Star Trek has never provided a particularly imaginative future. This isn’t really a problem, as such. Science fiction isn’t always—or even often—in the business of accurately predicting the future. And Star Trek in particular has always been more about commenting about the contemporary world than providing a possibly accurate lens to the future.
Because of this, Trek’s track record with schools is hilariously unimaginative, as we see in the last Short Treks episode of this batch, “Children of Mars.”
All the previous Short Treks that are bridging the schedule between the end of Discovery’s second season and the start of Picard’s first have hearkened to the past: use of Pike, Number One, and Spock across “Q & A,” “The Trouble with Edward,” and “Ask Not,” callbacks to Discovery’s second-season premiere in “The Girl Who Made the Stars” and to both the tardigrade in Discovery’s first season and the history of the original series in “Ephraim and Dot.”
“Children of Mars,” however, is a prelude to what’s to come. We’ve gotten hints from the trailers that some of the missing history between Star Trek Nemesis and Picard season one involves destruction on Mars, and this short piece is about that very destruction. It’s also only the second look we’ve had at the near future following Nemesis, the other being Spock witnessing the destruction of Romulus in the 2009 Star Trek. (In addition, the short “Calypso” and the Voyager episode “Living Witness” take place in the far future, relative to the 24th century, as will season three of Discovery.)
Our POV characters are two girls, one human (Lil), one alien (Kima), who attend the same school in San Francisco (we see the Golden Gate Bridge outside Lil’s window), and who both have parents who work on Mars. Kima’s mother works at Utopia Planitia, and we see them making funny faces at each other happily over subspace. Lil’s relationship with her father is more tense, as her father reluctantly tells her that he won’t be home “this year,” and she hangs up on him.
Here’s where the unimaginative part starts. The girls both live in apartments that have the exact same décor. I mean, I guess it might be student housing for the WSA (which I’m guessing stands for World Science Academy), but if that’s the case, why do they have to take a shuttle to school? Wouldn’t school housing be on campus?
In addition, WSA has a school uniform, which is—a choice, I guess. I dunno, in current times, school uniforms are primarily the purview of military and religious schools, and WSA doesn’t appear to be either. Also what do non-humanoid species wear? (Edited to add: several people have pointed out in the comments that my view on this is very U.S.-centric, and that around the world, school uniforms are more common. I stand corrected, though my question about non-humanoid species still applies…)
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The school itself has the students all sitting at desks and using little minicomputers. They’re transparent, so when one student sends a caricature of the teacher (unimaginatively called “Mrs. K”), the teacher sees it and gives two demerits to Kima, the girl who received it, rather than Lil.
Lil sent it to her by way of apology. Lil was so angry at her father’s note that she didn’t notice that she bumped Kima and knocked her schoolbag to the ground, making her miss the shuttle and come to school late. The caricature was meant to be a peace offering and apology, but it just got Kima in bigger trouble and Kima angrier at Lil. The tension between the two girls escalates, with Kima feeling picked on by Lil and Lil already angry at everyone and everything, so that it finally explodes into violence as Kima trips Lil in the library and then Lil jumps Kima at her locker and fisticuffs ensue.
That the kids aren’t pulled apart almost instantly is yet another thing that doesn’t make sense. The fight goes on far longer than it should be allowed to.
But then, as they’re sitting in the atrium awaiting discipline, there’s a major alert. An attack on Mars by “rogue synths” results in the destruction of both Utopia Planitia (where Kima’s mother works) and the orbital platform (where Lil’s father works). Their differences put aside, the girls clasp hands in the face of the tragedy.
As with “Ask Not,” this story—which is written by Picard co-creator Kirsten Beyer (who is, full disclosure, a friend of your humble reviewer), executive producer Alex Kurtzman, and Discovery co-executive producer Jenny Lumet—works mainly because of its short length. It’s pretty much completely predictable that the fact that both girls have parents working on Mars will be important to the story.
However, it most assuredly does work, due also to some excellent directing by Mark Pellington (who also helmed the much more claustrophobic “Q & A”), and superb performances by Ilamaria Ebrahim and Sadie Munroe as Kima and Lil, respectively. There is almost no dialogue in the short, with the action carried entirely by body language, facial expressions, and movement, while a haunting, elegiac cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes” plays on the soundtrack. Ebrahim and Munroe sell the unintended rivalry between the students magnificently, from Munroe’s apologetic look in the classroom to Ebrahim’s smoldering frustration at how her day has gone to shit, to both of their anger during the fistfight.
And then it all gets put into sharp relief when their respective worlds fall apart. As someone who was sitting in his living room watching two buildings in his hometown fall eighteen years and four months ago, I know the feeling that Kima and Lil and everyone at WSA has when they watch helplessly as ships strafe the surface of Mars.
Points also must go to Robert Verlaque—who previously played Saru’s father in the short “The Brightest Star“—for how he plays the Vulcan principal of WSA. Like everyone else, he has no dialogue, but he sells the character’s placidity, disappointment, and horror—all muted, as a proper Vulcan should be, but not completely suppressed, either.
The subtlety and skill of the performances overcome the simplicity of the plot, as does the very notion. I haven’t actually seen Picard yet, but I’m sure that it won’t present the destruction on Mars as anything other than an abstraction, a bad thing that happened in the past. Too often, dramatic fiction goes for the big event without really examining the human cost in any but the most general of terms.
“Children of Mars” puts a humanoid face on the destruction of Mars before we’ve even seen what impact it will have on Jean-Luc Picard in the future. (An image shows Admiral Picard’s response to the attack, which means it takes place some time in the interregnum between Nemesis, when he’s still a captain, and Picard season one, when he’s retired.) It’s not just an abstraction, it’s not just a vague tragedy, it’s an event that has consequences to at least two people in whose lives we’ve become invested in a very short time.
And it’s a nice teaser for that new show they’re debuting this month. I’m rather stunned that there wasn’t a preview at the end of it, to be honest…
In two weeks, we take a look at the premiere of Star Trek: Picard.
Keith R.A. DeCandido has been writing about pop culture for this site since 2011, discussing Star Trek in all its forms (including reviews of each episode of the various CBS All Access Star Trek productions as they’re released), as well as Doctor Who, Stargate, and various screen adaptations of comic books. His latest novels are Alien: Isolation, Mermaid Precinct, and A Furnace Sealed, plus his short fiction has appeared in Across the Universe, Footprints in the Stars, Brave New Girls: Adventures of Gals & Gizmos, Unearthed, Thrilling Adventure Yarns, and Release the Virgins!
I’ve always been disappointed with the lack of educational futurism in Star Trek, like the assumption that they still use letter grades in the future. The only time they’ve tried to portray any evolution in the educational system was in TNG’s “When the Bough Breaks,” which established that Federation children were already studying calculus at the equivalent of a grade school level. Otherwise, it’s always been relentlessly ordinary, even backward compared to the era when it was made (because the adult writers were remembering their own childhoods, most likely).
I’m particularly uneasy with the idea implied here that schools in the 24th century still tolerate any degree of bullying. That hardly seems compatible with an optimistic, improved future. But then, I suppose there’s precedent in the fact that the Starfleet Academy of Kirk’s time still had hazing and tolerated bullies like Finnegan.
It looks like Kima’s species is a new one that isn’t identified in the short. It’s interesting, then, that it seems to be consciously designed to look like the kind of makeup Michael Westmore would’ve come up with for a TNG alien-of-the-week.
Yeah, the school stuff bugged me, too. Especially the library. It looked like they just filmed in an actual library and put lights around all of the shelves. The books even had library stickers on the spins, which means printers still exist in the 24th Century. Wild.
There was no bullying. This was all a misunderstanding because Lil unthinkingly bumped into Kima.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I dunno, in current times, school uniforms are primarily the purview of military and religious schools, and WSA doesn’t appear to be either.
I work at Deerfield Academy, which has a dress code, but many boarding schools these days do have school uniforms and are not associated with military or religious traditions.
Every iteration of Star Trek has depicted books alongside digital information systems. I use ebooks for fiction and quick reference, but paper books for study. And of course the 24th century has printers: they’re called replicators. Go into any comic shop and look at the “stickers” which are part of the spine design for collections of stories easily downloadable to an iPad. How else would you order books on a shelf?
“in current times, school uniforms are primarily the purview of military and religious schools”
In your part of the US, perhaps. Where I live (not in the US, but equally Western and privileged, and arguably more progressive in culture and policy) all of the high schools have uniforms and none of them is military or religious.
I’m always saddened when current US defaults are used to endorse or criticise depictions of the future. Why should the default for 23rd and 24th century courts be the US model, rather than (say) the French? Why should people in the future be worrying about paying for their healthcare? Etc, etc. History shows that some things go out of and back into fashion (e.g. Shakespeare, who was pretty much forgotten for a century or so) and some things stick around for no apparent reason (e.g. I wear a tie to work). Futurism is hard.
