Actually, the books do a pretty good job of hiding the wizard in world in our own. This was an era pre smart phones and cameras everywhere. It was also Britain. The best bit of tying the two together occurs when we see a Prime Minister who is basically Tony Blair, meeting the Wizrding Worlds equivalent. The point is, there’s magic. So you can hide a high street behind a pub. Given that you can hide streets behind or under things already in Britain, (go to Edinburgh, see the one under the ground...) it’s not so big of leap, especially back then. The thing the books eventually downplayed following the lead of the films, was the extremely mixed or anachronistic dress...leading to slightly anachronistic, and wizards at large in the muggle world basically looking like the older attendees of the New Age festivals that did the rounds in the nineties.
Maybe it’s not plausible now, maybe the nineties was about the last time you could set a story with hidden worlds, but it was that mix of real and unreal that really worked. (See also St.Mungos)
Rowling made an effort, I'll give her that... and the fact that the thing being hidden was
magic does make it seem superficially more plausible. But we're still talking about a conspiracy that would require essentially
everyone who knew about it to keep the secret. Perfectly. For centuries. And that's not just some small cabal of people, it's a whole culture — with cohorts of indeterminate size in other countries, as well, as indicated by (e.g.) the provenance of the other Triwizard teams. And it's not just satisfied participants in that culture, but factions at odds with it as well, like the Death Eaters. And it's not just magic users, but any muggles who are in on it as well — including people like (e.g.) Prime Ministers, as well as the parents, family members, and friends of those born with powers, inevitably including people with little or no incentive to cooperate, like the Dursleys. And it's not just adults, but children as well, who are notoriously bad at keeping secrets. And it's not even just human beings, but animals as well, including a wide variety of less-than-intelligent and conspicuously less-than-cooperative creatures.
Basically, there is
no way it could possibly be a secret. I enjoy the books, but still... chalk it up to the fact that I first read them as an adult rather than a kid, perhaps, but it's an aspect of the concept I could never swallow for a second.
If one ... points out that it isn't true, well of course it isn't, it's fiction, but that completely misses the point in my view.
Well, fine. That's your view. Reasonable people can disagree.
I grew up reading comic books. But I knew, of course, that super-heroes weren't actually flying around out there, not even in the big cities. One of the things I loved about DC (back in the pre-
Crisis days) was the way it distinguished clearly between the world its readers inhabited (Earth-Prime) and the world(s) where its stories took place (Earth-1, -2, -X, and so on). It made perfect sense to me, even as a kid.
Considering your remarks about Harry Potter, you seem to understand 'our world' much more strictly than most people here. It is roughly our world.
I'm not sure what you mean by "strictly" and "roughly" in this context. A world is either the actual reality we inhabit, or one that's different from it because fictional events are true. It can't be both; the mere fact that a story exists
as fiction sets its world apart (aside from stories that deliberately play with that concept, like the delightful film
Stranger Than Fiction).
The only question is the extent of the difference. A lot of fictional worlds are by authorial intent almost indistinguishable from ours. (Is that what you mean by "roughly"? If so, I would argue that Trek's world is not even roughly our own. The differences are pretty stark. It's not remotely
mimetic litfic, nor trying to be; it's SF, which is categorically different.)
When most people say "it's set in the future" they mean ours, naturally with the imagination engaged.
I'm loathe to generalize about what most people think. At the very least, I'd submit that those who think that way are not regular readers or viewers of SF, because anyone who
is takes it for granted that there's never just a single version of "the future."
The producers clearly think so too, and always have.
Not so clearly. After all, as I've already mentioned, they told a story
in 1968 in which the US was about to launch a nuclear weapons platform into space in 1968, which was manifestly not the case at the time (or ever).
I have never ever liked villains that are seen as a mere plague - civilizations are infinitely more interesting than zombies. Both the Borg and Cybermen were a civilization, with a culture. Then they were turned into mere locusts. ... Why modern writers don't get this, and keep stepping over cultural limitations, boiling every technical civilization down into plagues, I have no idea. It has never been particularly interesting.
I largely concur with you there. The latter is far less interesting. But, unfortunately, it does seem to be easier to write.
We know that Eugenics War was the same as WWIII, and that was retconned to mid 21st century in TNG, space ships tech should probably be considered to be retconned to the later date too.
Actually, in context (even just considering TOS), the exchange in "Space Seed"...
SPOCK: Records of that period are fragmentary, however. The mid-1990s was the era of your last so-called World War.
MCCOY: The Eugenics Wars.
SPOCK: Of course. Your attempt to improve the race through selective breeding.
...can be read as McCoy taking the opportunity to correct Spock on a point of detail, something he was always happy to do. His use of the plural ("wars") rather than singular ("war") underscores that. Spock's knowledge of Earth's military history is less than perfect, after all, as evidenced by his later remarks in "Bread and Circuses" ...
SPOCK: They do seem to have escaped the carnage of your first three world wars, Doctor.
MCCOY: They have slavery, gladiatorial games, despotism.
SPOCK: Situations quite familiar to the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on?
...in which his death toll figures (for the first two, obviously) are drastically incorrect. (World War I killed over 18 million, WWII over 60 million).
And then of course there was also the ambiguous reference in "Savage Curtain" to "Colonel Green, who led a genocidal war early in the 21st century on Earth." All in all, it made sense to regard WWIII as a 21st-century conflict separate from the Eugenics Wars, even before TNG came along and cemented that in "Farpoint." And regardless, even if you take that as a retcon, it wouldn't be legitimate to extrapolate it to any impact on spaceflight history, since even
after that, in "Neutral Zone," broadcast in 1988, the
Enterprise-D encountered a spacecraft with cryogenic capsules preserving people that it explicitly dated to the 1990s.
My operating principle with continuity (just as with law) is that when texts seemingly conflict, it's preferable to reconcile them to the greatest possible extent, and not discard or overturn anything that can logically be retained. Saying "Or it was a retcon... get over it" is not a counter-argument, any more than "the legislature obviously must have intended to contradict that other law." More inclusive interpretations are available.
I'm really kind of astonished that out of my (quite long) earlier post, this of all things is the bit that got people talking. To me it's hardly even a matter for debate. I'm with BillJ:
Star Trek is Star Trek. If you're going to ignore huge chunks of its story, then what's the point? ... I doubt any real consideration was given to keeping Trek as "our future". That train left the tracks a long time ago.
. Totally mutate-able
