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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2236254" data-attributes="member: 5171">So basically, he's someone who thinks of himself as literary dissing something he thinks of as a pulp serial. Except that Star Trek was a bit deeper than he believes it is, and his stuff is a lot shallower than he thinks it is.He's certainly entitled to his opinion, but he comes off as a bit of a pretentious turd, and generally, while I've got no problems with an author saying what he likes and dislikes, once you as an author start telling people that they are wrong to like something that happens to be different from what you do... that's more or less the moment you've just admitted you're being beaten.Yeah, more people enjoy Star Trek than like your books. Yeah, more people stuck around for (insert mediocre movie or mediocre spinoff series here) than read your "Oh, oh, this time I'm going to tell the complete story of this minor character from Ender's Game!" sequels. You are less popular than Star Trek. Telling people that they're stupid for liking Star Trek in greater numbers than they like you is not going to solve the problem. In fact, it makes you look like a bit of a jerk who is intimidated by a franchise that was doing better than either your "One good book, and then a bunch of Ender Sequels" or "Retelling the Book of Mormon" series and is now taking the opportunity to kick the franchise while it's down. (Mind you, that's all separate from the criticism of Star Trek. I consider the actual criticism of Star Trek secondary to the attitude with which he addresses people who enjoy Star Trek.)One particular aspect of his criticism gets to what currently bugs me about the SF field: there's this "It's the fiction of ideas" ideology that says that SF always has to be new, and that any SF that isn't sufficiently new in the ways that the blowhards declare are acceptible is not REAL SF. So Star Trek is not REAL SF, because it's just a western that happens to take place in space and address racism and the cold war and other topical issues. And having Star Trek on TV is bad, despite the fact that the authors he's named would look really really bad if their fiction were taken to TV, because you can't put three-page infodumps about (tech-device the author wanted to write about and so dropped a few cardboard characters and a half-baked plot around) up on television. People expect an exciting and engaging ride. Often, they expect character development as well, something that is profoundly lacking in a bunch of the work of the people he mentions.</blockquote>

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