In (I think) Unworthy, B'elanna mentions an officer on one of the other ships who has a child about Miral's age. I get that Miral and Michael Owen have to be there because plot, and also since in the original mission, Miral and B'elanna weren't supposed to be there,
Frustrations with Trek lit...
- Thread starter Overgeeked
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Regarding the latter, JMS's general philosophy regarding kids on B5 was basically, "No kids or cute robots, ever...unless we get to drop a boulder on them by episode's end."
Yeah, but that was because of presentation, wasn't it? Like, he wanted to avoid that sort of shameless audience appeal stuff that other shows dip into. But it was literally supposed to be a city in space, I can't believe that there actually weren't any kids on board. I mean, it had 250,000 people, it wouldn't make sense for there to not be a significant number of kids.
Planets are not guaranteed to be safe. There are earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes and plagues and asteroid impacts and who knows what else. Not to mention how many people die every day just driving to work. At least on a starship you're surrounded by top-of-the-line defenses and trained defenders. As long as it's a vessel whose primary mission is exploration rather than actively seeking combat, I don't accept the assumption that it's intrinsically more dangerous than everyday life.
But it's not. The stardrive/battle section was specifically designed to be an independent combat vessel in its own right, with all the power and weapons it needed to do that job. It just happened to be mated to a saucer-shaped research station that it carried around on its neck and could leave behind when it needed to go into battle. The idea was that the battle section would be more effective in combat without the saucer, because it would be lighter and more maneuverable and able to devote all its power to battle instead of needing to handle life support, shielding, etc. for that massive habitat section. Consider how compact the Defiant is in DS9. Smaller can be better for a battleship.
This whole idea that the ship is more effective in combat with both hulls is nothing but a retcon after the fact to justify the visual-effects producers' desire to stop working with the separable model. It goes against the original intent of the design. After all, the battle section has the warp engines, which are immensely more powerful than the saucer's impulse engines. Having the same warp engine power with less mass to move around hardly seems like a loss to me.
On the contrary, it was heavily armed specifically for the purpose of defending the crew. The saucer had wraparound phaser strips both above and below and an aft-firing torpedo tube in the undercut (since it would mainly need to fire on a pursuer while retreating). In fact, the saucer had considerably more phaser coverage than the battle section did. Again, this is exactly how it was designed to work, so of course all of this was considered in the design.
Also, I think the idea was supposed to be that if the ship needed to go into battle, they would leave the saucer section and the civilians behind someplace safe before going to where the battle was. That's pretty much what Geordi did in "The Arsenal of Freedom." It's just that the separation maneuver was used so rarely that the real intention didn't really have a chance to come across.
The inciting incident of the attack was their assimilation of Future-Janeway and the anti-Borg weapon she'd infected herself with. Add that in to Locutus giving the crew of the Enterprise a path to hack into the collective, and it makes sense that they'd start being careful with what they ate when it came to the Federation.
IIRC, that very strategic change is what allowed their invasion to last more than five minutes. The away team at the end of Greater Than the Sum was carrying the weapon they intended to deliver to the Borg, so even if they couldn't inject it properly, it still would've hit them when one of the crew was assimilated. Destroying rather than assimilating paid big dividends from the moment they switched over.
This is correct, but JMS was speaking more from the general standpoint of storyline -- there were indeed many, many kids aboard the B5 station over the five years of the series, but JMS simply kept them tucked away unseen where they wouldn't intrude upon the more "adult" happenings in the storyline.
Once in a blue moon we got to see a child very briefly here and there (such as the kid to whom Franklin returns the ball while fighting off drug-withdrawal in "Walkabout"), and there was the one episode where the child actually plays a key role in the storyline ("Believers"), but of course the kid still gets it in the end.
That may also go to my point, though. The stardrive had two forward torpedo tubes, one aft tube, and inconsistently had phaser banks on the nacelles. There may have been others, but I don't remember ever seeing them used on the series and if they were mentioned in the Technical Manual, it's been probably 20 years since I last looked at it, if not longer. That doesn't really give them that great of a firing arc, especially to cover the stern.
I also always thought that, however powerful they may be, the saucer phasers fired too slowly to be useful against multiple targets. Perhaps I've just being spoiled by the Defiant's pulse phasers and the more heavily armed ships that Starfleet started cranking out post-Wolf 359. Whatever this says about my mindset, the Galaxy-class now seems more like a hotel out of the 80s.
I would expect a big ole space station that was a port of call, home away from home for diplomats, hustlers...to have kids there. Heck, at least families of the diplomatic staff and civilian businesspeople if not any of the military personnel. I think his decision to keep them mostly off screen was a wise one, as was the decision to find a ship far, far from the center of the fleet to keep Boxey. But B5 is a place I'd expect kids to be. I just don't think they'd be common on ships of the line.
The stardrive section has a phaser strip along the front of the "cobra hood" of the dorsal, two small phaser strips on the rear of the hood, another long strip running laterally across the belly of the ship, two short strips each on both the top and the bottom of the aft fantail, and two strips along the nacelle pylons at the point of curvature. They had plenty of coverage in all directions. Andrew Probert did actually know what he was doing when he designed it.
