For some reason both of the big "Star" franchises are addicted to prequels. With Star Trek, it's the pre-Kirk show Enterprise, and now the young-Kirk movie directed by J.J. Abrams. Star Wars, meanwhile, had its dull prequel trilogy, and now it's plugging in the gaps between episodes two and three — and episodes three and four — with two new TV shows.

Here are our reasons why prequels are actually bad for the human race:
Prequels are anti-creativity. When you decide to go back and fill in minor gaps in your backstory, you're saying there's no point in going forward. There are no more interesting stories to tell about what happens after the last installment of your storyline. That's not just false, it's actually an insult to writers everywhere. I can think of 100 ways to continue Star Wars after Return of the Jedi. And John Ostrander's addictive Star Wars: Legacy comic proves that there's still plenty of scope to move forward until that "long ago" era catches up to our own.

Prequels are anti-futurist. The great joy of science fiction is that it encourages us to look to the future, to what happens next. Prequels tell us that the future isn't that great, there's really nothing to see beyond what we've already seen. Why not just take a nice detour back into the past, and revisit some of the stuff we've already seen?

Prequels are anti-heroic. There's no point rooting for the good guys in a trilogy, because their future is already set in stone. This can be a bleak future, like the fact that we know Anakin will become Darth Vader. Or a happy one, like our certainty that the Federation will come to pass after Star Trek: Enterprise. When you make a prequel, you're coming down firmly on the side of predestination. There's no point in anyone sticking their neck out heroically, because future history is already set in stone. (The new Star Trek movie may avoid this problem by allowing history to be changed. J.J. Abrams has hinted strongly that the Trek universe may wind up being quite different after the time travel in his movie rewrites history.)

Prequels are all about trivia. We've already warned of the dangers in trying to answer fans' minor niggling questions, and prequels are more likely to do this than any other kind of story. You may already know that Captain Kirk outwitted the Kobayashi Maru test, but did you know what kind of boxer shorts he was wearing when he did it? No? Well, allow us to show you. No, thanks. I want to know what happened after the war with the Dominion and after Janeway crippled the Borg and after the Romulan government was destroyed. Which brings me to the final problem:

Prequels are small and personal. I love small, intimate portrayals of people's lives. But that's not what I look for from movies with "Star" in the title. (Well, maybe A Star Is Born.) By their nature, though, prequels have to be about a few people, not a larger topic. We already know the Federation will be formed and the Starfleet uniforms will get more pajama-like, so the only question in our mind when we watch Enterprise is, "Will Trip Tucker sacrifice his life in a totally contrived moment during a pirate raid on the ship?" By taking all of the bigger issues off the table, prequels force us to focus entirely on the characters. Who usually, sad to say, don't hold up to it that well.

If you're lucky enough to be running a TV show, putting out a movie version of a beloved story, or publishing book or comic series, here are some rules to remember:

• Fans love inconsistencies. Fans claim to hate contradictions in long-running stories, but actually that stuff is catnip to them. If Londo Mollari says he has seven penises in one episode and then refers to his twelve penises in another episode, the fans will spend hours coming up with explanations for the discrepancy. Marvel Comics realized this years ago, when it started sending "no prizes" to fans who could come up with the cleverest explanations of continuity goofs. So don't worry about trying to be consistent with old stories. Just ignore them, and let the fans worry about them.
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• By the same token, never give the fans what they want. They'll just hate you for it. They may clamor for two characters to get together, but once it happens, they'll instantly get sated, bored and disgusted, in that order. If you do have two popular characters get together, one should turn out to be a clone or an evil alternate universe version.
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• Don't geek out in interviews too much. Every time I read an interview with screenwriter Roberto Orci talking about how the new Star Trek movie fits in with the animated series episode where boy-Spock has quasi-bestiality with his pet Sehlat, it makes me less interested in the movie. You may think only fans will see your interviews with the fan press, but you'd be surprised how many on-the-fence viewers will come across your dorky quotes about minutiae.
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• Don't suck up to the fans, but don't insult them either. Davies' mistake wasn't that he ignores the fans, but that he talked publicly about ignoring the fans. The best bet is to pay lip-service to the fans, along with everybody else who supports your project, but don't gush over them. It just makes them despise you.
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• Pretend you just invented whatever it is. If it's a TV show, you're writing the first ever episode. If it's a movie with a numeral at the end, you're creating an upstart new indie film. If it's Volume Ten of the Space Dragon saga, imagine it's actually a cool new book project. That doesn't mean you should ignore everything that's happened before, but try to think of your project as something brand new that you just came up with.
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• Enough with the viral marketing already! Okay, so having silly games on the Internet is a useful distraction for the hordes of fans who might otherwise be camping out in your dumpsters and trying to take a photo of Katee Sackhoff eating breakfast. The only problem is when the little hints and clues start boiling over into the actual show or movie. When half the audience at Cloverfield is squinting to try and catch the Tagruato logo, it's like they're watching a different movie than everybody else. And it makes the movie seem even more impenetrable and mystifying to everyone who's going in cold.