How often does "Class M" get used outside of Star Trek?

[Stevil2001]

There are obviously some Star Trek coinages that have crept into the wider sci-fi world, like "cloaking device." But I was surprised to discover a sci-fi book called Class-M Exile clearly using the Star Trek meaning of the word. Here's its cover blurb:

Bay-zar.

Class-M planet in the middle of no-where. Dust, dust, and more dust. Unless ya circled ‘round to the more habitable region, you’d be stuck without a ship to anywhere. ‘Round the corner though, you could find everything from ship parts and dried food packs, to roast dog and the rare bi-cycle. Hell, you could even buy yerself a gen-u-ine religion if you were so inclined.

The ultimate tourist trap. And here I’d taken the bait.

Is anyone familiar with any other sci-fi that uses the term?

 

[Cyke101]

There are obviously some Star Trek coinages that have crept into the wider sci-fi world, like "cloaking device." But I was surprised to discover a sci-fi book called Class-M Exile clearly using the Star Trek meaning of the word. Here's its cover blurb:

Bay-zar.

Class-M planet in the middle of no-where. Dust, dust, and more dust. Unless ya circled ‘round to the more habitable region, you’d be stuck without a ship to anywhere. ‘Round the corner though, you could find everything from ship parts and dried food packs, to roast dog and the rare bi-cycle. Hell, you could even buy yerself a gen-u-ine religion if you were so inclined.

The ultimate tourist trap. And here I’d taken the bait.

Is anyone familiar with any other sci-fi that uses the term?

Well, the planet of Mercedes Benz uses the term M Class, if that counts.

 

[Christopher]

I don't think I've ever seen "Class M" used that way in other fiction, unless it was as a parody or wink in Trek's direction.

However, in the real world, there is a proposed habitability classification scheme for extrasolar planets which uses "Class M" (for "mesoplanet") as the label for Earthlike exoplanets with liquid-water temperatures, partly just by luck but evidently with awareness of its familiarity to the general public through Trek.

 

[Hatshepsut]

Curiously, "M" is the only class of planet you seem to hear about on Star Trek. The few non-habitable worlds they visit don't get a designation, for instance Elba II in "Whom Gods Destroy" (TOS) which is noted only as having a poisonous atmosphere.

In real-life astronomy, "M" is a spectral class for stars on the Herzsprung-Russel diagram, denoting stars of low surface temperature and reddish color. I've always wondered whether perusal of astronomy textbooks brought the term "class M" to mind for Star Trek's creators, but do not know if this is so.

 

[Vger23]

Curiously, "M" is the only class of planet you seem to hear about on Star Trek. The few non-habitable worlds they visit don't get a designation, for instance Elba II in "Whom Gods Destroy" (TOS) which is noted only as having a poisonous atmosphere.

In real-life astronomy, "M" is a spectral class for stars on the Herzsprung-Russel diagram, denoting stars of low surface temperature and reddish color. I've always wondered whether perusal of astronomy textbooks brought the term "class M" to mind for Star Trek's creators, but do not know if this is so.

"I Mudd" indicated that the planet with the androids was K-class. Regula 1 in TWOK was D-class.

 

[Christopher]

Nine letter classes have been mentioned in canon:

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Planetary_classification

The reason they usually only mention M-class planets is because those are nearly the only ones that people can live on without spacesuits.

 

[Mudd]

Does anyone have a second example? The initial citation is a self-published work, whose author may well have simply lifted a bit of jargon absorbed from watching a lot of TV. A competent editor responsible to a publisher might have suggested the use of some alternative terminology, either grounded in reality or more originally conceived.

 

[Stevil2001]

Poking around on Google Books turns up a few more:
* Romeo's Defender
* Frontier Zone (an RPG sourcebook, actually)
* Dark Planet
* Entities
* EVE Revised

And more...

To echo Dennis's point, they all look self-published/small press to me. None of them are more than a few years old, either-- I can't find any twentieth-century examples. (Of course, those books are somewhat less likely to be digitized.)

The term isn't listed at all in the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, which points against generalized usage.

It's interesting-- the term is so strongly associated with Star Trek for me that I would never use it in another sci-fi story.

 

[Mudd]

No, one wouldn't because it's very specific and meaningless throwaway jargon - like "phaser" for ray-gun.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

The demon planet in Voyager is referred to as 'Class Y' if I recall correctly. Also sometimes they use 'Class L' for planets that are only kinda habitable.

 

[Christopher]

The term isn't listed at all in the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, which points against generalized usage.

It isn't on the OED's SF terminology page either. But that site does note a few Trek terms that have gained broader acceptance, like "cloaking device"/"cloak" for an invisibility field, "inertial damper/dampener" (apparently), "mindmeld," and "sleeper ship." Although it doesn't have an entry for "nanite," a term for "nanobot" that originated in TNG: "Evolution" and has caught on far more widely (e.g. in the animated series Generator Rex).

