Just because it is more practical doesn't always jump to racial segregation. It just more practical to have a ship full of humans than mixing it up with a diverse crew becuase of environmental issues for one. Yes, Chris, if Dinos & Mermaids want to choose to participate alongside humans yes, it can be accommodated but it isn't always practical. Yes, if humans want to wear scuba suit on a ship mostly with mermaids, yes, it can be accommodated but isn't always practical. Yes, if humans want to work on a ship designed mostly for a species that is 2 feet tall, yes, it can be accommodated but it isn't always practical. Yes, when my kid was a lot smaller, he needed a booster seat to sit at the dinner table. When we would go on a road trip with his other siblings and my wife, we'd leave the booster seat at home as our vehicle was jammed pack with stuff. Yes, should we have accommodated my son by bringing a booster chair....yeah I suppose, but with limited space, it isn't always practical, so he made do in a "big-boy" chair and he moved on in life. And speaking of moving on in life, I guess we can agree to disagree --- or better yet -- DIVERSE opinions! LOL
Christopher, I'm not sure that I like what you are implying. Practical does not equal not fair, neither does it equal racial segregation - please don't let the discussion slide into an underhanded personal level. It's not as though people can't join Starfleet or ship out on a Starfleet vessel at all, the question is rather if it weren't more practical to have ships with a water environment etc. I mean it can't be easy to mingle socially with your comrades if you are confined to an environmental suit all the time and can't invite them into your quarters etc. That's what I mean with disadvantageous and isolating. Of course, everyone should be able and have the opportunity to choose, so if one chooses to live in an environmental suit that's fine. But such a choice has (psychological and other) consequences *for that person*, and I'd like those to be addressed.
Wow...I must be getting old. I just checked my Kindle and saw that I actually finished the first 3 novels and started on the 4th but didn't finish it. I might have to re-read them to refresh my (failing) memory. As far as practicality goes, with putting so many diverse crewmembers on board a single ship, I wonder why Starfleet always seemed to send a single ship out on exploration missions. Wouldn't it make more sense to send a group of 2 or 3? If you have different races that breathe different air mixtures or water, I think each race having their own ship would be more practical. Each ship could make allowances for the other races (a water breather visiting an air breather ship) but for the most part, any race that had major differences with living environments would have their own ship. You could still have the diversity with exploration missions with the added benefit of more than one ship.
I hear all this talk of what's "practical" and nobody's actually defining the word. What does "practical" really mean? It means attainable in practice, feasible, useful. It doesn't just mean easy or convenient. By today's standards, space travel is incredibly impractical. It takes enormous expenditure and effort and difficult adaptations. It requires putting astronauts through extremely arduous training and physical danger before they can even get to work, and once they're up there, they have to learn to function in a very alien environment that isn't good for the human body, so they have to spend hours a day exercising and relearn almost every basic function. There's probably no human activity more impractical than crewed spaceflight. But you know what? We do it anyway, because it's worth the effort. And in Trek's future, technology has advanced enough to overcome most of those difficulties, to take something that was once incredibly impractical and make it more practical. Because their technology is really, really advanced. There was a time when it wouldn't have been practical to get any imaginable food item delivered instantly to your quarters, but guess what -- they have replicators. There was a time it wouldn't have been practical, or even possible, to travel from surface to orbit in a matter of seconds, but hey, transporters. Today, interstellar travel is insurmountably impractical due to the enormous travel times, but bam, along comes warp drive and it's a regular commute. We're talking about an incredibly, almost magically advanced technology that can take the impractical and the virtually impossible and make them easy. We're also looking at a moneyless, post-scarcity economy where nothing is too expensive to achieve. So it is staggeringly incongruous to look at a technology that's perfected faster-than-light drive and teleportation and universal assembly and curing cancer and the common cold... and to claim that it's somehow prohibitively impractical for them to enable an organism to survive in an alien environment. For Pete's sake, folks, we can do that today, with spacesuits and diving suits and cold-weather gear and the like. Why wouldn't it be far easier 370 years from now? So of course it's practical. There are a dozen books now showing how it's practical. Lavena's been Titan's helm officer for six years now. Pazlar's been managing in its gravity for six years now. Ree and Huilan and K'Chak'!'op have been able to function quite well on the ship, because -- again -- the ship and its equipment were designed from the start to accommodate their anatomies. Federation technology makes it practical, just like it makes so many other extraordinary things practical and routine. Sure, there are some inconveniences and nuisances, but you know what? The same goes for a lot of things in life. It's inconvenient to go through airport security. It's inconvenient to put on a bunch of safety gear before playing football or using a jackhammer. It's inconvenient to put on a wetsuit and scuba gear before going diving. But inconvenience is not the same thing as impracticality, and it's never been an insurmountable hurdle.
