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monarchy just because a state is democratic doesn t mean it can t also be imperial but the way they re set up as orthogonal here echoes an idea that s been made to percolate in the western consciousness for a long time now hell even if you re a fanatically xenophilic democracy that has embraced interstellar immigration for decades the game still requires you to research a specific technology to get leaders who aren t of your founding species it s not so much that this is outright nostalgia for empire i think so much as it is divorced from the actual nature of empire unlike hyperdrives and psionic realms empires are real things and yet stellaris treats it as if it s as neutral as using lift instead of elevator but there s a lot of hidden nostalgia here the sort that aldiss meant when he wrote about luxury up until recently the general public tended to remember empires more easily because empires were the ones who wrote the histories when they did they remembered the accoutrements the displays of wealth and power and didn t stop to think about where that wealth came from and what that power was used for for those of you keeping score at home the wealth was plundered from other people using that power what gets me about stellaris is that to me there s a fairly evident disconnect between what was put there consciously and what slipped through unconsciously one event for example has your scout ship discover a planet in the grip of an ice age but with industrial ruins with the event text commenting on how nobody could understand how a species could be so foolish as to alter their own environment to uninhabitability another is how the humans are presented the default united nations of earth the hero humans begin with a black woman as leader and the default human species portrait is of a woman when in every other game i can think of it s been a man fun fact originally humans had quick learners as a trait they were only switched in a later patch to being wasteful but you have to look beyond that to get to the unconscious choices like the use of empire as something that s value neutral take the in game blockers these are meant as stumbling blocks to your developmental aspirations where mountain ranges dense jungles toxic kelp or noxious swamps need to be cleared away with advanced technology for you to make use of the resources on the tile they occupy you re trained for this by the inclusion of unique blockers on your homeworld there are two kinds one is industrial ruins left over from a past age of progress this is the other one yeah nothing political in that choice of description am i right you have to look at stuff like this to get a sense of the unconscious choices you have to look at how martin wiz anward one of the people who built stellaris apparently saw nothing wrong with wearing a red make space great again hat during the pre release streams in early 2016 when the orange one had already told us everything we needed to know about him you have to look at the things that are as far as the person who created them are concerned are so obvious that they don t need any special attention drawn to them you have to look at the people who believe uncritically that empire is a good thing posted by phoebe barton at 19 27 2 comments labels empires are evil science fiction society monday september 11 2017 star trek the orville quest this past sunday night i hunkered down and watched the premiere of the orville seth macfarlane s new sci fi series because i hate myself and believe i deserve to suffer none of the trailers or previews led me to expect greatness and it certainly wasn t great i tweeted many of my impressions at the time and if you re really interested you can do an archive dive but i feel my first impression is the most critical it s aggressively mediocre still it s been nibbling at the corners of my brain since i turned off the tv and it s at least worth talking about the orville is a unique show in that it is so transparently a star trek parody homage ripoff this isn t unique across media with 1999 s galaxy quest being the first thing that came to mind when i heard of it but it s different here first galaxy quest was a one off this is a series though at least it being live action means it can t stretch across decades the way family guy has second galaxy quest knew what it was doing the orville doesn t the fundamental problem with the series is that it s too galaxy quest to be star trek and too star trek to be galaxy quest galaxy quest is that it gleefully deconstructed trope after trek trope from the captain s penchant for losing his shirt to casual interstellar exploration to things that only exist to put the heroes in danger the orville on the other hand is one of the purest examples of the second artist effect i ve yet encountered if you haven t run up against it before it s a phenomenon described by charles stross the first artist goes outside beholds the landscape and paints it but the second artist goes to the gallery beholds the first artist s painting and paints that it s the artistic equivalent of clone degeneration and the orville is shot through with it why does the orville have a navigator and a helmsman because the enterprise did why is the orville s bridge at the top of its primary hull with a big honking skylight in the roof because that s how the enterprise was why does half of the bridge crew go down on away missions because that s how things were done on the enterprise the orville isn t a parody of star trek even though it has so many opportunities to be the episode s climax has the orville under attack from a totally not klingon ship and the daredevil helmsman flies the ship on a death defying series of attack runs that look like the video half of a motion simulator ride weaving around the enemy ship blasting all the way it s a lot like a scene that was the climax of a deep space nine episode where the defiant makes a death defying series of attack runs weaving around the enemy ship blasting all the way it was ridiculous then it s ridiculous now and yet both series play it completely straight but even ds9 knew enough to keep that bit down to twenty five seconds in the orville it went on for so long i m surprised seth macfarlane didn t cut away to five minutes of conway twitty the orville isn t a homage to star trek either from the look and feel of the sets to the fades to black before commercial breaks to the same streaming stars effect in quantum drive it hews far too close to its source material to be called that it doesn t poke at the structure it s built around the way galaxy quest did and it wastes its advantage of being made in the future the future is of particular importance here one thing i ve seen again and again both in official commentaries and in some reactions to it was on the need for optimistic science fiction in this hellscape of a decade but the orville doesn t feel like the future because it isn t it s the future of the 1960s sure the chassis may be smooth and modern looking but under the hood there is absolutely nothing that 1967 would be surprised by hell considering how much of the first episode consisted of captain ed mercer seth macfarlane s character complaining about his ex wife and his divorce to anyone who would listen it sometimes feel like it is more honest to 1967 than to 2017 for all its attempts at being not your father s star trek with a navigator who cares a lot about being able to