Imagine the outcry if DS9 had depicted the early 21st century as a place of Victorian/Edwardian beards…and yet!
@3/krad: Maybe not a pattern of bullying, but the girls escalate to fighting rather than talking it out, and from what I read on another site, the other students cheered on the fight rather than trying to break it up. To me, that implies an educational system that fails to teach young people how to resolve their conflicts without violence. I just find that hard to reconcile with the well-adjusted, peace-loving adults that are supposed to populate the Trek universe.
A lot of private schools use uniforms too. In our world, it’s another way for the school(‘s corporate backers) to squeeze money out of students’ families, but I can see the value in a multi-ethnic/multicultural setting like the Federation, as a way to subconsciously emphasize the things we have in common as opposed to the differences between us.
The post-Discovery disregard for visual continuity continues to distract me; the school shuttle and the ships under construction at Utopia Planitia were all DSC-era designs. Until Admiral Picard turned up, I assumed this was set during the Klingon War.
The attack being attributed to “rogue synths” is interesting. Has the Daystrom Institute succeeded in mass-producing androids, or are we seeing the rebellion of the enslaved ex-EMHs we’ve been waiting for since Voyager?
I enjoyed the minimal dialogue of the short and the use of music here – it really gave it a somber but resilient tone. The attack reminded me of 9/11 so that was effective if that was the intent.
Also, Star Trek: Picard premieres in roughly two weeks, not next week. Unless that changed and I wasn’t informed!
I did not get the impression that this was all a big misunderstanding between Kima and Lil. Lil was upset about her father not coming home, so she took it out on Kima by bumping into her, and it continually escalated throughout the day.
When Lil’s father says he’s not coming home “this year,” I don’t think he means “the entirety of this year,” which would be ridiculous if he’s just one planet over. Rather he’s saying he can’t make it home for Federation Day.
As to uniforms, Keith’s taking a way too Amerocentric view. Uniforms are uncommon in the US, but they’re standard in many other countries, including the UK and Japan. There’s no reason to think that everyone will default to the US’s slovenly ways rather than the other way around.
I think the most distracting thing for me was the cover of ‘Heroes’ but that’s probably more a me thing since I generally don’t like cover songs.
Also, I though Picard premiered on the 20th not next week?
Loungeshep: It actually premieres on the 23rd, but I’ve edited the post accordingly anyhow. Got my calendar all kerfluffled.
Christopher: Being taught not to cheer on violence is not the same as actually learning that lesson. These are still kids, and trust me, as someone who teaches martial arts to kids, it takes a while, and a lot of repetition, for those lessons to kick in.
And to all the people who pointed out my ethnocentric view on school uniforms: fair enough. I’ve added a note addressing your concerns, though I still wonder what non-humanoid species wear. I freely admit to despising the concept of school uniforms in general, and in particular in an egalitarian Federation, but whatever.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad: Sorry about that, for some reason I keep thinking the 20th
“I still wonder what non-humanoid species wear”
Ever wonder what non-humanoid members of Starfleet wear? Children of their species most likely follow the same convention when attending a mostly humanoid school with a uniform (maybe a robe, maybe belts, maybe a sash).
The “uniformity” of the uniform could be expressed through colour, pattern, etc. Insect-derived species might have to spray their division or school colours on their carapace every morning…
What about the species with different sensory priorities? Maybe there’s a school texture and a school scent?
That was Peter Gabriel doing “Heroes”, which is a haunting rendition, but not sure it fits the story thematically.
“Lil sent it to her by way of apology.”
There’s wiggle room on that one. The teacher is right by Kima’s desk when she sends over the doodle. Add in transparent screens and it’d be hard not to say Lil intended to get Kima into trouble. Lil’s actress is good enough that she was pissing me off. She’s less innocent than she seems. Might even be a mean girl.
The design for the synth ships was cool, as was the CGI attack.
I’ll never get why SF shows and movies think that transparent screens are cool and futuristic. They’re an utterly stupid idea. What use is a screen that you can’t see clearly because there’s stuff overlapping the image from behind? They’d be virtually useless if they were backlit. Heck, my understanding is that modern LCD screens actually are transparent, or would be, but their makers choose to put opaque backings behind them because it immensely improves their visibility. So transparent screens aren’t some futuristic advance, they’re actually a step backward, leaving out a very basic functional element of the design.
And the bit described here just underlines another reason they’re silly, which is that they have no privacy.
@11.krad – I’m definitely with you on kids being kids no matter what the century; it takes time to teach children how to be a Good Neighbour & a Good Citizen … and it takes even longer for adolescents to not only remember their social obligations, but also realise why all this Goody Two-Shoes stuff was a Good Idea in the first.
So far as I can see sanity begins sometime in your twenties and only begins to set in once you’re over thirty! (-;
Old? Grumpy? Me?!? Why NO, dear reader, it is YOU who are a withering old stick and I who am in my youthful prime! (-;
What do non-humanoid species wear? I imagine it would be some variant of the humanoid uniform. Fortunately, I know of a good tailor in the vicinity of Cardassia. He’s chatty but his rates are reasonable.
Very poignant. Best Short Treks thus far although the Tribble one was pretty good. I like to see regular people, not all the geniuses of Starfleet.
As to the bullying. I can’t say for sure if Lil bumped into Kima deliberately (after rewatching it right before this posting), but she didn’t pause a second to say that she was sorry or help Kima pick up her stuff. Had she just kept going I’d have said no, that Lil was in her own world. But she looked back at Kima. If I had to guess, I’d say she didn’t do it deliberately, but she didn’t care enough to stop and help. Lil was still angry, or didn’t want to miss the shuttle, or had past history with Kima or any combination of the three.
The look after sending the photo to Kima said apology. However, when the teacher caught her, Lil did not ‘fess up. Either cowardice (possible) or deliberate. Rewatching this, I’d say cowardice after trying to make amends. It would fit. Lil realized she knocked down Kima and Kima would miss the shuttle but Lil didn’t want to get in trouble for that, even if it was her fault. Ditto for the teacher picture.
Although, couldn’t the teacher tell from whom the picture originated?
Of course Kima doesn’t see the photo as a semi-apology and I don’t blame her. After missing the shuttle and being marked late and then getting in trouble with the teacher, it’s game on as far as she’s concerned.
Girls’ bullying can be somewhat passive aggressive like that. Girls are prone to “accidentally” bumping someone in hopes of getting them to drop their books. Happened to me in junior high which was the last time someone was stupid enough to bully me before I developed extreme sarcasm (since my fighting skills suck).
It’s funny, before I read your review, I thought for sure it was bullying. Now? Not quite so sure. But that ambiguity just adds to the episode. I suppose my own life experiences at the same age influenced my perception of what happened.
P.S. The U.S. is an outlier when it comes to uniforms. I’ve always thought uniforms were a great idea. It equalizes everyone, and one can easily tell who belongs and who doesn’t. When my kids were in school in Fort Lauderdale, elementary schools had mandatory uniforms. I can’t remember if they did in junior high, but high schoolers did not. I think that was a mistake. They caved to whining teens.
@20/TBonz: I hate the idea of school uniforms, of pressuring children to conform rather than embrace their individuality. It teaches that any variation from a predefined norm is wrong, and as someone who was ruthlessly bullied in school for trivial differences from expected norms like the length of my hair or the height of my pant cuffs, I consider that a truly horrible value to instill in children.
I mean, the Federation is supposed to be about celebrating diversity, not suppressing it. Uniforms and discipline in a military context like Starfleet are one thing, but civilians — especially children — should be encouraged to be themselves, to be welcomed for their uniqueness. Uniformity isn’t equality. Equality means that different things are regarded as having equal worth, that people who dress differently or act differently or think differently or develop at a different rate are equally accepted, rather than forced into a single mold and penalized for diverging from it.
Does a school uniform diminish individuality? I got two words for you: Angus. Young. ;-)
Sometimes I wonder if my school experience would’ve been improved somewhat by uniforms. I mean, it would’ve been nice going to school without worrying about being picked apart every day by a bunch of playground fashionistas obsessed with brand names. “Oh, I guess Tommy’s parents couldn’t afford new Nikes. Yeah, they’re New Balance poor. And look at what Denise is wearing…”
Meh, they probably would’ve found something else to pick apart, like a wrinkle in a shirt. Kids really can be awful little bastards.
@22/Kowalski: The name means nothing to me. I looked it up and apparently he’s a heavy metal musician who wears school uniforms on stage. I would guess that he does so as an ironic subversion, though, a rebellion against the conformity the uniforms represent.
And if bullies are picking people apart for how they dress, then the people that need to change are the bullies, not their victims. I can’t tell you how many times the teachers at my schools failed me, and hurt me, by saying that I was the one in the wrong for letting the bullies “get to me.” Just once I wish someone had told me unequivocally that the bullies were the ones in the wrong. More to the point, I wish someone had told them they were in the wrong, had taught them that it was wrong to make fun of people just for being different or not being rich enough. Children should be taught to accept each other’s differences, not to hide their own differences for fear of persecution.
