The sigh from me is wondering why Andy Weir felt it necessary to use a platform like ‘criticaldrinker’ to go out of his way to trash recent Star Trek.
“They didn’t accept my pitch so, you know, fuck ‘em,” doesn’t really sell me on putting my dollars and eyeballs towards the success of his movie — no matter a great performance by Ryan Gosling or great production values.
Rather tells me why all Weir’s 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.
“I think we can probably safely never talk about it again,” Marsden quipped.
“It’s gone baby!” Weir cheerfully agreed. “It’s all gone.”
Marsden said his advice to Paramount is to de-canonize everything Star Trek from Enterprise onward.
“Okay, you’re a little more severe than I am,” Weir said. “I’ll give you my opinion and I’m just a consumer. I like Strange New Worlds. I think it’s pretty good. I didn’t hate Enterprise. I thought it was kind of weird. Lower Decks I thought was entertaining and fun. All the others, they can go. And here’s 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 don’t 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 didn’t accept my pitch so, you know, fuck ’em.”
Andy Weir writes cerebral sci-fi. Star Trek used to be cerebral sci-fi. NuTrek has decided to absolutely avoid being cerebral and focus on antics and VFX glamour.
Weir’s comment on NuTrek comes at no surprised whatsoever, and it goes to show once again how people who are actually into science fiction cannot stand NuTrek.
Cerebral is definitely not the way I would characterize Weir’s writing.
Middle school or YA science fiction is more like it. I first encountered his work when it was recommended for one of our kids.
It’s popular science level stuff. Fun, popcorn stuff.
I do like and read cerebral science fiction.
As an example for contrast, I would suggest the Machineries of Empire trilogy by Yoon Ha Lee, starting with Ninefox Gambit. It’s more on the speculative mathematicians side but it made me think more about topology and probabilistic spaces than I have had to since grad school. All the intellectual fun without the grind.