pace Nine represents an end to the spirit of Star Trek that I loved. And I love DS9 but I love it because it’s a cool story set in the Star Trek universe whereas the classic spirit of Star Trek had episodes explore an idea, leaving a lot of story and continuity aside.
TNG’s Measure of a Man is a great example: what an actually idiotic story. We just want to get to the ideas and we do. It’s not about a functioning fictional universe with interacting characters, it’s a one-off Voltaire play.
(I know I’ve written about Measure of a Man before but I’m chewing my lips off so I gotta say it again – that episode should be 1 minute long. The JAG outlines what she wants to happen and everyone goes oh, then I’m not going to bother preparing for this at all. I’ll just start filing appeals and objections right away for all the conflict of interest and we’ll see you at trial in, like, 3 years which is how the law actually works.)
But all the Star Trek after The Dominion Wars became West Wing In Space and we did want things to have continuity and so we fell into the predictable trope of ‘the future’s not all it’s cracked up to be’ which studios think is such a revolutionary insight when it’s actually the bog standard norm. A thing I wish writers in all genres would fight their bosses on is twists you have to take aren’t twists. They’re just directions, they’re just perfectly functioning maps.
If you look at the post-war period and the birth of Star Trek, the assumption was that we were inherently good and progress was inevitable and when solve social problems that goodness shines through. That was the revolutionary idea at the time. That’s what set it apart from the sci-fi of the previous era with all the alien invasion cold war propaganda stuff.
Then eventually it was the 80s and we were ready to feel bad again and cyberpunk retorted yeah, but we never solve social problems, do we? Progress was only inevitable for some people, the power structures already in place, and the exploited were just going to keep getting exploited.
Blade runner is not a dystopian film though. There’s jobs, there’s disposable income, there’s restaurants and entertainment. It’s a film about characters being lonely but just putting loneliness in the future (fake movie poster idea: Loneliness. In. Space) doesn’t make it dystopian. Blade Runner is less dystopian than fucking Taxi Driver.
Blade Runner got labelled dystopian just because it felt different from the Utopian fiction that came before. The idea that the future would be good. The eras were: the future will be bad, the future will be good, the future will be much like the present – disappointing.
I think there’s upsides and downsides to this when it comes to how fiction makes us predict reality. A lot of people are guilty of thinking the future is going to be magically better. We don’t have to worry or try to fix anything because it’ll be better in the future anyway. It becomes a heavenly nihilism. It runs sort of parallel to the problem with Communism in the 20th century where the ends was a perfect Utopia so it justified any means but for modern escapists future utopia justifies any and all present neglect. Obviously someone is eventually going to solve the problem so no one has to try solve the problem.
Everyone looked around and realized this planet is going to be fucked and thought I hope we can get off it in time rather than we should try and stop it from being fucked and now it actually is too late.
So then of course we get into post-apocalyptic fiction. Not a vision where the future is bad per se but a vision of the future after the future has been bad. A vision where the future has become the past again. civilization is destroyed and we return to something.
There was some chat on a podcast a while ago about Preppers and Survialists and the ultra specific fantasies they have. There are millions of real people preparing obsessively for the end times and it’s driven by the feeling they’ll get to feel useful again. That modernity has stolen some purpose that was inherent to them. And there’s a lot of accelerationists trying to make things worse because if we drag society back down into the dirt their true potential will get shine there. Instead of the distant future being Utopia it becomes the distant past. And of course there’s always some xenophobic explanation as to why things changed.
So is there any fiction out there about the future being better? I can only think of Futurama and Star Trek: Lower Decks. Both cartoons and both comedies. And both do a good job of showing terror and wonder and tedium and have a sense that the future will be different things to different people. I don’t know how I can fit this in to my train of thought but I’m now thinking about the difference between post-war American fiction, the stuff that lead us to Star Trek, and post-war Japanese fiction that lead us to Akira.
There’s so much interesting shit about the psychological healing of Japan that played out through cataclysmic fiction but that’s pretty far from what I wanted to be talking about here.
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