Not to mention that the Federation is a moneyless society where any desired garment can just be punched up in a replicator, so there’s no reason for children to shame each other for what they wear.
It would’ve been wonderful if all those things happened in my rural, low-budget school staffed by apathetic burnouts and a school administrator who was embezzling money from the school, but, alas, that’s not the world we have. And the Angus Young reference was a joke, not a thesis. Hence the winky face.
Individuality is important, but so is belonging; and individuality can be expressed in many ways. I like school uniforms, even though my country doesn’t have them, and I agree with comment #22 that they don’t diminish individuality. Besides, I always like it when the Federation isn’t portrayed as a carbon copy of the US. So this sounds good to me.
Interesting that people are bothered by school uniforms, but weren’t bothered by prisoners having to wear uniforms in Discovery.
@25/Jana: Under no circumstances should the treatment of students ever resemble the treatment of prisoners.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think this is probably a stronger depiction of a “star trek 9/11” than, say, the Xindi attack, which was the previous attempt. On the other hand, I can’t help but think that it feels like the go-to “deep” storyline for science fiction for a long time. Certainly throughout the 00s (particularly Battlestar Galactica). This doesn’t necessarily mean the premise is bad, but I feel like TNG did this storyline much more effectively in Drumhead– and admittedly, much more optimistically too.
Similarly, the notion of “rogue synths” and the connections to this 9/11 attack is suggestive that we’ll see some sort of synthetic peoples oppression (right’s movement?) in Picard. It’s an interesting enough storyline in general, to be sure, yet at the same time the idea of “slavery of synthetic people” seems kind of misaimed within the context of Star Trek. Even if we leave aside the Measure of a Man for Voyager’s somewhat less successful revisiting of the issue in “Author, Author”, it still feels out of place. In particular, the last scene of mark I EMHs mining ore honestly feels like something out of the Doctor’s imagination. I mean, really, it’s absurdly, almost comical to think that the Starfleet or the Federation would ‘repurpose’ a medical program to mine rocks. Since they don’t consider the programs anything more than a program (and frankly I’m not sure other EMHs would be), they would surely just delete the program or overwrite it.
The other problem is similar to the problem with Discovery’s second 2, where we’re faced with (essentially) an AI uprising. I really think that there’s a serious set of real world issues that has to be discussed in relation to AIs and data gathering and so forth, and can be done within the context of Star Trek. But, the problem is that these issues have very little to do with the AI suddenly deciding it wants to be free or killing people terminator style. While it’s possible that Picard may well address this, I kind of doubt it will be able to, because Siri isn’t about to seize control of a f-16 and nuke someone, but Apple may use the data collected on users of Siri for their own, unethical or unconscionable ends.
Admittedly, it’s a bad idea to prejudge the show before it even airs, and Picard may well surprise me, but I’m not sure this short trek really gave me much hope in that arena. Also, admittedly, I’ve not really talked about the short trek, but really there’s nothing really to talk about in it. There’s no real story, and for most of its run time it’s kind of a slow motion music video.
A couple of strayer thoughts:
I’m not particularly bothered by the notion of kids acting poorly or getting into fights. I think, to a degree, if there’s a flaw with Star Trek as conceived by Roddenberry, it’s that it often seems like the setting is unwilling to admit that humans are going to be flawed, especially in the TNG era (but perhaps not the DS9 era). For the Senior Staff, having them so stable and functional is great, wonderful even, but I don’t know if that should be constantly extended to everyone in every situation. Children, in particular, are going to be assholes to one another– this is just normal human development, and it’s weird to think we could develop as a society such that children no longer need to develop as persons but (presumably) come into the world already fully realized mature people.
The uniform commentary is a bit weird too. It’s not really as common in the US or Canada, perhaps, but it seems pretty common elsewhere. Hogwarts students, for example, or nearly any anime featuring characters in a school setting.
I gotta admit that the teacher in me loves the idea of the transparent screen. :-)
Not to pile on with the school uniforms, but Miles Morales had to wear one.
@26/Christopher: I’m fine with uniforms for students, but not for prisoners, so I guess I agree :)
@27/xomic: It’s been my experience as a mother that children who are treated kindly and respectfully from the start, and have their emotional needs met, are rarely “assholes to one another”.
-30
I don’t remember the episode all that well. What sort of uniforms were the prisoners wearing? Were they like Starfleet uniforms? Or prison jumpsuits?
@31/Kowalski: Yellow prison jumpsuits.
There are advantages to uniforms, like not having to decide what to wear every morning. Admittedly a bigger problem for girls and women than males, usually.
People forget Spock was bullied as a child….. on freakin Vulcan….
@13/Idrydenb: Good suggestions!
In Diane Duane’s Star Trek novels, the Sulamids are “color-changers of great skill” and make rank stripes appear on their tentacles.
@26 ChristopherLBennett
I dress however I like in my personal life; at work, I wear clothes that reflect the fact that I am doing a job.
For children, school is their job. They are there to learn, not to compare the latest fashion trends, show off their family’s wealth (or lack of wealth), or find new ways to distract themselves from their work.
Instead of wasting time worrying about what to wear or how to show off how cool and fashionable they are, children can wake up, put on the uniform, and go to school. Just like I, as an adult, wake up, put on my work clothes, and go to work.
@36/dptullos: “For children, school is their job.”
That attitude is basically my problem with the way our society handles education — the assumption that it’s about conditioning children to become obedient, conformist wage slaves when they grow up, rather than stimulating their imagination and curiosity and inquisitiveness. True learning isn’t something you do by marching in regimented rows and memorizing rote lessons and conforming to the herd, it’s something you do by being free to embrace your own independent hunger for discovery and exploration. When I was in school, I learned far more from the things I chose to read on my own initiative, either at home or when set loose in the library during study hall, than on the assigned, prepackaged lessons in my classes. So I’ve always believed a truly advanced, enlightened future society would employ something very different from the school system I was raised in. Which is why I’ve never cared for Star Trek‘s relentlessly conventional portrayal of future education.
My experience of schooling was much like yours, CLB, but all kids aren’t like us. Some need more structure. Probably no one approach is right for all children. A smorgasbord of educational choices fitting to the child rather that molding the child to suit a system is probably the answer. Anyway it would make interesting Science Fiction.
As I recall, the most successful school systems in the world are in China, Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong, Estonia, Japan and South Korea: PISA Results.
I get the impression that those school systems are very much about uniforms, discipline and learning things by heart.
I also recall these articles about a new London School that just got its first exam results and turned up in the top 0.1% of schools in the country: Katharine Birbalsingh Michaela.
And there is this from the United States: ‘No-Excuses’ Charter Schools Produce Huge Gains for Kids
So I suppose @1 has a point: In the future, schools will be against uniforms, discipline and teaching any specific fact…
@39/ad: That sounds like a pretty shifty standard of “success”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#Comments_on_accuracy (emphasis added)
When you measure success by test scores, you produce a system where education is purely about teaching how to pass a test, rather than how to think or innovate or understand. It’s a travesty of real learning.
Just have your kids watch Star Trek. That’s a better education you’ll get than in most public schools. (Only half joking this time).
xomic @27
Star Trek novels have addressed AI’s before.
Battlestar Galactica’s AIs (the Cylons) destroying the 12 Colonies predates 9/11 by a couple of decades. It’s how the original series started off.
@37 ChristopherLBennett
That’s an interesting false dichotomy.
Discipline isn’t the enemy of creativity. Work isn’t the enemy of imagination. Before we enjoy the reward of success and accomplishment, we usually have to suffer through a long period of failure and defeat.
Children usually lack the self-discipline to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They often give up and do what is easy, even if they end up enjoying it less in the long run. Responsible teachers don’t let children learn what they feel like learning, just like responsible parents don’t let children eat ice cream for breakfast.
I disliked learning Spanish when I was in high school and college. I told one of my teachers that it shouldn’t be required, and that I was never going to use it. Seven years later, I was standing in front of an ESL class, working with kids who were fluent in Spanish and only partially fluent in English, and desperately wishing I had taken those “useless” Spanish classes more seriously.
As a librarian, I frequently run group activities for children who insist on doing things their way. They don’t want to limit their creativity and imagination by compromising or negotiating, and they fail until they realize that group work requires cooperation as part of a team, not the false “freedom” of everyone insisting that it is their way or the highway.
“Memorization” isn’t a bad word, and repetition is part of learning and growth. By practicing basic skills over and over, we develop mastery, which allows us to move on to more advanced, exciting tasks. But if we try to advance without those skills, we will be frustrated and defeated at every turn.
A truly advanced and enlightened future society would recognize that ten year olds are not the best judge of their own needs, and allow trained, capable professionals to guide their learning.
