The sigh from me is wondering why Andy Weir felt it necessary to use a platform like âcriticaldrinkerâ to go out of his way to trash recent Star Trek.
âThey didnât accept my pitch so, you know, fuck âem,â doesnât really sell me on putting my dollars and eyeballs towards the success of his movie â no matter a great performance by Ryan Gosling or great production values.
Rather tells me why all Weirâs heros are lone-guy-saves-all-on-his-own tropes.
Quoting Weir in the interview:
Later, Marsden brought up the divisive Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which Paramount+ recently confirmed will end after its already-shot second season.
âI think we can probably safely never talk about it again,â Marsden quipped.
âItâs gone baby!â Weir cheerfully agreed. âItâs all gone.â
Marsden said his advice to Paramount is to de-canonize everything Star Trek from Enterprise onward.
âOkay, youâre a little more severe than I am,â Weir said. âIâll give you my opinion and Iâm just a consumer. I like Strange New Worlds. I think itâs pretty good. I didnât hate Enterprise. I thought it was kind of weird. Lower Decks I thought was entertaining and fun. All the others, they can go. And hereâs another thing: I pitched a Star Trek show to Paramount and I was in Zoom with the showrunners with all the shows and spent a lot of time talking to [executive producer Alex Kurtzman]. I donât like a lot of the new Trek. He, as a person, is a really nice guy. But at the same time, those shows are shit. He is a nice guy. But they didnât accept my pitch so, you know, fuck âem.â
I would argue that very little good science fiction tries to have nothing to say about humanity or the human condition.
There is some very intellectual and intelligent science fiction that takes on and speculates about advanced science and mathematics concepts but these are rarely mainstream and not at all the kind of thing Weir writes.
Some science fiction can be just fun science, engineering or math speculation stories told in prose, but if doesnât have something to say about ourselves, itâs value isnât much more than diversion â although diversion and entertainment are valuable in themselves.
Setting aside for now Weirâs rather sour grapes criticism of Star Trek, and stipulating the fact that Star Trek has, from its earliest episodes, had a recurrent pattern of including very transparent and heavy handed allegories to current social and political situations and controversies, letâs consider the general question of what is science fiction for.
Science fiction can be and has been a means of allegorical storytelling, and of pondering the human condition at the individual and the societal level. It tells us about ourselves as much as it tells us about a broader universe.
Huxley and Orwell did this with their dystopias. However, so did hard science fiction greats like Arthur C. Clark. Childhoodâs End, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001: a Space Odyssey were as much about who we are now as what might be out there.
More literary science fiction authors explored themes in psychology and human consciousness from the mid twentieth century on, and high quality science fiction took up those questions in films like The Forbidden Planet.
I didnât find this kind of reaching about the human condition in either of Weirâs books. I did find them fun rides, the kind of pop fiction that used to be described as âairportâ novels â the kind of book people pick up in airport kiosks before a long flight, that are often make into âpopcorn movies.â
The science elements in his books are ok, but not astonishing. The level is really middle school, which is why The Martian was reissued in a âschool editionâ cleaned of the swear words. My own first contact with Weir was our youngestâs âschool editionâ. It wasnât an overly challenging book for a bright grade 6 student.
What I found in Weirâs writing was a repeating pattern of a lone-wolf individual male hero making some incredibly daft decisions after a catastrophic event that set up his opportunity to MacGyver himself out of the situation. Itâs a trope.
Itâs not definitive of the genre and itâs not conducive to the ensemble problem solving needed for more complex STEM work in science fiction. And unfortunately Weirâs short fiction has shown that he hasnât yet mastered the skill of telling stories on a broader canvas.
Fun ride episodes, shows and movies belong in Star Trek and other science fiction too. Iâm not saying that they shouldnât be there. One of the franchiseâs strengths has been that it can incorporate the full range of styles. But itâs never been only fun rides and individual heroism or individual MacGyvering. I think weâd see as much scathing criticism if shows tried to be just that.
