This post discusses plot points from Star Trek Into Darkness in some detail.

Starships and Klingons and tribbles, oh my! I’d expected that Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abrams’ follow-up to his 2009 alternate-timeline reboot of the venerable franchise, with returning writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, could have been any one of a number of things: a confident coming-of-age for Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), a return to the tradition of space exploration that defined the original show and movies, with some unintended consequences thrown in to accomodate the tastes of modern action audiences, and even continuation of the sci-fi screwball romance between Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana). What I didn’t anticipate is that as a blockbuster, Star Trek Into Darkness would be impressively generic, but that in a summer when drone strikes and extrajudicial killings appear to have been on many screenwriters and directors minds’, it would do one of the clearest (if not deep) jobs of outlining the debates over the American drone program for a mass audience.

When we meet up with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise again, they’re on a planet inhabited by a primitive species that’s about to be destroyed by a volcano. Spock, in a potential violation of the mission directive to explore the world, uses cold fusion to stop the explosion, but not without endangering his own life in a way that prompts Kirk to come to his rescue by means that blow the Prime Directive not to speed up that species’ technological development quite literally out of the water, or without hurting Uhura, now firmly established as Spock’s girlfriend. Their actions, and Kirk’s filing of a fudged report of them while Spock tells the truth, get Kirk demoted to First Officer under Christopher Pike, who returns to command of the Enterprise, and Spock reassigned to the U.S.S. Bradbury. But their split it short-lived after a man identified as Starfleet officer John Harrison induces a fellow member of Starfleet to bomb what appears to be an archive, an attack that turns out to be a trap to lure Starfleet’s top commanders to a single for a strategy session. When Harrison attacks that session from the air, killing Pike and other high-ranking Starfleet commanders, Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) gives Kirk back his ship and permission to go after Harrison, who turns out to be rather more than he seems.

The details of what how they do so are remarkably noisy and remarkably forgettable. But the nature of Marcus’s commission to Kirk and company provokes the movie’s strongest throughline and most clearly-developed ideas. The question in Star Trek Into Darkness is whether or not Kirk should follow strategic detail of Marcus’s orders to, using new and advanced torpedoes, “park on the edge of Klingon space, you fire, you take him out, and you haul ass,” or comply with Starfleet rules and make sure that Harrison receives a fair trial back on earth. That Star Trek Into Darkness presents that choice at all, outlining the debate in very similar terms to the arguments about the use of drone strikes to carry out extrajudicial killings of accused terrorists outside of the United States, differentiates it from the other pop culture explorations the subject, which has become a strikingly common feature of movies and television this year, including Iron Man 3 and Fox procedural Bones.
Read more

In an interesting nod to Hollywood’s influence, tech titan Peter Thiel has suggested that his industry is being hurt hurt by its portrayal in Hollywood as a source of advancements with post-apocalyptic consequences:

Thiel, who made billions as a co-founder of PayPal and as an early investor in Facebook, told a standing-room only audience Monday that the high-tech industry is in “deceleration” due in no small part to movies like Avatar and The Matrix that make technological innovation seem “destructive and dysfunctional.”

Hollywood keeps making movies where “technology is going to kill you,” Thiel complained at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. He said the “Star Trek retread movies” are an exception. Thiel said other factors — like government regulation and a “risk-averse” business culture — also are hampering the tech industry, but it will be a “very good sign” when Hollywood stops making movies about scary new technologies.

I think this calculation is a bit off. Hollywood tends to portray technology in three broad categories: as a source of miracles and certainty in day-to-day life, as an industry that has large concentrations of smart, if socially awkward, people, and as a force that operates independent of its creators. Those first two categories are almost uniformly positive. And I think that the real damage would be done if science fiction suggested clearer connections between the current state of science and the possibility of future developments gone terribly wrong.