@40 ChristopherLBennett
All tests are flawed and limited; all measurements are imperfect. That doesn’t mean that tests aren’t needed, or that some measurements aren’t better than others.
If you don’t test children, you won’t know where they are struggling, and you won’t be able to help them improve.
You keep talking about “real learning”, but you haven’t provided any description of what “real learning” looks like, or what it would mean for children. So far, it sounds like “real learning” involves children learning what interests them. If that policy had been in place when I was going to school, I wouldn’t have taken science or math classes at all. Children need a strong grounding in every subject, not just the subjects they like, so that they’ll have those skills for later in life if they change their mind about the career they want to pursue.
-43
I agree with you about testing having an important place. Although, I remember in school the tests being treated like the end of the lesson. You memorize something, you get tested and it’s over. The information can be pushed aside afterwards and you’re lucky if anything sticks in long-term memory.
I realize budgets are strained, but I wonder if any schools today follow up or incorporate a test into a field trip or a Skype session to see these skills being used in the real world. Seems like that would help underline the importance of the school lessons, and possibly get kids excited about what they’re learning.
@44 Kowalski
It would probably be cheap and easy to bring in professionals to show kids how to utilize the skills they’ve learned in the real world. Also, a good amount of STEM education involves applying a concept to build a bridge, break a code, or program a robot.
@43/dptullos: It depends on the kind of discipline. Yes, there were some educational disciplines I benefited from. I consider myself lucky to have gone to one of the few remaining high schools with a Latin program, since the discipline required to learn Latin is good for developing cognitive skills you can use in other fields, as well as being a good grounding for understanding a lot of English vocabulary and spelling. But there were other aspects of school that felt crushing to my spirit and restrictive to my curiosity and individuality — things that were more about making things easier for the system by pushing the students into a standardized mold, rather than about strengthening and enriching the students’ minds.
And it’s the same with tests. It’s not a binary question, tests vs. no tests. It’s a question of the kind of tests, the approach that’s taken, the sort of things they’re designed to measure, and whether they’re seen as a means to the end of teaching real knowledge or come to be regarded as an exclusive end in themselves, with the form being elevated above the substance. And unfortunately, there’s been an increasing trend toward the latter in our educational system, and many educators over the years have warned of the dangers of that.
-45
Oh right, I forgot about STEM. That’s one of those things I look at and envy the kids in those programs. They didn’t have anything like that when I was in school in the ’80s and ’90s.
@46 ChristopherLBennett
In life and in work, there will be times when we have to fit into a standardized mold, dressing and acting in a way that meets the expectations of the people around us. I don’t dress or act the same way at work that I do at home, and that’s a lesson which is better learned sooner rather than later. We can encourage curiosity and individuality, but we can also teach that working with others means limiting our own individual desires, and that we can grow stronger by doing what we need rather than what we want.
Instead of viewing standardization as a bad thing, we should consider the merits of a system that demands all children have basic competencies in reading, writing, math, and science. Rather than saying “learn what you want”, the system says “learn what you need”, and we are better for it. This is not to say that all discipline is good, or that adults can’t abuse a system for their own convenience, but it is to say that students grow stronger by doing work which is uncomfortable and difficult, work they would never do if they had a choice in the matter.
I agree that all tests are not created equal, and that they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. However, I don’t think creativity and imagination are easy to measure, and I see the value in a system which ensures that all children have certain essential, measurable skills.
If children want to learn something on their own, that is wonderful. But they’re going to learn those lessons on their own, regardless of what their school does. The school performs an equally vital task in teaching children how to work with others, compromise and negotiate, and learn in ways that aren’t always thrilling or wonderful.
@48/dptullos: “Instead of viewing standardization as a bad thing, we should consider the merits of a system that demands all children have basic competencies in reading, writing, math, and science.”
That’s a false dichotomy. That goal is certainly valid, but the current system of mechanistic standardized testing is not the only way or the right way to achieve that goal. It hurts actual learning and understanding by pressuring teachers to focus their classes on “how to pass the tests” rather than “what all this actually means and how it applies in real life.” See the link I quoted above — many educators warn that current standardized testing systems are actually detrimental to learning, and that schools often game the systems and falsify their reports, because their focus is on getting high scores for their schools rather than actually serving the needs of the individual students. So claiming that the system succeeds in achieving the goal it was intended to achieve is disingenuous. The evidence argues otherwise. It’s the wrong solution to the right problem. There must be better, more nuanced and refined ways of achieving the desired goals.
@49. CLB: “that schools often game the systems and falsify their reports”
Reminds me of the Christian Slater, Samantha Mathis movie from 1990, Pump Up the Volume, now largely forgotten (undeservedly). Also has a great soundtrack.
Concerning PISA, when we had our PISA discussions in Germany, we talked a lot about Finland. Finland always gets very good results with an education system not based on discipline and learning by heart (also, I must concede, no uniforms). Here’s a short article that mentions some of its features: “school starts at age seven, there’s not much homework, and kids don’t take high-stakes tests”.
It then goes on to correlate the PISA reading performance (whatever its significance) with the time spent learning, and Finland comes out tops. (Of course, Finnish spelling is much easier to learn than English spelling, so there’s that.)
About that fight: from the original series on, the Trek franchise’s vaunted “optimism” has always been rooted in the notion that while human society and its supporting institutions could drastically improve in 300 years, on an individual level human behavior need not change all that much. This was always due to the dramatic requirements of television more than anything else, and was never all that well thought-out. As I get older, I find it increasingly suspect. But it is what it is.
Great discussion about the realism of the school depicted in the short, a real breath of fresh air after the fannish obsession over whether the ships in the Mars orbital complex were from the “right era” that I’ve seen elsewhere. Strictly as cinema I thought “Children of Mars” was beautifully put together — something sadly not all that typical for Star Trek — and am hopeful that its admixture of melancholy and hope will carry over over into the Picard show.
@52/Michael Hall: “[…] the Trek franchise’s vaunted “optimism” has always been rooted in the notion that while human society and its supporting institutions could drastically improve in 300 years, on an individual level human behavior need not change all that much.”
Hmm, is that really unlikely? I’d say that in many countries, societies and institutions have drastically improved since 1720. Has individual human behaviour changed, too? I guess it has, somewhat. Has it changed very much? Not so much that we no longer understand the motivations of, say, Shakespeare characters.
If we’re going to have a good future (no major environmental degradation and accompanying wars, famines, etc.), I expect societies and institutions to continue to improve, to become more agreeable for humans. This would in turn bring out the best in more people, without essentially changing human nature.
@52 & 53: Human behavior has always been a wide spectrum. It encompasses everything from Gandhi to Hitler. The question is one of proportion. Is aggressive, abusive behavior a widespread, socially accepted norm, a practice tolerated or even encouraged by the society’s institutions? Or is it an outlier that the society’s norms and institutions work to minimize? All processes of social reform are basically about shifting the emphasis. For instance, in the days when institutional racism was the norm in the US, there were always those who saw its evils and opposed it, but they were the outliers. Eventually, though, they shifted the balance toward their beliefs and created a system where equality and inclusion were (at least nominally) the institutional norms and open racism was stigmatized (though unfortunately there have been some major setbacks there in the past few years). So it’s a question of which is the rule and which is the exception.
@54/Christopher: Yes. Well said!
Quoth Michael Hall: “Great discussion about the realism of the school depicted in the short, a real breath of fresh air after the fannish obsession over whether the ships in the Mars orbital complex were from the “right era” that I’ve seen elsewhere.”
I don’t have the bone in my head that makes me give a damn about the designs of fictional spaceships, so those discussions are a) lost on me and b) really really really missing the point. So I’m glad we’ve avoided that here, too. I think a discussion of the show’s approach to futurism is something that actually matters to the story. The special effects are window dressing.
(This is why, when I did the original series rewatch, I didn’t bother with the remastered versions, because they didn’t change anything that actually mattered.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Being from a poorer region of the UK I’m glad we wore school uniforms. Growing up in a working class family there wasn’t the budget for fancy clothing. What I wore was practical and warming, but my jeans, t-shirts, jumpers, sportswear, trainers etc didn’t have the labels and brandings that shouldn’t matter to kids, but do. I actively used to dislike non-uniform “mufti” days where you could wear whatever you liked because there would be an visible divide between the poorer and more middle class kids. Some of my close friends were from families that had far more cash than us, and it was good that day by day those differences weren’t constantly obvious.
I was an academically gifted Star Trek fan who loved playing and watching and talking soccer (aka football – at which I was less gifted but no less enthusiastic), and who was massively into indie music. My friends were spread over different social groups. I could hang around at break talking about a new album, sit and eat lunch with people talking about the previous night’s TNG, then go down the “yard” for a rough-and-tumble game of football with others, before doing an English Lit Shakespeare lesson that afternoon with disproportionately wealthier kids. The only person at the centre of that Venn Diagram might have been me, but I could switch between all these groups and at no point feel like I wasn’t fitting in despite these differing cliques tending towards differing clothing tastes outside school hours.