drink pop on the bridge and a helmsman who casually throws the word bitch around the fact is that this is your father s star trek with its hat turned backward earnestly willing to rap with you all in a most tubular manner this attitude was made clear in the premiere s first scene a place setting shot of new york city in 2417 it s the standard sci fi city with monuments like the statue of liberty and brooklyn bridge contrasted with supertall skyscrapers flying cars and so on what weren t there were the seawalls you see for the past while my usual encounters with future new york have been through the expanse which is everything the orville isn t in that series manhattan is surrounded by seawalls the size of small apartment buildings it s a stark image but given what we know it s a reasonable extrapolation of what new york might look like in 2350 the expanse looks ahead with eyes open and unblinking and sees some pretty ugly stuff the orville covers its eyes plugs its ears and builds its optimistic future with fifty year old blueprints the thing about the orville is that there are so many ways macfarlane could have done it without being what it is something that took inspiration from say the irresponsible captain tylor would play to his strengths but the orville is far too wedded to being star trek without being star trek that it couldn t go too far without falling apart it s like the holodeck one shows up in the episode and it requires no explanation where star trek the next generation took five minutes explaining it because macfarlane can rely on audience knowledge it s also like the holodeck in that beyond the door the photons and force fields that give illusions substance dissolve into nothing in the end that s all the orville is really thoron fields and duranium shadows posted by phoebe barton at 23 17 no comments labels 2010s science fiction tv wednesday march 22 2017 tailings of the golden age the goddess of world 21 the goddess of world 21 by henry slesar appeared in fantastic science fiction march 1957 she was a beauty all right by anybody s standards they stood gaping at her awed by both the superb contours of her body and by her incredible size the sun etched her figure sharply against the morning sky she was something unreal something out of an alien dream yet something as real and desirable as a man could know she s coming for us it was a shriek from the first engineer nothing like this actually happens in the story if there s one overriding statement underlying the vast majority of 1950s cultural artifacts it s this uphold the status quo understandable really in 1956 the largest and most devastating conflict in history was only twelve years past and the cold war was already warm to the touch throughout the west marginalized people were fighting for basic rights it s no surprise that 1950s cultural products aimed at the comfortable white majority like leave it to beaver depicted uncomplicated anodyne worlds only faintly related to the one outside the target audience s window in the 1950s world of cultural repression political repression and sexual repression the unstated drive to maintain the status quo left its stamp everywhere including the pages of science fiction magazines fantastic was one of the more successful of the post war magazines running from 1952 to 1980 and had a reasonable circulation for its day more than 30 000 in 1962 and 1963 which beats out analog s 2016 numbers it also ran covers like this in case there was any doubt as to its target audience from 1958 it would be edited by cele goldsmith one of the first woman sf magazine editors but in 1957 it was run by men and it shows especially in stories like this one one thing i ve noticed in doing these reviews is the way short science fiction tends to predict concepts that show up shortly thereafter in far more visible ways take tom ligon s funnel hawk which is pretty much twister with a high performance airplane except made six years before twister or robert silverberg s 1995 story hot times in magma city which did a volcano erupts in los angeles much much better than volcano would two years later the 1950s was receptive to stories about huge things with the theme established by the giant ants in 1954 s them giant women appeared in 1958 s attack of the 50 foot woman and 1959 s the 30 foot bride of candy rock with the march 1957 fantastic showing a copyright date of 1956 the goddess of world 21 was well ahead of the huge human curve even more so by not including nuclear mutation that s right compared to its contemporaries this story is actually sophisticated just think about that for a second so the story as it s a 1950s story written by a man it shouldn t be particularly surprising that the protagonist of the goddess of world 21 is a man himself stu champion syndicated feature columnist for the universal press syndicate resident of a retrofuture where photon drive starships share space with typewriters and where the interstellar media is dominated by newspapers after writing a column about the spacer myth of gulliver a planet eight times the size of jupiter and populated by giants he meets a space bum who claims to have crashed on an uncharted world only for a sky high dame to literally bend his rocket back into shape intrigued stu s investigation takes him first to damon scully s space circus where the sleazy scully tries to hire him to find gulliver so he can turn it into a circus exhibition and then to dr alvin domino pioneer of a revolutionary cellular regeneration technology i feel it s worth pointing out here that across this thirty eight page novella there are precisely two women with names and one of them is stu s secretary claire who exists mainly to be called sweetie i was honestly surprised the author even bothered to give her a name at all it turns out that the space bum s helpful giantess is actually victoria bray the first human subject of the regeneration technique at first it worked great regrowing three fingers and a thumb lost in an accident but then she started growing taller and taller with no end in sight to prevent bad publicity for the regeneration technology seriously that s the argument that and how the earth could only reject a creature such as victoria had become domino loads the now 85 foot tall victoria onto an interstellar transport and dumps her off on world 21 an isolated planet where she lives in dreadful loneliness a forgotten martyr to science in what may be the most science fictional aspect of this story stu who remember is a syndicated newspaper columnist hires a starship on the company tab to take him to world 21 where he meets victoria herself her now immense stature scares off the starship crew but stu chooses to stay their blossoming friendship is interrupted by the return of the starship and the discovery that scully s space circus plans to make victoria the centrepiece of its latest exhibition where do i begin unpacking this story the first step is the obvious one its rampant sexism sure there only being two female characters in a story focused around a woman is pretty bad but it gets worse and it s not just the garden variety stuff that was more common than air in the 1950s take this line for example stu located him behind a beautiful receptionist a beautiful secretary and finally a beautiful mahogany desk they re certainly meant to be women considering the unexamined 1950s social assumptions in space and not only do they represent fully half of the women in the s...