Sci-fi for Dummies no more: the death of Star Trek

Orson Scott Card, author of the brilliant Ender's Game, notes the passing of the Star Trek: Enterprise spinoff in a column in the LA Times and says that the end of the Star Trek franchise is a good thing:

The original "Star Trek," created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad. Nimoy was the only charismatic actor in the cast and, ironically, he played the only character not allowed to register emotion.

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As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s — a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. It was sci-fi as seen by Hollywood: all spectacle, no substance.

Which was a shame, because science fiction writing was incredibly fertile at the time, with writers like Harlan Ellison and Ursula LeGuin, Robert Silverberg and Larry Niven, Brian W. Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke [and he forgot Jack Vance -- TKM] creating so many different kinds of excellent science fiction that no one reader could keep track of it all.

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Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by.

But now, sci-fi on screen is catching up to sci-fi on paper. Thus, Card's epitaph for Star Trek:

We're in college now. High school is over. There's just no need for "Star Trek" anymore.