Strange New Worlds' showrunners advise fans to write to Skydance and Paramount if they're interested in a "Year One" Kirk sequel series
- Thread starter Quinton
- Start date
I think you could make the argument they’ve already done that to a point. At least from a technological and cultural/diversity standpoint.
In a piecemeal, superficial way, perhaps, but a lot of the core ideas are still rooted in 1960s or earlier pulp-era assumptions. Like the lack of transhumanism in the future, which was handwaved when DS9 retconned in a ban on genetic engineering that makes no sense (no society's laws are going to be shaped by fear of something that happened 400 years before and nobody alive remembers). Or the lack of nanotechnology except as something the Borg use (or that gets used in the far future as programmable matter). Or the commonness of psychic powers, which were an idea heavily promoted by John W. Campbell in the days when he had an outsized influence on SF literature, but have been pretty much discredited today. Or the general trope of a human-dominated galactic federation or empire, which is something of a relic of the colonialist era. Later Trek has tried to tack a token diversity onto the Federation, but TOS started out assuming the Enterprise was an Earth ship, so that human-centric (and America-centric) core remains despite everything they've tried to accrete onto it.
As a science fiction writer, I would relish the challenge of getting to reinvent the whole thing from the ground up. Roddenberry wanted TOS to be forward-looking, so it would be fun to start with what science fiction is today and build from that.
I always wondered in TOS if the Federation was a fairly new creation, and the other member worlds weren't as engaged with the project as Earth was, which explains the relative lack of representation - humanity has put a ton of resources and effort into Starfleet while people like the Tellarites and Vulcans have just committed the occasional ship or officer here and there, not convinced that the alliance is going to last. Obviously all gets blown apart by the later canon establishing that it was like a century old by that point.
It'd definitely be fun to see it reimagined to be less human-centric in a reboot. I wonder what kind of accomodations ships would have for non-humanoid species, like officers from races who evolved from flatworms or jellyfish.
It'd definitely be fun to see it reimagined to be less human-centric in a reboot. I wonder what kind of accomodations ships would have for non-humanoid species, like officers from races who evolved from flatworms or jellyfish.
A Starfleet ship will have a Horta captain one day. Catchphrases for going to warp speed:
"Space tunnel NOW!"
"Burn it!"
"Hole!"
"Rock it!"
"Eat stars!"
"No sit we!"
"Space tunnel NOW!"
"Burn it!"
"Hole!"
"Rock it!"
"Eat stars!"
"No sit we!"
Even once the Federation was established in season 1, it wasn't clear if it was multispecies or just a bunch of human worlds, like the federations and empires in much of the science fiction that Roddenberry and other TOS writers had grown up reading. Vulcans were involved, but could have been a client state (there was that line in "The Conscience of the King" about them being conquered). "Amok Time" clarified that Vulcan was important enough for T'Pau to have been offered a seat on the Federation Council, and "Journey to Babel" was really the first clear depiction of the UFP as a multispecies alliance.
But there was still evidence that Vulcan was a relatively new member. Their life-and-death mating rituals weren't known to Starfleet doctors, they had their own all-Vulcan starship crew rather than being integrated, and Kirk had never heard of Surak. But '70s tie-in books started the idea that Vulcan had been a founding member, which Enterprise eventually made canonical, and before that, FC had established Vulcans as humans' first alien contact.
I've been calling Trek an anachronism for twenty years, so I naturally agree with this. Ironically, I even suggested 2025 as a possible date at which Star Trek just looks too silly as anything but a retro-future period piece.
The problem with starting over is (a) I don't think modern Hollywood can do it justice, and (b) even if they could it would be prohibitively expensive, and (c) if actually done properly it would probably be boring as sin to most viewers today. Paramount has thrown everything at the wall to bring in viewers and their most successful effort other than a flashy revisit of TNG is a flashy revisit of TOS with strange new hair. Discovery was perhaps their most original big first-run show, but even that was mostly just a flashy retread of Trek tropes with modern TV storytelling flashiness and sillier pew-pew stuff.
Probably the best case scenario is that we would just end up with Star Trek: The Expanse . . . but we have The Expanse (or had it . . . I hear the later seasons got weird). So, why do it?
Interesting, though as always you need a touchstone for the present-day viewer.
Roddenberry and the gang had Rand Corp., contributions from the leading science fiction authors-slash-futurists of their day, and so on. We . . . don't. It would likely take years of development just to get writers who can even ponder within a setting as you describe.
My suggestion to you is to take the idea to the book realm. Suggest an anthology where you (as reward for the idea) and a couple of other authors (ideally some current sci-fi heavyweights, if possible) actively reboot the franchise with shorter-than-full-novel stories. Each one gets to do their own take, or maybe multiple existing Trek authors break one version like a writer's room, but still with multiple products in total.
I have no idea how realistic such a thing is in the modern publishing world, but it sounds pretty good in my head at the moment. Call it a 'seed mile' for a future series, if there's buzz, which there very well could be.
Three words: STAR TREK VANGUARD
*mic drop*
*mic drop*
Indeed the original version of WNMHHB is missing the famous opening monologue, and thus does not mention the 5 year mission in the episode.
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AIR, the original broadcast version of WNMHGB didn't have the monologue, either...the only episode of TOS that didn't. They appear to have changed that for TOS-R, though.
Vanguard would have made a great Trek show, David. It's a damn shame it never happened.
People have a nasty tendency to demonize that which they do not understand.
The Borg could end up being demonized regardless.
I was talking about how the writers of the show would approach cyborgs. TNG started out making some promising steps toward depicting transhumanism, what with Geordi's VISOR and Picard's artificial heart, but once Michael Piller came aboard that was pretty much abandoned. Those bionic parts were rarely mentioned except when they created problems, and otherwise the villainous Borg were the only example of bionic modification we usually saw. Which contrasts to a lot of futures in modern science fiction where transhuman augmentation is portrayed as commonplace and accepted. To my mind, that resistance to transhumanism in Trek (with regard to both bionics and genetic engineering) makes the franchise feel rather antiquated.
And that's kind of my point, that in the reinvention I'm talking about, transhumans and cyborgs would be a normal part of the culture, rather than something alien that people don't understand.
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Well, naturally, it would've depended on who was writing it. That's kind of the point, that the franchise ended up in the hands of writers who didn't want to deal with the subject, by contrast to other series that embraced it more. For instance, Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, developed by DS9 veteran Robert Hewitt Wolfe, was set in a future where most humans were genetically engineered or had bionic enhancements. Or you have something like The Murderbot Diaries where augmented humans are commonplace. And there are extreme takes like Ghost in the Shell or Altered Carbon where nearly everyone is in a synthetic body of one sort or another.
The other aspect is that having stuff like that changes the feel of the universe, and not necessarily for the better. DS9 only had a couple of episodes of alien people with dataports, for instance, and TNG had the Bynars, but it would have been a little ... icky ... to have a lot of that among the humans. Too alien.
