This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
I don't know enough about this site to know whether to add this, but I do kind of see an analogy between space and an ocean: they're the only two places where a vessel can be completely isolated from civilisation and forced to be self-sufficient for months or more at a time (millennia in the case of <i>Mayflower II</i>).
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known use of the word "spaceship" is in something called "Journey in Other Worlds" by one J. J. Astor. I'd go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction
to see if the concept has appeared earlier, but I don't feel like it. — 68.44.13.236
The Red-Hatted Plumber: What the hell's the problem with making space an ocean? I admit maybe the Rule of Cool has me blinded, but I think it makes perfect sense except for the three-dimensional quality of space. Plus, early NASA pilots were US Navy aviators (though this could be due more to the USAF still being an extremely young service), such as RADM Shepard and Neil Armstrong. Now, explain to me why the hell airline pilots get to wear Navy-inspired uniforms with officer stripes and then we can talk . . .
- SOME Early AMERICAN astronauts were naval aviators. Some were Air Force, and one was a Marine. But ALL of them were test pilots. And this ignores over half of the people who have actually travelled into space.
Mark Z: Nothing's wrong with it. The article isn't bashing the metaphor, just pointing it out.
Darktalon: Remember Tropes Are Not Bad. This one can even be justified if the setting is more Hard SF by making the ships analogous to submarines rather than surface ships (as the Transhuman Space example points out, a nuclear-powered tin can surrounded by hostile environment) which has been seen a lot in more recent SF and people are ready to embrace because submarines are cool.
Copied here, without removing from the main page:
- In general, Space Above And Beyond tended to have nautical metaphors for the larger craft and, like Battlestar Galactica, atmospheric flight metaphors for the one-person craft. The analogy seemed to be with an aircraft carrier.
The problem is that aircraft carriers, by virtue of being naval ships, fall under the trope, and one-person craft use atmospheric flight terms/metaphors in the Navy as much as they do in the Air Force. Coupled with the fact that Space Above And Beyond used Marine pilots, the trope is not being excepted here - it's playing itself out.
benteen: my "objection" to the excerpted passage, is that the main locale of Space Above And Beyond, the U.S.S. Saratoga, isn't analogous to an aircraft carrier, it is an aircraft carrier, pretty explicitly. The "Hammerheads" flown by the protagonists were capable of both atmospheric and space operations (up to and including achieving space flight from a ground level takeoff), which (in my book) makes them aircraft as well as spacecraft. In addition, one should note that the Saratoga was expressly a US Navy ship, commanded by a USN commodore and with US Marine Corps aviators (the USMC is still a part of the Department of the Navy, after all). In some episodes the Marines of the Saratoga did have interactions with US Army personnel as well, so in the Space Above And Beyond universe there was pretty obviously no unification of the US armed services.
I removed these passages because they were both verbose and marginally relevant:
The famous nonconformist and researcher of unexplained and anomalous phenomena Charles Fort (1874-1932), after which the Fortean Society is named, was fond of inventing "alternative" cosmologies and on occasion speculated (as a joke, although some Forteans take it a little too seriously) about a "Super-Sargasso Sea" surrounding the Earth from which all sorts of odd things fall to Earth, or that the entire solar system is a living organism, with "rivers of blood that vein albuminous seas" and "vast living things in the sky, as there are vast living things in the oceans (...) alive in outer space".
Fort wrote of the coming space travel on Lo! (1941), of "treks to the stars" and "caravels with wings", making this Older Than Television. A lot of Sci-Fi writers of late decades have openly or secretly borrowed ideas from Fort's books, for example psionics and teleportation (a term invented by Fort!). For more on Charles Fort's amusing and quirky hypotheses see "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" (revised and expanded edition 1957) by Martin Gardener.
Seven Seals: Removed this:
- Additionally, Mal went from being a Sergeant to Captain, mentioned several times in the first few episodes. Sergeant was his military rank. "Captain" is simply an honorific for someone who owns a ship.
