Characters or situations you'd like to see in the books?

[The Laughing Vulcan]

I wonder what Klingon Scientologists would be like. Tom K'ruuz!

 

[Geoff Thorne]

But, when comparing the sorts of stories and their relative impact, there is a hierarchy and a continuum.

The "story" of Jesus has more cultural, more tangible, practical impact than that of Dionysus, even in Greece, where the latter was worshipped for longer than the former. Dionysus is a figure of myth. Jesus is the founder of an ongoing faith. He is not a mythological figure despite his similarities to Dionysus.

Again, you're drawing a black-and-white distinction that ignores a wealth of historical and philosophical subtleties. It's the overlap, the ambiguity between history and myth, that offers endless possibilities for a storyteller exploring how cultures differ from one another in their way of looking at the world. And to me, that's the most fascinating part of writing science fiction, as well as the most fascinating part of studying history.

For all we know, the mythic figure of Dionysus may indeed have been based on some historic cult founder (and aren't you now contradicting your earlier argument, wherein you insisted that every myth was based on a historical reality?).

Nope.

Either a physical phenomenon or human activity. But we'll get to that...

And there's actually some debate about whether Jesus really lived, at least in the generation he's supposed to have lived. All the gospels were written at least a generation after his supposed lifespan, and there are only one or two known extra-Biblical references to his existence (I think Tacitus mentioned him briefly once). There probably was a man who was the basis for our cultural-founder figure of Jesus Christ, but most of the specifics of his life as told in the Bible and folklore are mythologizations, in the same way that Washington chopping down the tree is. Many aspects of the Biblical account of Jesus's life appear to be adapted from the myths surrounding earlier, similar religious figures such as Mithras and Moses. (The gospel that tells of him being spirited away to escape the slaughter of the innocents is essentially a retelling of Moses's "origin story"; the writer of that gospel was probably intending to say that Jesus was the Messiah, the new Moses who would lead the Jewish people to freedom from their oppressors, by the allegorical means of inventing a biography that paralleled that of Moses. Contrary to what the Biblical literalists believe today, people in that culture had a tradition of favoring allegorical and symbolic writing over literal accounts. To them, the distinction we draw between "truth" and "myth" would have been baffling. They made stuff up all the time, and knew it, but to them the truth was in what the stories symbolized, not in their surface content.)

I know quite well the various components of the Jewish, neo-Jewish and neo-neo Jewish faiths. I didn't see a need to go too deeply into the various controversies because I don't like to be too confrontational about issues of Faith. No point.

I'd like to address something that is a thread in your posts.

The initial heading was, essentially, "scenes you'd like to see."

I posted such a scene. You took it upon yourself to go after that desire with a little lecture on how that was not the "most interesting" way to go without having any data whatsoever as to how I would like to see that scene evidenced. The phrasing you chose was not, "here's an alternative viewpoint" but "here's a superior viewpoint." That dog don't hunt.

This discussion of your perception of what's interesting about how myths form and what their relative importance is is interesting, certainly, but, setting aside the generally lecturing tone, it just boils down to a difference of opinion. You say:

History and myth are parts of a continuum of human interpretations of the past, not mutually exclusive opposites. Our popular culture does tend to define the words in that way, but that's a simplistic misconception that falls apart on close analysis.

For you. History and mythology have minor points of overlap but, generally, actual history obviates myth (in fact often forcibly transforming active dogma into myth) which is why there is controversy about so-called "factual" accounts in the various bibles. I am of the opinion that Faith is the result of the evolution of shared survival data, becoming less and less literal as the faiths become more complex. Judaism is has more physical survival components than Christianity, for instance. And, not coincidentally, it's the older faith.

I neither elevate nor denigrate our position as Storytellers. I love us. We are talking about the difference between myths and faith, folk tales and fiction. As much as I love Star Trek and comics, their cultural influence, even on the aggregate level, is considerably less than the stories in the Quran.

You seem to think it's important to draw dividing lines and define the world in terms of opposites and hierarchical rankings.

Hm. Humans are primates. Every perception we have divides the world into hierarchical rankings. It's a primary and involuntary survival attribute. I'm just trying t be a good primate. And, of course, in terms of this discussion, the hierarchy actually exists.

