[EveningStar]

Gene Roddenberry was born 91 years ago today.

The Economics of Star Trek

[elteemike]

Original Star Trek series had its good moments...Check out “The Omega Glory” from 1968...

But Next Gen was a disappointment...

For any science fiction fan looking for a change from such socialistic fare...

Give Heinlein a try...

Breath of fresh air!

[jtonn]

Coming on the heels of William Windom's death (Commodore Matt Decker), this seems overly harsh. Yes, Gene held a utopian view, but he also introduced many of us to alternate ways of of viewing reality through his exploration of Science Fiction concepts. Some of the great writers of Sci-Fi contributed to his stories. To wit, The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison, and Let That Be Your Last Battlefield by Gene L. Coon. Given the fact that these stories were from the 60's, they were remarkable in their prescience. I hold them dear as an alternate way to view life, albeit not necessarily a better one.

[Misterioso]

I spotted the collectivist assumptions when the show first came on the air. Adding these to the laughable production values made Star Trek unwatchable.

[Wuli]

many science fiction writers entered that genre to create fictionalized versions of “a better world” or “a better humanity”, and “science” and invention were tools - fictional tools, they could apply to “make it possible”.

Poul Anderson seldom did.

He did present many different worlds and many different forms of human society, but, if my recollections are correct, he was usaully realistic and did not try to portray some kind of Utopia - there were imperfect and bad human societies and imperfect and bad intelligent beings and non-human societies on other worlds, and good ones of both kinds. What we call “human nature” (natural ability to be either good or bad) seemed to be universal in his works.

[FatherofFive]

The Federation claims to offer virtually unlimited personal freedom to every citizen, but no one ever tests this claim

With unlimited energy at zero cost, and replicators to provide all physical needs, there is no need for capitalism.

Everyone could have Monet's Water Lillie's in their living room. And the Hope Diamond as the gift for your 3rd anniversary.

The only thing of importance would be land. Like Picard's family vineyard. Or your beach front villa.

Property remains in Star Trek. So communism isn't there.

[RandallFlagg]

PING!!

[blueunicorn6]

Everybody knew that the Klingons were the soviets and they were the bad guys. Then there’s the episode where the Yangs and the Comms were fighting it out. We knew who the good guys were. And my hat is off to anyone who could get that many beautiful women to wear such skimpy outfits.

[Sirius Lee]

Geez! What a bunch of whiney losers. It was a friggin' tv show about a guy using his ship and crew to get him into situations where he could do some shoulder roles, shoot aliens, chew scenery, and bag a few green chicks. There's no deeper message to be had despite all pretensions.

Ultimately, the Enterprise was a place where the Shat shat like no other actor had shat before. And I say that with all affection for the Shat.

[DaxtonBrown]

Just finished watching 200 episodes of Stargate SG1. They don’t pussyfoot around with that Star Trek ‘no interference’ crap. They kill a lot of bad guys too.

[Secret Agent Man]

Like most science fiction writers, he was naive and of course wrote to his own personal biases. Clearly he was liberal and was a known globalist. And of course his stories were always full of liberal contradiction logic. Every story the prime directive got violated while Kirk or Spock preached about it not being their nature to interfere in other races internal affairs. The federation folks always talked about being peaceful and on quests for knowledge yet every show the phasers never got to cool down long. And just how exactly did anyone get paid for anything, did anyone get more for doing the harder or more dangerous jobs? Totally disassociating value from work.

Liberal illogic abounded. I enjoy the ship designs and scifi technology. Stories generally sucked.

[InvisibleChurch]

Lyrics to Star Trek theme song

Beyond the rim of the starlight,
my love is wand’ring in star flight.
I know he’ll find
In star clustered reaches
Love, strange love
A starwoman teaches.

I know his journey ends never.
His Star Trek will go on forever.
But tell him while
He wanders his starry sea,
Remember,
Remember me.

[Melas]

That is just blasphemy. Like the vast majority of geeks, I hold Roddenberry in the highest of esteem.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Star Trek was good. A bit shallow but fun.

TNG was boring. It was so painfully self consciously PC that it sucked all the fun right out of the concept.

[Revolting cat!]

I thought he was dead?!

[Bender2]

The nice thing about fiction is that the author can invent anything his heart desires and make it "real" as opposed to 'reality' where that pesky physics keeps you from unsqueezing the toothpaste back into the tube.

Gene Roddenberry may have created "Star Trek" as his fictitious version of the future but it evolved over the years into what the individual viewer wants it deep within his or her's id to be. The cannon of the Star Trek Universe has been squeezed and stretched into so many directions with the various series and films that one can serve up shredded boiled Tribble and call it Gagh BUT you cannot make it really squirm unless your supper guest agrees and slurps it down.