Technology really is everywhere in pop culture depictions of contemporary life, and almost uniformly portrayed as a source of good or an extremely useful tool. DNA matching is presented as so reliable on televised crime shows that it affects how juries view evidence, and how lawyers decide their cases. And it’s hardly the only technological miracle to make regular appearances on crime shows. Bones, a procedural I enjoy quite a bit, features everything from the Angelator, a computer simulation tool that can recreate all sorts of crime scenarios, crack codes, match faces, and pour through data, to the inventive experiments of Jack Hodgins who’s presented as a genius at analyzing particles and organic materials. And that’s just in the matter of biological science. Pop culture has adopted rapidly from presenting computers in and of themselves as magical portals—an early Veronica Mars episode treats the Internet Movie Database as if it’s something of a miracle—to treating them as tools that ordinary people can achieve wonders with, whether they’re empowered by blogging or tweeting (or sleuthing through social media), or hacking publications, databases, or processes, be it for good or evil. These are all tools that can be used for any number of ends, be they cruel or kind, but the capacities of technology are firmly under the control of the human beings who employ them, rather than independent entities with wills of their own.
Read more

On Thursday night’s Parks and Recreation, Patton Oswalt played a Star Wars-loving Pawneean who mounted an epic filibuster under a little-known provision of the rules governing the City Council. It’s a great meta cameo for a guy who’s a nerd icon. But watching the whole thing, which Parks and Rec wisely released online several days in advance of the episode’s air date, I got to thinking that Oswalt’s pitch for a new Star Wars movie, which would mash up Thanos, and Tony Stark, and the X-Men, not to mention Robot Chewbacca actually says a lot about the state of nerd franchises as geek culture has taken over the world and become big business:

Oswalt’s grand mashup speaks to the mass enthusiasm that has made comic book movies and science fiction franchises such generally dependable moneymakers for studios despite the significant upfront costs required to make and to market them. But it’s also a reminder that there is enormous corporate consolidation of geek properties, particularly in Disney, which owns Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, and in the form of J.J. Abrams, who now controls both the Star Trek franchise and the core narrative of the forthcoming Star Wars sequels. These companies—and Abrams and Joss Whedon, is acting as an overall creative consultant of the Marvel movie universe—are absolutely capable. But this consolidation does represent a narrowing of perspectives.

And in Oswalt’s monologue, the things that fit together about all of these universes is their gee-whiz elements, their Infinity Gauntlets and jets and X-Wings and Iron Man suits. They’re all worlds in which amazing things can occur, of course. But this kind of enthusiasm strikes me as besides the point, and makes me a little sad. X-Men is an engine for exploring ideas about collective identity, about genetics as a source of identity, about the Holocaust, about the regulation of extraordinary abilities. The toys are extras, not the point. Ditto for Star Trek, where things like warp drives and beaming are a way of getting the characters rapidly into a lot of different situations that are about opening up everything from interracial relationships to the question of whether artificial intelligences have rights. If those ideas get lost in the rise of geek culture as a massively consumed corporate product, we’re losing a lot of what made those franchises so deeply engaging, and objects of such deep identification and debate in the first place.

Corporate consolidation, in other words, is the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s granted beloved geek figures like Abrams and Whedon enormous amounts of control over Time, Space, Mind, Soul, Reality, and Power. But we’re at a critical point where we’ll see if the concentration of all of that creative and financial power actually lets science fiction and fantasy conquer pop culture in all of its multifarious inventiveness, or if it just means that a narrow, relatively homogenized set of stories and set of characters takes over the world, bringing a narrow set of ideas with it.

I’m glad to see Sir Patrick Stewart calling on men to prevent violence against women, particularly given the vicious harassment campaign against feminist commenter Zerlina Maxwell that commenced after she dared to suggest that maybe we should teach rape prevention to men rather than asking women to take all sorts of precautions that might or might not work to guard themselves against assault. In an appearance on Friday:

The 72-year-old British-born actor, best known for his roles in “X-Men” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” served as host for the launch of “Ring the Bell,” a global campaign calling on 1 million men to make 1 million “concrete, actionable promises” to end violence against women.

