The one that immediately comes to mind was in Mosaic, where as a cadet Janeway gets set up on a blind date with Riker. Seemed like the only reason for it was to toss in a familiar TNG character.
Small Universe Syndrome
- Thread starter William Leisner
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Yes, but that's a knock-on effect of having three simultaneous series about the same organization -- a lot of these characters would have/should have crossed paths in the Academy. Riker, La Forge, Janeway, Sisko, Chakotay, Calhoun (from New Frontier) -- they were all at the Academy in either the same class (Riker, Janeway, and Calhoun) or within a year or two of one another (Sisko and Chakotay entered a year ahead of Riker, La Forge a year after, assuming I'm remembering this correctly). If there's a single Starfleet Academy campus, it's entirely possible that a group of characters knew and crossed paths repeatedly over a period of three or four years.
Starfleet, being an organization to protect 150 worlds scattered across 8,000 lightyears, and to explore new worlds beyond that space, is definately way too big for that. And on most universities, if you're only a trimester apart, you never meet. Crossing paths occasionally on the way to the cantina, yes. Knowing them, no.
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Jarod, I'm inclined to agree with you, that Starfleet must, because of the volume of space the Federation controls, be rather significant in size.
At the same time, however, the various series give the sense that it's maybe a thousand ships at most, and more likely closer to 500. If the fleet is under a thousand ships, then Starfleet Academy would have a student body of roughly the same size as the United States Naval Academy, in which case it's absolutely possible that everyone knows everyone's name.
Well, the other thing that confuses the issue -- is everyone an officer, or are there enlisted personnel? If everyone has to go through the Academy, then the Academy would by necessity be several orders of magnitude larger than the Naval Academy would be.
At the same time, however, the various series give the sense that it's maybe a thousand ships at most, and more likely closer to 500. If the fleet is under a thousand ships, then Starfleet Academy would have a student body of roughly the same size as the United States Naval Academy, in which case it's absolutely possible that everyone knows everyone's name.
Well, the other thing that confuses the issue -- is everyone an officer, or are there enlisted personnel? If everyone has to go through the Academy, then the Academy would by necessity be several orders of magnitude larger than the Naval Academy would be.
Only if you read all of them.
Every time someone puts out a novel with lots of original characters (or new UFP alien races), just as many people end up complaining that they don't wish to have to get to know so many brand new characters and aliens when the Star Trek tapestry is already full of neglected characters who perhaps only got the one chance to be in a canonical episode or movie.
I'm one of the people who was talking about this in that thread, so I'm a bit sorry to say that I have a hard time really nailing down where the line exists for me. What Christopher said, upthread, makes for a pretty good set of guidelines.
What I'm looking for is a balance between avoiding needless replication of concepts and avoiding "too much" coincidence, and like any balance issue it's elusive.
One problem is that what might work in a given book can be undercut by other books that are out there. For instance there was a stretch several years ago in which I felt like Scotty was showing up in nearly every TNG era novel I read. Each of those appearances might have worked for me on its own (and to be honest I don't remember specific books well enough to be sure they would or wouldn't have), but one after the other it just started seeming silly. Now this was back when there was generally no continuity between books, but even so, a reader is going to remember "I've seen this before" and react accordingly. Was Scotty the only engineer in the galaxy? And was he really a better engineer than so many engineers native to the 24th Century who, if his work was so much better than anything else going in the 23rd Century, presumably would have that work and whatever refinements had been made on it in the 75 or so years that he was stuck in a transporter buffer.
On the other end, too many connections or crossovers in one book can be a problem. A few people have cited Countdown as an example, and I agree. Any one, maybe any two of the TNG characters (who were scattered all over the galaxy coming together in that story) I could buy, but four of them feels silly. What must be the odds that Data's former shipmate is in command of the Klingon fleet he encounters while ferrying around an Ambassador who happens to be both his own former Captain and the former captain of the Klingon commander, and, in another coincidence, the proposed solution to the adventure involves a ship designed by another former shipmate of all three. I mean, really, what did it add to the story to have Geordi design the Jellyfish? Was whatever that was worth the cost in credulity of jamming yet another TNG main character in?
This sort of thing triggers for me when several otherwise-unconnected minor or guest characters get drawn into a given story. I've not read the Eugenics Wars series, but what I'm reading here tells me it's a good example of what I mean. The Genesis Wave series had Maltz and Leah Brahms as main characters. I guess Maltz made some sense with his Search for Spock connection to Genesis, but I didn't see what was added by involving another character who had had a completely unrelated connection to an adventure by the crew of an Enterprise.
My only 'small universe' problem with the fact that if a species/spacecraft/anomaly has been encountered before its by the Enterprise/Voyager/Defiant. I mean what the hell are the other 74,000 plus ships in Starfleet doing that requires these eight ships and only these eight ships to do all the exploration?
