Orson Scott Card Rips on Stat Trek

[Betty Houle 0]

Ender's Game is a damn good book. Too bad Card has lived in its shadow ever since then, always trying to recreate the magic he somehow hit the first time.

I can't agree with that. Yes, he turned it into a series, some of which was excellent, some of which won mahor Science Fiction awards. He's written some thirty or forty books outside of that series as well.

[Art Sandusky 0]

I liked Generations just because I'm a sucker for time travel and seeing crossovers.

[The Metal Maniac 0]

Yes, he turned it into a series

 

To be fair, he had always intended on Ender's Game having at least one sequel, since Speaker for the Dead was the book he really wanted to write, but he felt it'd be better if he fleshed out one of his old short stories so he could use the same main character and all that jazz.

[Jingus 0]

I can't agree with that. Yes, he turned it into a series, some of which was excellent, some of which won mahor Science Fiction awards. He's written some thirty or forty books outside of that series as well.

I've only read the Ender books, but I have read all of them, and I still think the first one was easily the best in the series. As for the rest, it kinda felt like he used up all his best ideas in the original book. Speaker for the Dead was pretty good, but Xenocide and Children of the Mind were really just Speaker: Part 2 & 3, and the whole Shadow series was a weak attempt to regain former glory in my opinion. We already knew how that whole story basically turned out, and a lot of it just felt like flat Tom Clancy wannabe political/war thrillers.

 

To be fair, he had always intended on Ender's Game having at least one sequel, since Speaker for the Dead was the book he really wanted to write, but he felt it'd be better if he fleshed out one of his old short stories so he could use the same main character and all that jazz.

 

Where did he ever say that? If he did, he's a liar one way or another. In a book he wrote about writing fiction, he said that Speaker for the Dead was a completely different story that he only realized when he was already outlining it that the lead character needed to be Ender.

[Special K 0]

Xenocide is like the shittiest book ever. It's as bad as Ender's game is good. Also, i'm not a big ST fan, though 'Khan' is an awesome movie.

 

All right, aside from ripping card, his argument just doesn't make sense. His main contention seems to be that Star Trek had bad acting, and lacked a believable ficticious science.

On the first, he goes ahead and praises Buffy and Smallville? Yeah Smallville, what a well-acted show. And Buffy had as many good acting moments as bad, but I'll always have a soft spot for Ooooooh Baybeeeee... Ok, the shows ARE based on speculative scientific theory. And the sci-fi aspects on the shows aren't just to keep things moving along until the writers get back to the teen dramady.

 

Speaking of which, while both are good authors, LeGuin and Moorcock basing their science on anything close to actual science is just flabbergasting. Both were mainly fantasy authors, and Moorcock's sci-fi seems to be written under a heavy regimen of acid. Asimov and Clarke were two who wrote somewhat speculative science fiction, but it's more like 'what if we could predict the future given a mathematical formula.' Hardly hard science, because hard science is fucking boring, and no-one wants to read about some guy in space reading dials all fucking day.

 

P.S. It basically seems that he's jealous that ST got really popular.

 

P.P.S. I'm surprised that he likes Smallville, man when I watched that show I thought it was fucking GAY, not in any pejorative sense, but that it was created pretty much for Superman/Lex Luthor slash fans.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Card's The Worthing Saga is actually even better than Ender's Game. No Ender book is as good as the first, but if you can find a copy of Worthing--and I believe it was recently reprinted, so you might even be fine with a Barnes & Noble run--grab it. Most of his stuff is pretty disappointing, but that's a hell of a book.

[SuperJerk 0]

Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by.

 

I love it when holier than thou fuckheads try and tell other people what they should or shouldn't like.

 

Which was a shame, because science fiction writing was incredibly fertile at the time, with writers like Harlan Ellison and Ursula LeGuin, Robert Silverberg and Larry Niven, Brian W. Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke creating so many different kinds of excellent science fiction that no one reader could keep track of it all.

 

Gee, dickhead, its not like any of those dickheads actually, I dunno, WROTE FOR "Star Trek" or consulted with Roddenberry on ideas.

 

Does this douche honestly think sci-fi could exist on TV (in the 1960s, no less!) without a action-adventure element to it. What a moron. Typical of people who have no concept of history and apply today's standards of quality to 40 years ago. Then again, I rewatched "Space Seed" and "Mirror, Mirror" recently, and found them quite entertaining.

 

Charlie Kaufman created the two finest science fiction films of all time so far: "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

 

You gotta be shitting me. Better than "2001"? Better than "Star Wars"? Better than "E.T."? Better than "A Clockwork Orange"? Ridicules.

 

I just agree with him that Star Trek was pretty much the drizzling shits from the get-go. A horrible show with horrible movies attached to it.

 

"Wrath of Khan" was a fanastic film by anyone's standards, and was almost universally praised by film critics. You're free to like or dislike it, of course, but just don't expect anyone to agree with you.

