I've been a Trek fan all my life, I'd never heard the pitch fore Hopeship till today. Sauce: Screen Rant: Strange New Worlds Fulfills 1 Gene Roddenberry Star Trek Character Wish. https://screenrant.com/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-dr-mbenga-backstory/ Was this really a thing? If so, 10yrs from now, 2032 after SNW has run its course, and time allotted for his run on TOS, this show may someday still happen. [Note to mods, please fix title to read "unproduced" darn autocorrect got me]
Its something that could definitely happen in the future. If its supposed to be a spinoff series for M’Benga, the seeds could be planted with references to the ship in SNW.
Beverly Crusher could be the captain of the USS HOPE in season 3 of PICARD. I’d like to see here officially (not just in an alternate timeline) in that type of role.
The only published source I can find that mentions Darlene Hartman and Hopeship in the context of Star Trek is one of Marc Cashman's These Are the Voyages books. Not my idea of a reliable source, given that in the first book he included a fake book cover from a Deviant Art page and presented it as a real book. When told it was not a real book, he doubled down, even though all anyone would have to do is check Books in Print. So I for one do not believe Roddenberry was anywhere near collaborating with someone with no industry credits or experience other than writing some Christian stuff, who lived far from Hollywood. I mean, really... if Roddenberry had given 30 seconds of thought to the idea of having a Star Trek spinoff with a black lead character, by the 1970s he would have gone on and on about his visionary concept that was just too progressive for Hollywood. Not to mention that Cashman describes her as "a successful and well regarded science fiction author." That's more than a bit of a generous overstatement. I also don't get the appeal of a Star Trek medical series. I can think of one or two lit SF writers who managed to keep a medical space opera series going in book form (James White and... I think there was one other, but darned if I remember who). But considering how Starfleet's medical technology and capabilities change from one story to another as the plot dictates, it'd be hard to keep a consistent level of medical tech -- and suspense for the patients -- on a regular basis. I think medical stories work better as a once a season thing in the mix of a regular Trek series.
Being generous, the extent of the "development" of the idea was a thirty-second conversation between Hartman and Roddenberry in which she mentioned the idea briefly ("Maybe NBC will want a Star Trek spin-off? You could do something with M'Benga and the medical corps.") and Roddenberry politely listened to and then forgot five minutes later. It's big in her mind -- it's her idea -- but he had absolutely no involvement or interest in it, and so it was forgotten completely. I didn't know what this referred to, so I had to Google it, and how could he possibly think that "Arena" cover was real? Yeah. Star Trek is not a hard-sf universe. It occasionally resembles one, but that's by accident more than anything.
Fanlore references the similarity between 1973 science fiction novel, All the Gods of Eisernon by Simon Lang (pseudonym of Darlene Artell Hartman) to Star Trek. [The Halkan Council 20/21, a fan publication, was published in Aug 1976]. The paperback of the Lang novel is dated 1977. Book 1 of The Einai (or Skipjack) series. Hopeship is Book 5. https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Halkan_Council/Issues_20-27 Fanlore notes that the story includes a starship captain named Riker and his half-human science officer named Marik. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Simon_Lang Cashman's book mentions Hartman's TOS script submission for "Shol" (shelved when "The Apple" came in, with a similar story) supposedly introduced M'Benga? https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Undeveloped_Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series_episodes#"Shol"