Re: TITAN to diverse?
Christopher said:
the idea is to stop using differences as an excuse for division and to make an effort to understand and learn from those who are different.
Yep. The mistake would be to suddenly resolve everyone's attitudes after one incident where the differences made the difference in resolving a dilemma, because then you end up losing the long-term tensions you've deliberately set up. Everyone can't suddenly see the error of their ways and move on; there will always be new tensions that crop up.
Actually the 21st century workplace is a good model: there will always be people with more or less training, people of previous career paths who want to do things differently, the "fish out of water" overseas exchangee, mothers returning from maternity leave and balancing their time, people who are less-compelled to learn new technology, ambitious types who inadvertently (or deliberately) stomp on the aspirations of others in their climb to the top, age differences, class differences, race differences. There are times of tranquility, when it appears the company or faculty runs like a well-oiled machine, but there'll always be challenges to that status quo, if not from within this time, then external pressures.
In VOY the producers went to so much trouble adding Maquis crew (and only a few with Starfleet training, IIRC) to the regular Starfleet mix and stranding them far from home, so they could have the ongoing friction that Starfleet supposedly had resolved in the 24th century, only to have the tensions vanish after the first few episodes, and only rear up a few times over the next seven years.
If suddenly the editors or Paula Block decreed that "Titan" was indeed "too diverse", suddenly you'd have a whole lot of readers who've been hanging out for more diverse crews complaining.
After TMP, I expected the Pocket writers to embrace the alien crewmembers glimpsed - but tantalizingly-described by the publicity materials via Fletcher's and Phillips' costume/makeup notes. In the main, the new alien UFP races were practically ignored by the novels until "Ex Machina". I recall being very excited by the first Marvel Comics run 9as bad as its stories may have been), which did use them (at least visually, but sometimes giving them dialogue), and the LA Times Syndicate post-TMP comic strip (as hard as it was to locate them), the first few stories of which made excellent use out of them.
As I said earlier, Riker's experiment is the same as the experiment I did in 1980, with my very first fanfic. But the "Titan" writers (plus "Ex Machina") are doing it so much better than I could have dreamed of doing.
