>Star Trek always felt odd to me because the non-utopian elements felt far too embedded in the utopian stuff.
That's because utopias are boring. Gene Roddenberry's vision if actually followed through with would have made for dismal television, so the writers had to back away from it now and then.
To me the flawed utopias are more interesting and even more inspiring. I can relate to people having to struggle to uphold their morals in a violent and uncertain universe, but not so much to people who are already perfect.
>And, yes, redshirts - quite a few people in utopia still get killed because no one knows how to keep them safe.
Despite it being canon that transporter buffers can be used to store a backup of a person's entire pattern and make copies of them. I can understand the redshirts thing in TOS when that bit of technobabble hadn't been worked out, but by TNG it should have been standard operating procedure to spin up new ones when the old ones got vaporized by the monster of the week.
I can understand the redshirts thing in TOS when that bit of technobabble hadn't been worked out, but by TNG it should have been standard operating procedure to spin up new ones when the old ones got vaporized by the monster of the week.
In the Culture, they actually do that. Few people are in danger of unexpected death in the first place, but you can be restored from a pattern backup if you do suffer an unexpected death. It's extraordinarily rare for a citizen of the Culture to suffer involuntary permanent death.
I personally think of the Culture as "Star Trek done right." They have the same basic toolkit of fictional technologies: strong AI, FTL communications and travel, replicators, abundant energy, artificial gravity, force fields, and teleportation. But instead of being stodgily conservative like the Federation they're making full use of the possibilities offered by these technologies.
Is it possible for utopias to be both boring to talk about and incredibly exciting for the people who live in them (as they probably should be, given they're utopias)?
Probably. But the problem is they have to be exciting for the reader or viewer.
Star Trek's utopia is supposed to be one where humans have evolved beyond petty desires and base instincts. There's no violence, no greed or vice, no intolerance, no scarcity or inequality. People choose to work out of intellectual or creative desire, or simply to better their community, or choose not to work, because everyone already has access to infinite free energy, matter replication and holodecks that can create any fully immersive scenario imaginable.
It would be a wonderful place to live, but less wonderful to read about or watch, at least not without an external force disturbing its placidity (or getting on a starship and taking the plot somewhere more... lively.) YMMV, of course.
But that's my point, and to lay it all out more clearly — I just think writers are being incredibly lazy when it comes to thinking about utopias.
The very concept of a utopia conveys the idea of a world, or a trajectory of constantly increasing excitement and betterment. The idea that a utopia would be boring because "everything is already as good as it can get" betrays a fundamental misunderstanding: if people born in a "utopia" consider it normal and boring, it's probably not a utopia.
That's because utopias are boring. Gene Roddenberry's vision if actually followed through with would have made for dismal television, so the writers had to back away from it now and then.
To me the flawed utopias are more interesting and even more inspiring. I can relate to people having to struggle to uphold their morals in a violent and uncertain universe, but not so much to people who are already perfect.
>And, yes, redshirts - quite a few people in utopia still get killed because no one knows how to keep them safe.
Despite it being canon that transporter buffers can be used to store a backup of a person's entire pattern and make copies of them. I can understand the redshirts thing in TOS when that bit of technobabble hadn't been worked out, but by TNG it should have been standard operating procedure to spin up new ones when the old ones got vaporized by the monster of the week.