That’s right, I want to see this project succeed. Because I want the world filled with quality Star Trek ships, that’s why.
Anyway, the crowdfunding effort for Tomy’s 1/350 scale die-cast NCC-1701 USS Enterprise went live earlier today. They need 5,000 orders before proceeding; so far they have 130. I’m not sure if that’s a good start or not.
It’ll be a while yet before Disney snaps up all the righted needed to make this happen. But when the day comes, the *idea* will be there. Whether the execution will be any damn good is another thing entirely.
And here it is, the dumbest thing you can say about Star Trek:
No, it hasn’t. Let me illustrate with a fairly famous scene:
An alien takes on the guise of Abraham Lincoln. The alien does it well enough that it seems that “Lincoln” actually thinks he’s Lincoln. Lincoln then goes on to use the term “negress,” which is not only a term describing race, but also sex. That in and of itself would be enough to set off the baying hounds of wokism… he’s “assuming her gender,” as well as using a word that was probably pretty cringey even back in the 1960’s, never mind 2022. And how does Lt. Uhura respond? By *not* being offended. By not *taking* offense, by not assuming that offense was intended. Nobody gets mad, nobody tries to police speech or teach “Lincoln” about his privilege or in any way demonstrate the sort of unhinged lunacy that defines wokism. Those characters just smiled and went on about their day. They were all about free speech.
“We’ve learned not to fear words.” Try to square that with wokism.
Also note in that clip above, Kirk points out that humans have finally learned to be delighted with what they are. Can you think of any concept more transphobic?
Honestly, that one clip above utterly refutes most of the world view of the woke. If people thought as suggested above… the woke would find no purchase and they’d be about as relevant as theosophists.
Also: Yes, the bridge of the Enterprise was multi-ethnic, certainly “progressive” for its time. But it was also *mono* cultural. Everyone spoke the same language, had the same basic values. They didn’t bow to “other ways of knowing;” they relied exclusively on objective reasoning and hard science. The only two who even had non-American accents were two white guys (Scotty and Chekov).
They all packed heat when they went someplace new and unknown. They didn’t freak out about other people packing heat. They kept and bore arms.
They worked within (and accepted) a hierarchical command structure. When the Captain ordered, you obeyed.
It was a meritocracy. You didn’t rise through the ranks based on identity politics.
They guarded borders and prevented, sometimes violently and lethally, illegal border crossings. Whether it was Romulans or Klingons trying to sneak across the Neutral Zone, or Borg trying to migrate en masse into the inner Federation… the cops showed up to shoo ’em off.
Capitalism was alive and well. Private traders and private property were not loudly touted as they would have been had Ayn Rand written the scripts… but you had asteroid prospectors like Cyrano Jones plying his trade; space yachts like the SS Aurora out there being stolen by dipshit space hippies (who, like modern wokies, abandon objective reality for mystical nonsense, and end up being injured and killed by their ignorance); con men like Harcourt Fenton Mudd trying to make their fortunes dishonestly in a system that does not seem to mind if you make a fortune *honestly.* Yes, “Next Generation” tried to portray a post-capitalist future, but that only worked insofar as they were a post scarcity society: anyone could have a desktop fusion reactor and a desktop food replicator. Even in Next Gen, average schmoes could own their own stuff, including ships and plots of land. The Ferengi were depicted as despicable capitalists… and yet, they were legally allowed to be as capitalist as they liked, so long as they didn’t cheat. *Everybody* did business with the Ferengi. Because capitalism gets stuff done.
Related: private property is sacrosanct. And more to the point, you are your own property, and nobody can tell you what to do with you (outside the bounds of following the legal orders of your superiors, of course). And “you” include artificial people like androids and sentient computer programs. You do not belong to the village or the society or the state. Anyone tries that crap and Kirk will phaser the bejeebers out of the control system.
The favorite episode of those claiming that Star Trek was “woke” back in the sixties is “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield,” which shows irrational race hatred. As if irrational race hatred and modern progressive/woke politics are somehow mutually exclusive. These people love to hate white people, white history, white culture… and they hate ’em so much that they have expanded the franchise to hating Asians because they are “white adjacent.” Wokies *want* the government and society and businesses and regular people to treat people differently based on race. Captain Kirk and company not giving a rats ass about someones race? That sort of thinking is alien to wokism.
