Spoilers Section 31: Control by David Mack Review Thread

Yeah, people have been shipping Garak/Bashir for over 20 years now. There's nothing new about it. And as always, it remains more subtext than text -- especially since Garak seems to be in a relationship with Kelas.

 

In a nut shell that is my issue with the book. It potrays all of the Trek Characters, Archer more so then the others, as being mere puppets on strings.

 

As I've said before, I don't think that's true. Whatever influence Uraei had on Earth and Federation computer systems would've been limited when it came to starship crews operating far from home. The very nature of starship crews, especially in the ENT and TOS eras, gives them a great deal of autonomy from centralized control. The only affected computer systems would be those of their own ship, and in such contained circumstances it would be hard for Uraei to conceal any overt manipulations or calculated "accidents" from detection by the crew. They would be interpreted as computer malfunctions and investigated/corrected.

 

But could Archer have helped found the Federation if Uraei had not killed the people who could have exposed the Romulan-Vulcan connection, among other things? It was implied that Uraei, later Control, did have a profound influence on history.

 

I think society would've found a way to manage. Uraei basically just eliminated those that could potentially have threatened the outcomes it considered necessary. But there's no guarantee that those threats would have materialized, or that they couldn't have been dealt with in some other way. (How many TOS and TAS episodes are about finding a way to negotiate a resolution with a foe rather than just destroying it?) And if those outcomes were necessary, then there would've been a strong incentive to achieve them with or without Uraei. They might just have been achieved with more difficulty.

And really, I think the idea that people would turn on the Vulcans if they knew they were related to the Romulans doesn't make much sense. I mean, back in the Revolutionary War, the French knew the Americans were descended from their enemies the English, but they still allied with the Americans because they had eyes and brains and were able to see that having a common heritage doesn't mean two populations are on the same side. Once they learned that the Romulans were descended from a group that fled Vulcan because it opposed Surak's reforms, that should've made it clear that they and the Vulcans were enemies, not allies. Sure, some racist idiots would've mistrusted the Vulcans, but that doesn't mean everyone would be that stupid about it.

 

Honestly, I imagine the various changes made by the computer only makes things worse. How much ignorance was humanity kept in out of the belief it was for our own good? Knowing nothing about the Romulans probably made peace much harder.

 

Those are good points, but the vibe I got from reading the book was that Uraei/Control was the puppet master that brought the Federation to greatness - and the humans to power within the Federation - and that it played a key role in galactica events, e.g. apparently Uraei provoked the war with the Romulans.

Don't get me wrong, it is an excellent book, and I read it in one take till the early hours of the morning, I was just a bit uncomfortable with it being a Star Trek book.

 

Uraei/Control certainly believed itself to be the "puppet master," but you gotta wonder exactly how reliable a megalomaniacal A.I. with multiple personality syndrome really is.

 

But as you say, that's a very disquieting way of interpreting things, so I try to find ways to mitigate that. Certainly Uraei was there manipulating events, but I refuse to accept that something doing evil is responsible for good things happening. Groups that practice dirty tricks tend to make things worse in the long run -- a theme I addressed in Patterns of Interference. Doing damage to others for your own good is a bad idea, because that damage doesn't just go away. It has consequences down the road. Damaged individuals and populations have a way of paying that damage forward. And that long-term harm can cancel out any short-term gain.

Uraei may have been stage-managing events behind the scenes, but people still had free will within the situations it arranged -- and as I said, it would've had far less ability to arrange and control most of the events we've seen in onscreen Star Trek, events happening on starships and planets far beyond the Federation, than it would've had to control events on Federation worlds with its circuitry installed in every system. So it was certainly a presence, but that doesn't erase the importance of everybody else.

Also, no event in history is monocausal. It's the end result of many different processes and circumstances pushing events in a certain direction. Changing certain factors here and there can affect the way it turns out, but it's still likely to play out in generally the same way in the long term. (Trek tends to favor time travel stories that suggest otherwise, that changing a single event can change the entire future -- but the archetype of such stories, "The City on the Edge of Forever," posited that time has "currents" that cause travelers to converge on those critical nexus points in time, which implies that those nexus points are exceptions to the rule, that a randomly chosen event would not be so critical. And it shows that killing Edith Keeler changes everything but killing Rodent the bum changes nothing.) As I said, since Uraei was trying to ensure the outcomes that it calculated to be necessary, it stands to reason that many or most of those outcomes were in line with where the currents of history were already heading -- and that even without Uraei, there would still have been people working toward the achievement of those ends. So they might still have come about, just in a way that required more struggle and delay. Some of them would have failed to occur without Uraei's influence, but there's no logic in assuming they all would have failed to occur.

