Morgan Bateson
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Yeah, really. I don't think the demographics of most any modern-day engineering school are anything the future should be aspiring towards gender-wise. :P
No one was saying she did it on purpose, or saying Carey had supremacist leanings. (Or misogynist, or racist, or anything.) But something doesn't have to be purposeful to be disappointing or to be worth mentioning. Most examples of things like this in fiction aren't purposeful, that doesn't mean they aren't worth pointing out.
I agree but in this world, it happens. In the future, no doubt there will be some aliens less prone to Starfleet service and once in a while some command crews may end up without a diverse senior staff. So long as that doesn't happen on purpose or isn't the norm, it isn't a big deal. We saw that in TOS many member races still weren't well integrated. Jumping to TNG and then to the relaunch times you see more diversity; the great thing about this adjustment is it shows the different races integrating and working together better.
Back to my college, it tried to reach out to females and minorities into engineering but you can throw out all the bait you like, if the fish don't want it they won't bite. If a large demographic doesn't care about my field, that doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that, on average, female engineers are paid less than their male counterparts. That inequality is wrong.
Anywho, love me some Bateson and I miss Diane Carey.
It's been several years since I read Ship of the Line, but mostly what I remember is that I got extremely tired of all the naval jargon. She laid it on pretty thick, to the point where it was very distracting. At least for me. And, as I recall, there were other issues that kept me from "buying in" to the story she was telling.
I liked a lot of Carey's earlier work, but this book really turned me off to her. YMMV.
No offense, Matthias, but I think the culture of most engineering students (I'm not including you in this, I'm just saying overall) might be part of what discourages women from entering that field. I came out of a Computer Science program myself at a school where it was treated essentially as a branch of engineering, and I can say that was certainly somewhat of a problem from a few students. And the fact that nationwide, the number of women entering graduate-level programs in the sciences outside engineering has pretty well equalized to if not surpassed the number of men certainly seems to point towards it being part of a problem with the culture of the field rather than the women simply not caring about engineering.
That is complete and absolute crap. Yes, if you plot the bell curves of the range of behaviors within men versus the range of behaviors within women, the average man is going to be slightly more in a certain direction than the average woman, but the curves as a whole are going to overlap by nearly their full width. The diversity within either sex hugely outweighs the slight difference between the averages.
There's something I'm missing in this whole discussion, and that's the assumption that Captain Bateson would have the same crew years later. Personally, and this is just me, it would make sense to disperse the Bozeman crew due to their 90 year gap. Think of the culture shock Scotty went through in "Relics." And that was just one man, not an entire crew. Hell, for all we know, some of the crew might have opted to do something outside of Starfleet, or at least off of a ship, given what they'd been through.
Furthermore, I remember someone posting that the Enterprise crew sticking together for so long is a bit of an anomaly. Granted, it is the flagship, but, at the least, the command crew should have experienced some turnover (especially if Riker accepted or was forced to accept his own command).
I'm not defending Carey's use of an all-male, all-Caucasian crew, just saying using what his crew looked like in "Cause and Effect" as an example of what it should have been 3 years later in Ship of the Line doesn't seem to fit, for me.
Furthermore, I remember someone posting that the Enterprise crew sticking together for so long is a bit of an anomaly. Granted, it is the flagship, but, at the least, the command crew should have experienced some turnover (especially if Riker accepted or was forced to accept his own command).
I'm not defending Carey's use of an all-male, all-Caucasian crew, just saying using what his crew looked like in "Cause and Effect" as an example of what it should have been 3 years later in Ship of the Line doesn't seem to fit, for me.
Which statement of mine, specifically, is complete and absolute crap?
It was said in the book that Bateson kept them together because being so far displaced, they felt the need to look after one another as they were the closest thing to family they had left. Picard also told Bateson that due to temporal displacement rules, Starfleet seniority was based upon commission date, not years of service; since Bateson would have the oldest commisssion date of sitting captains, he would be the most senior captain in the fleet. Bateson then used that seniority to keep his crew together and secure the captaincy of the E-E.
I don't know if that seniority rule is bunk or not. I'll bow to Christopher on that issue as the expert on temporal law.
