Darren New wrote:
> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/why_i_hate_star_trek.html 
> 
> 
> This pretty much says why I consider science fiction to only be that 
> where you couldn't write the story without the technology. Could Star 
> Trek be written as a western or a Spanish Armada kind of story? Yes. 
> Could Ringworld? Not hardly.
> 
> If you can still tell the story without the technology, it's not SF. 
> Oddly enough, most of the original Star Trek series that people liked 
> the best (say, the one with the Horta) were ones where you couldn't take 
> out the tech and tell the same story.

One element that is very common in SF is the political dimension. 
Generally, an SF tale revolves around the effects of a given technology 
on society; either the explorers stumble onto a society that is 
different because of some piece of technology, or some new technology 
causes our society to be shifted in a significant way.

For instance, Trek used the "society run by a computer" for multiple 
episodes, and several episodes had the characters doing something less 
than intelligent in order to avoid violating the sacred Prime Directive 
(TNG was far worse in this regard).

Regards,
John

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