Posted on 01/11/2010 5:52:50 AM PST by Slyscribe
“Avatar” is wowing audiences with its groundbreaking 3-D technology (too bad the characters are one-dimensional). But in another way it’s ordinary: a science-fiction film that plays to leftist fantasies about capitalism and the military.
Yet many sci-fi fans are on the political right. So why are sci-fi films and TV shows typically liberal?
Hollywood films tend to be liberal, sure. But science fiction in particular lends itself to utopian visions that the world’s problems can be solved once and for all.
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I don’t need to ask how Kevin Costner breathed underwater, because had a pair of gills on his neck. How he got the pair of gills on his neck was left to the audience’s imagination. Was it a birth defect? Was it evolution?
Seems to it would have been easy to find land as well.
So would you then be an advocate of replicating trained Star Fleet crews?
Nearly all the “Golden Age” authors were either libs or socialists. Read Heinlein’s early works. He was an unapolegitic FDR backer. I think Sturgeon was a communist party member. Asimov stayed a liberal while most of the rest changed.
Dunno. Aside from the fact that it completely betrayed Heinlein and the book, I’ve always had problems with the Starship Troopers movie.
The MI were fighting bugs with weapons wholly inadequate to the task. They needed something more along the line of big game rifles or automatic grenade launchers for bugs, not small caliber assault rifles.
In the book the Bugs were a dangerous technologically advanced race, but in the movie, the Bugs were, well, bugs. Since they didn’t have powered armor, all the MI needed was to become the Armored Cavalry instead. I doubt the soldier bugs could bite through advanced alloy armor... Use tanks, IFVs, and gunships to slaughter ‘em on the surface and then pump gas into their burrows. Easy, efficient, low casualties.
Of course it would require the directors and writers to actually have a grasp of military technology and tactics.
No need. The M5 computer was capable of running a starship back in the day (TOS: The Ultimate Computer). Granted, it occasionally went insane and tried to kill everyone on your side (probably a Windows problem) but they've had 80 years to work out the bugs.
If that doesn't work, just staff each ship with robots. While Data is cutting-edge technology, surely it would be easy enough to make robots that aren't sentient but could perform their tasks adequately. Even if they aren't as efficient as humans, the sheer number of ships will overwhelm any enemy such as the Borg.
Better yet, take a Defiant class, eliminate the living spaces (or fill ‘em with more power plant, shields and weapons...), and turn ‘em into UCSVs (Unpiloted Combat Space Vehicles). Just a have a few command ships backing them up and the Borg (and the Klingons, and the Romulans, and the Cardassians and the Ferengi and the...) will never know what hit ‘em...
From Eisenhower's D-Day speech:
"In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine..."
I'm not saying that he emphasized it, but he did mention it from time to time. In any case, I'll be watching for this angle as I re-watch B5.
I agree completely about the 5-year arc aspect of B5. It redefined television SF in this regard.
So I guess you'd advocate recompiling the source code to work on a Mac, then.
If that doesn't work, just staff each ship with robots. While Data is cutting-edge technology, surely it would be easy enough to make robots that aren't sentient but could perform their tasks adequately. Even if they aren't as efficient as humans, the sheer number of ships will overwhelm any enemy such as the Borg.
Why not? As long as you are willing to take certain chances:
(Remember, Data has an on/off switch)
Well, not having enough ships to repel a Borg invasion is a bit risky as well...
I agree with all your points save for the fact that it was a fun shootem up movie...and that is what I watched it as...
...not Heinleins masterpiece that was ruined by the director...
Very possibly that is one movie I _won’t_ see. I couldn’t bear to watch Hollywood shred Atlas to pieces. Starship Troopers, I knew better and wasn’t surprised with the liberties taken. Atlas in the hands of Hollywood lefties...ugh.
Heinlein wrote many stories from many different perspectives and resisted all efforts at being “pegged” as this-or-that. A lot of writers can’t lift themselves out of their belief system or personal perspective—or do it badly or superficially. Heinlein could and he did it well enough and extensively enough that he had critics believing all sorts of things about him that he’d deny when asked.
I find that it’s easier and more accurate to get an estimate of the man based on his non-fiction essays. I get the impression that he loved his country, appreciated the military, understood politicians, was extremely wary of government, and was an advocate of capitalism, reason, and individualism—though he wouldn’t call himself a ‘big L’ libertarian nor an Objectivist.
Could be. But the East India Company was sort of a monopoly, sort of a semi-governmental enterprise. I don't know the history very well, but it was pretty easy for the running of India to be transferred from the company to a British bureaucracy that took a dim view of commercialism.
Maybe it would be better to say that the empire may have liked big commercial ventures, large trading companies, and plantations, but didn't want a lot of small English businessmen around making India too much like the England they'd left.
Star fleet might be a private enterprise, but it wouldn't be what we have now, at least in science fiction, because sci fi values the emptiness and differentness, the strangeness of space too much. If it's too much like earth, the escapism is gone.
And while the space of sci fi films (more so than the novels) is dominated by government or quasi-governmental entities, you probably won't see Spock and Kirk or Han and Chewy filling out tax forms, since people don't want to be reminded about that either.
I am going to chew on that. I am in the process of coming up with a story...
The best fiction is never solely for the purpose of entertainment.
Indeed. Firefly was profoundly libertarian. And Heinlein was profoundly libertarian as well. I'm listening to the audio version of Starship Troopers right now. I love RAH's politics. Couldn't get into B5, and BSG was too dark to make me think about anything "political".
My notion that Heinlein had, at one point, been a socialist was based on his involvement with Upton Sinclair in the thirties.
You may be right and Heinlein may just have had the ability to perfectly capture disparate perspectives. I almost hope not though. It would be absolutely remarkable to consider a writer doing this so well as Heinlein (if that is what he was doing) . . . but at the same time those parts of his works that speak so powerfully to what I believe in . . . well I’d rather like to think that those were sincere.
Perusing the essays is an excellent idea . . . I’m going to search a few of those out for sure.
From the fiction though it does seem that for much of his career he was strongly devoted to the principles of individual liberty, individual responsibility, reason and capitalism. And while I tend to agree that he probably was not an Objectivist (though I’m pretty sure he was at least an agnostic) some of his works (Rocketship Galileo/Destination Moon, The Man Who Sold the Moon and to a lesser extent The Roads Must Roll) seem aligned with a decent amount of Rand’s philosophy.
I’ve always wanted to to a ST:TNG story where the crew members used to holideck to go to a “Renaissance Fair”. Only it turned out that what they considered to be renaissance culture was the mid 1990’s and so Picard was sipping gin and juice out of a pimp cup, Riker was confessing to Troi on the springer show and Data had turned himself into a Tamagachi. Meanwhile back on the bridge Ensign Everyman had the situation well under control because he had adopted a new ships policy of arbitrarily reversing the polarity at random intervals.
Well, no one said this movie was the best fiction.
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