Okay, I buy the "keeping the family together" aspect, but they'd still need to add in some officers who are familiar with contemporary tech, politics, etc. Especially in engineering and arguably in sickbay they'd need crew who were familiar with the technology, not crew members with working knowledge from 90 years ago. And, I'd imagine they'd need someone on the bridge to keep the Captain apprised of galactic politics. Someone to explain who the Ferengi are, who the Cardissans are, who the Borg are, why we're not at war/why we're at war again/why we're no longer at war with the Klingons, etc. Of course, as time went on, these crew members would be less and less necessary, but at least at the start, I'd hope Starfleet wouldn't send out the Bozeman crew without this knowledge. And that's after I assume they gave the crew a crash course in everything that's changed in the time the Bozeman's been away.
That was explained in SOTL. That very reasoning is WHY Bateson brought on many members from the D. He told Riker that the main reason he wanted him was because he was more technologically proficient than Bateson was.
BTW, loved when Bateson showed Riker that structural elements of the D were built into the E to guarantee she would not be forgotten. Also liked how the book mentioned that the E had a Battle Bridge.
BTW, loved when Bateson showed Riker that structural elements of the D were built into the E to guarantee she would not be forgotten. Also liked how the book mentioned that the E had a Battle Bridge.
I think the debate of the gender capability is one best left for another time and thread.
To me the entire plot of Ship of the Line felt Horatio Hornblower-esqe. I'd always assumed Carey must have been a fan and simply built her story around that kind of frame work, hence the heavy use of naval jargon and the all male senior staff
To me the entire plot of Ship of the Line felt Horatio Hornblower-esqe. I'd always assumed Carey must have been a fan and simply built her story around that kind of frame work, hence the heavy use of naval jargon and the all male senior staff
Huh? The all-male Ship of the Line bridge crew we're talking about is the crew that the book depicted the Bozeman as having before and during the events of "Cause and Effect." The actual Picard/Bateson conversation from the end of "Cause and Effect" is included in SotL, but in SotL the crew behind Bateson is all-male at the exact same moment that the episode explicitly showed it as mixed-gender.
Plus, as I've already pointed out twice, the novel erroneously characterizes the Typhon Expanse as a well-patrolled region on the UFP/Klingon border in 2278, when in fact C&E establishes it as uncharted space as of 2368. So the crew is not the only continuity problem here.
Okay, I missed that in the discussion. I read SotL over a decade ago, and like others here, didn't care for it that much to re-read it again. I didn't realize we were talking about that same scene. In which case, wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey?
Ship was deliberately Hornblower-esque.
Not only did Carey use a C.S. Forester title and quote from Forester's work, but Gabe Bush, Bateson's first officer, was a descendent of William Bush, Hornblower's First Lieutenant on the Hotspur, the Lydia, and the Sutherland.
Carey is a fan of the Age of Fighting Sail; the best parts of Ancient Blood are the holodeck scenes with Picard and Alexander aboard a Royal Navy ship during the American Revolution. I've wished for years that Carey would write an American fighting sail book or series. The problem is that there's not really a market for that; once you get past Forester and O'Brian, everything's small press in the genre.
So she apparently decided to shoehorn it into all her Trek novels, even changing stuff we saw on-screen to suit her purpose.
Carey is hardly the only ST author to "shoehorn" their personal passions into a ST novel.
And the Pocket editor and (then-)Viacom Licensing allowed the variation to onscreen information. So blame them.
I don't recall offhand when Ship of the Line came out, but it's worth keeping in mind that it's far easier to keep track of continuity details today, when we have Memory Alpha and TrekCore screencaps and DVD box sets and episodes streaming on Netflix, than it was in the days before all that became available. The genders of the extras behind Bateson is a detail that would've been easy to overlook if, hypothetically, Carey only had the episode script as reference (although that wouldn't explain the discrepancy about the Typhon Expanse).
Fair enough. I'm just not a fan of her work (as it should be quite apparent right now).
Carey is hardly the only ST author to "shoehorn" their personal passions into a ST novel.
And the Pocket editor and (then-)Viacom Licensing allowed the variation to onscreen information. So blame them.
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