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Dorothy (D.C.) Fontana wants to write a new Trek novel with Joanna McCoy

hbquikcomjamesl said:
Hell, it's pretty damn utopian for 2016 audiences, when racist riots are raging, a substantial part of the Middle East has been destablized by a "war of choice" that was waged "for fun and profit," the threat of a terrorist apocalypse looms over everyone, and there are reactionaries who are willing to deliberately cause economic collapses in order to further their goal of erasing from the memory of history every bit of political, economic, and social progress we've made since President Roosevelt took office (that's President THEODORE Roosevelt), and usher in a new Gilded Age.
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Most of that is true, but "terrorist apocalypse?" No such thing, except in the rhetoric of people who want to stir up fear or are trapped by outdated conceptual models. Terrorists, as a rule, are fringe groups outside the seats of power, trying to force changes to a status quo that excludes them. If they were the ones in power, after all, they'd have armies and missiles and wouldn't need to use terrorist methods. Their attacks are designed for maximum drama and intimidation, but their collective death toll is actually comparatively small. Here are some revealing infographics about death rates from wars since the end of WWII. The number and percentage of war deaths since 2000 has been far lower than it ever was before then. People are more scared today, because both terrorists and politicians have been stirring up the people's fears for their respective gains, but the facts don't support that fear. The number of wars has been increasing lately, but they're much smaller, civil wars with much lower death tolls than the wars of the past century. And the fact is that more Americans in recent years have been killed by toddlers with guns than by terrorists. The "terrorist apocalypse" is propaganda used to distract us from the real problems and dangers our country faces from within.

Terrorism has been a factor in global politics for centuries. The only reason it gets more attention now is because there are fewer wars between nations to preoccupy us, so the smaller threat seems bigger from lack of contrast. Also because terrorism has always been a form of propaganda and attention-getting, and modern media culture makes it easier to spread.
 
hbquikcomjamesl said:
With attitudes like those, I wonder why either of you have any interest in Star Trek in the first place. We all know that Roddenberry was a world-class chiseler, and we all know that he had a problem "keeping his pants zipped and his wick dry," but to say that Star Trek was nothing more than the product of base material greed, and had nothing to do with "finding intelligent life in the television audience" or with presenting a future Humanity that had mostly outgrown racism, sexism, and other forms of petty tribalism is to say that Star Trek is (as Captain David Gold might say) bupkis.
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I've never been that big a fan of Roddenberry. He put together the show and some of the basic concept, so he obviously deserves respect for that, but pretty much all the stuff I like the most in Trek is the stuff he was the least involved with, like Wrath of Kahn - The Voyage Home and Undiscovered Country, later TNG, DS9, and the books.
 
Roddenberry surrounded himself with people who shared and expanded on his vision. Of those who were closest to him in that regard, Dorothy Fontana is, so far as I'm aware, the last one still living.

And Mr. Bennett: yes, the wars are smaller, with smaller death tolls, than the wars of the 20th Century. But they're still bigger and deadlier than the wars of the pre-machine-gun era. And the terrorists of, say, Biblical times weren't generally turning automobiles or airliners into "baka bombs." On the other hand, we have gotten into a bad habit of treating terrorists as belligerents, rather than as criminals, and those who are the most interested in "war for fun and profit" (and in reinforcing tribalism) have an annoying tendency to deliberately provoke terrorists.

But you get no argument from me on toddlers (or nutjobs, for that matter) with guns.
 
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hbquikcomjamesl said:
and engineers [albeit in science-blue uniforms, for no apparent reason],
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Considering the engineering department is responsible for looking after a matter/antimatter reactor it makes sense there'd be a few science officers on the engineering staff. The real question should be why is Lt. Masters the only science officer attached to engineering we've seen in 50 years?
 
hbquikcomjamesl said:
(And yes, female characters in TOS were nurses, secretaries, and "switchboard operators," but they were also research scientists, psychiartists, executive officers, historians, relief helm and navigation officers, lawyers, gunners, and engineers [albeit in science-blue uniforms, for no apparent reason], and at least one "switchboard operator" was quite capable of rewiring her own "switchboard" if the need arose.)
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After watching all of Star Trek, I feel like the "switchboard operator" stereotype overshadowed what would logically be a vital position on any starship. When seeking out strange new life on the final frontier, you want a well-trained officer capable of maintaining all kinds of communication equipment with an expert and intuitive understanding of diplomatic protocol and inter-species linguistics and communications. What you arguably don't want is Worf answering the phones. :lol: :klingon:

I think Hoshi and Kelvin-Uhura have worked to redeem the position more recently, but it was unfortunate that Uhura's importance was minimized in the original series and the post of communications officer all but eliminated in the 24th century casts because of it.

