At 22:16 8-2-01 +1100, Julia Jones wrote:

"Once you start lubricating you have to continue to do so, as the lube gets in the innards and f*cks them up, so they won't work properly without anymore." Seen on alt.fan.pratchett

The Dutch railways actually tried that with their switch points (cleaned away all the old oil and then left them alone) and it seems to work perfectly. They need far less maintenance that way.

ObB7: Ermm.... Would they still have to use lube on the Liberator? Or in the mutoids?

Jacqueline

My recent back-and-forth with Neil over the "ideology vs. characters" thing has got me to thinking quite a bit... And this is really just me being a sort of real-life character junkie, here, because what I'm really interested in, I admit, is what aspects of a show people choose to focus on and why. And my own attitudes are easiest for me to examine. So...

The thing is, I was having a conversation with a friend earlier today, in which we got to talking about _Star Trek_. Specifically, we were talking about the fact that good ol' Captain Kirk feels free to violate the Prime Directive and meddle his little heart out whenever a society is not "progressing normally," and that there are a whole host of insidious assumptions behind that attitude. And, hours later, when my thoughts (as they always do) turned to B7, I suddenly realized that here I'd had this (quite interesting) discussion about an SF-TV show that concentrated almost solely on the ideological elements, with very little character content at all (aside from a few snide remarks about Kirk's dalliances with the alien babes). In other words, I was doing with Trek pretty much *exactly* the sort of thing Neil likes to do with B7.

Which really got me to musing. Why am I perfectly comfortable doing this with TOS when I was, I admit, slightly uncomfortable seeing something rather similar being done with B7? I think part of the reason is that one of the things I most like about B7 is how it does things differently from Trek, even taking so many of the conventions Star Trek established for the genre and deliberately subverting them. In Trek's case, Kirk and company *are* representatives of their society, they'd self-identify as such, they act officially in that capacity, and they're quite obviously (IMO) deliberately written as representatives of a particular worldview. But, with B7, every single one of Our Protagonists is a person who's struggled to maintain his or her individuality in a society that has tried hard (*very* hard, in Blake's case) to force them to conform. So, unlike with Kirk and co., it seems to me that to slot the B7 characters into the role of representative for their society's ideology is to ignore possibly the most important facet of their personalities, and to force them into a role that they simply don't belong in. Or, to jump firmly into "external mode": IMO a major theme of the show is the struggle for individuality and individual freedom in an opressive and conformist society (and I think it deals with variations on this theme on a number of levels, actually). And if that's the case, then doesn't abstracting the characters out to the level where they lose their individuality and become representations of an ideology undermine an important theme that the writers were trying to convey?

I also think another part of the problem I've had with this is that we're dealing specifically with the idea of sexism. And I agree with what several other poeople have said: viewing people as representations of maleness or femaleness rather than as individuals *is* sexism, plain and simple. So even when it's possibly a valid thing to do (as I suppose it is in this kind of litcrit), I don't want to do it. (Note that I'm *not* saying that it's wrong to assert that there are differences between men and women, or that social inequalities do exist, or anything like that. That's a different matter entirely, I think.)

In message 5.0.1.4.0.20010208230526.00a02310@pop3.wish.net, Jacqueline Thijsen inquisitioner@wish.net writes

At 22:16 8-2-01 +1100, Julia Jones wrote:

...

"Once you start lubricating you have to continue to do so, as the lube gets in the innards and f*cks them up, so they won't work properly without anymore." Seen on alt.fan.pratchett

The Dutch railways actually tried that with their switch points (cleaned away all the old oil and then left them alone) and it seems to work perfectly. They need far less maintenance that way.

ObB7: Ermm.... Would they still have to use lube on the Liberator? Or in the mutoids?

The quote in question was actually about Rubik's cubes, but I thought it looked very nice quoted out of context.

Presumably if lube is used on the Liberator, it's applied as part of the self-maintenance routines. I'm somewhat curious as to exactly where the supplies for the self-repair and maintenance come from. Some of the time the ship seems to be using a form of nano-technology, building parts out of raw materials, other times there's a stock of spare parts, used by both the ship itself and the humans. Perhaps the explanation for this is that self-repair is a nice SF idea, but if the ship was entirely self- repairing, you couldn't have "obtaining a replacement McGuffin" as an excuse to drive the plot.

The ship has a strong suggestion of organic technology, and "feeds" off energy. It's possible that it can create much or all of what it needs so long as it has raw materials to work with. How far down do those raw materials go? All the way down to being able to convert energy to matter? How complex are the things that can be built up? Pretty sophisticated, I would think. Weight for weight, spider silk is one of the strongest materials we know. Bones are made largely of apatite crystals, laid down on a framework to build up a lightweight but strong structure. There's more than one species of fish out there capable of giving its prey a nasty shock.

This leads me into some speculation about the kitchens that I'm not sure I want to pursue... And yes, Predatrix *has* speculated on what an organic ship might do with lubricant:-)