Star Trek: Titan may seem "in your face" about its diversity, because its diversity is part of the premise. It is literally a series about diversity, about how very different people get along. Saying that TTN is too "in your face" about its diversity is like saying that the original Star Trek is too "in your face" about being set aboard a space ship exploring the galaxy. Meanwhile, I'm kind of tired of all these predictable posts whining about how it's not "practical" for species from mildly different environments to live together in a sealed metal can in the vacuum of space. This argument is predicated on the idea that there is a "default setting" for Starfleet officers, that there is a "normal" and a "deviation," and that anything that "deviates" from what is "normal" is therefore inconvenient and shouldn't be mixed in with what is "normal." Except, of course, there isn't a such thing as normal, there is no default setting, and things that differ from your mental prejudices about what is "normal" are not automatically impractical Because Reasons.
I was unaware that we had ever seen the entire crews of every federation starship. Which wasn't really a thing until the Titan books and used either the authors over explain stuff thing. Or they just make weird assumptions about things. Which requires a pretty damned big assumption about the make up a the crew of a typical Starfleet vessel. Which is why I find the whole Starfleet vessels weren't diverse until now thing smelling of an author created problem. As at least one other author figured all the more alien crew members were just off screen the whole time.
Why, then, was it that whenever we saw a random selection of Starfleet personnel on DS9 or Voyager, they were all human except for the alien speaking characters in the main cast? Realistically, if there had been nonhumanoids in the crew, they would've shown up in at least one of those samplings. At least DS9 tried to pay lip service to the idea by mentioning the nonhumanoid Vilix'pran as part of the crew. Like I said, I would love to pretend that all of Starfleet had always been properly diverse, but our obligation as tie-in writers to stay consistent with what was shown onscreen makes that a tough sell. Don't blame the writers -- blame the makers of the shows for being so lazy about their presentation of Starfleet extras. If they hadn't created the problem, we wouldn't have had to try to deal with it. Besides, it's worth pointing out that diversity is something that needs to be worked at. It's not a problem that can be solved once and for all, because people have a tendency to forget the importance of diversity if they're not careful. I've been listening to the Superman radio serial from the '40s, and in their post-WWII episodes, they were constantly going on about how Nazi Germany had proven the folly of judging people by their race or religion and how we all needed to treat our fellow Americans as equal no matter their origin. They talked about it like it were a common-sense reality that any good American would take for granted (although they were clearly speaking out against the hate groups and demagogues that were stirring up racial tensions at the same time). But then race relations got worse and we had to wage the battle all over again in the '60s and beyond. And then we got to the point where we got a biracial president and people were talking about how we'd finally entered a post-racial era -- until we got ferocious racist backlash against the President and now this awful stuff going on in Ferguson, MO. Every time we get complacent about having won the battle, we end up having to fight it again. It takes constant vigilance to keep from falling back into old, bad habits. And that's a message Star Trek has made about other things. "The Drumhead" made that point about paranoia and the rush to judgment. The Maquis and Dominion War arcs made that point about humanity's potential for violence. So it's a point that should be made about inclusion and diversity as well: That people can forget, that they can backslide if they don't keep an eye on their own behavior. That they can fall back on associating only with people who resemble themselves because it's more convenient or familiar or easy -- more "practical" -- than making an effort to bridge the differences between groups and achieve real unity. So only telling Star Trek stories where inclusion has been "solved" and become a non-issue is something of a cop-out. There should be room for stories that actually face the issue, that serve as allegory for the real-world issues we face in trying -- or failing -- to build a more equal and inclusive world. The events of the past week should prove that we are not beyond the point where such stories need to be told.