Now I’ve nieces and nephews at the same school, in the same uniform. Smart shoes, black trousers, shirt, blazer, school tie. They are entitled to have fun, and a giggle with their mates, and be provided with the freedom and material things that enhance their childhood. But their side of the bargain is they got to spend a few hours a week in that uniform doing their job – which is ensuring they are a little bit smarter tomorrow than they were yesterday. I tell them to do that so they can put their uniform on with pride.
I see a future society that chooses to put its scientists and explorers in uniform absolutely realising that, far from being regressive, school uniforms are conducive to helping kids grow into being good citizens. A daily reminder that, whilst we love and celebrate our differences, no classmate is worth more than another, and there’s something that unites us that can’t be cast asunder.
@40 I think it is a perfectly normal standard of success to suppose that schools whose pupils end up knowing more, are successful. And it seems that schools that concentrate on teaching pupils things, end up with pupils that know more than pupils at schools that don’t. I can’t think why this surprises people.
Though I have noticed that educationalists who are unenthusiastic about teaching things to pupils, are also opposed to any tests that might reveal the resulting ignorance. That does not surprise me at all.
JanaJansen & ChristopherLBennett: really appreciate the thoughtful replies. I understand that social institutions have managed to progress while, as you (and Nicholas Meyer) point out, human behavior has changed so little that we can still relate to the characters in Shakespeare’s plays. However, I also note that those same institutions have come under unprecedented assault, all over the world, in an astonishingly short period of time, and have to wonder if our complacency and refusal to behave as if even our smallest acts really matter isn’t at least part of the problem. In that context, at least, Gandhi’s admonition to “be the change you wish to see in the world” has especial resonance for me.
There’s a scene fairly early on in Kim Stanley Robinson’s wonderful Mars trilogy featuring a debate between a liberal reformer and a radical utopian — who, at the end of the day, want pretty much the same things — about the necessity for social change and on the timetable it needs to take place. My own torn feelings on the subject are reflected by the fact that I agreed with each character when they had the floor.
Keith R.A. DeCandido: that Trek should serve as a springboard to more important topics was, I think, all that Gene Roddenberry really wanted (aside from the money, of course). Neither of the college lectures he gave that I attended during the ‘70s gave any indication that he thought the show itself was of cosmic importance. Quite the contrary, in fact.
@57/jmwhite: Okay, but in the post-scarcity, moneyless future of Star Trek, there’s no longer any reason for clothes to be signifiers of status, or for anyone to judge anyone else for having less. So that takes away a major argument in favor of uniforms.
@58/ad: “I think it is a perfectly normal standard of success to suppose that schools whose pupils end up knowing more, are successful.”
One more time: It’s not about whether the kids know more. It’s about the folly of assuming that high test scores actually prove greater knowledge, rather than just the ability to test well. The two are not at all the same thing. When tests are elevated too high, when the educational process becomes purely about how to pass the test, then knowledge of anything outside of the testing process becomes irrelevant. It’s like in the Ming Dynasty civil service, where the testing process became so ossified that it was exclusively about the ability to correctly reproduce the form of a standard eight-legged essay, with the actual content of the essays being utterly irrelevant. Actual thought or understanding or insight were not valued, just mechanistic repetition of rote formulas, and the civil service grew stagnant and ineffectual as a result.
Tests can be valuable, sure, but only if they’re kept in perspective, if it’s remembered that they’re a means to an end. Once they become the end in themselves, it undermines true learning.
“Though I have noticed that educationalists who are unenthusiastic about teaching things to pupils, are also opposed to any tests that might reveal the resulting ignorance.”
You’ve got that backwards. The lazy educators are the ones who just rely on the tests to do everything for them, who just blindly follow the predetermined formulas. The educators who really care are the ones who express doubs about the system, who are concerned about whether it really benefits children and demand that the tests either prove their worth or undergo reforms. The people who want to make a system better are the ones who question and challenge it, not the ones who uncritically embrace it.
#56
While the designs of fictional starships and other things ultimately don’t matter a great deal in terms of the meaning found within a story, there are some fans who take a keen interest in them for good reason. Having, for example, a series devoted heavily to engineering, visual effects, and the evolution of technology presented over multiple timelines and universes can inspire in multiple ways – in professional ways. Someone has to think up the window dressing, too, in a visual medium.
In other words, never be surprised to find squirrels at a nut farm.
@57/jmwhite: That’s lovely. Thanks for sharing it!
While there would be no poor people in the Star Trek future, there would still be great differences between students – of culture, species, way of life. And this might lead to conflicts. Uniforms could be a tool to overcome these differences and build a sense of community.
@59/Michael Hall: Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that continuing improvement is guaranteed, nor that our small acts don’t matter. Complacency is never a good idea. In fact, one of the reasons why I like TOS better than TNG is that the TNG characters are too complacent for my taste.
@63/Jana: “Uniforms could be a tool to overcome these differences and build a sense of community.”
But the Federation’s values are about embracing and celebrating diversity, not burying it under a facade of uniformity. It’s about accepting and liking people because of the ways they differ from you, not in spite of them. If the only way people can get along is if they hide their differences, that’s anathema to everything Star Trek is about. Difference is not a problem to be “overcome.” Differences are good. It’s the fear of those differences that needs to be overcome.
@64/Christopher: I’m not advocating burying diversity, I’m advocating building a sense of community. Perhaps “bridging differences” would be a better choice of words.
@65/Jana: It’s entirely possible for people to build a sense of community without wearing the same color shirt. They just have to listen to each other, to look past the surface layer.
Really, I have to wonder how all the people arguing for school uniforms would feel if the uniform design being used were not from their own culture. School uniforms are usually based on Western clothing conventions. Even Asian school uniforms are Western in design, a vestige of colonialism. What if a school in the US or Europe announced that all its students should dress in kimonos or dashikis? Would people be equally okay with that? It’s easy to say people should conform to the same standard if you’re not the one who has to change.
ChristopherLBennett: while TNG definitely established a post-scarcity/poverty society (at least on earth), I’m not so sure about the situation wrt money. I’m inclined to doubt that Ben Sisko’s father just gave his elaborate Cajun meals away, or the Picard family their fancy wine.
it always seemed to me that Kirk’s throwaway line about the 23rd century not using money strictly referred to cash, especially given that it was written by Nick Meyer, who is no utopian.
@42
I don’t mean to imply that Star Trek has never dealt with the issue, although I haven’t read that particular book and can’t say much more on it. Only that the sort of AI-related story that this short trek seems to be setting up for Picard is kind of a fantasy issue, and glosses over real world issues related to AIs and data gathering (etc), and has already been discussed with much more grace and optimism in Measure of the Man. Sentient AI demanding rights is a popular enough concept in science fiction, and I would argue that it’s even one worth talking about– but critically it’s also kind of a fantasy issue, since it’s unlikely that we’re going to make AIs that are sentient, either on purpose or by accident, and the notion of an AI rebellion is blatantly fantastical.
Similarly, I don’t mean to imply that “9/11” style situations have never been shown before, because the premise (that is “some sort of incident, society becomes increasingly fanatical in trying to root out the source of the incident”) is probably as old as humanity itself. I’m just saying that this has been done before, and in all likelihood, handled better within Star Trek, and outside of star trek it’s been used as an establishing premise for dozens of other franchises (or, as we see in ENT, a season).
@37 (etc(
I don’t think I agree, tbh. I once thought like you, but ever since I’ve entered a STEM field, I’ve taken the opposite view of things: the real purpose and goal of education is to bring these newly created persons up-to-date before they can actually do actual discovery or exploration.
I mean, I don’t think the problem with humans has ever been a lack of hunger to explore or discover. Rather, I think these are normal parts of the human condition; the problem arises that if everyone starts off exploring and discovering, they end up exploring and discovering the exact same things over and over again, and then they die and the knowledge is reset. if you look close at history there seems to be dozens of times (that we know of) where we’ll find something seemingly anomalous, such as the metal working techniques in Ulfberht swords, or the fact that greeks were able to create the Antikythera mechanism over 2000 years ago. It seems to me that if we could travel back in time and look at the period, we’d find examples of things that seem too advanced for the time and place, because some brilliant person realized how to do it. Unless this knowledge is passed on, however, it never goes anywhere and never gets built on.
The education system is meant to do just that, fill in what we know so people are all on the same general level. Even in university the courses are usually teaching what is known and allow for very little exploration or self discovery. It’s only when you know what’s already known that you can productively explore what isn’t known.
