Man, I’m tempted to go back re-watch that whole show. My wife’s never been indoctrinated seen it.
6 Likes
It’s good. I think they try to walk a balance and not come down on either side with it, but there was some tension between them. I do think by the time he was involved in TNG, Roddenberry was already on a downward spiral, health wise and he really sort of bought into this notion that he was a visionary for creating Star Trek in the first place. [quote=“GulliverFoyle, post:61, topic:79289, full:true”]
Speaking of William F*king Shatner, he made a documentary about Roddenberry’s involvement and the creation of Star Trek called Chaos on the Bridge which was, surprisingly, actually pretty good. I think it might still be up on Netflix.
[/quote]
Dude… I just posted a link to the io9 review of that… !
2 Likes
God, now I really want for the Redshirts series to happen.
1 Like
Sometimes I wonder if this sums up the average person’s understanding of Heinlein.
I feel like his writing is seriously misunderstood. I can get how Roddenberry’s rosy view of the future would crash into Heinlein’s, especially after reading some of Heinlein’s nonfiction about the Soviet Union, but Heinlein was so left-wing that he got kicked out of the Navy.
I went through a Heinlein reading binge a few years ago, and it was pretty clear to me that his stories weren’t glorifying a future of peace through might, but a cautionary tale about the “good guys” becoming tyrants through might. It’s the kind of thing you see on Star Trek from some of those Other Races.
Later on, as he got older, he became a libertarian, as did his stories. Somewhat bizarrely, his libertarian-leaning stories also seem to be fairly cautionary.
Not my favorite author, but imho he wasn’t a 180 from Star Trek.
And for the people saying that he had to believe in it to write it, we could also have a conversation as to whether I Will Fear No Evil was him expressing himself as a trans woman.
4 Likes
I’m told that the CGI is painful to watch these days.
1 Like
The writings from before or after the brain tumor?
I was serious. I guess it wasn’t a tumor but:
http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/biographies.html
After that, he wrote some rather…odd… novels.
Video Toaster, Amiga 2000s? Surely not…
Bab5 got messed around something chronic in the UK. Late night, early mornings, Friday, Sunday, it was impossible to keep track of. One of these days I’ll go back and try it again.
1 Like
Didn’t the oddness kick in before then, though?
Heinlein was full of barmy ideas about gender, much as I read the shit out of his books as a youngster, I couldn’t go back to them now without constantly going ‘What the fuck, Bob? Seriously?’
3 Likes
I was hoping for the Sexual Fetishes of Stranger actually. Roddenberry would never have gone there. He was a great popularizer, but weak on original ideas.
…which was itself in part a critique of Star Trek, and in turn heavily influenced both Farscape and Lexx.
2 Likes
Sounds like you might want Farscape.
Cheesy but fun, and a lot smarter than it might first appear. Similar to Blake’s 7 in setup; morally grey protagonists struggling to survive in a mostly dystopian universe. There’s a touch of Buck Rogers, too.
Over five seasons, they hit just about every classic SF plot you can think of, as well as doing some interesting original things.
It’s substantially more colourful and energetic than Trek, though. Plenty of action amongst the ideas.
1 Like
Heinlein’s titled his first (unpublished) novel “For Us, the Living” in 1939 - three years after Ayn Rand published “We, the Living.” I think the libertarianism was there from the beginning.
I thought the increased oddness enso was referring to was sexual, but perhaps he was getting at something else.
1 Like
Sorry, picked the wrong comment to reply to! The sexual oddness was always there, too, at least the polyamory. There are hints of it even in the Future History.
1 Like
Have you read the two volume Patterson bio?
Geordi’s taste seem pretty contemporary now though… stalks women via their output online, creates elaborate fantasies for himself with technology and finds the real life versions of the women he obsesses about icky and frustrating.
1 Like
It’s on Netflix too, I noticed. Something else for the list that I’ll never find time to go back and watch…
