[Note: Someone suggested I should do something to preserve and disseminate some of my more interesting Usenet posts. I said I’d give editing and converting them to blog entries a try. Here’s the first.]

It was reported that Orson Scott Card said that he didn’t think much of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes — that “most seventh-graders can come up with better ones.” This was my response.

The thing is, nobody came up with the Star Trek universe; it just accumulated. When the show started, nobody thought it was necessary to create a consistent background, and nobody bothered. In the very early episodes even stuff like what “USS” stands for and what the name of the government is aren’t consistent; they didn’t settle on “United Federation of Planets” until halfway through the first season. The “science” was nonexistent because nobody on the show cared, and nobody thought viewers would notice or care. If stuff changed from one episode to the next, so what? They assumed viewers only cared about the characters and the action.

There’s a reason that the various “tech manuals” and the like didn’t come out until years after the original Trek series was off the air — they didn’t exist until people who had worked on the show went back afterward and created them by going through what had been seen. It wasn’t worked out in advance, it was built up as needed.

As for “Star Wars,” George Lucas knew perfectly well it was nonsense and initially rejected attempts to even call the first movie “science fiction” — it was “space fantasy.”

So if by “better” you mean more consistent or more scientifically accurate, then any bright seventh-grader probably could do better, because neither Roddenberry nor Lucas was trying for consistency, logic, or scientific plausibility. All they cared about was providing a cool background for storytelling.

Which they obviously succeeded spectacularly at, though in both cases it was the result of years of accumulating cool ideas from multiple writers, actors, set designers, directors, etc.

The whole concept of “worldbuilding” didn’t really exist in Hollywood until 1982, when “Blade Runner” established it — I remember reading articles in places like STARLOG about how Ridley Scott had consciously decided to have Syd Mead and company design the world beforehand, instead of letting it accrue gradually or be worked out by fans, and this was seen as almost revolutionary.

Yeah, some writers and SFX people had tried to work out background stuff for movies and TV before that, but the directors hadn’t seen it as binding and would change it any time it was inconvenient for a story.

So yeah, “better” technically is easy. “Better” as a backdrop for cool stories? Not so much.