Although many seemingly Trek-related terms are older -- "communicator" antedates 1934, "deflector" antedates 1945, "prime directive" in the non-interference sense dates to at least 1956, "starbase" antedates 1944, "starfleet" 1939, "sublight" 1950, "subspace" 1937, "tractor beam" 1931, "warp" 1936 and "warp drive" 1950 -- although "warp speed" seems to be original to Trek.

(Hmm, interesting... the site has no citations for "escape pod" earlier than Star Wars in 1977. That's unexpected.)

 

[Stevil2001]

I had no idea "nanite" and "sleeper ship" were Star Trek coinages. It's interesting that some Star Trek coinages catch on, and others still feel distinctively Star Trek.

This makes me wonder if "Class M" is going to catch on more widely soon.

 

[Christopher]

I'm surprised by "sleeper ship," but I knew that before "Evolution," teensy robots were known as nanobots or nanomachines. "Nanite" stood out for me as a weird variant the moment I first heard it in that episode. I'm not sure it even works etymologically. But since then, it's been used more and more in other works. I guess it rolls off the tongue better than "nanobot."

 

[Stevil2001]

Well, I was four years old when "Evolution" aired, so I've never known a world without nanites!

"Nanobot" is a better word to sing, though.

 

[Nebusj]

I'm surprised by "sleeper ship," but I knew that before "Evolution," teensy robots were known as nanobots or nanomachines. "Nanite" stood out for me as a weird variant the moment I first heard it in that episode. I'm not sure it even works etymologically. But since then, it's been used more and more in other works. I guess it rolls off the tongue better than "nanobot."

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the popularity of ``nanite'' comes from its being adopted on Mystery Science Theater 3000 for its later seasons. That was surely a Star Trek reference occasionally, but they did do a bunch of pretty funny sketches with the little critters.

 

[Greg Cox]

Speaking as a professional SF editor, if I stumbled onto a reference to a "Class M" planet in a non-Trek novel, I would ask the author to come up with their own term. To my mind, that's specifically Star Trek jargon, not a general SF term.

Ditto for "phaser" or "Prime Directive" or "cloaking device."

All Star Trek is science fiction, but not all science fiction is Star Trek.

 

[IrishNero]

Until now, we've not really needed a planet classification system, but I Imagine that we will likely need such when we have the ability to travel at multiples of the speed of light as they do in Trek.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

All Star Trek is science fiction, but not all science fiction is Star Trek.

Logical. Flawlessly logical.

 

[Christopher]

Ditto for "phaser" or "Prime Directive" or "cloaking device."

Well, as I mentioned, "Prime Directive" predates Star Trek. Its first notable use was by Jack Williamson to refer to the Humanoids' Prime Directive to protect organic beings, basically the First Law of Robotics run amok. Poul Anderson used it in the '50s to refer to a noninterference policy, which may have been an influence on ST. (Lloyd Biggle's fiction also featured a noninterference policy, but he didn't use that term for it, I think. And it was more of an "interfere without letting them know you're interfering" policy.)

Still, granted, by now the term has become indelibly associated with Trek, so it would be hard to divorce it.

"Cloaking device," on the other hand, has become a very generic term. Star Wars used it in The Empire Strikes Back, when the Imperials were puzzled by the Millennium Falcon's "disappearance," and it's been used in plenty of Star Wars tie-ins since. The Stargate franchise used the term "cloak" or "cloaking device" routinely. The Paul McGann Doctor Who movie in 1996 used it as a term for the TARDIS's shapechanging chameleon circuit, and the modern DW series has made numerous references to "cloaking fields." So we're decades past the point when that term was exclusive to Trek.

All Star Trek is science fiction, but not all science fiction is Star Trek.

Then again, plenty of science fiction is set in universes where Star Trek existed as a work of fiction and features characters who are fans of it, and who would therefore be influenced to use its terminology. That's implicitly the reason so much Trek terminology shows up in Stargate TV.

After all, a lot of the real-world terminology we use today was coined in works of science fiction. James Blish coined "gas giant." Jack Williamson coined "genetic engineer" and "terraform." So it stands to reason that a conjectural future universe might get its technical terminology from popular science fiction such as Star Trek.

Until now, we've not really needed a planet classification system, but I Imagine that we will likely need such when we have the ability to travel at multiples of the speed of light as they do in Trek.

Except we don't have to travel to planets to have a need to classify them; we just need to be able to study them. We can study a fair number of planets right here in our own system, and we've already discovered hundreds of exoplanets in other systems. As we learn more about them, we'll certainly need ways of classifying them.

After all, we already have a letter classification scheme for stars, and we haven't visited any of them. (Not even at night!)

 

[Ithekro]

Well the Doctor (Who?) has seen Star Trek it would seem (or perhaps he lived it some of the time).