Recognizing the difference between Tolkien and the apostle Paul in no way denigrates Tolkien.

What I'm saying is that different cultures can have very different ways of defining these things. You yourself acknowledge that the "influence" of figures like Zeus and Dionysus in past cultures was once comparable to the "influence" of Jesus in our culture. So what makes our perspective so much more fundamentally "truthful" than theirs?

Better testing facilities?

We're just one more culture occupying one tiny slice of time on one portion of one little ball of dust in the cosmos. Who's to say what different opinions and definitions people 2000 years from now will have? Who's to say there won't one day be a church worshipping the divine Kirk and Spock and their prophet Roddenberry?

Yeah. Possibly. If there's some great disaster that blurs the future society's ability to separate facts from fictional portrayals. Unlikely, barring extreme accident. There are a bunch of nutjobs trying to deify Tupac Shakur in the US right now. It won't catch.

More on point: Star Trek presents its aliens as planetary cultures. There are no nations, no "Jewish" Klingons taking issue with "Shinto" ones. All Klingons follow a single cultural model. Ditto Vulcans, etc. In reality this is a function of their 1960s TV past where the various species were designed to serve as representative of extreme POVs.

In continuity it must be a result of the Klingon culture's relative age. They've had the time to thrash these things out, to define themselves as a single species (avoiding or discarding fictions such as race and even ethnicity).

Given the uniformity of ethos in each species, we can presume that the sorts of discusions about which faith is "true" for each culture have been had and settled. So, to me, discussion of their archetypes and symbology couldn't possibly be more dull. The real events that led to those belfs are far more interesting and, of course, make a better story. EVEN if those real events are three Klingons sitting in a room, realizing their culture is falling apart or in trouble, and making up the death of their gods out of whole cloth.

There is no human culture that has humanity killing off its deities. That image is central to the Klingon sense of self as written so far. I'm sorry. I want to see those events just as we did in THE FORGE (ENT). Discussion of why the archetypes resonate or what they say about the Klingon psyche make for a potentially interesting scholarly work but, when you're talking about Klingons, who wants scholarly? Not me. I want duels and daring rescues and dead gods on the ends of spears, whoever those gods happened to be.

Only if you choose to take "Barge of the Dead" literally. The episode itself was at best agnostic on the issue, and to me its climactic scenes implied very strongly that B'Elanna's "visit" was merely a psychological manifestation. If she had really, literally been in some afterlife, then why was she suddenly seeing shifting visions of her crewmates repeating passages from her memory, and why was her mother dressed and behaving like Janeway? Come on, how Freudian can you get? It was a hallucination. Her mind was interpreting her inner turmoil through her culture's very powerful archetypes.

If her mother was actually dead on B'Elanna's return to the Alpha quadrant, and died at the time of B'elanna's vision, according to the rules of the universe, it is equally likely that a "real" journey took place. I don't recall the ep in specific detail but I seem to remember some physical object changing based upon B'Elanna's "hallucination." Another check in the "it really happened" column.

When the Bajoran Prophets speak through visions they also appear in familiar forms rather than as they are. Visions are tricky things.

When Q changes reality it is always a real physical change, even when it's presented as some sort of vision. It's a pattern, a trope.

Just because beings exist that can perform feats resembling those of divine figures from myth, it doesn't remotely follow that all myths arise from such beings. It creates the possibility that a myth may have a basis in such a being, but possibility is not proof.

No, but it goes a long way towards it being the most likely situation as nearly 100% of the time in the Trek-verse that turns out to be the case. "What does God need with a starship?"

The mass of existing material, not to mention the intent of the creator of the Trek-verse, is that stories involving magic of any sort are based on actual events during which no magic was performed. This theme is repeated often enough to be considered a trope.

Again, that's drifting well away from the topic I was discussing. I don't believe in magic. What I believe is that it can be interesting to explore a culture's psychology and ethos through an examination of their symbols and archetypes. You and I are just not having the same conversation here.

Sure, we are. I think such an examination is boring unless you're talking about a culture that actually exists. Klingons don't, so no such examination is possible. You're making up everything out of whole cloth, archetypes, history and all. Since that's the case, I prefer the cloth have blood on it.

