Spaced Out
Be warned, I am going to be tearing down holy nerd idols with this piece. I enjoy science fiction. As a child two of my favorite shows were Battlestar Galactica and The Six Million Dollar Man. I remember very little about them now, but I'm sure they shaped me. What I remember most is waiting in anticipation on Saturdays, when sometimes a Godzilla movie would be shown. That love stuck. From childhood up until this very day, Godzilla holds something for me those other stories never did, and it took me a long time to understand what.
Star Wars & Star Trek... ugh. I've never really liked these franchises very much at all. For someone of my generation this is somewhat of an anomaly. When it comes to Sci-Fi, it would be true to say these two represent a pinnacle. For years I couldn't put my finger on why they didn't appeal to me. It's as if in reality they are just about pure technology... The story bits are kind of bolt-ons to a soulless mechanism. Let's distill these fictions down to their base elements.
A main idea in both is that space represents some mysterious frontier, filled with all sorts of exciting planets to explore. Planets with trees who may have blue leaves and a green sky. Planets where the alien inhabitants exist on a spectrum, looking like strangely colored humans or severely deformed ugly humanoids. In some cases the humans fight against these alien races. In other cases, they work together side by side wearing the same uniforms. These aliens generally encounter the same problems humans do.... Maybe only amplified by advanced technological weapons.
Take Star Wars. (THX-1138 was by far George Lucas's best work, in my opinion, but Star Wars is what he's known for.) A farm boy is swept up into a rebel insurgency against an evil empire that has built the ultimate malevolent machine, a station that destroys entire planets. He learns a mystical force from a small green troll, steals the schematics, finds the weak point, rescues the princess, blows up the machine. Even 'The Force', the one genuine mystery, gets treated as a science for the most learned. Not much of a mystery at all.
Star Trek wears its skeleton even more openly. Gene Roddenberry flew bombers in WWII and later joined the LAPD, where he started writing television scripts, and given that background it's no wonder what he came up with: literally the Earth Based Space Navy, traveling the galaxy on expeditions. Every episode takes place aboard a Spaceship where everyone is an officer of some type. The demeanor of the characters, especially on the bridge, reflects rigid militarism. The prize technology is the transporter, which might be thought of as the final evolution of the radio... instead of broadcasting sound, it broadcasts the entire human body to a location. For some, Star Trek more than Star Wars represents a kind of Technological Utopian vision of the future.
But look at what that vision actually contains. In these universes there is little larger than the physical beings and their technologies. We get humans doing human stuff with advanced gadgets. Even the aliens, even the robots, read as humans, just colorful physical distortions of us with new toys. It seems gimmicky in this sense. And what's worse, especially with Star Trek, is that the systems these beings live under mirror the systems of today in form and function. Navies, officers, empires, meetings. I found myself asking, who wants a future like that? Given how popular they are, I guess a lot of people do.
Here is what I think is really going on. These heavily materialist stories are the mythologies that permeate the Western collective consciousness, and because they are dressed in scientific ideas, they quietly reinforce the materialist / reductionist view of the world. Which, let's face it... is just dumb. Science doesn't explain everything, and it likely never will. The mystery they keep promising in the word "frontier" is the one thing these stories refuse to actually contain. This is in some way actually counterproductive to real science, as it deifies it. Maybe this is exactly what the majority like about these stories... They provide safety and comfort.
There is no safety or comfort in a radioactive lizard forged through the follies of science at the bottom of the ocean. That is what Godzilla had all along. He is not technology and he cannot be reasoned with, out-engineered, or filed into a chain of command. He is a force of nature, the unexplained walking into the city, the part of reality no instrument on the bridge can measure. That is a far more interesting story than any about spaceships or laser swords.
As for me, I find ideas larger than myself, larger than physicality or technology, the most interesting. I don't think Space is the final frontier. If we're to believe what we're told... it's largely a vast inhospitable place scattered with floating rocks. That isn't worth exploring until we figure out who we are and why we're here. If I'm honest... I'd much rather watch Godzilla destroy Federation Headquarters than watch a scene of officers having a meeting inside of it.