[Guest JMA]

I've never really watched much of the original Star Trek, but I did enjoy some of the movies (especially Wrath of Khan). I tend to agree with RobotJerk that Card is applying today's standards of quality to something so far in the past. Still, Star Trek has many fans and was very influencial. In my view, it deserves all the praise that it gets.

 

And as for Star Trek: The Next Generation, that show is probably my favorite sci-fi television show ever. We would've never gotten that show without the success of the original.

[Jingus 0]

Charlie Kaufman created the two finest science fiction films of all time so far: "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

 

You gotta be shitting me. Better than "2001"? Better than "Star Wars"? Better than "E.T."? Better than "A Clockwork Orange"? Ridicules.

Well, here's where individual preference comes into play, cuz I did like Eternal Sunshine more than any of those movies.

[bobobrazil1984 0]

the original star trek, over time, is very uneven. there are dozens of episodes that are just cringe worthy now, from acting effects and story,but there are also some episodes which still hold up as dramatic awesome TV, like "The Doomsday Machine" (tense as fuck), and that one about Kirk and Edith Keeler, also "Balance of Terror" which I think is the Romulan's first debut episode.

[SuperJerk 0]

^True, but Card is bashing it as a whole, and thus ignoring the good and while highlighting the bad.^

 

Charlie Kaufman created the two finest science fiction films of all time so far: "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

 

You gotta be shitting me. Better than "2001"? Better than "Star Wars"? Better than "E.T."? Better than "A Clockwork Orange"? Ridicules.

Well, here's where individual preference comes into play, cuz I did like Eternal Sunshine more than any of those movies.

The science in "Eternal Sunshine" is just as hokey, if not hokier, than anything in Star Trek. It was a well made film with compelling characters and situations, but it is only barely even sci-fi, and its big idea is how men and women get tired of each other...hardly anything new there.

 

Card's full of shit to point to that as "the finest of all time", while ripping Trek for having "little regard for science or larger ideas".

 

I'd say the most possible full of shit most of this piece came either when he said:

 

Nimoy was the only charismatic actor in the cast and, ironically, he played the only character not allowed to register emotion.

 

This was in the days before series characters were allowed to grow and change, before episodic television was allowed to have a through line. So it didn't matter which episode you might be watching, from which year — the characters were exactly the same.

 

...which is crap because if you HAVE seen the original episodes, you know that the Spock character develops quite a bit from his earliest appearances through the end of the series, and even more into the films.

 

Card simply doesn't know what he's talking about.

[Art Sandusky 0]

I hesitantly call Star Wars science fiction. It's really just a mythic fantasy set in a technology-heavy setting. Science fiction to me is Star Trek and 2001 and Solaris and stuff like that, material that examines how people behave and interact in a futuristic setting and the changes it brings.

[Jingus 0]

Eh, to me sci-fi is a pretty broad category, and it overlaps with other genres like fantasy and horror. Technically, any story that is placed in a futuristic setting or that has technological or supernatural elements which would make it impossible for such a story to take place in our contemporary reality would qualify as "sci-fi".

[The Metal Maniac 0]

If you really wanna get technical, in order to be science fiction (most authors of the genre don't like the term sci-fi, as it has connotations with bad movies and such), the main premise of the book has to revolve around something that is scientifically probable, but not necessairily possible.

 

What I mean is, it's not possible to travel faster then the speed of light. However, in most science fiction books, they do exactly that, because the authors come up with an explanation that sounds at least somewhat probable (IE: They go through a wormhole or something like that). That's not the best example, but I think you see my point. The genre is stories that have some degree of scientific possibility, and of course that does expand on to aliens and whatnot.

 

I wouldn't say fantasy overlaps with science fiction too much though (though it does happen) because the two are kind of opposites: Science fiction is probable, while fantasy is wholly impossible.

 

This is why Star Wars isn't science fiction, or at least, not very GOOD science fiction. I mean, swords made out of LIGHT, that can cut through everything in the universe except another beam of light? I'd say it's more of a fantasy with science fiction elements.

 

Anyways...

 

Where did he ever say that? If he did, he's a liar one way or another. In a book he wrote about writing fiction, he said that Speaker for the Dead was a completely different story that he only realized when he was already outlining it that the lead character needed to be Ender.

 

We're both talking about the exact same thing, Jingus, only what I read came from the intro to Speaker for the Dead (which was included in the "author's definitive edition"). Basically, Card wrote "Ender's Game" as a short story a few years prior, then he came up with "Speaker for the Dead". As you said, he then realized that Ender would be the perfect lead for the book, and so he decided to use Ender. BUT, then he realized that in order to write "Speaker for the Dead" and have it make any sense, a huge chunk of the first part of the book would have to be just about what Ender did in the three thousand years between the books, finding the hive queen and all that other jazz. So he figured it would make more sense to just write "Ender's Game" as a book in and of itself, so that when he wrote "Speaker for the Dead", all those things would be addressed to some degree, so he could just write Speaker without having to worry about it. Plus it fleshed out Ender's character a hell of a lot more (he's not nearly as interesting in the short story) so things worked out for the better.

