Comment on Does Star Trek Need Starfleet?

buckykat@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• LtLiana@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Plus given the track record of how the Federation is represented in recent Trek especially, I don’t trust them to portray actual paradise.

  In Picard we constantly see car-centric Americanized cities, the FNN just being a thinly veiled once-again American CNN clone, everything’s about the West and its culture again (this was already bad in old Trek, like why San Fran and Paris are the most important cities and how the Xindi weapon fucked up the USA instead of literally any other place on Earth). It’s like they think being in space and having technology makes paradise, and culture wouldn’t change at all.

  I trust single novel authors more than huge production companies and writing rooms.

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  • buckykat@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Absolutely. Star Trek writers are in no way immune to capitalist realism themselves, especially when they’re beholden to studio execs and budgets.

    I didn’t make it more than a few episodes into Picard before giving up in disgust, and this only validates my choice there. It’s not just Picard though. Strange New Worlds is generally quite good, but the colony shown in the most recent episode was explicitly modeled on a mid 20th century American small town, a place Federation citizens should know better than to emulate.

    Are there any novels or fanfics you’d recommend that do an actual good job of portraying a properly post scarcity Federation culture?

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    • LtLiana@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s difficult, honestly. Most of the novels I read don’t put much of a focus on the societies they live in, more on the characters or cool phenomena. I personally liked the depiction of Earth in the Department of Temporal Investigation novel series (which, by the way, is excellent anyway), but even that wasn’t very specific.

      As for fan fiction, I personally try to write much more plausible fiction that doesn’t take “human-ish” patterns for granted; e. g. some of the species we explore don’t even form nation states, I put more of a focus on non-humanoids, I try to make Starfleet and Federation names and representation equally distributed among member species (e. g. no USS Einstein, but instead like USS Rogra jav Baur, after the Tellarite diplomat), and look at super underrepresented peoples, subcultures, professions and areas to flesh them out a bit. I also assume that in the future we are talking about, important places are all over Earth, not just in the USA and Europe. Like, the hero ship freighter that I am writing about currently is called the SS Kyakhta, after the Russia-China trade route in the late middle ages. The Captain is a non-binary elderly Kaferian. And the only human crewmate is from Daşoguz, Turkmenistan; which developed into quite a bustling center for high-quality engineering schools.

      But I haven’t read much other fan fiction with the same values; most Trek fan fiction is centered around the main characters of the shows, usually in a romantic or sexual manner. Not that that’s bad, I just wish there was more general, plausible-for-a-show fiction too.

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