All the more reason it makes sense to use them strictly for defending the saucer population rather than for aggressive action. The saucer was meant to be either left behind before combat or defended by the battle section while it retreated from the combat zone, leaving the battle section free to engage.
The Starfleet maxim according to the original TNG writers' bible was "Any military operation is automatically a failure of the ship's mission." That's making the mistake of equating "military" with "combat," but the idea was that fighting was an absolute last resort for a fleet whose primary mission was peaceful contact and diplomacy. Personally I'm far fonder of that idea than of the overly militaristic direction the franchise has taken since then.
Yeah, IIRC Patel was the only Golden original to survive the purge, wasn't she? (And I believe she's still around to this day...)
I miss Jarem Kaz.
Well, not every reader is going to be willing or able to do that. So from a writer's standpoint, the goal should be to make sure that a story is understandable entirely on its own terms without requiring the reader to consult anything else. It can be helpful to refresh your memory of other works if you like, but it shouldn't be mandatory. Writing a story that way would just confuse and alienate many readers.
When I was in grade school, my English teachers always stressed that in essay writing, I should never assume the reader already knew something, and should always be sure to cite all relevant information. Better to be redundant than to leave out something important.
As for the Dresden Files, I disagree and sort of don't. If you read the Desden Files out of order, you DO spoil the series. That is a series that is not able to be read out of order. For example, you could pick a book at random and find out some character is dead and maybe how that character died or you can find out what a character is doing now and then when you read an earlier book, you find things are different and thus, you know how things will be (up to a point) and that's spoiling the series.
Most of the time when you get someone saying a series of books can be read out of order, they really can't. While the main plot might be standalone, there are other things in the book that are not standalone. There could be a reference to something that happened in a previous book hat would be a spoiler.
For myself, I read in order because I don't want to risk being spoiled. All it takes is as little as a single sentence to be spoiled.
An example of a spoiler. "I wish Joe Bloggs was still alive."
This it totally the way to do it, I agree 100%. However, does it actually happen or do writers end up going too far down the metaphorical rabbit hole? Are the ST ongoing series really open to all?
I think if I were editor I'd have the books do this the same way TV shows do, and just put a "Previously on..." at the beginning of the book. If you remember the backstory already, you can just skip it. If you need to be reminded, it's there for you.
I suppose the counterargument there is that seeing that at the beginning would be unwelcoming to new readers, but I feel like a lot of the books are pretty unwelcoming to new readers anyway.
I suppose the counterargument there is that seeing that at the beginning would be unwelcoming to new readers, but I feel like a lot of the books are pretty unwelcoming to new readers anyway.
Now, that's how Doctor Who books were in the '90's and up to the relaunch in '05. The continuity that had developed not just in the Virgin NA's but then the BBC Eighth Doctor novels was labyrinthine and impenetrable to new readers. Interestingly, when the series relaunched again in '05, and ever since, the BBC has had a policy of no ongoing continuity in the new series novels. They follow what's happening in the TV series of course, so companions and Doctor is always concurrent with what's on TV, but any ongoing plot lines have been eschewed in favour of just telling a story from that contemporary universe.
Honestly, No.
Imagine what would happen to someone if they picked up a DS9 novel.. and the only character they recognized was Quark. Or a TNG Novel expecting it to be like the show.
I have had this exact issue trying to get new readers into the books.
There are loads of people who are going to jump on this with "Have them read one of the older, numbered ones!" The problem is.. the older, numbered ones are not in the stores right now. The books that are currently in release bear no resemblance to the series name that is printed on the cover. That is why I was saying we need to release a couple set during the run of the show.
For what it's worth, I have given casual Star Trek: TNG watchers the Destiny trilogy, and they've uniformly loved it. Even without having seen some of the TNG movies or DS9 or Enterprise, in a couple cases. So it's certainly possible for writing to be good enough that it overcomes the lack of backstory.
Even still, I do think getting into the novels is hard for new readers. Even trying to jump in on something like The Fall, a big event that you might think would be a good spot like Destiny would be, the first three books are all built around conclusions to previous long-running plotlines. I bet you'd be totally lost.
Even still, I do think getting into the novels is hard for new readers. Even trying to jump in on something like The Fall, a big event that you might think would be a good spot like Destiny would be, the first three books are all built around conclusions to previous long-running plotlines. I bet you'd be totally lost.
To illustrate that point... Destiny was EIGHT YEARS AGO.
Well, there's always a difference between the ideal and the execution. As with everything, some attempts are more successful than others. And whether a given attempt is successful is in the eye of the beholder. We can just try the best we can, and keep trying to do better.
Not just to new readers. I collected them regularly at first, but when money got tighter and I couldn't afford to keep up, it got to the point that I just couldn't follow the narrative anymore and stopped buying them. There was this 5-part arc that I never actually read the last 2 parts of, the one that began (?) with The Left-Handed Hummingbird. I did get a couple of later ones -- First Frontier and Human Nature, and maybe one or two others that I didn't keep -- but there were references it was hard to keep straight. It didn't help that some of the Missing Adventures tied into the NA continuity as well.
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