Comment by WalterBright

> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.

Utopias used to be the most common scifi futures. This is what the so called Cyberpunks (Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, ...) rebelled against.

It used to be all about what wonders technology will bring us. By the time of the 70s it became clear that technology doesn't necessarily make everything better, but can be a burden in itself, or even widen the gap between the haves and haves not. And that is what they wrote about. It turned out to be the most popular scifi with audiences deeming it more believable.

I would not call Deep Space 9 a dystopia. Nor Babylon 5, for that matter. They are not happy places to live, for sure, but both settings are abundant in hope and possibility.

your growth hacking worked. i didn’t want it to, but it did. i saw your book at the end of your comment and gen looked up the book and read the sample and was expecting to look down my nose at it but… the sample was good so i bought it.

thats the first sample i ever read that got me to read a book. not particularly great writing, but clean and propulsive and i hope the mystery pays off.

Tank Girl makes this list? Why not Judge Dredd, or even Idiocracy?

> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.

Some say it was the last sci-fi utopia in modern pop culture.

Obligatory reference to the other great utopia in scifi, The Culture series from Iain M. Banks.

As much as I love Star Trek, The Culture feels more mature and nuanced.

speaking on the movie : Tank Girl doesn't portray a world that's great for the rich, either.

it's pretty shitty for anyone outside the singular theocratic military enclave that hordes all the water and decapitates scientists.

>it's why I think we're so afraid of AI

I think you're overestimating the sci-fi cannon indoctrination of the general public, or even tech people, and underestimating their reaction to current events. As things lie at the moment, Big AI is served as a SaaS that can be manipulated at any time by obscenely rich and powerful individuals with questionable decision making skills, some of who reside in the White House and some of who have called empathy a "fundamental weakness". One would be hard pressed to dispute these characters rival the caricatures present in some dystopian sci-fi as it is, they themselves even seem to enjoy the irony. Yes, I also cringe at the alarmist nature of these sentences, but we are at a point where we are most likely to dismiss things right in front of our eyes just by how outlandish it all sounds.

The public's willful transfer of their most intimate personal information to these entities, and once given almost impossible to remove, would make any surveillance state salivate. You have only to look at who holds the keys to this estate.

This insufferable band of Holy Scouts was the reason I never liked TNG. I find DS9 much more believable, up to and including Trump as Gul Dukat. That character was prescient. There is one difference between the two though. While both are malignant pathological narcissists, the fictional Gul Dukat knew how to fake grace once in a while. The real Trump doesn't give a shit.

> Riker does spend a long time on the Enterprise, even after being offered command a few times. He does eventually move on.

Also he is not free of ambition, he wants Picard's job. He isn't willing to do anything negative to get it, but part of that is that Picard constantly proves himself the better captain. Picard isn't captain because he joined Starfleet first or because he has better connections, he is genuinely better at the job and non-toxic ambitious people can respect that. Riker still has more to learn from Picard that will make him a better captain later.

So I think a lot of the people staying in their positions make sense, the primary characters are as high as they can go (for their specialty) without transitioning into a role that stays on a planet.

We coincidentally watched that one just last night, The Booby Trap. There's a derelict ship on the view screen reminding the crew that the other crew never figured out a solution to the problem, and there's no indication that the Enterprise crew won't suffer the same fate.

(That one, at least, has Geordi literally saying, "that's impossible", but comes up with a solution. Apologies if that's not the one you're thinking of.)

Sounds like The Ensigns of Command:

   > LAFORGE: Captain, we can do it. We can modify the transporters.
   > PICARD: Excellent.
   > LAFORGE: It'll take fifteen years, and a research team of a hundred.
   > PICARD: Mister La Forge, I believe we will postpone.
   > LAFORGE: Yes, sir.

Sounds like certain AI agents that had an impossible task and found a workaround. Interesting that we cheer for it in SciFi for people, but dont like it when LLMs that have been trained on our stories do the same.

I meant TOS, not TNG.

> Competence Porn

Don’t get me started on their engineering that causes a matter-antimatter runaway reaction if their fuel tanks ever lose power. And routing discharge-prone HV power lines behind the bridge consoles, or placing the bridge on the outer hull.

I love it, and I know this is all in the service of the story, but I will not give Starfleet a pass for that kind of irresponsible engineering.

There's been a resurgence of that in contemporary big budget SF. The Martian. Project Hail Mary. For All Mankind and The Expanse on TV.

The West Wing exemplifies that category.

Top Gun: Maverick - great class on leading a high performing team.

It isn't really military fiction in the sense that it intends to accurately portray or extrapolate on military culture and tactics. Gene Roddenberry was (apparently not) in the Navy, and TOS is mostly The American Cold War In Space (with the Enterprise as a Submarine In Space - looking at you "Balance of Terror" - but it's pretty clear watching TNG onwards that the "military" aspect of the whole thing, like the "post scarcity communism" is window dressing. It's just a necessary part of the franchise.

And they aren't even really members of the military. Starfleet is canonically not a military force, its purpose is exploration, science and diplomacy. It just happens to have a military chain of command, and ships with military designations bristling with planet-cracking weapons. That get into battles and fight wars a lot.

He was also a prop device they used to make many changes they had wanted for a while Troy's outfit, the fish tank - Patrick Stewart believed that 24th-century humans—who had evolved past cruelty and the subjugation of life—would not keep a living creature in a glass tank for mere display.

Much less, but not none at all. Roddenberry refused to budge on his rule that the crew shouldn’t have grievances with one another. That why even scenes shared earlier still end in a positive outcome.

Whereas Voyager, which was written after Roddenberrys passing, leaned heavily into inter-crew disputes.

I'm not so sure about that. I enjoyed the subtle humor of the illogical Mr Spock, whose logic always came to the wrong conclusion. And McCoy with "dammit Jim I'm a doctor not a bricklayer!"

The best dialog ever:

Lawyer: Mr Spock, I understand you know something about computers?

Spock: I know all about them.

Always makes me laugh.

And it had a MUCH bigger budget than the original, as well as the assurance that it wouldn't be cancelled at a moment's notice.

Unsurprising, then, that Peter Theil found common ground with Mordor & Sauron when reading LOTR.

Jonathon Frakes / Riker directed two great episodes of the Orville as well

I prefer fiction that is entertaining, rather than preaching the author's vision of morality/politics.

I've seen every episode of TOS, most multiple times.

In-universe there was a brutal nuclear war that killed a large number of people. And then after the war they developed technology that got rid of a lot of material scarcity and disease.

I find it somewhat plausible that this could actually lead to something like the show depicts. There is precedent for sweeping moral changes in human history. For example, large parts of the world now find practices like torture, slavery, and collective punishment to be repugnant. Those practices still happen to some extent, but they're not viewed as being just normal like they generally were seen back in the day.

Another example is how Europe and Japan after WW2 genuinely became more pacifistic. Not just as a pretense to fool outsiders, but as a genuine change in how the inhabitants see things.

Apparently there's enough capitalism for mining colonies and merchant traders. "No!! If you shut down the mine we'll go bankrupt!!"