Yeah, I think it's largely a question of dosage, with the difficulty being: different readers will be getting different dosages, depending on which books they choose to read and how many.
Within a specific story or set of stories, I think the mirror universe offers a pretty good point of comparison. The occasional visit to the mirror universe can be a lot of fun. No one is going to complain that alternate versions of characters pop up, because that is the whole point of going to that universe. However, in my experience frequent mirror universe encounters tend to become stale rather quickly. The fun's over, the device wears thin, and running into alternate characters becomes boring.
Tie-in appearances are basically the same. Initially, known Trek characters popping up will just seem like a natural side-effect of visiting the Trek universe. The more it happens, the more artificial the device seems, and it becomes gradually less entertaining as a result.
It was fun to have the Enterprise crew on DS9 in the Avatar novels, for example. This worked because fans of the series had never had a chance to see this, and logically it would have happened at some point, so it felt natural and very satisfying.
I agree that Lives of Dax was an example of the device being overdone. It felt like the character was getting edited into old photos or film footage of historical events a la Zelig, which was of course what was happening, but without the ironic intent.
That's not quite right either. The novel has four sections spanning nine years: one covering the loss of the Stargazer and Picard's court-martial in 2355; one covering an archaeological expedition in 2358-59; one covering the aftermath of that expedition in 2360, including a starship mission; and one covering a climactic set of events in 2363, with an epilogue showing the launch of the Enterprise-D at the start of 2364. Guinan is a catalyst of the events of Part 2 and plays a key role in Part 4. Data is a major player in Part 3. Deanna is involved in Part 4, but doesn't meet Guinan.
Kathryn Janeway plays a role in Part 2, which leads to a one-sentence reference late in Part 4 to Picard thinking of her as a potential first officer for the E-D, something that doesn't go anywhere since she's unavailable.
I don't think The Buried Age is a case of SUS, because these aren't coincidental cameos. The point was specifically to show how Picard got from the Stargazer to the Enterprise and how and why he chose his command crew. The book is, in part, an origin story for TNG. These are people that Picard encounters at various times over the course of nine years, and they never meet each other until they board the Enterprise. We know canonically that Picard and Guinan had a close, long-standing friendship, so it was logical that she would be included. We know that Data looked to Picard as a mentor and Picard seemed somewhat more accepting of Data than most people in Starfleet, so a prior history seemed logical there. And we know that Picard is not the sort to open up to people easily, so given his trust in Deanna Troi as a confidante, it seemed that he must have known her before the Enterprise.
There are also appearances from other characters from Picard's past, such as Gregory Quinn, Donald Varley, J. P. Hansen, and Professor Langford (mentioned in passing in "Rascals"). But these weren't random cameos either. We knew these people were old friends and colleagues of Picard, so it stood to reason that, in a book covering nine whole years of Picard's life, they would show up here and there. And given that they were old friends of Picard's, it was justified to include them in order to explore those friendships and add some history to them.
As for Janeway, she and Picard seemed friendly in Nemesis, and the novel Homecoming established that they had met before. So it stood to reason that she would've played a role in Picard's past at some point. Besides, that portion of the novel called for a Starfleet science officer to play a fairly major role, and it seemed more fitting to use an established character with some resonance with the readers than to make up an original character. There are plenty of other original characters in the book.
If anything, I'd say that the closest I came to a gratuitous cameo was having Picard's defender in the Stargazer court-martial be T'Lara, the admiral who presided over Worf's trial in DS9: "Rules of Engagement" 17 years later.
I often try to work in references to discoveries and adventures of other starships. I think that in Ex Machina, I mention an artificial intelligence discovered by Commodore Wesley on the Lexington, and in Orion's Hounds, I mention a couple of Klingon encounters with vampire clouds of the same species seen in "Obsession."
About Countdown, it wasn't the Picard or Geordi cameos that bothered me. It was Worf's. Though I admit it was cool to see him appear, as it was for all the other cameos, it just didn't make sense that he would be a Klingon general. That was way too much.
As for Geordi, since the Jellyfish is an engineering marvel, I can see Geordi, or Torres, or Scotty, or maybe O'Brien being involved in making it. I like the idea of Picard being an ambassador, but it seems like they would put him in a more important place to get better use out of his talents, like say post-War Cardassia.
I didn't mind Data, but I don't like the idea of Data essentially assimilating B-4. Why not just have Geordi build a new android body and transfer Data's memories to it? It just felt wrong for Data to take over B-4 like that, esp. since B-4 had his own personality.
I guess there is a tendency sometimes to overdo it, but I generally like cameos and tying things together. That's one of the cool things about Elias Vaughn. He can be used from TOS-DS9 eras and beyond, so there's a lot of people he could interact with, and he's a familiar character that might provide a good POV into some Trek historical moments, like the excellent novel on the Tomed Incident or the Betreka Nebula Incident.