TC
 
hbquikcomjamesl said:
And Mr. Bennett: yes, the wars are smaller, with smaller death tolls, than the wars of the 20th Century. But they're still bigger and deadlier than the wars of the pre-machine-gun era.
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Even so, as someone who lived the first two decades of my life under the spectre of nuclear armageddon, I feel people today don't know how lucky they have it. Terrorism is nasty, yes, but orders of magnitude below an apocalyptic threat (well, unless they got their hands on a nuclear weapon, but that would probably be more a regional threat than a global one). The planetary-level threat we face today is global warming, and the business and political factions trying to endanger the future of the planet for their own short-term profits.
 
Christopher said:
Even so, as someone who lived the first two decades of my life under the spectre of nuclear armageddon, I feel people today don't know how lucky they have it.
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You do have a point there. I was born in 1962 myself, and so I, too, lived a significant fraction of my life under the threat of nuclear war. On the other hand, I don't think we had quite as many hotheads as heads of state (or aspiring heads of state) in countries with the potential to acquire nuclear weapons.
 
TalonCard said:
That was my first thought too!

TC
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Yeah, I realized after I posted the thread, that "featuring" instead of "with" probably would have been clearer. I usually try to keep my thread titles fairly short and simple, and the title was just the first short and simple version that came to mind.
 
hbquikcomjamesl said:
You do have a point there. I was born in 1962 myself, and so I, too, lived a significant fraction of my life under the threat of nuclear war. On the other hand, I don't think we had quite as many hotheads as heads of state (or aspiring heads of state) in countries with the potential to acquire nuclear weapons.
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I'm not sure if I agree that we have more hotheads leading countries these days, but I do think you touch upon something that I think speaks to why people are so frightened of terrorism:

Chaos.

It's like the Joker says in The Dark Knight: Nobody freaks out if a group of soldiers are ambushed or members of a street gang are shot, because it's "all part of the plan." But if something disrupts social expectations about when violence will occur and who shall be its victims -- and in particular if the violence in question is seemingly random (not subject to the vast pressures nations bring to bear upon other nations), local, and near-impossible to prevent? It begins to take on a larger quality in people's minds, because the mechanisms of control (such as, for instance, the systems of international relations set up after World War II to try to disincentivize nations from waging war) are (or, rather, feel) less reliable than they are for other forms of violence.
 
Christopher said:
Even so, as someone who lived the first two decades of my life under the spectre of nuclear armageddon, I feel people today don't know how lucky they have it. Terrorism is nasty, yes, but orders of magnitude below an apocalyptic threat (well, unless they got their hands on a nuclear weapon, but that would probably be more a regional threat than a global one). The planetary-level threat we face today is global warming, and the business and political factions trying to endanger the future of the planet for their own short-term profits.
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THANK YOU. The way people shit their pants over terrorism when the clear and present danger is brushed off and ignored is one of the constant baffling mysteries of life.
 
Yes. Which is to say that Ms. Fontana, being one of the two persons most closely connected with (and who helped shape and flesh out) Roddenberry's vision, and being the only surviving person that close to Roddenberry and his vision of Star Trek, is more than welcome to write another Star Trek novel. Very likely her very worst effort would still be light years better than a lot of published Star Trek authors' best efforts.
 
hbquikcomjamesl said:
Yes. Which is to say that Ms. Fontana, being one of the two persons most closely connected with (and who helped shape and flesh out) Roddenberry's vision, and being the only surviving person that close to Roddenberry and his vision of Star Trek, is more than welcome to write another Star Trek novel. Very likely her very worst effort would still be light years better than a lot of published Star Trek authors' best efforts.
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Has she written any novels before or has she just written screen plays and the like?
 
I hope she does write a novel with Joanna McCoy; I would buy a copy in a heartbeat.
 
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