reclaiming copyrights to many of its most popular characters, including Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Ant-Man and Doctor Strange.

The move comes after heirs of five Marvel authors filed dozens of termination notices with the U.S. Copyright Office. If the notices were to succeed, they would not prevent Marvel from using the disputed characters, which were created by multiple collaborators. But they would require the studio to make payments to the heirs.

The termination notices were filed by Marc Toberoff, a veteran copyright attorney who fought similar battles on behalf of the heirs of Jack Kirby, a co-creator of several Marvel heroes, and of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the co-creators of Superman. Toberoff argues that the Marvel authors’ work led to multi-billion dollar franchises, and that their heirs should be allowed to share in the wealth.
 
I'm not a moderator, but it's been made quite clear in a warning by Antonio that discussion of nationality, ethnicity or social justice or macaroni cheese are not relevant to this thread in this forum.

Except that that's not necessarily true. "Nationality, ethnicity or social justice" are entirely likely to be primary plot points of the most recent episode of Star Trek or The Orville or The Mandalorian. In fact, those are primary *drivers* of entire seasons and character arcs in recent shows.
 
10000 Gigaton
To be fair, ten teratons is a tenth of a Chicxulub. I don't blame the writers at all for their decision in 2003!

Well it´s still one shot from one canon and the larger ships have dozends of them...
If you want whooshy-whooshy spaceships in space that can get from Yavin IV to the Death Star in fifteen minutes according to a countdown, while crossing the limb of a reasonably-sized gas giant (>100,000km) and the orbital diameter of a reasonable moon around a reasonable gas giant (Io orbits at half a million km)...

...and if you want your spaceship to be a mile long wedge with a volume of 100 million cubic meters or so...

...your spaceship is necessarily going to have a multiyottawatt engine by default.

And since you for some reason want spaceships to have shields that need to be overwhelmed, but don't want wars to devolve into ramming attacks with kinetic munitions (ten-million-tonne rocks tossed by relativistic mile-long whooshy-whooshy spaceships), then you need your conventional pew-pew guns to have the energy to compete with ten-million-tonne rocks tossed at relativistic whooshy-whooshy velocities.
 
"Nationality, ethnicity or social justice" are entirely likely to be primary plot points of the most recent episode of Star Trek or The Orville or The Mandalorian
Ok, I agree with you if we can keep comments focused on its effects on SF alone.
 
"Nationality, ethnicity or social justice" are entirely likely to be primary plot points of the most recent episode of Star Trek or The Orville or The Mandalorian
Ok, I agree with you if we can keep comments focused on its effects on SF alone.
But then, SF has an effect on culture in return. Consider: let's say Star Trek has an episode that says that "in the 21st century it was discovered that the macaroni and cheese was the cause of the decline in sperm counts and birth rates in the western world." And because Current Year is insane, this results in people actually believing it, and Kraft Cheese Headquarters is burned to the ground while at the same time Extinction Rebellion starts scattering cheese powder into the water supply...
 
One of the things about architectural education is playing 'name that location' with film and TV. For instance, in Manhunter, the original adaptation of Red Dragon, Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned in an art gallery (Richard Meier, High Museum of Art, Atlanta). I suppose he would have been quite pleased with that.

Now, in Foundation, the Trinity College Library in Dublin is the Imperial Library (that building's been in so many films, it deserves a lifetime achievement Oscar). Best of all, Hari Seldon's trial took place in a crematorium. That's a bit on the nose, I thought (Schultes Frank Architekten, Crematorium Baumschulenweg in Berlin). Apparently the Empire believes in speedy justice.
 

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"Nationality, ethnicity or social justice" are entirely likely to be primary plot points of the most recent episode of Star Trek or The Orville or The Mandalorian
Ok, I agree with you if we can keep comments focused on its effects on SF alone.
But then, SF has an effect on culture in return. Consider: let's say Star Trek has an episode that says that "in the 21st century it was discovered that the macaroni and cheese was the cause of the decline in sperm counts and birth rates in the western world." And because Current Year is insane, this results in people actually believing it, and Kraft Cheese Headquarters is burned to the ground while at the same time Extinction Rebellion starts scattering cheese powder into the water supply...
If wheat derivatives affected virility the Roman legions would not have won any battle and if cheese were the cause Heidi's grandfather would never have reproduced. Star Trek is just a sociology course and lacks a scientific basis that I can respect.
 
Cowboy Bebop live action opening credits:

View: https://youtu.be/Yq2N-9EmedA


Release date 21/11/2021.
Whoever devised this was definitely drinking from the same well as the person who did the titles for Archer. To be fair, they're good pastiches. So many title sequences are either nondescript or too pompous (enough with the sands-of-time motif and the monuments, Foundation).

Saul Bass was the absolute master (warning - it's an hour-long compilation):
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqM3McG4-LE&t=4s
 
You also have people put into a role because they are box office draws. Tom Cruise plays Reacher. Anyone read the books? Not great writing but reasonable story's. Reacher is well over six feet tall with "Dinner plate fist's". Tom Cruise, respect to the man aside, is well, not.

Could have sworn I saw the model for Reacher the other day at a local shopping center. At least six and half feet tall (a head taller than his sergeant), nice shiny corporal's uniform, bright red MP armband, do-not-fuck-with-me written all over him. :oops:
 
So, having seen the trailers for Foundation, has anyone noticed that the imperial starships look like they could have decently-sized centrifuges instead of 'gravity plates' or whatever?
Well, they looks like they are build around snall black hole, so they may just carry their own source of gravity...
 
More detailed write up of this copyright business.

Disney believes that since freelanced contributions were done at Marvel’s instance and expense, these characters were authored by the company, not by individual writers and illustrators. But Disney has a fallback. Even if judges decide Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, etc. aren’t works made for hire and can be terminated, these characters would be joint works. Marvel would remain at least a co-owner. (That’s due to past settlements with Lee and Kirby.)

