In his book How To Write Science Fiction & Fantasy (a Writers’ Digest book), Card analyzes Star Trek and says (EXCERPTS):
The original series creator [Gene Roddenberry] wanted characters with the power to make decisions, and centered on the captain and executive officer of a military starship. Unfortunately, however, as anyone who knows anything about the miltary will tell you, the comanders of ships and armies don’t have many interesting adventures. They’re almost always at headquaters, making the big decisions and sending out the orders to the people who do the physically dangerous work.
In any real starfleet there would be teams of trained explorers, diplomats, and scientists ready to venture forth at the commander’s orders. If Star Trek had been about one such team, the stories would have been inherently more plausible–and there would have been room for tension between the ship’s officers and the exploration teams, a rich vein of story possibilities that was virtually untapped.
Instead, Star Trek centered around the characters with the highest prestige who, in a realistic world, would have the least freedom.
Any captain of a ship or commander of an army who behaved like Captain Kirk would be stripped of command for life. But the series would not have worked otherwise.
At this point you might be saing to yourself, "I should be so lucky as to make mistakes like Star Trek–I could use a few bestsellers." But the point I’m making is that Star Trek could not possibly have succeeded if the captain had actually behaved like a captiain. Centering the series around a commanding officer was such a bad mistake that the show immediately corrected for the error by never, for one moment, having Kirk behave like a captain [p. 68].
In saying this, Card is right (except that–in a few individual minutes–Kirk did behave like a captain). Kirk, and the captains that followed (even on other series, like Capt. John Sheridan of Babylon 5) did not behave like captains when it came to leading missions themselves.
Star Trek thus violated a real-world law.
So what. Sci-fi does that all the time.
And in this case there may well be a reson: When Star Trek started, in 1967, would the networks have bought a show that focused on an exploratory team instead of a commanding officer? I don’t know that at all. A network today would buy that (think: Stargate SG-1), but in 1967 the networks had such a limited undrstanding of science fiction that they barely bought it to begin with (thinking Star Trek "too cerebral" and rejecting the idea of Mr. Spock utterly in the first pass), so it is quite plausible to suppose that the network would have simply passed on the idea if it focused on ordinary soldiers.
Having set the mold for TV space opera with Kirk (who is not, incidentally, without precedents like action hero Capt. Rocky Jones), other captains followed in his stead.
Over time, though, TV and movie sci-fi would have the chance to evolve away from this formula, and that’s something we can all be glad about.
Unfortunately, not all of Card’s analysis of Star Trek is so on the money.
More in a bit.
Card’s analysis of Trek may not always be on target, but his writing analysis is. If you don’t have the book Jimmy mentioned and care at all about science fiction (or even writing in general), buy it, even if you don’t ever plan to write a word.
I second Geoff’s opinion. I bought a copy at a GenCon in 1996, and have been periodically returning to it ever since as a hack SF writer. The book does trancend genres–even non-genre ficition writers would find it handy on many points. His “Character and Viewpoint” (or something like that) book is also quite handy.
I think this is one of the things they fixed in TNG, with Picard not going on most away missions, because it was ‘against protocol.’
Of course, they also later had Kirk bemoning being an Admrial, because that meant he had no fun 🙂
Actually…Roddenberry may not have been all that far off. I read a book about a young Navy guy’s experiences on a destroyer’s crew during the Cuban missile crisis. His captain was a great deal like Kirk, except that he was a lot ruder about pulling people out of their stations and taking over their jobs. He was allowed to carry on like this because he was practically psychic about finding submarines and also very good at teaching others to find them. He also won a lot of naval exercises. 😉
And his crew liked him and thought him a very good captain, actually.
If Roddenberry served under a few similar personalities, it might explain a lot.
Ah, conventions in fiction.
It is a convention in comics that a small mask can hide your face enough to make you very difficult to identify. This allows the writers to make use of secret identities without spending copious amounts of time keeping the secret.
It is a convention in (certain subgenres) of mystery novels that the murder takes place under circumstances which are very rare indeed in the real world. (In a place where few murders are committed, where many people can be suspected of commiting it, where the business is piecing together clues to find out who did it, rather than whether you can throw the book at them.) This allows the novelist to set up an intriguing puzzle, which most real world murders are not.
It is a convention of Elizabethean drama that the characters speak in blank verse. This allowed the dramatist to give the characters dialogue that expressed their hearts better than realistic dialogue.
Conventions have artistic points.
BTW, in case some of you want military-inspired SF: I just read John Hemry’s A Just Determination, Burden of Proof, Rule of Evidence, which are quite good. He was in the US Navy. (And while they are the US Navy in space, they are fundamentally courtroom dramas.)
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