Think of it like fixing a game to make sure your team wins. If you don't fix the game, your team could still win on its own. The Federation's win-loss ratio was probably better with Uraei than without it, but it still had plenty of competent people in it who could've still pulled off a lot of wins without extra, uninvited help.

 

Really, the only 100% win I'll give Section 31 and their Machine God is their genocide plan is what brought the Changelings to the bargaining table and that's bad enough as it is.

Actually, that's one of my issues that Section 31 is usually incompetent as well as evil.

This goes a long way to reversing their Villain DecayTM.

 

But it didn't. Everyone gets that wrong. That implies that they surrendered in exchange for the cure, but in fact, Odo gave the Female Changeling the cure freely, demanding nothing in return. With that act, he cancelled out Section 31's plans. It was Odo's act of kindness, and his offer to return home to his people, that convinced the FC to stand down and end the war. The things he revealed to her in their link helped too. She believed she couldn't surrender because it would be "an invitation" to the solids to invade the Dominion, but Odo showed her that the Federation had no interest in conquest, despite what a few of its more unethical members had attempted to do.

There's also the fact that Section 31 wasn't trying to use the disease to blackmail the Founders into surrender -- they intended it to kill the Founders, period. And to kill Odo as well, which would've prevented him from convincing the Founders to end the war. If Bashir hadn't found the cure, thereby causing Section 31's plans to fail, then Odo would've died, the Founders would've died, and the Vorta and Jem'Hadar would probably have annihilated the Federation in revenge. The people who deserve credit for ending the war are the people who stopped Section 31's plans from succeeding, namely Bashir and Odo.

 

There are those who believe such things and those who know better. We happen to be at a point in our culture where the people who believe such things (or have a vested interest in convincing others to believe them) have disproportionate influence over politics and the media. But we know that humanity in Trek's future will marginalize those attitudes, that more open, informed, and understanding attitudes will be in ascendance, because humanity would never have united and achieved world peace if that hadn't been the case.

 

Thank you for taking the time to post that. I would also like to believe that Uraei did less, but keep in mind he was installed on every Starfleet ship, starting with the NX-01. In Dresden Uraei was able to manipulate events with a precision that included having a ship release a cargo container on fractions of a second, and slowing down traffic in Dresden with the result that it's creator got hit in the face by that container. Since Uraei was installed on NX-01 was it augmenting Mayweathers piloting, Reeds targeting? And at the end of the novel Sarina is dead, Bashir is a vegtable and the Algorithm still won. A very depressing novel.

 

It couldn't have manipulated Kirk to spare the Gorn. It couldn't have caused McCoy to inject himself with cordrazine or Kirk to let Edith Keeler die. It couldn't have arranged for Q to accelerate contact with the Borg, or helped Picard find the will to resist the Borg programming and say "Sleep." It couldn't have known that the starships disappearing in the Badlands were being abducted by an alien in the Delta Quadrant. Just because it's a constant presence, that doesn't make it God. There are countless things that would've been out of its control.

And there's a difference between Dresden and a starship, as I already tried to hint at. In a system as open and complex as a whole planet, you can hide the occasional manipulation and have it go unnoticed. But in the much more contained, regulated environment of a starship, there's only so much the computers could do for themselves without it being noticed as an anomaly.

So I think you're overestimating how direct its impact would be. It would probably have been more along the lines of ensuring that the best people got assigned to the right ships at the right times, and the right ships assigned to the right crises, so that they'd be in a position to make a difference at the right moment.

To continue my analogy, just because a gambler arranges to fix a game so their team wins, that doesn't mean the gambler deserves 100 percent of the credit for the victory. It just means they tipped the odds in their team's favor. And to avoid exposure, it would have to be subtle. If an obviously incompetent team were always winning, that would give away that cheating was going on. So Uraei can't be doing everything for the Starfleet officers. It may be finessing certain things in their favor, but ideally it should do so to the minimum possible extent in order to avoid tipping anyone off that something strange is happening.

That's another thing I talked about in Patterns of Interference. The idea that a conspiracy can be both undetectable and in absolute, pervasive control of everything is a contradiction in terms, an absurd conceit of fiction and paranoid delusions. The more a conspiracy acts, the more likely it is to give itself away. Secrecy demands subtlety and restraint, doing the minimum necessary. The less Uraei or Section 31 has to interfere, the better.

 

Well, that does make for an interesting (and topical!) philosophical question; how much does it matter that the computers Star Trek characters depend on have an agenda? We see it happening today already; algorithms that are designed to be impartial nevertheless pick up and propagate the biases (unconscious or not) of their programmers and the data-sets they're based on. Hoaxes bubble to the top of social media and search results because they're designed to be provocative rather than enlightening, boosting "engagement" even though everyone who clicks them may not actually get what they wanted.