So A Bajoran space station and a small science vessel are the entirety of Starfleet? Sure if they had the budget for it. Plus it assumes that DS9 might not have a crew compliment thats in flux. Honestly it seems weird how attached to things that are largely the result of being made in a certain decade at a certain budget trek fans are to the point of needing a explanation either for it or why they dare update things when they have access to better SFX and money. The problem is is that whats on screen consists of the relative handful of crew 2 starships and 1 space station as well as the even small samples of personal for various starships, space stations, and planet bases meaning a tiny drop in the great pool that is starfleet. So it feels kind of weird that said tiny cross section is being treated as the sum total of the Star Trek universe. Plus they weren't too consistent with the TV shows since the Enterprise finale seemed to shoot down the Andorian four sexes thing among other thing that were pretty much flat out rewritten for "The Good Men Do" This again assumes there is a problem just based on a visible minority of Starfleet officers shown happening to be human at the time the episode of the week takes place. Which would be nice if not done in a way that screams nitpicky fans trying to explain inconsistencies likely based on budget concerns, or being made in a certain decade when sfx tech wasn't as advanced as it is today. aka my big issues with the unnecessary explanations for the Klingon forehead issue, the TOS Enterprise's (non-existent thanks to JJ Abrams retcont) retro tech, and the Andorian extinction plotline.
Not I mean the fact that this aka the Kelvin http://cdn.filmschoolrejects.com/images/startrek-kelvinbridge.jpg looks different than this aka the TOS Enterprise https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4051/4270370018_175a5a3418.jpg Largely becuase it was made in 2009 and not 1966. And that tech from Enterprise would probably being advancing towards the Kelvin's tech (2230s) instead of the TOS Enterprie's tech (prime 2260s). So there wouldn't be any need for some idiotic technological downgrade thing as their tech should be advancing forward not really really backwards. And I am largely okay with this as I like Starfleet ships looking like 23rd century futuristic designs instead of slavishly devoting them selves to design ascetics that the freaking show creators were willing to ditch because of some misguided inability to except change.
No, but add in two flagships of the Federation over the course of a century, and then we have a pretty decent sample size. Given that we have no reason to believe that both of the Enterprise's, Deep Space Nine and Voyager are somehow special, and different from the rest of the fleet, it strains credulity to argue that what we saw isn't typical across the entire fleet. (Whether what we saw is racially homogenous crews or a largely human Starfleet is an open question.) I understand and appreciate the spirit of your argument, but it doesn't quite fit in this case. Trek authors are contractually obligated not to contradict what is shown in the movies and the TV series. They don't have the same freedom you and I have with our headcanons. I wouldn't say it's being treated as the "sum total." But we have plenty of reasons to think that this cross-section is generally representative of the larger universe, and not many reasons to think that it isn't. Meh. I think they're pretty consistent. Some things required a little more explanation, but I don't think it's fair to call them inconsistent. That's an awfully contrived assumption. The camera just happened to always look away when a non-human or non-humanoid walked by? I feel like if that were the interpretation taken by the authors, we'd be (rightfully so) criticizing them for using a cop-out instead of dealing with the thornier aspects of the Federation's depiction on screen. The "unnecessary explanation for the Klingon forehead issue" came from a TV episode, not the novels. The explanation of retro tech on Kirk's Enterprise was proposed in a single chapter of a single novel by Michael A. Martin; if memory serves, Christopher has, since then, walked that explanation back drastically. As for the Andorian extinction plotline– it's not clear to me that that was ever intended to explain inconsistencies. If it started that way, it certainly developed into something way more complex and worthwhile. And that's the thing. I don't mind if authors try to explain inconsistencies, so long as we get good stories out of them. That seems to me to be the only real worthwhile criterion here.