Here’s where it starts getting as trippy as a Doctor Strange story.

Under U.S. copyright law, co-authors are allowed to freely use and license work. They must share revenue with each other, but this means (and Disney consoles itself with the following fact) that whatever happens in court, the comic book author heirs can’t block the making of new movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

While that’s true, there are some caveats that may cause Disney to pause before becoming too overconfident.

First, sharing profits on MCU films is no small thing. These movies cost hundreds of millions to make, generate billions, and are now being used to prop up streamer Disney+. Sharing impacts the entire economic structure of production and distribution and could lead to more court battles like the one being pursued by Scarlett Johansson.

Second, since co-authors are allowed to freely use and license work, that potentially means Patrick Ditko and other Marc Toberoff clients would have the right to license rights to these iconic superheroes to other studios. (Imagine Thor being licensed for a Superman movie. Theoretically, it could happen.)

Third, and perhaps least appreciated of all, is what happens outside of the United States. The termination provisions of U.S. copyright law only impact the domestic market. BUT foreign copyright laws might come into play if these superhero characters aren’t deemed as works made for hire. Some countries aren’t as generous to authors’ heirs as the United States. But some countries are more generous. Take Canada, for instance. The northernly neighbor mandates automatic reversion of the copyright to the estate 25 years after the author’s death. And get this — in Canada, joint owners may not license jointly owned work to others without the consent of the other co-owners. Could a future season of Loki be prevented from showing in Canada? The suggestion of something like this occurring seems crazy and dangerous to even broach, and yet….

It’s no wonder that seven years ago, Disney’s brass blinked. There’s a good likelihood that Disney will eventually do similar weighing of the risks (and litigation expenses). Right now, the entertainment giant will hope for momentum in court and leverage before getting serious about a negotiation. But at some point, the stewards of the MCU will have to contemplate the truly unimaginable.

 
Good news: there Reboot of Babylon 5 in Making

The bad news: the TV channel is CW that made Woke Batwoman and B5 Reboot will end same way...


giphy.gif
 
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Saul Bass was the absolute master (warning - it's an hour-long compilation):
He was Genius and brilliant graphic designer

and he made one of most unusual sci-fi movie of all time: PHASE IV.
Were scientist are confronted with Hive mind of Ants
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaVaDwLj_mk
Thanks, I'll look for that. I'd heard of it, but didn't know that it was his work.

Have you seen Quest? A short film in collaboration with Ray Bradbury.

 
Good news: there Reboot of Babylon 5 in Making

The bad news: the TV canal is CW that made Woke Batwoman and B5 Reboot will end same way...


giphy.gif
I am guessing you never watched his Sense-8 show. Complaining about a show being Woke with something like B5 is the same way that people complaining about this with Star Trek just make me think they never understood these shows or what their creators intended. After all we are talking about B5 not the latest project from Frank Miller. By the way how the hell can there be a woke Batwoman when the character has always been canonically a lesbian. This is why these kind of statements annoy me as they always come from a place of zero knowledge about the thing they are talking about.
 
By the way how the hell can there be a woke Batwoman when the character has always been canonically a lesbian.

That's not even *remotely* the problem that sane fans have with these wokified shows. The denigration of characters like Batman is more the problem. Same with the Star Wars sequel movies: it wasn't that Rey was a woman, but that she was automatically super-duper capable (lazy writing) while turning legacy icons like Han into a bad father and worse husband and Luke into a craven coward.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnaW9RUbv8U
 
Star Trek TOS got some strong reactions in the US when it was first shown in the 60s. A black woman Comms Officer, a Japanese helmsman and a Russian ensign were a bit much for some people then.
That said, I do wonder why the younger generation of writers have to reinvent old series rather than creating new ones as Roddenberry did with TOS. He did not simply serve up a new series of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.
 
That said, I do wonder why the younger generation of writers have to reinvent old series rather than creating new ones ...

It's actually quite simple. TV series, comic books and movies these days are more often than not vehicles for ideology, rather than storytelling. And the simple fact is that "Insane Political WokeScolding: The Motion Picture" would flop hard... unless it was cloaked in a pre-existing popular franchise.

Plus, when your goal is proselytizing (political, religious, whatever) rather than storytelling, chances are good that your ability to tell not only a good story but an original one will be minimal. Thus you have to appropriate someone else's stories since you don't have any of your own. And even then you are likely to create "heroes" who are just terrible people.

Every now and then something reasonably new comes along, and Our Social Betters just can't understand it. Remember the leadup to "Joker?" The movie itself was relatively apolitical, except for perhaps some complaining about funding priorities in New York in the 70's and 80's. But the wokescolds were freaking out that the movie would be some sort of "incel manifesto." They couldn't imagine that it would just be a good story that didn't try to cram a Message, because they can't imagine having the opportunity to create a movie and *not* cramming a Message into it.
 
2. Conflict over reproduction, now possible with any number of parents and "genders" and many arguments of proper behavior of all, with differing level of genetic and social information transfer. There is also the horror of binary fission, which is a sign for aggressive homogenization swarms that unchecked will destroy everything.
"Lower Decks," the only Star Trek worthy of the name since season 4 of Enterprise, recently dealt with exactly that:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bWGREfpvio
Do not forget Star Trek The Orville ;)

PS: I agree hard :) Star Trek Battlestar-Discovery and Star Trek Old Man-Patrick Stewart are s**t :(
 
As I read about new prototyping technology (back the 1990s) using metal particulates suspended in a gas and fused together by multiple lasers. I new Sci Fi ideas were becoming real....

And as for virtual atoms (only in 2d and massive compared to the real thing)....well there's your hard science fiction become real.
 
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