We're in a flying-by-the-seat-of-our-pants stage of computerization, a wild-west internet that's doomed to eat itself (another favorite historical analogy; when people painted everything with radium in the early 20th century because it was a fun way to make things glow in the dark), but we already have ghosts in the machine influencing us, pushing events with a sloppy brashness that would make Uraei or Control spit, and they're the cybernetic equivalents of lab animals driven neurotic by too many random zaps in the skinner box.

What I'm getting at is that something decides what the top result should be when Spock looks something up in the Library Computer. Something decides that when people ask the computer to "delete" a log entry, they mean "destroy the file," but "delete" a holographic character means to remove it from the current scenario. So is it necessarily a bad thing that the computer's fundamental point-of-view was to preserve the lives, safety, and comfort of the human race? It has to have some way of deciding what to do (the ship's computer being able to violate orders to preserve life and limb in "Discovery" was an interesting twist), so what should it be? Probably something very similar to Uraei's standing orders. Making it, say, the Prime Directive would make space exploration difficult, if everything someone tried to do was filtered through a system doing its best to encourage them from polluting primitive and foreign cultures. Automated probes would just happen to leave gaps where inhabited planets might be. Starship courses would be tweaked to prevent happenstance discoveries of ancient Klingon artifacts.

I think I theorized earlier in this thread that Control's "new beta version" might be its egocentric spin on a spontaneous gestalt cyber-entity consisting of all the civilizations in known space, not unlike something Asimov discussed in his robot stories. Given Star Trek's positions on nature, freedom, and self-determination (it likes them), it'd be fair to say such an entity would probably be kinder that Uraei, but does that really make a difference from the "our heroes are just puppets" angle? Their computers would still be massaging their numbers, showing them the answers they judge to be most pertinent, running the scanners in such a way as to find the most interesting things. Just like always. I mean, it became less common as time went on, but there where episodes where characters simply asked the ship's computer to do their work for them (I'm thinking specifically of "Mirror, Mirror," but I'm sure their were others). "Control" (the novel) kind of forces us to reckon with that, that Star Trek's characters (not to mention ourselves, sooner or later) might be influenced by a force of our own making operating like Futurama's take on God; when you do things right, people won't be sure you did anything at all.

 

Nyotarules, you quoted my comments from post #495, but I think you meant to refer to my comments from post #493.

And I still don't buy it, because my whole point is that "humans" are not a monolith. Yes, those attitudes exist in some people, and sometimes those people manage to be politically or culturally ascendant. But there are always going to be other people who are more enlightened, and sometimes they end up being the ones in ascendance. The United States that elected an African-American president in 2008 is the same United States that elected a white supremacist president in 2016, with the same mix of racist and progressive attitudes among its citizens -- it's just that different sides gained the advantage in the two instances, like a sports tournament where the same two teams are playing but different ones win different games.

So, yes, finding out that the Vulcans and the Romulans were the same species would've inflamed those groups like Terra Prime that were already racist and just looking for excuses to hate the Vulcans. It might have energized those groups to organize more and be a louder voice in the ongoing debate, and that could have increased the resistance to a group like the Federation. But it wouldn't turn progressive, open-minded people into bigots, or make them too stupid to look at the facts and realize that the Romulans were enemies of the Vulcans. And the fact that humans as a whole were willing to form the Federation at all -- indeed, that they were the guiding force behind it, the ones whose open-mindedness and inclusiveness overcame the other founding species' mutual mistrust -- shows that the bigoted voices were unlikely to be numerous enough to sway the outcome of the decision.

Now, maybe it would've been different with the Andorians, who had a long history of enmity with the Vulcans. If they were given a new excuse to be suspicious of the Vulcans, that might have turned their public opinion enough against the idea of the Federation to keep them from joining, at least initially. So we might have ended up with a slightly smaller and weaker Federation to start with. That would've made it harder for it to succeed, but it wouldn't have guaranteed its failure.

So I just refuse to accept that Uraei deserves exclusive credit for everything that's ever happened since 2151. It's been one factor influencing events, but that doesn't make it the only factor that counts.

 

Yes. And thankfully, Lt. Andrew Stiles appeared to have realized that he was being a racist idiot after Spock saves his life at the end of BT.

 

The discussion over whether Uraei deserves credit for controlling everything that happens in the UFP reminds me a lot of the eternal debate over the "Great Man" Theory of History. Some people think history is driven by the unique decisions of powerful individuals; others argue that social forces are more important and no one person, however powerful, can overcome or control the social forces upon which he rides.