“Violence against women is the single greatest human rights violation of our generation,” Stewart said.

“This is a call to action—not an action that will make things better in six months’ time or a year’s time,” he continued, “but action that might save someone’s life and someone’s future this afternoon, tonight, tomorrow morning.”

First, I think it’s great to see a genre-fiction icon like Stewart speaking out on violence against women, and speaking from a place of personal experience. That’s something women are often asked to do to personalize women’s issues, but that also gets them dismissed as subjective or overstating problems. Hearing that domestic violence affects men as well is powerful testimony, and takes some of the weight off women to repeat their stories, and to make the argument that such violence may be directed at women, but that doesn’t mean that its effects are confined to people who are physically damaged. To have Stewart define masculinity as solidarity with women strikes me as a useful thing in the geek community, though I think it’s definitely worth talking about concrete action that respects women’s agency, rather than setting up domestic violence survivors as simply another version of the Damsel In Distress.

And I think it’s important to talk about what concrete steps can look like for men who don’t conceive of themselves as violent (or in the conversation Maxwell started, as potential rapists), or who don’t have direct personal contact with domestic violence right now. How do men start and frame effective conversations with other men, whether it’s about the presentation of women’s issues and violence in the real world, or about content they’re consuming together that may be casually violent against women, or may employ violence against women and sexual assault as a lazy way of generating stakes? What are good ways to teach consent-seeking as that push back against pick-up artist techniques and attitudes, some of the only guides to being more socially engaged that some men in the geek community ever encounter (a point made valuably, and pushed back against, by the wonderful Dr. NerdLove, who I had the privilege to meet up with here in Austin)? Being committed to not being personally violent against women in a theoretical way is a wonderful thing, and one I’m glad to see men embrace, but it’s the kind of mentality that can also make men think that they’re the kind of people who could never possibly be violent towards women, which contributes to the inability to see one’s own bad acts. Trying to reduce a culture of violence, and to promote the idea that violence against women ought to be something that makes men feel uncomfortable for their own sakes, is something rather different.

I’ve been looking forward to Star Trek Into Darkness, which, judging by the first trailer, looks gorgeous, and has appropriate amounts of Cumberbatchiness, though I am somewhat concerned about the levels of Karl-Urban-as-Bones:

One thing I’d note, though: I kind of appreciated the ludicrousness of the Red Matter-driven explanation for Nero’s actions in the last movie, if only because of the way they removed the movie from contemporary geopolitics. Nero was acting like a terrorist, but for reasons that had to do with failures of diplomacy, bonkers science, and personal grief. Star Trek Into Darkness looks like it could be considerably more engaged with our own environment, and I’m not sure how that will play out.

The voiceover from Benedict Cumberbatch’s villain here lays out are a sort of inverse of the current justifications for our security state. Currently, we convince ourselves—and pop culture plays a role in this, from the veneration of Abu Nazir on Homeland to Silva in Skyfall— that we’re under constant threat from hyper-competent terrorists, even though all of the potential attacks on the U.S. over the past couple of years were small-ball affairs that were easily foiled, in part because they were carried out by laughably incompetent figures. Cumberbatch, by contrast, tells Kirk (presumably) that his society is complacent, saying “You think your world is safe. It is an illusion. A comforting lie told to protect you,” and then setting out to prove it. Even though these sentiments come from different places, they’re both fundamentally oriented towards ramping up security, towards the maintenance of a certain level of paranoia. I’m looking forward to seeing how the movie handles that challenge, especially in the political context of the Federation, which is much more interconnected than our own world.

I was reading through Annalee Newitz’s piece in last month’s Smithsonian about Neal Stephenson’s efforts to create a more optimistic science fiction in the wake after reading Emily Nussbaum’s piece on Community and Doctor Who in the New Yorker, and the combination struck me. The thing that I’m most interested in seeing in my science fiction right now is not solely new technology, and not solely explorations of what relationships might look like in the future: I’m interested in explorations of what our relationships to our new technology are going to be like.

