The book actively frames Bozeman as having an all male crew. Like says outright that the crew consists of only men. Which just never made sense, considering that TOS made it clear that the Enterprise was gender integrated. It was one of Carey’s things of “age of sail IN SPACE” where the metaphor overrides sense.
Spoilers TNG: Ship of the Line by Diane Carey Review Thread
- Thread starter Defcon
- Start date
That wouldn't explain all the other contradictions, like the Typhon Expanse being a settled part of the Federation rather than a sector still uncharted eight decades later.
The simplest explanation for the ways in which Ship of the Line contradicts canon is simple: Carey didn't care. She saw Star Trek as a manly, masculine, military action series. She had her own thing she wanted to do and an editor who'd let her do it because her books sold.
I do have to admit that I chuckled at the description of the Enterprise-D bridge as seen by the Bozeman in that scene from “Cause and Effect”: “… a huge, wide, bright room of some kind with lots of lounge chairs and people sitting in most of the chairs.”
Lounge chairs.
—David Young
Brandon, Florida
Lounge chairs.
—David Young
Brandon, Florida
Simplest explanation maybe but not really a satisfying one. I’m more partial to just considering it an odd alternate take (kind of like the early novels subsequently contradicted by later television episodes or films.
—David Young
Brandon, Florida
Considering the size of Starfleet, isn't it possible there'd end up an all-male ship? By some fluke or whatnot. I'm guessing Bozeman's crew is somewhere between 40 (Lantree) and 200 (non-canon techie stuff on Miranda-class ships)
Ignoring the canon discrepancies, of course.
Hmm... Let's assume an egalitarian Starfleet, in which maybe about any randomly chosen human crew member would have about a 48-49% chance of being male (or female; the other 1.5-2% being non-binary). Throw in the occasional humanoid species with more than two sexes, or zero sexes, and it might drop down to, say, a 45% chance that any random crew member would be male.
I think the calculation is quite simple: for a crew of X people, the probability that they're all male is 0.45 to the X power. If it's 40 people, the probability is 1.3443 x 10^-14, which is 1 in 74.4 trillion. Which means that if there were 74.4 trillion 40-person ships in Starfleet, one of them would probably have an all-male crew. As crew size increases, the odds get exponentially lower.
So no. Nuh-uh. No way that's happening in an unbiased Starfleet, except as a wild statistical fluke.
Similar threads