It's not weird if there's story value in it. As I said, in the case of Titan it provided an opportunity to make an allegorical comment about inclusion and accessibility and the mental blocks that can cause people to unconsciously undermine such things. Star Trek has always been about social commentary and allegory, so why should this be any different? Ever heard of statistical sampling? A small cross-section can effectively represent the whole if it's random or unbiased enough to be representative. We've seen a bunch of Starfleet vessels over the 700-odd Trek shows and movies, so if the nonhumanoids were as evenly distributed as you suggest, then statistically speaking we should've seen more of them than just Arex. I don't agree that it did anything of the kind. Certainly the show treated Andorians as "male" and "female," but that's quite easily reconciled with the novels, since two of the Andorian sexes are effectively male and the other two effectively female. And if the show had overtly contradicted the four-sex paradigm, then the novels would have been obligated to follow that lead and either abandon it or find some convoluted way to reconcile it. That's what I've been saying all along: That the books have to acknowledge what's in the show. You seem to be arguing backward, because you're using the shows' choice to ignore something from the books to assert that the books should be free to ignore things from the show. That's not how it works. They're not equal. The canon is the "reality" of the Trek universe, while tie-ins are an interpretation of it. The books follow the shows' lead, always. You're absolutely wrong about that. It's not about nitpicking continuity details, it's about people like Marco Palmieri and myself (I shouldn't speak for him, but I believe we were on the same page about this) feeling that the shows had failed to live up to the diversity that Star Trek is supposed to celebrate and that Titan was an opportunity to correct that. Remember, I personally am the one who, in Orion's Hounds, called the most attention to the lack of diversity in prior Starfleet crews and the desire of Captain Riker and the Luna class's designers to do a better job of inclusion. So I'm not guessing about the reasons why that decision was made, because I'm the one who made it. (That is, I presume it was a factor in Marco's and Andy's and Mike's thinking too, but I chose on my own initiative to spell it out more clearly in OH.) So you can rest assured that I didn't do it for the sake of continuity porn -- I did it because, looking around me in the real world, I saw how much racial exclusion and discrimination continued to exist, not out of deliberate malice, but simply because of people not noticing the problem and not making an effort to look beyond their own ethnic or cultural type for potential friends or employees. I saw a problem in the world today that I wanted to comment on through the allegory of science fiction. Which is what Star Trek is for. And it was also an opportunity to critique and question the decisions of the shows' creators, which is often what tie-ins or other literary pastiches are for. Not about continuity or anything so superficial, but about principle and commitment to ideals. I mean, DS9 was able to fill its Promenade scenes with all sorts of exotic background aliens on a weekly basis, and TNG and VGR were able to do so with various alien space stations and taverns and the like in quite a few episodes. It would've been just as easy to put a few of Voyager's or the Defiant's background crew in alien masks as it was to do it for scenes in Quark's or on the Promenade. But they didn't. Instead, they reflexively assumed that anyone in a Starfleet uniform would be human unless the script specified otherwise. It was a conceptual double standard, not a budgetary issue. They coded Starfleet as a predominantly human organization. I don't think they did so consciously, but they did. That bothered me a lot, and Orion's Hounds was my chance to confront it and comment on it.
Did we see all 430 members of the TOS Enterprise's crew, how about all 1000 of the Enterprise-D's, or all 300-2000 members of DS9's crew, how about all 150 crew members of the USS Voyager? If not it seems presumptuous to assume most of them were human. Again was it stated onscreen that federation starships and space stations had primarily human and/or humanoid crews? We have a minority of entire crew compliments being shown and fans assuming there must be some great reason behind it when its probably just budget related. Klingon forehead ridges in general need an explaination, but not the somewhat radically different designs for said ridges that sometimes occurred on the same character doesn't? Which is a lot better that Starfleet being a homo sapiens only club. This assumes that said problem actually exists in universe and is not just some fans blowing the guys making the show not spending money and time to put alien make up on some one scene extras when they could just focus on the actual plot important aliens out of proportion because it affects their ability to pretend Star Trek is real. And again other authors had no trouble assuming there were more alien like characters off screen. The "unnecessary explanation for the Klingon forehead issue" came from a TV episode, not the novels. [/quote] And I could have lived with out it either way. Didn't Christopher also say it was sticking around becuase in universe Starfleet liked it or something despite the USS Kelvin pretty much showing that their is no retro tech in the 23rd century. I remember Christopher mentioning that the plot line was thought up to explain why Andorians weren't that visible in the TNG era. My first though was to wonder if that meant all the Tellarites were in fact dead since they didn't show up again until Enterprise as an example of how ridiculous an assumption that was based largely on the same minority of Starfleet shown. Actually I don't feel that the Andorian thing was really that good of a story since it basically started out as a glorified sub plot for one character that was dropped the moment said character left, then picked up later to start another plot line that only lasted a few books and largely seemed to crap on Vanguard's resolution and pretty much did so in one case largely just to set up a character for a more interesting story.
