Yeah, I'm trying to target the general (curious) public. Like Carl Sagan Cosmos level (or soul of a new machine, accidental empires, masters of doom, etc). I'm still finding my element. Hopefully it will be generally enjoyable by all and genuinely 80-90% new information per episode to people who aren't scholars or academics.
Check out my play from last week for an example of what I mean, http://comphistpod.com/1-4-the-stolen-stars-a-dramatization-... ... this is one of the diversion episodes (which are thematically aligned to the timeline topic in the odd episodes but slightly off the path)
The shows in question generally a) hire specific writers for this, and b) don't really give that much care to this. Even Trek, which had a manual that detailed the fictional systems in depth (The TNG Technical Manual was a writer's guide written by the artistic directors), let it slide for the point of the plot.
And ultimately, these snippets are just filler that add background to the world in question. To people who aren't you, or me, they do not matter all that much.
ooooh. the text is a transcript. i was going to say, tighter editing would be good, but as a transcript, yeah it works.
it's really good. my only comment is meta. sorry, there is no way i am going to start on a 30-episode series and have you pull an ABC 'Lost' on me. Produce all of them, then launch it all at once.
That's a very good point, but I think that would double or triple the length of any episode to delve into such details. Which is not exactly bad - one could just have less species introduced and more over arching story lines.
But for their episodic style, I don't think it would have worked. I suspect any cursory mention of their alien multculturalism would be lost on the viewer, unless they always explicitly point it out.
And, really, many of us do the same. People are pretty familiar with the subcultures of their own country, but many are not very familiar with the subcultures of other nations. Chinese food is a simple fast example. I suspect most people could not tell you what comes from which area/subculture. It's all just lumped together. Or when people refer to foreign government policy, and blame all the people for it, instead of just the government. Blah blah blah
Imagine if the author of the novel had to write those irrelevant scenes anyway in order to get to the good stuff. There might be someone, a literature academic for example, who would want to study that material. It wouldn't be for everyone but there are some who might want access to it. My point is that we are generating this history anyway, so why throw it out? There may be someone who wants to see how the code has evolved. Plus, nobody says you have to watch stuff that is not interesting. There are ways to filter out things you aren't interested in.
There was a discussion the other day about whether it's bad when HN gets derailed from TFA by incredibly minor details. I'm in favour of the tangents, which can often be more interesting than the primary topic - as is the case (for me) with your comment. Thanks for sharing :)
Adams says as much as that he's not a "world builder" in the linked article, yeah.
I get it. I've done extensive worldbuilding for a couple of stories, and it can be a lot of fun! You find yourself researching everything from the geological and climatological history of Earth to the detailed mechanics of gravitational slingshots. And then most of that ends up not really mattering all that much to the story, because for the most part what matters in a story is the characters and their relationships, and the worldbuilding mainly goes to determining what situations and circumstances can feasibly arise. And then you probably end up throwing out or reworking a bunch of it anyway, when you have a compelling scene that the research says can't happen, and the scene does more for the story than all the worldbuilding in the world.
Worldbuilding is best done with caution and in moderation - it's useful to an extent, but it can also easily become a rabbit hole at the cost of the story it's meant to support. You'll rarely err by spending less time in research and more with the characters whose stories you are after all trying to tell.
(Granted, given Adams' prior experience as a Doctor Who scriptwriter that gave rise to his most famous series, and also his legendary work-shyness, I don't really credit him with having thought the whole thing far enough through to identify the general case. But who cares? His most famous series is famous for a reason, and I've never really felt the lack of a concordance describing the complete history of the Vogon bureaucracy or a Wikipedia page about Milliways.)
Ya ive been hoping to see something similar emerge. Both in terms of putting the story within big picture numbers and a chain of stories to explain what and why it happened as more time passes.
There’s nothing to read into here. The writers of these shows are chiefly interested in set pieces that will sell CBS subscriptions via dramatic trailers. They aren’t considering the implications for the ST universe any more than they’re considering the internal consistency of any single episode.
the new story pitch is actually very good. i just rewatched the whole 9 seasons in the past weeks, and it feels right at home.
edit : now that i think about it, i wonder how they'll manage to get multiple variation of the story unfold depending on your choices. it's already hard enough to write one linear... i suppose they'll just block you until you click on things in the right order. Wonder how interesting or funny this could be in that context. Maybe a lot ? Like, making the absurd choice and bad decisions the character usually make and see the consequences unfold... this could be fun.
The author should post some of this to Wikipedia. Then a greater audience can read details they may have missed from the series - and possibly re-watch it with a different perspective.
For that you simply need to have the sudden inspiration of how the scheme works. Snark aside, I don't think that discarding half of the source material as random junk is such an obvious thing to do.
Check out my play from last week for an example of what I mean, http://comphistpod.com/1-4-the-stolen-stars-a-dramatization-... ... this is one of the diversion episodes (which are thematically aligned to the timeline topic in the odd episodes but slightly off the path)
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