@67/Michael Hall: There’s a difference between whether money exists and whether it’s essential. There may still be a cash economy for luxuries like fine food and wine, things that are the product of human skill and expertise and thus have a degree of scarcity; but there would no longer be such a thing as people who are deprived of the basic necessities of life because of money, because any basic need can be filled by replicators. Money would be an optional thing, commerce a peripheral activity, rather than something that people would literally die without. So people wouldn’t build their entire personal and class identities around how much money they had, and wouldn’t shame and denigrate other people for having less of it.
After all, with a replicator, it’s just as easy to manufacture an elaborate, fancy gown or tuxedo as it would be to whip up a t-shirt and jeans. It’s all just made of fibers and dyes in different arrangements, after all. The only reason for there to be a difference in their availability is if the replicator patterns are copyrighted as intellectual property and you have to license their use. So the idea that clothing would be some sort of indicator of wealth, status, or personal worth just doesn’t make sense in that context.
“it always seemed to me that Kirk’s throwaway line about the 23rd century not using money strictly referred to cash”
Well, of course there was money in the 23rd-century Federation. TOS and TAS had multiple references to capitalism within human/Federation culture. Harry Mudd was a swindler, Cyrano Jones a trader. Flint and Carter Winston were independently wealthy. Kirk occasionally told his officers they’d “earned their pay for the week,” and he and Spock once discussed how much Starfleet had invested in the latter’s training.
Aside from the line in TVH, it was only in the 24th century that the Federation was established as moneyless, which is a logical outgrowth of the development of replicators.
@66/Christopher: Of course you could build a sense of community without uniforms, too. There’s usually more than one way to achieve an abstract goal.
Kimono-style school uniforms would be fun! But I bet viewers would complain that they look like bathrobes.
@@@@@ 69/ChristopherLBennett: My guess would be the money-for-luxuries scenario. Again, I doubt that Pere Sisko would spend sixteen-hour days running a restaurant (and forcing a resentful grandson to shuck oysters in it) just for the sake of a hobby. Of course, I could be wrong.
Personally, I’m fairly convinced that with just the production capacity we have on hand in 2020 we could move many of the worst aspects of late-stage capitalism to the peripheries of human life, wholly without the need for replicators, were it not for the greed and vanity of a few. But that’s another subject for another time.
-70
I would prefer a bathrobe with epaulets.
@71/Michael Hall: “Again, I doubt that Pere Sisko would spend sixteen-hour days running a restaurant (and forcing a resentful grandson to shuck oysters in it) just for the sake of a hobby.”
Why not? It’s doing something he loves and is good at, and it’s doing something for his community. Those are both splendid reasons to devote yourself to something.
I’m a professional writer. And I would love it if I could take the need to earn money out of the equation and just write for the love of writing. I don’t need money as a motivator; heck, I have an easier time getting motivated to create out of enjoyment and inquisitiveness than out of the need to make a profit or fulfill an obligation. And worrying about money just makes it harder to focus on creating.
“Personally, I’m fairly convinced that with just the production capacity we have on hand in 2020 we could move many of the worst aspects of late-stage capitalism to the peripheries of human life, wholly without the need for replicators, were it not for the greed and vanity of a few.”
That is entirely true. But hopefully replicators or the equivalent would make it harder for those few to hoard wealth and power and perpetuate artificial inequalities.
@68. xomic: ” it’s unlikely that we’re going to make AIs that are sentient, either on purpose or by accident, and the notion of an AI rebellion is blatantly fantastical.”
Serious scientists/intellectuals would disagree with you on that, including futurist Ray Kurzweil, the late Stephen Hawking, and SF author Vernor Vinge. It’s not at all a fantasy issue.
As far as school uniforms, what about signifiers of wealth and status other than clothes? The children at a particular school may be required to wear uniforms, but what happens when one or more show up with the latest iPhone they got for X-mas? I’ve seen the envious reaction. I live adjacent to a couple of the richest towns in the Pacific Northwest, Bill Gates country, and the competition for status is fierce. I was at a party where the homeowner had just bought a large gun safe, fridge sized. A guest said he had the same and was thinking about upgrading. The homeowner immediately said, “Oh yeah, me too,” even though he’d just installed the damn thing.
That kind of competitive behavior from the parents has to be rubbing off on their kids. It’s perhaps an obvious symptom of the warping effect capitalism and the love of money has done to society. From the outside, we may expect these upper crust rich folk to have a social conscience, to consider the welfare of those less fortunate. From my observation, they are too busy keeping up with the Joneses, too busy bragging about how much they are worth, about how much they have. To gobble up more wealth and possessions, some are even willing to siphon off more from those less fortunate. Doesn’t even occur to them to ask what happens when those who make/have the least can’t meet basic expenses. Love of money is a disease.
@Michael: “There’s a scene fairly early on in Kim Stanley Robinson’s wonderful Mars trilogy featuring a debate between a liberal reformer and a radical utopian…”
Was that in Red Mars? I remember a large debate (in Green Mars?) about the kind of society the colonists wanted during the convention for the new Martian Constitution.
@73 ChristopherLBennett: You may very well be correct about Ben Sisko. More germane to the point than your career as a writer may be the example of Anthony Bourdain, who stayed on as head chef at Les Halles long after “Kitchen Confidential” made him financially independent, just because he loved the work. (Which is pretty difficult for me to relate to, having loathed every minute I was forced out of financial necessity to spend in restaurant kitchens.)
Still, given the sweat and long hours involved my guess is that the “real food” restaurant trade would suffer quite a dip in a post-replicator world.
In any case we’re completely agreed that loving your work and wanting to better your community is more than good enough reason to want to do anything. Years ago I was privileged to get the opportunity to work at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA. Jonas Salk famously gave away his polio vaccine when he could have made a killing by selling it, but making a killing was not what he was about.
@@@@@ 75 Sunspear: The debate takes place between Arkady Bogdanov and Nadia Chernyshevski in the first third (I think; it’s been awhile) of Red Mars, during their tour of the Tharsis volcanoes. The two are both Russian engineers with similar backgrounds and talents but very different personalities who nevertheless get on well enough (and in fact become lovers by the end of the trip). Nadia, who’s as pragmatic and restrained in her work as in her politics, chides Arkady for his revolutionary zeal, making the case that progressive liberalism gets the job done without all that drama that usually winds up getting people killed. Arkady listens to all of this, then sadly shakes his head and says something like: “Dear Nadia, there are currently ten billion people on earth. And half of them are starving. Very liberally.”
@77. Michael: might be time for me to put that series on my re-read list.
@Michael and Sunspear: Can you recommend the series? I read Aurora and liked the theme, but had a hard time with the writing style.
@Jana: Robinson is one of my favorite writers, so I’m biased. But the Red, Blue, and Green Mars books are among his best. There he expresses a liberal humanist perspective, with a side interest in various personality theories. The original set of 100 colonists represent specific personality types (one lens is Jungian), with the Russians a bit stereotypical (one is subject to periods of melancholia).
I can say that the Mars books are less experimental in style, a bit more straightforward, although there are still mysteries. The first book features a stowaway and Mars’ first murder, akin to the Cain and Abel story. I’d say try Red Mars.
@@@@@ 79 JanaJansen: Robinson is also a favorite of mine, so I’m biased as well. That said, I’d agree that Aurora is a difficult novel to like, not for reasons of style so much as substance, as it features a rather dour theme (interstellar travel is basically impossible) and some pretty grim events. The Mars trilogy is by no means entirely free of the latter — as Sunspear notes, it starts with Mars’s first murder — but its events eventually add up to a soaringly optimistic, even utopian take on how human ingenuity and compassion can make history. As the books were published in the ‘90s Robinson’s meticulously researched science is now somewdated, but other than that slight downside you bet I’d recommend them.
Thank you both for the recommendation!
It’s true that Aurora is bleak, but I liked the message that Earth is precious and unique, and we ought to take better care of it. Also the musings about the ethics of generation ships, and the simple fact that the objects the ship is made of won’t last forever. I really mostly disliked the rambling, uneven writing style. I get that much of the book is written from the ship AI’s point of view, and it makes sense that it sounds different from a human, but it still grated on me. Red Mars sounds good, though; I’ve added it to my TBR list.
I would posit that the mission statement of science fiction has always been: “about commenting about the contemporary world [rather] than providing a possibly accurate lens to the future.” Or, at least that variant was that started with Galaxy under H.L. Gold (which is where I came in) and later Fred Pohl.
@83/BillReynolds: It’s true that SF is a commentary on our world, but that doesn’t mean the customs and institutions it portrays should just be an exact, unquestioning copy of the way we do things today. Part of what makes SF so effective at commentary is that it shows us different cultures that reflect some aspects of ours, which lets us see those aspects from a new angle, in a new context, and thus question things we’re used to taking for granted. Or it makes us question them by amplifying them to a more extreme degree, or by inverting them to put the shoe on the other foot, or the like. It’s reflecting our world and our concerns, but through a funhouse mirror that changes how we see them.