Numerous episodes deal with time travel, and they make great efforts to not change history. There’s an entire department of the Federation devoted to making sure that history remains unchanged. How about the woke? They make every effort to change history every chance they get. Whether it’s tearing down statues or re-naming institutions or *eliminating* institutions or destroying national pride by claiming that the founders or national heroes were actually evil or that the principals upon which this or that nation were built are evil and corrupt, the woke do everything they can to re-write history, the facts be damned. Modern wokies with access to time machines would be the Department of Temporal Investigations worst nightmare.
Related: the great works of western literature, philosophy, politics and science are still highly venerated. They have not been memory holed or retconned. Scotty is proud of his Scottish heritage. Chekov is proud of Russia. Kirk is clearly enamored of America and American history and virtues.
Numerous times humans are shown to have adopted the dress, food and customs of other races (Vulcans and Romulans spring to mind). And yet… nobody screeching about “Cultural Appropriation.” Everybody makes use of whatever they find that they like, that works for them, that profits them.
Several episodes deal with insanity. How does the federation, Starfleet, the crew of the Enterprise deal with the mentally ill? They send them to high-tech looney bins which work to MAKE THEM SANE. They do not try to convince them and the people around them that their “emotional interestingness” is Stunning And Brave. They do not go along with delusions. They cure people who are bugnuts. Doctor McCoy would take one look at the blue haired weirdos who populate Twitter and Libs of TikTok and start mass injectiosn of anti-whacko meds.
And… colonies. Colonies galore. Colonialism on a galactic scale. Small colony vessels, vast colony armadas. Worlds getting terraformed to suit *our* needs.
Feel free to add to the list.
A 34-inch long, 1/350 scale DIE CAST METAL USS Enterprise, all for the low, low price of $599…
https://startrek-registration.tomy.com/register
They want 5,000 backers before going ahead. It will be available to order only through July 8.
Anybody want to buy me one? Or two?
If Disney really wanted to “subvert expectations” with their Star Wars movies, they coulda done something like this:
This five minute fan film, entirely CG, is more entertaining than the entire sequel trilogy:
This makes for an interesting read:
The SFWA is the formerly respected “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,” presenters of the formerly respected Nebula Award. Mercedes Lackey is a… well, I guess now *formerly* respected writer of left-leaning science fiction, quite popular and successful, and now her reputation and potential future career could be trashed because she off-handedly referred to a black guy as “colored” rather than “person of color.” She’s 72. I suspect she spent a good many formative decades in a time when “colored” was the preferred term. So now the SFWA and the baying ghouls who populate it and Twitter are out for the blood of an old lady who many of them, five minutes earlier, considered a hero because she had gay characters in her stories back in the 80’s.
According to her husband, whose Twitter account virtue signals at a professional level, she has been badly emotionally damaged by the treatment she’s received. You tear up old people, sometimes you break them. I wonder just how happy and proud these bargain bin revenants will be if they manage to bring her to an end. I suspect “a lot.”
Here’s a potential explanation as to why so much of modern science fiction seems so awful: the gatekeepers have changed from the people who know what they’re doing and are good at it… to just whoever. And that invites the political whackaloons.
As the creep of leftist identity politics has spread throughout the organization, a startling erosion of quality came with it. This is perhaps most objectively apparent in their membership qualifications, which were changed in May of 2014. Until then, to be considered for “Active membership”, an applicant had to have sold three pieces of short fiction at a 8c per word or one book for $2,000 or more in a Qualifying Professional Market (in other words, a top-tier publisher like Tor or Del Ray).
It was after this time that the “Associate Member” tier was introduced, which came with a gallingly low bar for entry – one paid sale of short fiction at a pro rate OR one that has been self-published, or published by an indie or small press for an amount equivalent to 8c per word. In other words, slap a thousand words or more up on Kindle, fork over your $90 annual fee, and you get to vote on the finalists for the Nebulas.
This is the best product I’ve seen today:
$25.00
Out of stock
Just the thing to drive a fan *nuts.*
“Playmobil” toys aren’t my thing, not even waaaaaaay back when I was the target demographic. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the effort that went into the Playmobil Enterprise, not least because they went with the *real* Enterprise, not one of the nutrek Fakeprises. Makes sense: the JJprise has largely faded from the public conscience, and the STD/SNW Enterprise has, at least so far, virtually no traction, and has a *lot* of negativity to overcome. Go with the Enterprise that people actually *like.*
That said: at nearly $400, (note: it originally came out at about $500; Amazon lists it at about $380 on their site, but it seems to be $340 on the link below, a discrepancy I can’t explain) it’s a safe bet that this “toy” isn’t going to be given to too many five-year-olds, who likely aren’t going to be all that familiar with NCC-1701 anyway.
Much more lore-accurate than the “Sequel Trilogy:”