I’ve been revamping a few ideas related to the book, and I found myself vacillating on a few points. It’s one of the fun types of procrastination I’ve cataloged when it comes to setting thought to the written word.

It’s fun because you get to argue with yourself, and who better qualified to argue with you than the person who you think knows you best? I learned that when I was a child, playing myself in chess, pitting strategies against each other while in the same brain space, a task that one can never perfect but one can practice.

The last few days I’ve been trying to come up with a better way to deal with a ‘magic’ aspect of the book since there were some updates in our scientific knowledge that made some of it obsolete. Science does that, sneaks up and advances when you least expect it, and when you’re writing science fiction I suppose it’s safer to write purely about magic rather than science if you want the longevity someone like Gene Roddenberry or Isaac Asimov has.

Those two names should pop out to Trekkies and anyone who has ever heard a bad story about a robot. The two authors did something that few authors actually do – they set up very human stories in a technological framework.

Speaking for myself, I don’t know why the Enterprise warped around so much (or why it was named ‘Enterprise’, which is quite Ferengi). You’d think that some form of communication wave would work for stuff rather than having a flagship warping around so much. The Enterprise is largely a carrier pigeon in that regard, but Roddenberry drew us in. He was probably writing about going back and forth to the surface on the shuttle so much he came up with transporters, too.

The technology, though, wasn’t central to his stories or those that have come after in the initial framework he created. The technology was about the future, a nice comfy future, and people want a nice comfy future while people go off and fight the Gorn and Klingons. It’s easier to give them medals than to go do it yourself, so give them medals. Starfleet is hard. Plus all those directives and rules…

That is Roddenberry’s actual story. The directives, the rules, the ethical dilemmas, the perspectives shifting within the framework and expanding it. It challenged us as individuals and as a society. That is what Roddenberry was really writing about within his framework. Watch anything Star Trek and you’ll see it.

I suppose I should mention George Lucas, but honestly, he could have kept the first 3 episodes of Star Wars and saved us that mess. And the conclusion… man, that looks like a BMW hatchback where the designers began drinking at the front and were blackout drunk at the back. Terrible.

Asimov didn’t have to invent too much science. Instead, he used a fairly predictable framework that lead to the desired results related to artificial intelligence but he really didn’t write about the technology. He made some stuff up. I can’t think of anything he made up, but I’m sure he filled in some gaps.

I wonder, too, how much he was annoyed about people talking about the Laws of Robotics as if they were sacred when the whole point he was making was that they couldn’t work. He stepped us through that whole thing and yet people don’t get that. If I wrote that, I would be annoyed by everyone who points to the Laws of Robotics as some form of solution.

Both of these authors – and I would wax more poetic on Asimov, but he’s somewhat of a niche for some of us – they had a balance of the possible and the probable.

When we are children, we live in a world of possibility: the monster under the bed and the friendly dragon under the maple tree. When we are adults, we live in a world of probabilities – it’s very unlikely that there is a monster under the bed or a friendly or unfriendly dragon under the maple tree.

Roddenberry’s works were more about the possible than the probable. A civilization with warp technology could probably do a lot better at communication than carrier pigeon. The lean on the officers rather than those non-officers fits the time of his writing well also, since officers were supposed to be the ‘best of us’. I’m former enlisted, and I know this is not as true as many seem to believe.

Roddenberry had no trouble pulling the Bob Ross to fill the gaps, to cover inconveniently improbable with magical technology. It works.

Asimov leaned more toward the probable than the possible. His framework was that of technology itself and it’s impacts on humanity, and the grounding of computer technology he uses is pretty solid to this day because it hasn’t changed that much and we’re on the cusp of making an intelligence that may not recognize us as intelligent. I wouldn’t.

So here I am, trying to decide what mix of probable and possible should be in what I’m writing, and I haven’t quite figured that out yet.

Thus, I wrote this post and still haven’t made up my mind. 🙂