It is like the Prime Directive, the supreme law that cannot be broken but is repeatedly broken, bent and stapled in just about every conceivable way known to man and Q. Otherwise, the Star Trek Universe and everyone in it would be as boring as real Marxism/Communism/Socialism would be if ever it came to pass.

So, what the Great Bird of the Galaxy invented is not just his version but rather the results of what passed through multitudes of filters by writers, editors, directors, producers, censors, suits from the network and finally fans.

Get to point, Bender. I've a date with a Doomsday Machine... and no time to dawdle!

Okay, Matt, fellow campers, to cut to the chase... whatever anyone says about the Marxist/Communist/Socialist/Whateverist utopia Roddeenberry was aiming for, the original James T, Kirk would kick it in the balls with a full bank of phasers.

And that... is good enough for me--

And for me as well...

Right on, Barack! You made me what I am... your always faithful supporter, Julia!

Is it just me here in Spain, the wine or my perverted imagination that Julia... truly arse backward?

Hey, Michael Caine in Spain, it is not your local nor that Spanish wine. Your perverted imagination is correct... Julia is arse backward because she is a ward of Obama's cradle-to-grave society.

Yeah, yeah, Bendy... but I'd hump it!

Why you old dog, Brian... you'd hump the leg of anything female.

Or male, for that matter, Bend. As Gene Roddenberry envisioned, I am truly, logically... bi-humpual--

[usmcobra]

He’s dead Jim.

[GOPJ]

All (good) military groups MUST function as ethical totalitarian socialists organizations. They don't have time or energy to be democratic.

(Ok, let's vote on this attack plan... all in favor raise your hand.."

Our military today is a socialist organization. As it should be. Medical care is free, housing is provided, orders are 'given' not 'voted on'. Think about it - it has to be that way ... That's NOT to say Roddneberry didn't screw up trying to apply those totally workable ideas for a military to civilian situations ( where they become unworkable) - even if it was fiction.

[ronnyquest]

"Sorry to all you Star Trek fans out there. I may be the only science fiction fan in the universe that really hates his guts. He stands in the annals of history with Karl Marx as one of the most vile perpetrators of socialism and communism this planet has ever known. I call him the used philosophy salesman…. and he was good at that job, one of the best. "

No, sir, you are not the only person in the universe who despises Roddenberry's marxist utopian fantasy and I make no apologies. I despise him and his cultist followers. Bunch of marxist nitwits. That's redundant--the two seem to go hand in hand--marxism and nitwittery.

It was people like him who called Robert A. Heinlein a fascist because he dared to claim that people who had never served their fellow man in any capacity and who were unwilling to risk their own safety did not deserve citizenship.

After creating his utopian vision of our future, Roddenberry was forever uncomfortable with the militaristic nature of Star Fleet, which is why we got those freakish pajama outfits in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

And he also issued that remarkably stupid statement that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few--or the one." My ass. That's marxist-speak for their disdain for individual liberty.

Firefly is where it's at.

[x]

That's a very complicated question. Space in the 1960s was a socialist realm. There wasn't much room for private property or private initiative when you needed millions or billions of dollars just to get up there. Stanley Kubrick could imaging Pan Am and Howard Johnson's in space, but that wasn't the only possible future. So far, given what happened to Pan Am and Howard Johnson, Roddenberry (or Lucas) look like better prognosticators.

And Roddenberry's cosmos was largely a military realm, where of necessity business enterprises took a back seat to military requirements. We don't know what earth or its neighbors looked like in Roddenberry's 23rd century. So far as I know, we only see the lightly settled frontier planets and the ships that police them. So it's only natural that private firms and individual enterprise don't play a major role there.

Much of the ideology behind Star Trek (or The Twilight Zone) was tepid Sixties liberalism -- civil rights, civil liberties, international organizations, collective security. If there was some deeper hostility to private property involved, it's hard to separate out the real political edge from the demands of creating a fantasy world -- one that was very different from Earth ca.1966 AD, one that resembled the conceptions people had of outer space at the time, and one that had enough space for adventure and the astounding.

Plato or St. Thomas More or Tommaso Campanella wasn't necessarily advocating putting socialism in practice, when they wrote their utopias. There was a certain amount of fantasy, of whimsy, of allegory involved. Roddenberry was -- well, first of all he wasn't any Plato or More -- but he was more political than they were. Still, there was enough of the fantastic and other worldly in his shows that I don't think you can say that he was sketching an attainable blueprint for a socialist future. Sometimes, utopian fiction is a compensation for the unattainability of dreams, rather than an incitement to realize them.

RIP William Windom.