No a portion of Star Trek was about social commentary and allegory, not the whole thing. It was also about comedy, space adventures, and ect. Didn't statistics also say Thomas Dewey would be elected president? Hell a lot of polls thought Mitt Romney was a sure win and yet here we are in the middle of Barack Obama's second term. So you'll excuse me if I'm a little skeptical about statistics especially in a case where an proper study isn't being conducted. You're absolutely wrong about that. It's not about nitpicking continuity details, it's about people like Marco Palmieri and myself (I shouldn't speak for him, but I believe we were on the same page about this) feeling that the shows had failed to live up to the diversity that Star Trek is supposed to celebrate and that Titan was an opportunity to correct that. [/quote] Again which is based on assuming things based on a small sample size. Again which is based on assuming things based on a small sample size. Assuming the money fairy comes by to give them money of more masks and face appliances. Oh so you know what went on behind the scenes when they made Star Trek episodes. So I guess they gave the Klingons forehead ridges in TMP instead of TOS just for the hell of it. Or gave most of the Romulans in TOS helmets just becuase. Under that logic the Rebel Alliance is just as racist as the Empire (supposedly was based on the defunct EU) because in New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back had them as mostly human with only token aliens showing up in Return of the Jedi.
And Titan is a portion of the Trek publishing line, so why shouldn't it choose to be about social commentary? This objection makes no damn sense whatsoever. You're using "it was only a portion" to claim that it's somehow wrong for any Trek novel to embrace it. The point is, it's included and permissible, and I did it and I'm damn well proud of it. It's easy to lie with statistics if you don't apply them properly, true, but that's exactly what you're doing -- misunderstanding how statistics work and using your own ignorance as a basis for twisting them to mean whatever you want them to mean. Again you prove you don't understand statistics. It's not about the size of the sample, it's about the representativeness of the sample, whether it's biased in a particular direction or more randomly drawn from the whole population. You're positing an extreme sampling bias while offering no justification for why that would be the case. As I said, they were able to spend the money almost every week on DS9 to populate Quark's and the Promenade with alien faces. So there's no reason a typical TNG or Voyager episode, with a comparable budget, couldn't have done the same. For that matter, TNG and VGR often did episodes where most of the guest characters were Klingons or Romulans or Hirogen or what-have-you. It wouldn't have killed their budget to pick out two or three Starfleet extras in a crowd scene and put Bajoran noses or Trill spots or Vulcan ears on them.
I'll use my Kindle as an example. I read a lot and have since I was a kid. I find more adventure in books than in any other form of entertainment. One of the "negative" side effects is that I have so many books, I've run out of places to store them. The Kindle solved that problem (I'm on my 3rd one.) No more storage problems, I can have thousands of books at my fingertips on a device smaller than a single paperback. So, for me, a Kindle is more practical than continuing to buy books and having to find a place to store them. Sure, I could get a bigger place and create my own library, but for me that's not "practical." Just because you "can" do something, doesn't mean that you have to. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the better ones.
Which is a very, very ugly argument when you're using it as an excuse for not making the effort to associate outside your own kind. Remember, Star Trek is allegory for the present. When we talk about humans coexisting with aliens, we're not really talking about the logistical difficulties of balancing alien anatomies and environments. We're talking about human ethnic groups, religions, and other communities and how they get along with one another. The technological problems of the fictional aliens' biological or functional needs can be handwaved with a few lines of description; we assume the technology the Federation has at its disposal is advanced enough to solve whatever problem we need solved for the sake of the story. But the point is about us, here, today. Yes, it's more of an effort and more of a challenge to reach outside your easy comfort zone and overcome barriers to get to know people who aren't like yourself -- say, to learn about another culture or religion or language or perspective on life that's different from the one you and the people immediately around you are familiar with. But you know what? It's worth the effort and the challenge. It expands and enriches you in ways that people who prefer to stay inside their bubbles of familiarity will never understand. After all, Star Trek is about explorers. It's about people who are curious and eager to learn, who want to make the effort to reach beyond the familiar, because they feel the rewards are worth the effort and the challenge and the risk. Good grief, it's right there in the name. A trek is a long, arduous journey, not an easy, convenient thing. And the stars are the epitome of that which is a mighty challenge to strive for but an immeasurable reward to achieve.
It sounds like it would be awful to have stay in an environment suit most of the time in order to live among a species with an incompatible environment. I do love the really diverse crew of Titan. I think the hundreds of scenes we see with nearly exclusive human crews clearly represents what Star Fleet ships are like. I find it a bit silly to think that we're supposed to think there's lots of alien diversity always around the corner that we never see. It is nice to see the arguments on Titan's diversity are about the alien races and not the gay characters.