@ 84. ChristopherLBennett: Though ostensibly set in an optimistic take on the future, Trek’s view of humanity has mostly been rooted in an idyllic take on the (American) past. Kirk teasing soliloquy to Spock on the joys of “childhood pranks” could have come straight from Dandelion Wine, or any novel about growing up in the 1950s.
@85/Michael Hall: Yes, and Trek is an imperfect construction that’s sometimes limited by the preconceptions of its writers. That doesn’t mean that’s the optimal approach or that it isn’t desirable to see it try harder at futurism. I mean, that very pigtails-in-inkwells speech you reference hasn’t aged well at all.
@86/Christopher: I dunno, I find it works pretty well as a last word on Trelane, exactly because of the anachronisms. After all, they just spent the last hour or so in a hugely anachronistic place, and Kirk is obviously in a playful mood and imagines more of the same.
@@@@@ 86. ChristopherLBennett: Actually (and unlike, say, TOS’ rampant sexism), the speech ages just fine for me, because like Gene Roddenberry I never took Star Trek seriously as extrapolative SF in the first place, for all its veneer of scientific literacy and practicality compared with the presentation of SF in the visual media that had come before. It’s always been a product of its time, for better or worse, at once both politically progressive and deeply conservative. Inkwells and tin cans in the 23rd century? Sure, it’s totally absurd — and, also, typically, wonderfully Trek. It is what it is.
Yes, “Children of Mars” could have presented a far more provocative and thoughtful take on what education in the late 24th century might actually look like, but that wasn’t really the film’s subject, and in fact any such attempt would have probably just distracted from what was a very slight story of two rivals bonding in the face of tragedy. And I thought it worked wonderfully well, for what it was.
@87 & 88: I was thinking more about how badly it aged from an audience-comprehension perspective. A lot of viewers today are going to hear those lines and go “What the hell is an inkwell?”
KRAD wrote:
To that end, uniforms are an expedient way to visually indicate “this is a school, and this crowd of characters are students”.
On a purely practical front, it was presumably faster-cheaper (especially for a Short Trek) to tap a local supplier of school uniforms than to fabricate multiple individualized 24cen Earth-tween mufti, much less decide on a look (presumably unlike the Theiss civvie jumpsuits of TNG-TV).
KRAD further wrote:
In this case, at least, the use of instantly-familiar school-imagery and school-tropes can equally well be explained by “the writers are unimaginative” and “the idea must be conveyed expeditiously”.
Perhaps (if we take a fanfic/extrapolate-between-the-lines stance) this particular school uses an intentionally “retro” pedagogy, but other schools on Earth use individualized experiential learning in holodecks, or 20% of the post-scarcity population are tutors, and moreover memory RNA implants were outlawed by the United Earth Congress in 2140, as amended in 2164 et seq … but there’s no room in a TV narrative for this kind of world-building digression.
To expand on the theme, and to address various comments above …
@7/Cybersnark:
I agree, but at a guess, this is another case of expediency: suitable CGI models were at-hand from DSC, but TNG-types would need to be freshly built or ported.
But in a more general, fan-savey sense, its easy to posit any number of reasons for the tech to be *in*consistent, such that a straight-line extrapolation from the audience’s single viewpoint ship-and-crew is incomplete. Maybe venerable hull-designs are still in use because they’re proven or cheap (*), but their unseen interior fittings are modern. Maybe this particular shipyard is dedicated to reserves instead of front-line vessels. Maybe it’s an intentional “avoid a monoculture” form of risk management in the fleet mix.
(*) Which I’ve seen advanced as an explanation for the DSC-era shuttle: it’s a school bus, not a bleeding-edge warp-capable auxiliary. Maybe Starfleet surplus, maybe the low end of the manufacturer’s product line.
@89, CLB, When I saw the episode in the seventies I knew what an inkwell was – I just didn’t understand what one would be doing in school.
-88
I would have to go back and watch the scene, but from what I remember I didn’t take it to mean that there are still inkwells and tin cans in the 23rd century, but that the well-read history buff Jim Kirk simply knows about them.
@ 89. ChristopherLBennett: True dat, but that’s been the legacy of far more imaginative SF than Trek will ever be. Alfred Bester was a gonzo visionary by any standard, but that doesn’t prevent The Stars My Destination from feeling like it was not just written in the Fifties, but in many ways like it was set in the Fifties.
Even in Neuromancer there are still payphones, and no one bothers to carry a cellphone.
@ 92. Kowalski: That seems a bit of a reach, but maybe only because I was never imaginative enough to think of it myself. :-)
@74
When I say it’s a “fantasy issue”, I’m getting at the fact that our actual interactions with AIs, should they ever actually develop, is going to be a far cry from, say, so-human-like-we-can’t-tell robots running around or being enslaved. This is what I’m getting at when I mentioned “Author, Author” in my original post, an episode that ends, almost sarcastically, in EMH mark 1s being “repurposed” to mine ore. Issues around AIs are unlikely to be things like enslavement, or having an AI try to kill us all, despite this popular conception of those issues.
@90
I’m not really sure I buy the notion that they couldn’t afford to have TNG ships as models. For one, there’s a fair number of well done modern models floating around– for example, Eaglemoss, as I understand it, has a number of models it’s produced from the original lightwave models. I’m skeptical that it would take much work to bring them up to modern CGI standards. I can’t imagine it’s too expensive to make a starship model to begin with, either. If anything, I would imagine that, of all the possible things you might create with CGI, making a starship is probably one of the easier ones to do, and relatively cheap as well, especially with modern processors and graphics cards. Even during Voy and Ent, when they had a smaller budget than the current Star Trek, were able to create whole ships– sometimes one ofs, like the USS Relativity.
Perhaps most importantly, even if Picard isn’t going to “focus” on the Federation or Starfleet, ships like Galaxy class or Intrepid would be invaluable to fill out scenes where they’re supposed to be a lot of Federation ships. Suppose, for example, that Picard and his band of merry men go on the run– Starfleet is searching for them. ergo, you’re going to need a few ships. Assembling a fleet for some reason? ergo, you’re going to need a few ships. This sort of asset would be invaluable to have, and the fact that it isn’t in this short trek (essentially “reusing” it from the series it was originally made for), doesn’t really bode well for anyone expecting or hoping to see ships like the Sovereign class again.
@94/xomic: I would assume that any use of an existing CG ship model would require paying its creator, just as you’d have to pay a builder of a physical model. Using existing in-house digital assets costs less.
Then again, AMT donated the Klingon ship miniature to TOS, because it was free publicity for the model kit thereof. But I think that was kind of under-the-table. While I have no doubt that there are plenty of fan artists who’d be willing to donate their models and such, it might still be considered legally necessary to compensate them.
@xomic: “having an AI try to kill us all, despite this popular conception of those issues”
That’s a confident but subjective assertion you’re making. It’s not just popular conception based on decades of SF featuring robots and AI. As I said, there are serious people holding such ideas about post-singularity society. Some are scared of aliens too, even though we haven’t met any.
The truth is that we don’t really know the future. It’s speculation and extrapolation all around.
@@@@@ 15
It took me a few years, but I eventually worked this one out. The advantage of a transparent screen is that you can stand behind the screen with a camera and all your viewers will see what’s on the screen AND see the faces of the people reacting to what’s on the screen at the same time. If the screen is a “chalkboard” then you can see them doing their complex equations AND emoting. Useless IRL, priceless on, uh, screen.
Did y’all never go to a school museum when you were little? They have desks with inkwells there.
@93/Michael: At least Star Trek “invented” sliding doors and flip phones.
@@@@@ 94 xomic: In one of the trailers there’s a hologram of the Enterprise-D drifting over Picard’s head when he visits Starfleet headquarters. So there’s apparently no reluctance on the part of the producers or budgetary issues with regards to such TNG callbacks. I think people are making way too much out of a few seconds’ worth of CGI footage in an eight-minute short.
@100/Michael Hall: Yup. It’s clear that the Short Treks are designed to be low-budget, usually built around standing sets with few cast members, and repurposing existing resources from Discovery (and now Picard) rather than creating new ones. So the fact that a short recycles existing ship designs doesn’t say anything about what the actual show will do. Presumably the short was done before Picard‘s FX team completed whatever new ship designs it’s using, so they had to settle for ship models already present in the digital library.
This didn’t really work for me, and I think it’s mostly a question of what they decided to focus on. The possibility of the Federation having created an entire synthetic species raises a lot of interesting philosophical and ethical questions that, in classic Trek fashion, are just begging for exploration. So why in the world are the writers disregarding that to waste time on what is basically a Degrassi knock-off set in space? I’m unpleasantly reminded of the Regency-era holodeck program that kept showing up on Voyager whenever Jeri Taylor wrote an episode; even if I was tempted to see a Jane Austen story instead of, you know, Star Trek, it was just a distraction that took away screen time from the actual plot and characters of the show.