But back to Weirâs attitude and tone, speaking in his moment of success.
He could have let his work speak for itself, and focused on promoting his film.
Instead he chose to prop up himself by putting down others. I donât respect that. I donât see that as having integrity. I see that as being a jerk, and it validates the sense that I got from his books that he doesnât know himself how to work well with others so he doesnât write what he doesnât know.
He didnât have to shoot his mouth off when baited. Instead, he chose to weigh disingenuously into the âculture warsâ by claiming to be above having a message.
He could have chosen at some future moment to drop a mention that he, like many writers had pitched spec scripts to the Star Trek franchise that werenât taken up for movies or television, that werenât seen as a fit in the strategic plan of the franchise at the time. That would have likely garnered a lot of positive interest from across the Trek fandom.
Instead, he chose to use his moment to trash the creations of others and, implicitly, the part of the fandom that those shows were written for.
He wonât be getting my money.
Iâll take it a step further and say itâs impossible for any fiction, let alone sci-fi.
If youâre writing a story, you have something to say, and to claim otherwise is either a cover-up or profound ignorance of your own work.
Thanks for writing that. Itâs quite long but I can see your point. Iâm relieved that you didnât just read two headlines and sent him to the digital gallows. Personally, I donât reach the same conclusion as you. If youâd say in reply my standards were perhaps lower I would not disagree with you. As I wrote before, this is not enough for me. Weir is not a saint. I heard hin trash talk his own follow-up to the Martian in an interview when Hail Mary came out. He knows heâs not Asimov or Dick. Or Shakespeare.
In terms of what science fiction is best at doing, we donât appear to be that far apart. Allegorical storytelling is great. Thatâs why I mentioned Picard S2 where there is none of that. They have characters sit in ICE detention or looking at the burning mountains in 2020 and say this is shit (which, of course, it is). Zero allegory, all in our face virtue signaling. Virtues that I find valid but in a sci-fi story told in a very literal (read: shit) way. Politics overrode good story telling. (Then again, it was the pandy, there are extenuating circumstances.)
You donât have to answer this; Iâm just curious. How is your enjoyment of 90s Trek knowing that Rick Berman was involved? Iâd argue heâs a far bigger sob than Weir.
Another factor in Picard S2 was that the characters - through whom the show is telling you what it thinks - are from a future where those problems donât exist. That made it feel to me like a lecture from a position of privilege. I really only realized this while watching Quantum Leap (the more recent show; Iâve not yet seen the original), where the characters live in the present day and tend to deal with problems that do still exist in their own time.
Regarding Rick Berman or other showrunners of a large collaboration, my reaction is more complex, because there were so many others involved in the creation.
While a cinematic feature is a huge collaborative undertaking, Weir sells himself as a kind of lone-wolf type author and so invites reactions on that basis.
Thereâs also the fact that Bermanâs abusive behaviour was kept largely secret while the shows were running. So, my love of the specific shows and episodes was already set before I had the full context.
Iâd known from friends in the fandom, with close connections to production, that the early TNG years were generally miserable for all involved but hadnât heard as much by season four. Berman made the other showrunners be the media frontman, spokespersons for production during most of the 1990s. He wasnât an eminence gris in reality, but might have well have been for the amount of information available for viewers to know what was actually going on.
Watching now, knowing how the actors and crew were treated, hearing their sides to the story, definitely does impact my experience on rewatching, and I am not as likely to rewatch as frequently as I was.
As another comparison, to someone who made himself out as more of an auteur creator, I find that I really canât rewatch Josh Whedon productions at this point, especially Buffy.
Maybe it will be for the best that in the future weâll all create our own holodeck stories. It will rid us of having to separate artists (or co creator/producer) from the work. Reading Bermanâs name in the credits is a bit like Weinsteinâs in movies. Immediately lessens the enjoyment. Thanks for taking the time to answer.