Pablo Fernandez

Tag: science fiction

  • What Star Trek: Discovery should have been

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    Star Trek DiscoveryMy opinion of Star Trek: Discovery is positive, but there’s still something that annoys me and since it’s a bit of a spoiler, you should stop reading here until you watched season 1.

    Star Trek: Discovery shouldn’t have been a prequel. STD (oops, unfortunate acronym) should have been a sequel to all the other Star Treks we had. I don’t understand why they made it a prequel. It’s not trying to explain an origin story; if anything, it’s destroying Star Trek cannon.

    If it was a sequel, in the 25th century:

    • the uniforms wouldn’t be an issue
    • the introduction of new races wouldn’t be an issue
    • the introduction of a human that went through Vulcan academy wouldn’t be an issue (she could be Spock’s protege, instead of Spock’s father’s protege)
    • the Klingons looking different wouldn’t be an issue
    • flat screens and holograms wouldn’t be an issue
    • the use of a sort of holodeck wouldn’t be an issue
    • discovering a way to teleport through the galaxy without needing warp drives wouldn’t be an issue
    • we could have Star Trek: The Next Generation, Voyager and Deep Space 9 cameos.

    The BorgWhy make it a prequel then? There’s no advantage to having it be a prequel. You could still have a war with the Klingons if they wanted to bank on their fame (although a war with the Borg is much more frightening in my opinion, specially since peace with the Borg is impossible).

    They couldn’t have the flip phones, I mean, the communicators, which apparently are iconic enough to put on one of the posters, but aren’t the badge communicators also iconic? And if not, it feels like a small lose.

    I don’t understand this obsession with needles prequels, are people afraid of the future? of moving forward and seeing what happens next?

  • The importance of context

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    Since I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time when I was 15 years old, I’ve been wanting to watch it on the big screen. Last Sunday I realized that dream.

    A little story about why that movie was so important to me. There’s a before and an after 2001 in my life. I think it was the first movie that really challenged my brain. The first movie that when the credits rolled up I asked myself “What the fuck just happened?”.

    It was recommended to me by a teacher, so I went and asked him… without the “fuck” I suppose. He told me that if I wanted to understand it, I’d have to read the book. I read the book and I understood more, but I had even more questions. So I read the next book, and the next, and the next. And by the time I had finished I was hooked into reading science fiction for the rest of my life.

    Back to the topic, context. It’s not an entertaining movie. It’s slow, it’s abstract, it’s art. But hey, even if you watch Alien it doesn’t look like entertainment, it’s slow and looks artistic. Honestly, go and watch it, you’ll see. 2001 was released before Armstrong put a foot on the moon, in 1968.

    Let me put that in context for you. Star Wars wouldn’t come out for another 9 years. Star Trek was on it’s second season and not many people were paying attention, yet. I bet for most people, 2001 was the first time in their lives when they saw outer space in the big screen.

    But 2001 isn’t just another silly space opera (of which the space age was probably full of). In 2001, space is silent, like it really is. How important is that? I watched Firefly just because space was silent. That important.

    2001 doesn’t have some magic solution for artificial gravity, like almost all other movies and TV shows. We have huge revolving space stations as well as spaceships with revolving sections. We see amazing shots of people walking on this curved floors. Or using sticky shoes. We not only see space… we see ourselves, for real, in space. I don’t think I’d seen anything that treated outer space as realistically as 2001, ever. And it happened in 1968.

    Put that movie in context, ignore the long psychedelic scenes (hey! it was the 60s!), and it’ll blow your mind. Context is important.

    I also recently read Snow Crash. When the book started describing a kind of physical virtual reality, with people walking on virtual streets, companies putting buildings on those streets, etc. I was honestly disgusted. I couldn’t stop feeling that the author somehow missed the last 10 years of history when we realised that VRML (remember VRML? Virtual Reality Markup Language) was not the way to go. And then I saw the book was released on 1992 and all made sense to me. Reading it in context was awesome and I enjoyed it a lot.

    Thanks to Daniel Magliola and Romina Roca for reading drafts of this.

  • What I didn't like about Avatar

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    I’ve just seen Avatar. I liked it, except for one thing.

    In Avatar there are two societies, one is technologically advanced and believes in science; the other is religious. Of course they gave some consistency to the religion, but it remains a religion. The technological society, the humans, are warmongers; while the spiritual society is peaceful. They go to war and the religious society wins. I don’t think that’s the right message.

    I’m a geek. I believe in reason. I believe in science. I believe in technology. I believe the human race will only survive if it stops taking myth and legend seriously and start seeking proof, learning, studying, researching, building. Look at medicine, people were dying of very simple deases a hundred years ago. Today we conquered a lot of them!

    The life expentansy is growing at the rate of one year every two years. If today the life expectancy is 80 years old, by the time I’m 80, it’ll be 106 years old. And that’s consider the growth of the life expectancy linear, it’s actually accelerating.

    The previous generation of science fiction authors dreamed of supercomputers in our pockets, being able to pick up a microphone and talk with anyone on the planet. We are living that and it’s great.

    Back to Avatar, for me a story that is much more worthy of being told is the one of Rama. In Rama there’s an alien civilization, extremely advanced and technological, and at the same time very pacific. They inhabit part of a huge ship while the humans inhabit another part. One day the stupid humans decide they want the whole ship. Maybe they were procreating too much and were overpopulated, go figure!

    Stop reading know if you intend to read Rama, spoilers ahead.

    They start invading the technological civilization. A selected group of the technological civilization gathers to save their race, they develop a virus that would kill adult human males; the group that was actually attacking them. In a couple of hours, the war is over, every human adult male is dead and peace returns.

    The individuals of the advanced civilization who participated in the extermination, all commit suicide. It’s part of their law: those that participate in war must kill themselves at the end, even the leaders. Nobody that causes the death of other beings is fit to return to the society.

    How many soldiers would enlist if they knew that after returning from a tour, what awaits them is suicide? Very few. How many wars would we have in the world if those declaring them would have to blow their brains out at the end of it? None.