One of the things Emily praised about Doctor Who in its latest incarnation was its exploration of how a specific technology—time travel—affects characters’ relationships to each other, and enhances fears of abandonment, missed chances, and the need for profound patience with the people you love. Stephenson, Annalee writes, has a more concrete set of motivations:

“We have one rule: no hackers, no hyperspace and no holocaust,” Stephenson says. He and his collaborators want to avoid pessimistic thinking and magical technologies like the “hyperspace” engines common in movies like Star Wars. And, he adds, they’re “trying to get away from the hackerly mentality of playing around with existing systems, versus trying to create new things.”Stephenson’s greatest hope is that young engineers and scientists will absorb ideas from the stories and think, “If I start working on this right now, by the time I retire it might exist.”

I think what I’m curious about is a fusion of the two. Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel 2312 is about precisely that dilemma: what happens when humans who are interconnected to their personal computing devices to the point of having them embedded in their bodies, discover that computing’s evolved to a higher level such that they aren’t sure they trust something they’re intimately connected to? What happens when they date someone or get involved in professional relationships where someone wants them to detach? These aren’t exactly new questions—Orson Scott Card posed a lot of them with his character Jane, a sentient expression of the internet, in Speaker for the Dead—but Robinson feels like he’s riffing off Siri, the Apple personal assistant that doesn’t work as well as we’re told it will, but that we’re supposed to want to like quite a bit.

And these aren’t the only technologies that pose those kinds of questions. Watching Star Trek a couple of years ago, I was struck watching Bones repeatedly stab Kirk with injections. I have a nut allergy, and my Epi-Pens are a source of both great comfort and anxiety to me. I’m glad they exist, but I’m terrified of actually having to jab myself with one, and I was both uncomfortable and fascinated to see Bones doing that repeatedly as if it was no big thing. I’d be curious to hear from long-time Trekkies in the audiences whether there are episodes of the show or movies I might have missed that address what it’s like to have medical technology that good. Do people take more risks? Do doctors overmedicate patients? Does it lead them into error? I feel like we have a lot of science fiction, whether it’s John Scalzi’s work or The Forever War that discusses how medical technology changes decision-making by soldiers. But from a doctor’s perspective, I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a tool that powerful at your disposal, and I’d love to see a futuristic medical show that explores some of those questions. I’d totally watch a show about a futuristic Atul Gwande (or, who am I kidding, Shonda Rhimes 2032 show Space Mistresses).

Good gadget design or carefully thought-out rules are a first step towards good science fiction. But just putting those tools or those rules into action without meditating on them aren’t the only way to tell stories with them.

The bridge is yours.

-Is Tumblr ruining musicians?

-Is Uhura, at long last, going to get to wear pants?

-Russell Crowe will save life on earth by building a large boat.

-Kirk Cameron gets yet more time in the spotlight for no discernible reason.

-This is the perfect role for Eddie Izzard.

It’s coincidental that they came out so close together, but two recently-published interviews, one with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, and the other with William Shatner, present an interesting portrait of the odd institutional bias against genre fiction. Chabon, in an interview with Wired, talked about the way he’d been discouraged from writing genre fiction, even though it was one of his first loves, in his MFA program:

I had been taught early on in college and graduate school that I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I wrote genre fiction, and not only would I not be taken seriously, but people just really didn’t want to read it, like, my workshop mates and my workshop leaders. I had workshop leaders who just out-and-out said, “Please do not turn science fiction in to this workshop.” That was discouraging, obviously, and if I had had more courage and more integrity, I might have stood up to it more than I did, but I wanted to be read, and I wanted to receive whatever benefits there were to be received from the people I was in workshop with, and the teachers I was studying from.

And, you know, I wasn’t looking for a fight, and it wasn’t like I don’t love F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov, and Eudora Welty, and all those people. I love their work just as much — if not more in some cases — as Arthur C. Clarke, or Frank Herbert, or whoever it might have been. So I had just sort of allowed myself to fall into this channel as a writer that at some point I realized I didn’t want to be limited to anymore.

