Or perhaps a ships of the line type of book containing all sorts of things introduced in the books, ship interiors and exteriors, aliens etc.
But I guess that is very unlikely to happen...
Titan's crew diversity
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Or perhaps a ships of the line type of book containing all sorts of things introduced in the books, ship interiors and exteriors, aliens etc.
But I guess that is very unlikely to happen...
Maybe it's not so much that someone is a writer sycophant as that he thinks the other poster is being stupid?
That wasn't really spelled out until Orion's Hounds. Not every part of the premise of a series is necessarily going to be made explicit in the first installment.
It's impractical to send living beings to explore space at all, instead of just letting robots do it. Starfleet is not about limiting yourself to what seems easy or unchallenging. Starfleet is about tackling the new and the unknown, embracing challenges and difficulties in the hopes of discovering new things or bringing the life forms of the universe closer together. Yes, diversity in combination creates more possibilities for things to go wrong, but that's alongside all the new possibilities it creates for things to go right. If that's true about different worlds joining into a single Federation, how can it be any less true about their inhabitants joining together in a single unified crew? And how can the former be anything but a hollow sham if people are too afraid to try the latter?
As a noted starship captain once said, "Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. It's why we're aboard her." It was true about the Enterprise taking the risk of exploring new worlds, and it's just as true about Titan taking the risk of exploring new ways for sentient beings to live and work together.
It bugged me a little at first. Now I'm used to it and I enjoy Titan's wide variety of species.
I do dislike so many aliens having ' in their names. There are too many of them, it doesn't seem alien anymore, just cliche. At this rate I'm expecting for somebody to pop up with the name '''''''''''aa'''''''b''''3''''''''''''''''''''''2 or something.
I do dislike so many aliens having ' in their names. There are too many of them, it doesn't seem alien anymore, just cliche. At this rate I'm expecting for somebody to pop up with the name '''''''''''aa'''''''b''''3''''''''''''''''''''''2 or something.
I would read that...or something along the lines of New Worlds, New Civilizations, with really good illustrations, which both the writer and the artist in me would adore.
Yeah, like that O'Brien guy... that's just silly.
I don't get the apostrophe complaint. There are lots of real, human languages that have apostrophes in them when transliterated into the Roman alphabet. An apostrophe can stand in for a variety of things, such as a glottal stop, a click, an elision, or simply a separation between sounds that are meant to be pronounced distinctly. And given that alien languages would most likely include sounds that don't occur in English, or indeed in any human language, it's really inevitable that many of them would use diacritical marks of some sort, including apostrophes.
That said, I did go overboard with the apostrophes when I coined the name K'chak'!'op. I should've made it just K'chak!op. Although now that I look at it, I think that might've been misread as K'chaklop. So maybe it did serve a purpose.
And I love the way you handle them in Ex Machina and Orion Hounds.
Personally, I prefer that Starfleet vessels have diverse crews manned by a variety of species. It shows that the Federation is more than humans and Vulcans and the occasionally Andorian. What we got in the various shows, mostly human and humaniod crews was due to budget constraints. I kept wishing that the other movies after TMP would continue to show the diverse crewmembers we glimpsed in the first movie. Alas, they went back to the mostly human ships.
It looks, however, that in the Abrams movie we'll be getting a more aliens on the deck.
One of the best things about TrekLit is that the writers aren't constrained by budget, make-up, and costuming. The only limit is imagination -- not that it's hampered anyone writing the Titan series.
Ah. Pretty roundabout way of going about it, but I agree that homogeneity can often be as problematic (if not more, at least in my case) as extreme variation. A few years back, I watched a film called "Twelve Angry Men" with Henry Fonda, which is a film about a jury. But as the title implies, because this was made in the 50s, the cast is a dozen white, mainly middle-aged men with no distinguishing features, and I had a hell of a time telling them apart. The film also doesn't use names (not that it would have helped me, because I'm terrible with names) and is in black and white, so you can't even use the colour of clothing as identifying features. A couple distinguished themselves by personality or role--there was protagonist guy, old guy, baseball-obsessed guy and pissed-off guy--but for the most part I spent the film going "Which one is this one again?"
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Well, "12 Angry Men" did have one non-anglo character, that russian fellow with the mustache. Now, you want to talk monotonous casting, I still have trouble telling most of the cast from each other in "Forbidden Planet." It doesn't help that they all have similar builds and hair.
I just finished "Taking Wing" (Kindle version) about half an hour ago. I agree about being "overwhelmed" with all the different alien species, almost as if the author went out of his way to make it as diverse as possible.
I enjoyed Riker's first mission, although I did have a "WTF" moment...when they sent a PREGNANT shuttle pilot (forgot her name already) on a dangerous away mission and she ended up going into premature labor. That made no sense to me. I would think that Riker, Troi, the doctor or even the pilot herself should have raised her hand and said "Excuse me, I'm pregnant, can I get a pass on this one?"
It just seemed to be very poor judgement, if for no other reason that it could have jeopardized the mission (and almost did.)