 

So yeah, "Ender's Game" was always supposed to have a sequel, but only because it had to be written first in order for "Speaker for the Dead" to make much sense.

 

And while we're on the subject, he never intended to write a third or fourth book - but his publisher got him a deal for three books, and he figured he may as well write the third, since then he'd be able to tie up the loose ends of "Speaker for the Dead". And then, in the process of writing "Xenocide", the story just kept getting bigger until he figured he'd need another book to finish it all off.

[Guest pinnacleofallthingsmanly]

I only clicked on the link to see what Stat Trek was all about.

[LessonInMachismo 0]

Star Trek would best be described as "science fantasy." Transporters, gravitons, etc. They make stuff up to explain plot elements.

 

Babylon 5 would best be described as "science fiction." Theory of tachyons, centrifugal gravity, etc. They use real science or theories in the story.

 

Star Wars would best be described as "space opera" or "space fantasy." The story takes place in a futuristic setting, but the scientific elements are not essential to the plot. Why Lucas ever chose to invent midichlorians is beyond me.

[LaParkaMarka 0]

Please, Babylon 5 also has psychics and reincarnation.

[LessonInMachismo 0]

Please, Babylon 5 also has psychics and reincarnation.

The Centauri ability to see their deaths was controversial, and could be the result of subconciously making themselves arrive at the circumstances of their death that they saw in their vision.

 

And I think you misunderstood the "reincarnation."

[Jobber of the Week 0]

Orson Scott Card wrote one good book. However, he's not only a Mormon, but he's generally a moron as well.

[SuperJerk 0]

Star Wars may have supernatural elements to it, but it still fits into the broad definition of the science ficiton genre.

 

Star Trek would best be described as "science fantasy."  Transporters, gravitons, etc.  They make stuff up to explain plot elements.

 

Babylon 5 would best be described as "science fiction." Theory of tachyons, centrifugal gravity, etc. They use real science or theories in the story.

I find your opinion that Babylon 5 is somehow more scientifically based than Star Trek to be...flawed.

 

A few years back there was a A&E documentary called "The Science of Star Trek" in which they explained how many of the things were based on actual scientific theory. The technobabble was written by actual paid science consultants, and while it only exists to servie the plot, to call it "science fantasy" is really inaccurate. "Farscape" or "Babylon 5", with their supernatural elements, would be much better served with that title.

 

______________________

 

 

Peter David had an interesting reply to this Card piece on his blog:

 

May 07, 2005

Wotta Card

 

Orson Scott Card recently heaped some abuse on "Star Trek" in the LA Times, vigorously trashing everything about original "Star Trek," although generously conceding:

 

"The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut. So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long?"

 

Well, I can answer that: They, and I, did NOT see it as poorly imagined, weakly written, or badly acted. Opinions are merely opinions, and not absolutes. That, and the growth of "Trek" conventions made it more than a canceled TV show, but instead a solid socialization experience for many people--including me--who had no social life to speak of.

 

"Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by."

 

I wouldn't disagree. But that's not the point. Rather than gleefully heaping dirt on Trek's ostensible grave, as Card does, he might stop to consider that a considerable number of those "grade school" fans went on to high school and college. The first time I saw the name "Harlan Ellison" was on the credits of "City." Granted, the aired version didn't represent his vision. Didn't matter. It led me like an arrow to other works of his that most certainly DID represent his vision. Nor was I alone in that respect. I was already reading SF when "Trek" came along, but others weren't, and "Trek" created a new wave of SF fans whose interest spread from "Trek" to Ellison, Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Gerrold, and even some guy named Card.

 

To say nothing of the fact that "Trek" fandom had a huge female population (no, not a population of huge females, although yeah, there was a bit of that.). Maggie Thompson recounted how she was at a WorldCon where a roomful of fans were bitching about this influx of *yuckickypoo* Trek fans to their beloved WorldCon. And Maggie pointed out, "Guys? You've been crabbing for years how there's hardly any women attending these conventions. Look around the room; I'm the only female here. Have ANY of you noticed that the vast majority of the Trek fans are female?" The guys looked at each other; they hadn't noticed, because they'd been so busy excoriating the TV show that brought them there.

 

"Trek" got me into conventions, and I met both my wives at conventions (at different times). Four kids were the cumulative result, all of whom have attended conventions. "Star Trek," if NOTHING else, may well be the single greatest contributor to the perpetuation of SF fandom in general.

 

So, Mr. Card...how about a little goddamn respect, okay?

 

PAD

 

credit: http://www.peterdavid.net/