You know that. I know that. But there's a segment of fans who just won't accept it since it's not the actual word "military."
What's the worst non-canon decision in the history of Trek?
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
You know that. I know that. But there's a segment of fans who just won't accept it since it's not the actual word "military."
There are always people who are wrong. That doesn't make the truth ambiguous, it just makes them wrong. If we're talking about a trip around the world, it's just a pointless distraction to bring up Flat-Earthers. We should focus on the truth instead of giving a platform to people who are obviously wrong.
Honestly, half the time the people who argue that Starfleet isn't a military are just ignorant of what a military is. Case in point, one of the previous threads devoted to The Argument, I pointed out the fact that the allegedly non-military Starfleet has court martials, and the reply I got was "Is a Starfleet court martial based on a military court martial?" As though there could be any other kind of court martial.
There are times when people try to argue the fact that Starfleet has a science division is proof that they aren't military. Despite the fact the US military has its own science division. Hell, even within the confines of Trek Canon, militant races like the Klingons and Romulans have science divisions in their militaries.
when they find out that NOAA is one of the uniform services of the US military.
They have these discussions on the Internet, which is built upon the foundations of ARPAnet, which was invented by ARPA which is..
oh no
Exploding Elmo is the perfect representation of The Argument.
Finally, my 15 minutes of fame is at hand!
Does your heart burn on Qo'noS?
There are things you can do when twenty-four novels were being published a year that you can't do when there are twelve or nine or six, like burning a book on a character-driven story. I think of a review @Stevil2001 wrote a few years ago of early Stranger Things and how it was "all epic, all the time," and what he really wanted was a quiet story where the characters could mix in different ways and do things that had nothing to do with the metaplot. Or my own thoughts on the BBC's Doctor Who spin-off Class, which was eight tight mythology episodes, but what it really needed (and what I really wanted) was the five "monster of the week" episodes that had nothing to do with the mythology that would have been possible in a thirteen episode season. The epic, mythology stories are fine, but you can't subsist on just the epic, mythology stories. You need the smaller, quieter stories, the ones that seem like filler, the ones that let the characters breathe. But Pocket would have had to develop other outlets for that kind of storytelling, maybe ebooks (cutting back on SCE and replacing it with DS9 and TNG relaunch stories) or anthologies (which don't sell well).
While that's valid for TV shows, I'm not sure it really works for novels, since novels are long enough to flesh out character subplots alongside the bigger mythology plots. If you look at the novelizations of Trek movies or 2-part episodes, they tend to be in the 200-page range with relatively large print. So a hefty 300- or 350-page novel might be the equivalent of 3-4 episodes. And novels with large ensemble casts often have them split up and dealing with two or three independent storylines at the same time, as if they were in separate "episodes."
I definitely felt that during my last trip through his work. Like the second I started reading the NF novels after the time jump to around Nemesis, there was just a noticeable plummet. Didn’t even finish out Blind Man’s Bluff and decided that entire batch of books were just going to be for collection’s sake, that I wouldn’t be reading them again.
Also couldn’t make it through Before Dishonor, but that was definitely made worse by the string of NF novels around it.
And they don't really even have to be 350+ pages long to do this.
But I will note that if you're writing a book that takes your protagonist from infancy to graduate school, and you're not either summarizing or completely skipping years at a time, you're going to end up using 100-200 pages just getting your protagonist out of high school.
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All because he habitually pulls his uniform tunic down? Oh, not that "Picard Maneuver"; the other one? Nevermind.
You can go all the way to Disco's first season, first episode even, where Prime Georgiou has a diploma from a military academy in her ready room.
