Babylon 5 and Ancient History

[FaxModem1]

Chuck has a distaste for when Trek mentions something, and how it conflates everything in history to Ancient history, given how wide a topic that is. Well, in Babylon 5, the same thing happens with "In the Shadow of Z'hadum". Sheridan calls World War II Ancient history, bringing up the bombing of Coventry and the Enigma code.

Is this something that just happens with science fiction writers, or is it just considered more egregious in Trek?

When is something considered ancient?

Would it be considered because the setting is 'the future', and some sort of big historical event reset their view on history? A third world war, meeting aliens, colonizing the galaxy, etc.

Thoughts?

[Riedquat]

Considering how very different the world is now compared with, well, what it's been just within living memory, let alone another hundred years or so before that I'd say we've had a sufficiently big event, even if it wasn't a single one-off one, that would have that effect (it's curious to speculate about how history might be viewed when a few hundred years ago wasn't all that different though).

My perception of "ancient" history is that it's nothing more recent than the Roman Empire, it's hard to imagine that perception changing significantly within two and a half centuries.

I think it happens when writers get a bit carried away with trying to say "Our current lives to these people are history to them" and go a bit too far (particularly when they often portray societies that in many aspects are fairly similar to current society, although of course inventing something both different and plausible is very difficult).

[hammerofglass]

In everyday usage "ancient" just means "older than "current" and much older than "new"".

[Robovski]

In everyday usage "ancient" just means "older than "current" and much older than "new"".

It's like how on the internet nothing really existed before 2010.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

It's a device (maybe at times a subconscious one) to create a sense of separation between the show's setting and the time it was made.

Characters knowing too much about the 20th or 21st century can feel like an anachronism. In Star Trek, it's one thing to have multiple characters who can quote Shakespeare or Milton at each other; it's a little less believable to have Spock and Kirk citing Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins at each other in The Voyage Home (although it does make for a nice little gag that took me forever to get). Calling WW2 "ancient" is overcompensating in an attempt to maintain suspension of disbelief..

[FaxModem1]

Sidenote, what is the joke regarding those two and their literature? I never got it.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

Ironically, I think the joke has lost some of it's significance because a lot of people already don't remember them, but the joke is just Spock's deadpan reference to a couple mildly trashy, forgettable writers as the 'giants' of literature.

[TheLibrarian]

Generally in the Western scholarly tradition, "ancient" referred to any history predating the Fall of Rome, AD 476. As more recent historical scholarship debates when or if Rome actually "fell" and the newer discipline of Late Antiquity questions the whole notion of a hard divide between the "ancient" and "medieval" periods you won't see many modern historians claiming a firm date, but generally "ancient" history is pre-500 AD, medieval is roughly 500-1500, and modern is 1500 to the present.

In these kinds of far-future SF works it doesn't really make sense to refer to the 19th and 20th centuries as "ancient" history when i) the scholarly definition of "ancient" is tied to the Roman empire or pre-Christian era, not a specific length of time, and ii) people in Star Trek and B5 are about as far from our time as we are from Shakespeare or Milton and we don't call those guys "ancient" authors.

It would be fine if they used the term colloquially, like you might joke that anything that happened before you were born is "like ancient history, man". But in these shows they always talk about "the ancient United States" or whatever like they're quoting from their high school history textbook. Can't they just say "back in the 20th century"?

Sidenote, what is the joke regarding those two and their literature? I never got it.

Susann and Robbins are still two of the biggest-selling novelists of all time, they utterly dominated the publishing world in the 1960s and 70s (and in a time before the Walkman, cable dramas, and video games, books & periodicals were the most popular forms of portable entertainment) and pioneered a lot of the type of marketing and publicity that is now commonplace for authors. And by the mid-80s their extremely popular trash was mostly forgotten. So the joke is how 400 years later, it would be "logical" to assume that the fiction with the most copies in circulation was a massive culture-shaping force.

[Durandal_1707]

To be fair, if humanity did manage to head out into the stars, that could well be an epoch-defining event on par with the fall of Rome.

[RobbyB1982]

I think meeting aliens and going out into space and colononizing other worlds is enough of a major shaping event to start putting everything behind it into the ancient category. Maybe not right away, but certainly faster than how we've come since the middle ages.

Heck, even now, with computer technology moving lightning fast and the advent of the internet, the world of today is vastly different than the world of just 30 years ago in ways we take for granted now because the change was gradual, but vastly different all the same.

Comparatively, the difference between say, 1985 and 1955, is largely cultural, (entertainment, fashion, race relations, presidents, etc) but we had cars and tvs and refrigerators. But go back 100 years to the old west and and its vastly different.

Maybe not "ancient" by what we currently consider ancient, that's mostly ascribed to stuff before accurate records, but quickly becoming more and more less civilized than we are right now.