And William Shatner, talking with Terry Gross, explains how, though he took his work on Star Trek extremely seriously while he was acting on the show—” I applied every talent I had to making it valid and working on story and fighting management and doing the best I could”—he came to feel ashamed of it afterwards, and was bucked up by Patrick Stewart’s commitment to the work:

When I left “Star Trek,” I left it with pride and went on to other things. And then “Star Trek” started to become popular about six years afterwards, as it went into syndication. And then people started talking about, hey, there’s – beam me up, Scotty. And there’s Captain Kirk. And, you know, and then somebody would say: Do you really go where no man has gone before – in that sort of semi-mocking tone that I thought, well, all right. Maybe it wasn’t as good as I thought it was. And maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. And I held myself up defensively.

It was only watching Patrick Stewart – and I have great respect for Patrick, both as an actor and as man. I love him. And the gravitas that this great Shakespearean actor gave to his role, that I suddenly realized that this guy is taking Captain Picard every bit as seriously as Macbeth. And I used to. And I stopped. And what the hell’s the matter with me? It was a great piece of work. Everybody contributed to three years that has lasted 50. It’s a phenomenon. Why aren’t I proud of it? And that’s when I had that moment.

I’ve never really understood the bias against genre fiction. It’s not as if there’s something inherently more praiseworthy about contemplating the present in an entirely realistic way than about considering the possibilities future or the norms of the past. It’s not actually less self-indulgent to revisit and fetishize, say, the sixties or the eighties than to imagine what it would be like to live under an interplanetary government, to settle Mars, or to fight the War of the Roses with powerful metaphors for uncertainty and danger thrown in the mix. That MFA programs and critics have managed to convince people otherwise is evidence that they’re good at preserving the privilege awarded certain kinds of work, not that they’re correct.

Those of us who have fallen for Benedict Cumberbatch, whether via the good graces of Sherlock or through some other exposure will be pleased to learn that in a bit of surprise casting, he’s to play the villain in the new Star Trek movie. I’ll be curious to see what that means for the tone of the conflict between Kirk and whatever baddie Cumberbatch ends up playing. Eric Bana’s Nero was a man moved to planetary destruction, to play a role in galactic affairs, by personal grief. Cumberbatch’s certainly capable of working in that key — he proved that in a few key, touching scenes in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the most brilliant alteration to John Le Carre’s original work. But he’s also wonderful playing cold or strange. Unlike most maniacs who populate action films, Cumberbatch has practice playing people with fully realized alternate worldviews. And that’s really the key, isn’t it? If you can’t sell the idea that you’re really convinced that nuclear war is the best way to bring about world peace or that the death of your wife and your planet gives you the right to kill as many worlds as you want, there’s not going to be any dramatic tension. Those alternate perspectives are nigh-impossible to make compelling to an audience. But I think Cumberbatch will have fun chewing some scenery and whacked-out motivations, and we’ll have a delightful time watching him.

After a week when I’ve been feeling kind of cranky about pop culture, it was nifty to hear that it turns out that the role of Spock seems to have been written as gender-neutral — and that Nichelle Nichols, who was eventually cast as Uhura, read for the role. I’m not sure why this isn’t default practice more often. There are a lot of characters in a lot of projects that don’t inherently need to be male or female, and that very much includes action heroes in an era of high-powered weaponry. You don’t need to be able to overpower someone with six inches and 50 pounds on you as long as you have enough ammunition. Maybe that’s more of a comment on the generalized lack of specificity in entertainment writing more generally. But it does mean there are opportunities to be taken advantage of. If you’re writing a show where the characters’ backstory can be filled in over time, it doesn’t have to be a weakness. And while writing parts to be race or gender-neutral may mean some more work for casting directors, it doesn’t seem like it should be overwhelmingly onerous burden, given the potential creative benefits.