STAR TREK failed utterly as science fiction. Why? Just the transporter or tractor beam technology spawned worlds of implications they never mentioned, let alone pursued or exploited for plots and cool scenes. How about the food maker? Apparently they could combine atoms into molecules into actual items. WTF? It never struck them how incredible the ramifications of that would be? Look at what mere 3D printers are doing as they proliferate through the population. Need more trilithium crystals? MAKE SOME, Scotty, and stop talking like that.
How about asking why they fired torpedos, or operated, (except in one famous scene) all in one up-down plane? It’s ludicrous, how badly STAR TREK went for cliché TV scripts when it might easily have dazzled weekly.
As Fred Pohl once observed, not one SF story from 1920 on caught the rather obvious implication of how cars becoming common, which was a frequent story-line, would transform courtship and baby-making. Thinking things through is a fine art.
Compare and contrast START WRECK to DOCTOR WHO, a show with cardboard backdrops that packed a dozen mind-bending cool concepts into each scene and navigated through episodes as if trying every time out to break the viewer’s ability to keep up. That was conceptual SF at its best.
Do not even mention that Lucas dreck, pure plagiarized echolalia in bad fantasy mode. Didn’t even try for SF, nor pay Frank Herbert, let alone Joseph Campbell’s estate.
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