Shout out to SNWโs
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
354 points (97.3% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
3894 readers
1083 users here now
/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Honorary Badbitch:
@[email protected] for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Lary Niven was written some good scifi detective stories but the difficulty is that the mystery has to be solvable for it to be a good detective piece and it has to be leaning on things that don't exist in our world for it to be scifi. To make a mystery solvable and not feel like the answer is pulled out of nowhere the "rules" of the scifi part have to be clear and firm and we'll established. Unfortunately this is very difficult to pull off; Lary Niven is a top of the line scifi author but even he only managed to make about half of his scifi detective stories really work. It would be a moments undertaking to squeeze enough creative juice out for even a handful of scifi mysteries in a series I think. It would be fucking awesome though.
I see what you mean.
Possibly the worst part of a bad detective story is relying on information not knowable to the reader until the big reveal at the end. I, for one, love stories that are puzzle-boxes that are solvable by the reader (in a way). Remove all familiarity to the story's setting, as you do in sci-fi, and you now have to thread world-building alongside the mystery while not giving the whole plot away. And therein lies the temptation to toss out the puzzle-box premise and just drag the reader passively along for a ride; it sounds really hard to do. I'd give full credit to Mr. Niven: a 50% success rate sounds impressive, all things considered.
I'm glad to see that my point was so well understood! You and I are on the exact same page. I think Lary Niven did very well all things considered and I hope that the next generation of great writers will do even better.
Yes, though the fact that Trek is already a very well-established world with very well-defined rules probably makes that at least a little bit easier.