And the society doesn't exist that sits down and calmly decides to believe in Olympus rather than Heliopolis.

Now you're just making up straw men.

No, I just conflated two responses into a single post without separate attribution. It's been posited that some myths are just the result of people using archetypes to express some notion of their version of existence. That's not plausible to me. Faith, especially those older faiths, the closer-to-the-ground ones, serve a survival function. They are a collective response to REAL events or phenomena. When they become myths, they are no longer useful and therefore are no longer used.

I think you're actually continuing an ongoing argument you've been having with somebody else, because you aren't engaging the actual points I've made at all.

I'm reading what you write. I think it is mostly a really long way of saying you'd do it differently than me. I get that. I think your reasoning is flawed as to why you would find your way "more interesting." More interesting for you, certainly. Me, I like swords.

The ideas you're refuting and questioning just bear no resemblance to the ideas I've tried to raise, so they have to come from somewhere else in your experience. I feel like I'm becoming a spectator in a debate you're having with someone or something else. I don't think this is going anywhere constructive and I think we should just let it go now.

I think we're in the same conversation. I just don't accept most of premises you present so we drift into esoterica.

 

[Christopher]

^^What you call "esoterica" is the subject I was trying to talk about in the first place. You keep rejecting it as valid because it's not what you believe, and you keep demanding that what this thread is about is what you want it to be about. You can't even acknowledge that it's possible for us to have fundamentally different and equally valid ways of looking at things -- you have to insist that what you're talking about is the only possible "real" topic of this thread and that my point of view is just useless "esoterica." And that just illustrates why there's no point trying to continue this discussion.

 

[BrotherBenny]

Christopher, Redjack, I think it's time to throw in the towel. I'm not a mod but I think we're getting somewhat off topic here since this thread is about what we want to see, not how we want to see it. That really is up to you guys when you write the thing.

I've mentioned a couple of things before, but another thing that i would like to like to see is the Romulan outlook on the Dominion War. We've seen the Klingon in DS9 and through Klag's eyes, but we haven't seen anything Romulan. Perhaps Diane Duane could show us Rihannsu society through the DW to Nemesis. That would be cool

 

[LightningStorm]

Given the great (if heated) discussion going on there, I'd very much like to see a duology where one book is by Geoffrey Thorne and the other by Christopher L. Bennett that covers some belief system inside the Trekverse from the vastly different perspectives of each. Such a duology would, if nothing else, make you think. And both would be quite interesting.

ETA: OH!! A flip-book perhaps?

 

[Geoff Thorne]

Given the great (if heated) discussion going on there, I'd very much like to see a duology where one book is by Geoffrey Thorne and the other by Christopher L. Bennett that covers some belief system inside the Trekverse from the vastly different perspectives of each. Such a duology would, if nothing else, make you think. And both would be quite interesting.

ETA: OH!! A flip-book perhaps?

LOL.

I want KRAD and OSBORNE, dammit!

But it's all good. Fans disagree. We're all fans here.

 

[KRAD]

I've mentioned a couple of things before, but another thing that i would like to like to see is the Romulan outlook on the Dominion War. We've seen the Klingon in DS9 and through Klag's eyes, but we haven't seen anything Romulan. Perhaps Diane Duane could show us Rihannsu society through the DW to Nemesis. That would be cool

We did see some of that in three of the Tales of the Dominion War short stories: "Twilight's Wrath" by David Mack, "Mirror Eyes" by Heather Jarman & Jeffrey Lang, and "Blood Sacrifice" by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz.

 

[Trent Roman]

Late on my reply, but I've read the posts and the problem seems to stem from a different comprehension of the word 'myth'. To those who study such things, like folklorists, mythographers, sociologists and cultural anthropologists, a myth, mythos, and myth cycle all refers quite simply to a series of stories that explicate a belief system and/or observed phenomena. In that sense, all religion is myth, though not all myth is religious, since we can think of things like national mythology, racial mythology, UFO/Elvis/tabloid mythology, etc. (And, to that token, one doesn't need to consider myth 'a good thing' to consider it's study to be meaningful; I don't much care for the impact economic systems have had on my life, but that doesn't mean I consider the study of economics to be worthless.) That certain religious individuals get prissy when their belief system is characterized as myth is entirely irrelevant; if we had to make adjustments every time a religious fanatic got angry, we'd never come to the end of it.

