A theme that always interested me since i read the TMP Novelization! Were they meant to be still homo sapiens? What information do we have about them and what happened to them? Are there novels or fanfiction stories with them?
The New Humans
- Thread starter Unimatrix Q
- Start date
As I understand, it was just one of Roddenberry's ideas in the TMP novelization that never materialized in the greater Trek pantheon. Basically, "New Humans" were just the humans living the modern lifestyle. You know, love instructors, optional last names, nudist parks, pet tigers, families visiting nudist parks with their pet tigers.
I always believed all thing Gene invented and brought into Trek were canon and imo the Group Conscious Thing hinted at some possible Evolution Factor. Wish they would be brought back into a Novel or someone would write a fanfic story about them!
If they needed "love instructors," New Humans must have been pretty dull to be around. Especially if they walked around naked all the time anyway! 
Found this: "New Humans In the early-23rd century, society was evolving to a point where large numbers of "New Humans", telepathically linked as a group mind, represented a sizable portion of Human society. Although more intelligent than normal humans, these people proved incapable of deep space exploration, lacking the ability to bear encounters with more advanced beings than themselves - for all their intelligence, aloofness was a hindrance to them."
It is my understanding that "love instructors" were not part of the New Human movement but rather humanity in general. Now while the idea of a "love instructor" might be strange to us. There are some cultures where it is common. I have a vague memory from an anthropology class that there is a tribe where the post-menopausal women take the young males who have recently passed into adulthood (probably age 13), and instruct them on how to please a woman. I would look it up, but I'm at work right now.
It is my understanding that "love instructors" were not part of the New Human movement but rather humanity in general. Now while the idea of a "love instructor" might be strange to us. There are some cultures where it is common. I have a vague memory from an anthropology class that there is a tribe where the post-menopausal women take the young males who have recently passed into adulthood (probably age 13), and instruct them on how to please a woman. I would look it up, but I'm at work right now.
With or without Sandmen?
Sound like an idea that got reworked into the Borg.
If they needed "love instructors," New Humans must have been pretty dull to be around. Especially if they walked around naked all the time anyway!
Is it clear that Kirk's parents were 'New Humans' - doesn't he make a reference to the Enterprise being crewed by 'throw-backs' or something similar?
If they needed "love instructors," New Humans must have been pretty dull to be around. Especially if they walked around naked all the time anyway!
Is it clear that Kirk's parents were 'New Humans' - doesn't he make a reference to the Enterprise being crewed by 'throw-backs' or something similar?
Kirk refers to himself as the member of a graduating class specifically picked for being "less mentally flexible" than previous classes.
The problem was that New Humans were so used to being part of a "true" collective that they didn't adapt well to the stratified, structured life of a Starfleet officer.
They also had a disturbing tendency to meet some unique new form of life with a different way of being and saying "I want me some of that", and off they went, abandoning their career (sometimes on the spot).
Decker's whole "merge with V'ger" thing is a prime example of the problems of "New Human" thinking.
There was (as I have recently been informed) one novel written featuring the New Humans, called Triangle. And yes, the similarities to Borg (or at least a cult) are very on display.
No, that's just normal 23rd-century humanity as Roddenberry saw it. The New Humans were a subgroup experimenting with collective consciousness.
Roddenberry himself would've been the last person to think that. He reinvented his own ideas all the time. When TMP came out, he claimed that Klingons had always had ridges and the show just hadn't depicted them correctly. The TMP novelization suggested that TOS was just an "inaccurately larger-than-life" dramatization of Kirk's real adventures and that TMP was a more accurate dramatization.
Canon is not the immutable word of God handed down from on high. It's just what ends up in the final work, which is the end result of a long process of trial and error and includes a lot of ideas that the creator will probably come to regret and rethink later on and will gladly change given the opportunity. No writer would ever believe their ideas to be immutable, because rethinking and revising and ditching the bad ideas is key to how writing works in the first place.
Roddenberry saw TMP as his opportunity to change or rework a lot of things about TOS that didn't satisfy him, because his thinking had changed in the intervening years. It had changed again by the time TNG came around, and he saw that as another opportunity to revise or ignore past mistakes. He wasn't married to the ideas he'd tossed into a novelization eight years before.
Think that through. Pro basketball players need basketball instructors. Great actors need acting instructors. Expertise doesn't just happen. How many skills are there in life that can't be improved by formal instruction?
Very probably not, since Roddenberry's involvement with TNG had become peripheral by the time Maurice Hurley invented the Borg. Group consciousnesses and hive minds have been a trope in science fiction for generations -- The Midwich Cuckoos, Foundation and Earth, Ender's Game, The Forever War, countless others.
I thought it was because of the Writer's Strike?
I wonder when did the New Humans appear on Earth and what influence did they have on human society and the federation? Could it be that they were already around during Star Trek Enterprise?
Yep. Sadly, out of all the new TMP races Marshak and Culbreath chose to feature in "Triangle", they chose the Zaranites, which seemingly had an insectoid carapace and breathed fluorine gas! The "Triangle" Zaranites are quite humanoid.
I always guessed that Will Decker's mother was the New Human advocate in his family, perhaps in reaction to Matt Decker's fate?
http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/New_Human
There were also short-term marriage contracts, right? It's been ages, but weren't Kirk and Ciana married, but only for two years, after which they opted not to renew? An interesting idea that was also never seen again.
^I think marriage contracts were also mentioned in The Entropy Effect, along with the stuff about group marriage. It was a bit of social futurism that I think I've seen in a fair amount of SF from the '70s and '80s, the idea that marriage would become a renewable contract rather than a lifetime commitment -- presumably extrapolated from rising divorce rates.
And, of course, Roddenberry's most in-depth exploration of the "love instructor" concept can be found in Pretty Maids All in a Row . . . .
Not sure that's quite what he had in mind for Kirk's mother...
Similar threads
- Poll
