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.”
The man has a vested interest to be in the headlines. Media take an interest in him because of the movie. It’s the perfect climate to turn a statement of not much importance into a news headline.
I haven’t listened to the podcast. If anybody has, maybe they can comment on the tone of the conversation. Seeing it just in writing makes him seem a bit petty and adversarial. But the way it happened it could just as well be isolated, throwaway jovial comments where the “fuck them” could be much less pointed and we are left feeling this was a nothing burger.
This is of the same quality journalism as any actor of the fantasy lightsaber universe being asked if they world return to the franchise. Sure, if the script looked promising, said Daisy Ripley. “Ripley to return to Star Wars!” reports niche media site struggling to get eyeballs in front of their ads.
This is the second quote of its kind in a day. The earlier one was about ‘woke’ messaging and how he writes to have no symbolism or underlying meaning in his work.
Going on a media tour is something that people are trained for.
They have their messages. They are ready for the provocations and the traps. And this isn’t Weir’s first Hollywood movie that’s done well.
This specific call out against Star Trek is something that he could have easily stepped about. He didn’t need to go out of his way to alienate a significant potential portion of his audience.
I just read up on the woke comments. What do you find so terrible there? That he writes avoiding an agenda? Or that he criticizes works that plainly have one?
It’s his opinion. I don’t wholly disagree with him. Science fiction often works best when they don’t hang a giant lantern on what the lesson to be learned is. When the politics override good storytelling. Like in Picard S2. ICE is shit and so are climate change denial and the burning mountains around contemporary LA. But to me that came across as preachy, not a great story.
If anything you have to respect the man for not mincing his words at all. That doesn’t mean I agree with him but in this outrage driven world that’s almost a baller move.
I don’t think he has alienated as many people as you suggest. And I haven’t heard enough to be worried. He might be a prick but these two stories are not enough to build a case just yet IMO.
Science fiction often works best when they don’t hang a giant lantern on what the lesson to be learned is.
I would argue that very little good science fiction tries to have nothing to say about humanity or the human condition.
There is some very intellectual and intelligent science fiction that takes on and speculates about advanced science and mathematics concepts but these are rarely mainstream and not at all the kind of thing Weir writes.
Some science fiction can be just fun science, engineering or math speculation stories told in prose, but if doesn’t have something to say about ourselves, it’s value isn’t much more than diversion — although diversion and entertainment are valuable in themselves.
Setting aside for now Weir’s rather sour grapes criticism of Star Trek, and stipulating the fact that Star Trek has, from its earliest episodes, had a recurrent pattern of including very transparent and heavy handed allegories to current social and political situations and controversies, let’s consider the general question of what is science fiction for.
Science fiction can be and has been a means of allegorical storytelling, and of pondering the human condition at the individual and the societal level. It tells us about ourselves as much as it tells us about a broader universe.
Huxley and Orwell did this with their dystopias. However, so did hard science fiction greats like Arthur C. Clark. Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001: a Space Odyssey were as much about who we are now as what might be out there.
More literary science fiction authors explored themes in psychology and human consciousness from the mid twentieth century on, and high quality science fiction took up those questions in films like The Forbidden Planet.
I didn’t find this kind of reaching about the human condition in either of Weir’s books. I did find them fun rides, the kind of pop fiction that used to be described as “airport” novels — the kind of book people pick up in airport kiosks before a long flight, that are often make into “popcorn movies.”
The science elements in his books are ok, but not astonishing. The level is really middle school, which is why The Martian was reissued in a ‘school edition’ cleaned of the swear words. My own first contact with Weir was our youngest’s ‘school edition’. It wasn’t an overly challenging book for a bright grade 6 student.
What I found in Weir’s writing was a repeating pattern of a lone-wolf individual male hero making some incredibly daft decisions after a catastrophic event that set up his opportunity to MacGyver himself out of the situation. It’s a trope.
It’s not definitive of the genre and it’s not conducive to the ensemble problem solving needed for more complex STEM work in science fiction. And unfortunately Weir’s short fiction has shown that he hasn’t yet mastered the skill of telling stories on a broader canvas.
Fun ride episodes, shows and movies belong in Star Trek and other science fiction too. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be there. One of the franchise’s strengths has been that it can incorporate the full range of styles. But it’s never been only fun rides and individual heroism or individual MacGyvering. I think we’d see as much scathing criticism if shows tried to be just that.
But back to Weir’s attitude and tone, speaking in his moment of success.
He could have let his work speak for itself, and focused on promoting his film.
Instead he chose to prop up himself by putting down others. I don’t respect that. I don’t see that as having integrity. I see that as being a jerk, and it validates the sense that I got from his books that he doesn’t know himself how to work well with others so he doesn’t write what he doesn’t know.
He didn’t have to shoot his mouth off when baited. Instead, he chose to weigh disingenuously into the ‘culture wars’ by claiming to be above having a message.
He could have chosen at some future moment to drop a mention that he, like many writers had pitched spec scripts to the Star Trek franchise that weren’t taken up for movies or television, that weren’t seen as a fit in the strategic plan of the franchise at the time. That would have likely garnered a lot of positive interest from across the Trek fandom.
Instead, he chose to use his moment to trash the creations of others and, implicitly, the part of the fandom that those shows were written for.
He won’t be getting my money.
I would argue that very little good science fiction tries to have nothing to say about humanity or the human condition.
I’ll take it a step further and say it’s impossible for any fiction, let alone sci-fi.
If you’re writing a story, you have something to say, and to claim otherwise is either a cover-up or profound ignorance of your own work.
Thanks for writing that. It’s quite long but I can see your point. I’m relieved that you didn’t just read two headlines and sent him to the digital gallows. Personally, I don’t reach the same conclusion as you. If you’d say in reply my standards were perhaps lower I would not disagree with you. As I wrote before, this is not enough for me. Weir is not a saint. I heard hin trash talk his own follow-up to the Martian in an interview when Hail Mary came out. He knows he’s not Asimov or Dick. Or Shakespeare.
In terms of what science fiction is best at doing, we don’t appear to be that far apart. Allegorical storytelling is great. That’s why I mentioned Picard S2 where there is none of that. They have characters sit in ICE detention or looking at the burning mountains in 2020 and say this is shit (which, of course, it is). Zero allegory, all in our face virtue signaling. Virtues that I find valid but in a sci-fi story told in a very literal (read: shit) way. Politics overrode good story telling. (Then again, it was the pandy, there are extenuating circumstances.)
You don’t have to answer this; I’m just curious. How is your enjoyment of 90s Trek knowing that Rick Berman was involved? I’d argue he’s a far bigger sob than Weir.
He’s still a huge hypocrite because he’s famous for a story about a human and an alien getting along, and the human putting everything on the line to save said alien. It is literally the “woke nonsense” he’s bitching about. I will give this man and his work no further attention.
Edit: If you don’t think “being kind to aliens instead of being a human supremacist” doesn’t qualify as “woke nonsense” the way anti-woke reactionaries define it, I don’t want to hear from you.
It’s hilarious that your basically claiming all good deeds under the banner of woke.
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He is a huge hypocrite in your opinion. Which I don’t find convincing.
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