And that’s not to say that showing things from a civilian/everyman perspective is always a bad idea; indeed, having that change of viewpoint to someone outside of the heroes can often be quite interesting. One of the reasons why Necropolis is the best Gaunt’s Ghosts novel is that Dan Abnett quickly and effectively establishes the setting of Vervunhive and the people who live there before the shooting starts. We see daily life in the hive through a variety of social strata, how it all functions, and how in a single bloody instant, that world can fall to pieces around them. The Ghosts themselves don’t even show up for a full 30 pages.
This works nowhere near as well, simply because we as the audience are more-or-less left in the dark as to the exact nature of the conflict. What are these synths? Who created them? What are their motivations for attacking Mars? Are they a completely unknown factor, or are people familiar with them? What’s the state of the Federation at the time? I get that they’re probably saving these answers for the Picard series proper, but that doesn’t excuse poor world-building, or rendering this short a glorified prologue filtered through the eyes of people we don’t care about and will probably never see again. The “Sadie’s Story” audio logs from Halo 3: ODST worked in large part because the struggle against the Covenant had already been well established, and we’d previously been to New Mombasa in Halo 2 and ODST proper. Now we were seeing things through the eyes of an ordinary teenage girl rather than a genetically enhanced super-soldier, her concerns the more personal drama of finding her father and surviving the invasion rather than taking down a Scarab or engaging in a secret mission for ONI. We don’t have that context here, and every moment spent on literally childish drama is one that could have been better used to flesh out the setting and conflict.
@ 102. Devin Smith: “This works nowhere near as well, simply because we as the audience are more-or-less left in the dark as to the exact nature of the conflict.”
So am I to assume that on 09/11 you were entirely unmoved because you didn’t immediately know who the attackers were? Sorry — I’m not trying to be flippant here, but I honestly can’t even begin to fathom this sort of reasoning at all.
@103: First off, there’s a difference between fantasy and reality. A fictional story needs to establish its characters and setting rather than just demanding the audience get it without giving them a reason why. There’s also a substantial distinction between flesh-and-blood human beings and the products of a writer’s imagination set on Mars in the future. Sorry – I’m not trying to be flippant here, but I honestly can’t even begin to fathom how you can’t tell the difference.
Second, I did know about al-Qaeda and the Taliban before 9/11, on account of the fact that Mrs. Smith didn’t raise a fool.
Third, a story doesn’t magically become meaningful or poignant simply because 9/11 imagery is used. In fact, it’s quite the contrary; most of the time, it comes across as supremely mawkish, manipulative and downright lazy. The only time I’ve seen it work has been the Horus Heresy novel Know No Fear, mostly because Dan Abnett actually has talent.
@103. Michael: something similar happened over in the Witcher threads. Some viewers didn’t immediately grasp where the story was going and got upset. In a first season that had to set up the world before launching into an adaptation of a five novel sequence, they wanted to have it all laid out like a buffet table. I don’t remember anyone saying during season one of GoT that they wouldn’t watch it anymore unless they were told right now who ends up on the Iron Throne.
This is a very slight intro, a small plot point in an upcoming series. Seems a bit odd to me to expect it bear so much weight. We’ve already gone over a 100 comments on six minutes of story time (the rest is credits).
@104/Devin: Michael said “immediately.” In the first hours after 9/11 happened, it was unclear to the public who was responsible for the attacks, and even the federal government needed a while to get confirmation. Al-Qaeda was one of the suspects right off the bat, but there was a lot of uncertainty and confusion about it in the first day or so. But at least for me, that did not in any way prevent me from being horrified at the loss of life.
Gene Roddenberry is supposed to have said that a reasonable prediction of what people would be like in the 23rd century would be bizarre and frightening to present-day audiences. So he deliberately wrote 20th-century characters. But I’ve never been able to track down an actual quote.
@105 – You are deliberately misconstruing the negative reaction to the Witcher. Not understand what you are watching as it is happening is NOT wanting to know who winds up on the Iron Throne. I read those books before the show was even a whisper, but even if I hadn’t, I would understand each episode as it happened. I had almost no idea what the heck was going on in the Witcher during the episode. Some of it was bad writing, but a lot of it was because they must have assumed everyone was familiar with the books. So, as I said in that other thread, being flabbergasted as to why magic students were turned into eels (which the show did not even explain), is not the same thing as wanting to know the plot to the entire planned series. Not understanding what the Law of Surprise is, as the characters stood around and debated it and seemed to regard it as very significant, is different than wanting to know what happens to Geralt and Ceri, for example. So please, stop throwing shade at people like me who thought the Witcher did a very poor job with viewers with no prior knowledge of the world.
-107
Whatever the reasons behind it, I’m glad they made it. It’s nice to know physical books still exist in this version of the future. Indeed, feels like home.
@austin: “Not understanding what the Law of Surprise is…”
This was explicitly spelled out in the dialogue: “The first thing you see that you did not have before.” Simple. Warrior/noble returns home, did not know his wife was pregnant. The person who saved the life of the father is now bonded by destiny to the child. Hence, Geralt is now bonded to Ciri when he claims (somewhat ironically) Law of Surprise and finds out Pavetta is pregnant. It backfires on Geralt because he didn’t want that outcome. Geralt: “Fuck.”
It is not the show’s fault. It is explained.
Some of this would be alleviated by turning on subtitles so you don’t miss names and dialogue. I actually wanted more details from the books, but apparently that would’ve confused some viewers even more. The show’s not perfect. They made mistakes in trying to simplify too much in some cases, like the reason Geralt kills Renfri’s men. I’ll give you the eels thing, though. Still weird.
This may reassure you for season 2:
witcher’s-timeline-wont-be-so-confusing-in-season-2
@@@@@ 106 ChristopherLBennett: Indeed; thanks. Though I’ll admit the criticism that the audience needed more information on the girls (as opposed to the attackers) to properly empathize with their loss doesn’t strike me as entirely unreasonable; I just don’t happen to feel that way myself.
And, Devin Smith: with all due respect, while there are certainly many distinctions to be made between reality and fiction, the one you happen to cite in this case I don’t agree with at all.
@@@@@ 107 Gareth Wilson: I can tell you for a fact that Gene Roddenberry said something very much like that, having heard it personally when I attended a couple of the college lectures he gave during the Seventies. (Yes, I’m starting to get up there.)
Roddenberry’s reputation has taken some real hits over the past few decades, and by no means has it been completely undeserved. But I always have admired what he had to say to the thousands of us starry-eyed nerds who treated him like a rock star, which essentially boiled down to this: “Thanks for liking our little show. We’re certainly proud of it, though we wish it could have been better. It’s not Ibsen or Shakespeare, just the best we could do under the pressures of time and money, and having to deal with idiots. Always remember that the real magic is within you and the human yearning for brotherhood, and not a TV space opera. Now go out and build that better world we all want to see.”
@111/Michael Hall: I haven’t seen the short, but apparently it opens by establishing that both girls’ parents are on Mars, and then Mars is bombed. I think that’s all the information we need to understand what they’re going through.
@107/Gareth Wilson: It’s in the 1967 Star Trek Writers’ Guide, p. 27, “Some Questions and Answers”:
“But projecting the advanced capabilities of your starship, wouldn’t man at time have drastically altered such needs as food, physical love, sleep, etc.?
Probably. But if we did it, it would be at the cost of so dehumanizing the Star Trek characters that only a small fraction of the television audience would be interested, and the great percentage of viewers might even be repulsed.”
@109/Kowalski: “Whatever the reasons behind it, I’m glad they made it. It’s nice to know physical books still exist in this version of the future. Indeed, feels like home.”
Oh yes, me too! Books and boardgames, singing and musical instruments, coffee and drinks with friends, enjoying the outdoors,… all part of what makes the Enterprise such a cosy place.
-115
Right, and most of those things you listed are organic or allow for human or natural imperfections. Seems like the more we advance towards the clean technological future the more we’ll yearn for those natural touches.
Well, a lot of private schools in the US have school uniforms, not jut religious or military ones. So as Starfleet kids this might not be unusual.
The decor reflects the lack of imagination in the 24th Century, or maybe a lack of funding.
Once again, the Federation seems woefully unprepared for any sort of attack at home.
mspence: There’s no indication that they’re Starfleet kids at all. Neither Kima’s mother nor Lil’s father are in uniform. They appear to be civilian workers, not Starfleet.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I finally saw the short. I wish I’d seen it before I saw the first episode of Picard, since its value is largely as a teaser for what’s to come, and since the impact of the moment when the attack on Mars is reported would’ve been more potent if I hadn’t known it was coming. I’ve become skeptical of the culture of spoilerphobia, but this is a case where I feel I would’ve been better off seeing it unspoiled.
I agree with Keith that the nonverbal acting by the girls was very well-done, especially in Sadie Munroe’s case.
Have we seen Vulcans with male-pattern baldness before (as opposed to being entirely bareheaded)? Well, there was this guy in TMP.