There is no logical basis to exempt current belief systems from the overarching category of 'myth' (and note, of course, that faith is a subset of myth and not vice versa), given the fact that all religious traditions have the same burden of proof (which is to say, nothing), and in the absence of any reason to doubt that adherents of previously popular belief systems were equally sincere in their beliefs as contemporary believers. Under those circumstances, to identify one's own tradition as truth but all other systems, past and contemporaneous, as myth in a derogatory sense, is merely obscenely arrogant, with no impact on the theory. Likewise, the idea that influence determines the boundary between religion and myth is untenable; in their time, what you identify as exclusively 'myth' was just as influential in their culture as what you identify exclusively as 'Faith' (why the capital?) is now. For that matter, Christianity, to cite an example, used to be much more influential; does that make it more 'myth' now than it was two hundred years ago?

And those past mythologies you dismiss: many of them are undergoing a revival in belief as part of the generalized neo-pagan trend; Celtic deities, Norse deities, Greco-Roman deities, all are once more the object of active worship. Are these, and the Mithraists, and the Zoroastrians, and all the rest, worshippers of 'myth' because they don't meet some criteria like the number of adherents or influence over politics? Or did they stop being 'myth' and begin being 'faith' the moment one person resurrected the cult? It's obviously an absurd situation; the truth of the matter is, they are now and always have been myth; it's just that they temporarily stopped being observed religions.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

EDIT: Sorry captcalhoun; when I get really enthused, I forget to paragraph.

 

[captcalhoun]

too...much...dense...text...

MY EYES!!!!

 

[Rabid Trekkie]

One of the things I'd love to see is the Kelvan Empire making it to the Alpha Quadrant. Yeah it would be way ahead of schedule, but would it really be that much of a jump for a race that has already traveled across the galaxy to be able to come up with an engine to get there faster? And it needs to be a multi-series event, like what Destiny is going to be.

 

[Vastator]

Completely forgot about the Kelvans, I think there was a short mention of them in "Valiant" and mention of Kelvan expeditionary probes in the Shatnerverse Totality storyline, the first book I think.

 

[foravalon]

MJF has used them the most in his Stargazer books

 

[JD]

Did you realize that week's TOS Remastered was By Any Other Name when you asked about the Kelvans? If not then that was some really good timing.:thumbsup:

 

[Rabid Trekkie]

Did you realize that week's TOS Remastered was By Any Other Name when you asked about the Kelvans? If not then that was some really good timing.:thumbsup:

No I didn't. Haven't really been paying attention to the remaster stuff, but I have TOS on dvd and while its not my favorite episode I think a lot of good stories could come out of it.

So I guess I just have really good timing.

 

[Lonemagpie]

Of course, the Blake's 7 episode Star One is the perfect sequel to By Any Other Name (and B7 is set in at least the 28th Century, so plenty of time for the Federation to fall!)

 

[JD]

Mind explaining that to those of us who've never seen Blake's 7?

 

[Steve Roby]

Andromeda attacks the Federation.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Mind explaining that to those of us who've never seen Blake's 7?

Don't worry. It's not the same Federation, anyway.

 

[Lonemagpie]

Mind explaining that to those of us who've never seen Blake's 7?

Extremely weird aliens from Andromeda take on human form to launch an invasion of the galaxy...

 

[JoeZhang]

Mind explaining that to those of us who've never seen Blake's 7?

here's a good summary of the wider differences between the series:

"If you wanted to sum up the relative position of Britain and America in this century - the ebbing away of the pink areas of the map, the fading of national self-confidence as Uncle Sam proceeded to colonise the globe with fizzy drinks and Hollywood - you could do it like this: they had Star Trek, we had Blake's 7... No "boldly going" here: instead, we got the boot stamping on a human face which George Orwell offered as a vision of humanity's future in Nineteen Eighty-Four." Hanks concluded that: "Blake's 7 has acquired a credibility and popularity Terry Nation can never have expected... I think it's to do with the sheer crappiness of the series and the crappiness it attributes to the universe: it is science-fiction for the disillusioned and ironic - and that is what makes it so very British."[