Comments on: There are no decent civil servants, there are no smart cops, there are no loyal first responders out there

By: Guy

Guy — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 19:47:11 +0000

“It takes real writing to come up with a way of keeping your characters in jeopardy, despite there being skilled professionals who want to help them.”

Wasn’t that the central premise of 1984?

By: Candide III

Candide III — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 19:10:26 +0000

Preposterous. I haven’t read all of Brin’s SF, but the first three novels of his Uplift series don’t have decent civil servants and first responders either. Brin simply envies the vast success Lucas had with his vastly more conventional (as Bomag rightly points out) stories.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 16:37:09 +0000

Bomag,

I dunno about Tolkien, so much. In very general terms of “The Hero’s Journey”, maaaaybe…

From Valerian? He didn’t even bother to file off the serial numbers, first…

By: Bomag

Bomag — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 07:51:48 +0000

Lucas is probably one of the worst storytellers... And he cribbed most of it, primarily from Tolkien. Friends were laughing that Christopher Lee essentially played the same character in both franchises. But I've heard the case made that all modern cinema is a riff on Tolkien.

By: Watcher

Watcher — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 22:10:16 +0000

I seriously doubt anyone is spreading any assumption about ‘first responders’ in stories. The essence of many good stories is people having to do things because they have no choice. There is no story to be told where people do nothing but pick up the phone to get someone else to do things for them.

The assumption in this nonsense is that skilled professionals are always moments away and are equipped to deal with anything. Of course it isn’t propaganda to say that someone isolated by events has to come up with answers.

One of the lasting themes of successful stories is ‘Into the Woods’ where the hero/heroine is on their own and has to use any natural resources, their intelligence and skills. It is, among other things, how we learn to do things other than dials number on a telephone.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 22:09:53 +0000

Star Wars is crap science fiction, just like Star Trek. It’s visually intense, but content-wise? It’s crap. Utter, fatuous crap. Same with Star Trek, to be quite honest.

Lucas and Roddenberry are both examples of the poisonous fruit coming off the left-wing moonbat socialist cultural ferment that was post-WWII California, and it shows in the way they created their fantasy universes. Roddenberry wasn’t quite as nihilistic as Lucas, but when you look at the whole breadth of the Federation culture he imagines, as well as the straw men he threw up…? Wow. Neither of them did anything really worthy to deserve the notoriety and fame they garnered. Cripes, Lucas is probably one of the worst storytellers and dialogue writers in the history of the craft…

What’s really irritating is that there are a lot of people who know nothing of the genre outside of these two dreck-lords. Their work has forever warped the nature of movie and television, with regards to this genre. You’re very unlikely to see anything that doesn’t conform to the tropes they laid down, and that’s a pity. Mostly because there’s much better material out there, that won’t ever be filmed.

Lucas doesn’t realize it, but he’s probably the perfect embodiment of a new-age Leni Riefenstahl. We’re just extraordinarily lucky that he never found his Hitler.