Looking forward to reading the next book (already loaded on my Kindle!)
Actually I wasn't "moaning" about the diversity. I'm not even going to go into my point again because I've already typed it like three times. And for the record, as noted in my first post, I did like the book. I was just trying to bring up a topic for discussion. I thought that was what we did here.
Agreed. I was scratching my head at that one as well.
Yeah, like that O'Brien guy... that's just silly.
I don't get the apostrophe complaint. There are lots of real, human languages that have apostrophes in them when transliterated into the Roman alphabet. An apostrophe can stand in for a variety of things, such as a glottal stop, a click, an elision, or simply a separation between sounds that are meant to be pronounced distinctly. And given that alien languages would most likely include sounds that don't occur in English, or indeed in any human language, it's really inevitable that many of them would use diacritical marks of some sort, including apostrophes.
That said, I did go overboard with the apostrophes when I coined the name K'chak'!'op. I should've made it just K'chak!op. Although now that I look at it, I think that might've been misread as K'chaklop. So maybe it did serve a purpose.
I see what you're saying, I just feel that they are a bit overused. Not just in Titan, in all of Trek Lit. It isn't something that really bothers me, I just feel like more work could go into the alien names over than dropping in some 's. After bitching about this however, I actually kind of like K'chak!op because it is so over the top!
It's funny; I was doing some reasearch over the solstice break into the Book of Jubilees, a 2nd century BCE scriptural text, and I just started laughing when I read the names it gave to the wives of Noah's sons (he of the ark): Sedeqetelebab, Ne'elatama'uk and 'Adataneses. I couldn't help but think: "I bet if I saw these names in a sci-fi or fantasy piece, I'd have thought the author was trying too hard to come up with alien-sounding names."
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Yep. Just goes to show, the diversity of languages and cultures on Earth alone dwarfs the diversity you tend to see in English-language SF.
The weird thing about the Book of Genesis is, where do these women come from, anyway? They just sort of happen to be there without any explanation being given for their existence. Noah and his family were the only humans left alive after the Flood, and it was apparently just him, his wife, and their three sons, so where did these wives for the sons come from? I think the same thing goes for Cain and Abel; they also get convenient spouses out of the aether.
I have to admit that at first the diversity seemed a little too much. It was indeed hard to keep track of who was who and to picture in my mind's eye what the alien crew member and their quarters or work areas looked like. Part of this I think can be attributed to trying to adjust to a new crew. Much like when a new series starts up it takes time to get to know the characters. I did find I enjoyed Taking Wing much more after a second reading through because I was now somewhat familiar with the characters.
I would say that if you find it overwhelming stick with it and maybe give it a second reading before moving on to the other books in the series. I think if you do you may find that your initial evaluation of the series is unjustified.
I'm really looking forward to two more books in the series next year and hopefully at least another in 2010. To all the authors who have contributed to bringing the Titan crew to life (Andy and Michael, Chris, Geoffrey, and most recently David) a big THANK YOU!
Kevin
I would say that if you find it overwhelming stick with it and maybe give it a second reading before moving on to the other books in the series. I think if you do you may find that your initial evaluation of the series is unjustified.
I'm really looking forward to two more books in the series next year and hopefully at least another in 2010. To all the authors who have contributed to bringing the Titan crew to life (Andy and Michael, Chris, Geoffrey, and most recently David) a big THANK YOU!
Kevin
The versions of Genesis I have at hand (KJB, NIV) actually have the wives go aboard the ark together with the sons ("thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee" [Genesis 6:18]), so they belong to the antedeluvian human population. No clue where Cain and Abel got theirs, though.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Exactly, which is why I don't quite why it is such a big deal for the Titan books to be doing this.
Diane Duane was showing us a diverse Enterprise crew 25 years ago in her books (i.e. The Wounded Sky). And she did it with a lot more grace and subtlety than the current books, and with a lot less self-congratulatory BS (oooh look at us, we're being diverse!).
^
I never thought it really came off like that. Care to elaborate?
I never thought it really came off like that. Care to elaborate?
I always found Duane's books to be very self-congratulatory about her crew's diversity, in part because she never acknowledged that diversity of that sort would be an issue, would cause conflict, and diverged from how we saw the canonical Starfleet depicted. The crews got along unrealistically well -- in that sense, I found her works much more self-congratulatory about her crews' diversities. The Titan series, on the other hand, acknowledges both that Starfleet hasn't been very diverse in the past and that a level of major diversity like that would cause problems and be a source of controversy.
But that's the point. None of those things get mentioned because it's just the way Starfleet does things and it'd already been worked out. Not worth getting into. And at the point those books were published, we really hadn't seen enough of Starfleet to know really how diverse it was or wasn't. Not a lot of non-humns in TOS, presumably due to budget reasons, but TMP showed the Enterprise with a pretty diverse crew. I think Duane took her cue from TMP, and just assumed (as many of us did at the time) that the alien crew-folk had been there someplace all along and the tee-vee guys just didn't have the money to show us.
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