Where No Man, Rover, Nor Impactor Has Gone Before Options

[MiniTES]

How many of you here are Star Trek fans? I've loved watching the original for as long as I can remember.

[edstrick]

My brother saw the Star Trek pilot "The Cage", presented by Gene Roddenberry at the Tricon World Science Fiction Convention in (I think, Cleveland) about 3 weeks before the series first aired. The fans, mostly literary SF fans, because this was before media fandom, gave Roddenberry a 10 minute standing ovation.

Star Trek, Original and subesequent series have all had major problems as being good Science Fiction. "Captain! The Gobbldygook Generator is a-busted! I dinna know if I can fix it afore the end of the episode!"....

But we tend to forget just how horrible the "Scifi" and "Skiffy" TV that passed for Science Fiction was and largely continued to be long past ST-TOS. Twilight Zone had class, but it was "Fantasy and Science Fiction", not at all hard science fiction. The Outer Limits presented some of the all time classic science fiction ideas on TV for the first time done well, but the series degenerated into the Monster or the Mad Scientist of the week. Otherwise, we had mostly Irwin Allen's hollywood-lame dumbass SciFi series: "Lost in Space", "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" "Land of the Giants", "Time Tunnel", and others. They all had good episodes, all had some redeaming qualities, especialy Time Tunnel <which looks forwards in some ways to Stargate>, but they really were drek.

Granted, they were better than Gerry Anderson's "Space 1899" <sic!> 1899 was the level of astronomical and scientific knowledge of the creators and writers. The idea of the series was wonderful, but the execution produced transcendentally lame Skiffy. They had utterly no idea of the difference between a solar system and a galaxy, etc.

Star Trek has had many problems, it is after all, not "hard science fiction", but Space Opera, and written science fiction has always been decades in advance of the best hollywood has made <and hollywood's product almost completely dominates all mass media discussions of Sf>, but Star Trek was indeed a great leap forwards for media Science Fiction.

[Bob Shaw]

Although much TV SF was very poor (apart from Fireball XL5, a show without peer!) it's worth remembering the very fine radio material which was made in the 1950s (and later). Dimension X, X-Minus One and so on in the US featured sophisticated stories with excellent visuals (inside your head) and this tradition was perhaps exemplified in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where Marvin was much more depressed-looking on the wireless than in the TV series or the recent movie!

I recently bought a bundle of old-time SF radio shows in MP3 format via eBay and have to say that I'm delighted with the purchase.