As for Geordi, since the Jellyfish is an engineering marvel, I can see Geordi, or Torres, or Scotty, or maybe O'Brien being involved in making it. I like the idea of Picard being an ambassador, but it seems like they would put him in a more important place to get better use out of his talents, like say post-War Cardassia.
I didn't mind Data, but I don't like the idea of Data essentially assimilating B-4. Why not just have Geordi build a new android body and transfer Data's memories to it? It just felt wrong for Data to take over B-4 like that, esp. since B-4 had his own personality.
I guess there is a tendency sometimes to overdo it, but I generally like cameos and tying things together. That's one of the cool things about Elias Vaughn. He can be used from TOS-DS9 eras and beyond, so there's a lot of people he could interact with, and he's a familiar character that might provide a good POV into some Trek historical moments, like the excellent novel on the Tomed Incident or the Betreka Nebula Incident.
SUS or not, I have to mention something I really appreciate. I really dig that Christopher L. Bennett publishes annotations for his books on his website. It fun to read the book or chapters and then cross reference back and see if you picked up all the background stuff. Heck, it sometimes leads me off to read other things.
Do any of the other authors do something similar?
Thanks
Do any of the other authors do something similar?
Thanks
^ A bunch of other authors have annotations on their respective websites.
http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Author's_annotations
(Sadly, my annotations are no longer available, since AOL did away with their service, and I have yet to get around to finding someplace else to put them.)
http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Author's_annotations
(Sadly, my annotations are no longer available, since AOL did away with their service, and I have yet to get around to finding someplace else to put them.)
Okay, I'm gonna take on the thankless task of defending Small Universe Syndrome (to a degree).
To be honest, I tend to assume that people buy STAR TREK books because they want to read about Picard or Spock or Major Kira or whomever, not Captain Mimsey O'Roarke of the U.S.S. Asparagus. Sure, in theory, there are other ships and engineers and Klingons out there, but the various series aren't about them. If I want to read a space opera featuring a bunch of brand new characters, I'll pick up a Peter Hamilton novel. When I read Trek, I want to see Scotty save the day, not some anonymous engineer I've never heard of before.
To use a weird analogy: Sherlock Holmes probably didn't investigate every crime in Victorian London, but if pick up a Sherlock Holmes novel, I want Holmes and Watson and Moriarity and Lestrade, etc.
Tie-in novels are, to some degree, about the comforts of the familiar. So if I see a chance to bring back an old character or alien species, I usually take it.
To be honest, I tend to assume that people buy STAR TREK books because they want to read about Picard or Spock or Major Kira or whomever, not Captain Mimsey O'Roarke of the U.S.S. Asparagus. Sure, in theory, there are other ships and engineers and Klingons out there, but the various series aren't about them. If I want to read a space opera featuring a bunch of brand new characters, I'll pick up a Peter Hamilton novel. When I read Trek, I want to see Scotty save the day, not some anonymous engineer I've never heard of before.
To use a weird analogy: Sherlock Holmes probably didn't investigate every crime in Victorian London, but if pick up a Sherlock Holmes novel, I want Holmes and Watson and Moriarity and Lestrade, etc.
Tie-in novels are, to some degree, about the comforts of the familiar. So if I see a chance to bring back an old character or alien species, I usually take it.
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Personally, I have no problem with "SUS" as long as the character being there makes sense. If a character with no connection to plot pops up just to be there, that annoys me, but so far I haven't really run into that with any of the stuff I've read. But I've only read like 2 or 3 books published before '02, and I haven't read any of the cameo heavy books like Eugeinics Wars yet. The most cameo heavy book that I can think of that I've read is The Art of the Impossible, and I loved the way KRAD tied all of the characters into the story.
I agree with this. But I also think that the cameo characters (and places) and those that are relatively unimportant to the particular story could be new ones so that the number of coincidences can be reduced. Unless it is a big epic story where "the fates have brought these people together for some grand purpose" or something (and then again, not every story should be of this type).
That's true, and that's why I used Janeway in The Buried Age instead of a new science officer. But I think the key is to balance it, because some readers are going to like the familiar while others are going to find too much coincidence to be annoying. So it's best to have a mix of familiar and new characters, races, and other elements. Give the audience characters they know and have an interest in, but make those characters part of a larger world that feels like it's not made up exclusively of people and things we've seen onscreen. And give those characters good in-universe reasons for being involved rather than just making a Charles Dickens novel out of it and have them keep running into each other by coincidence.
Oh this has got to be worth a series...!!
Time to get to work on the proposal! (Which will, of course, feature a cameo appearance by Khan's long-lost twin brother . . . .)
Absolutely agree with this! I love me some Peter Hamilton for space opera stuff! But when I want to feel at home I go with some Star Trek. I think that might be a some of my concern about new books in new Trek timeline (movie). How much of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc personalities will be there? I know in the movies there was much of it there and some new aspects as well. Anyway, I digress, sorry.
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