Re: Star Trek background - Reply

In message <s418133a.065@wpg.uwe.ac.uk> Phillip Atcliffe writes:
> Allan Goodall, survey collator extraordinare, wrote:
> 
> > The most obvious military is the Federation. The Feds are
essentially an
> extension of the American ideal of the US military system. <
> 
> Actually, the entire Federation is based on the ideal of the US, what
with the
> President, Fed Council and all, particularly in unofficial stuff like
the Franz
> Joseph Tech Manual. 

If you read the Constitution of the Soviet Union, you'll find it
really isn't very different. Oddly, their constituition doesn't
ever mention the Communist Party and makes a great deal of the
freedom to vote and other BS...

[I may, of course, be confusing the old USSR constitution with the
constitution of the old RSFSR. That's the Russian Socialist 
*Federated* Soviet Republic...]

B5, as I've said, is far, far worse in not even making a token
effort to disguise the American governmental hierarchy that it
uses for the whole of Earth. Very irritating. Where did the Mother
of Parliaments disappear to? What happened to the U.N.?

> >Nothing ever breaks, innovation is rampant, and they are always in
the moral
> right. In fact, Starfleet is essentially identical in these respects
to the
> US military as shown in Tom Clancy's novels, and I doubt if you could
> successfully claim Clancy is a leftist. <

[ROTFL, Allan]

> Perhaps not, but the influence of StarFleet on Federation politics
(e.g., the Fed
> Council members in the 4th movie who wore StarFleet uniforms) is more
like
> that of the Soviet Union or China 

...and seem sometimes to form a hereditary militocracy. It often
struck me that just about everbody on the Enterprise-D bridge had
a parent as a Starfleet officer. Riker certainly did, LaForge did,
the irritating Wesley Crusher had *both* parents... didn't the 
Picards stretch back to Trafalger as naval officers?

More lazy writing.

> > As for Klingons and Cardassians, that's the same Alien problem as
before.
> Klingons are just Japanese samurai with the Norse afterlife (well, at
least
> Valhalla) grafted on. <

Something else that afflicts both ST and B5 and, well, just about
everything else is the inability to portray alien cultures as
*diverse*. 

All aliens are monocultures, while humanity is not. This is really
underlined in a truely terrible B5 episode where everyone is 
running about explaining their religeons to each other, and each
alien race has one religeon, while humanity has about a hundred.

I think, just to drag this somewhere vaguely on-topic, that this
should be avoided in any medium, including game-background. So the
Kra'Vak, there's no diversity to them at all? All the same bunch
of stock psychotic predator aliens?

> Interesting, because the _original_ Klingons (no ridges) were designed
as
> quasi-Russian-commies to compete with the "Free Worlds" of the UFP in
a kind
> of Cold War, kept from becoming truly hot by those deuses ex machina,
the
> Organians. 

Ah, back in the days of "Captain Kennedy's Space Patrol". I often
think of B5 as TOS's true inheritor... I've seen more than one 
source refer to Sheriden as "Captain Clinton".

> It was only when TNG was made that the whole honour thing turned
> up. The original Klingons would have scorned honour as a waste of time
and an
> impediment to getting what they wanted; the _Romulans_ were the ones
with
> the honour fixation, although that didn't stop them from ambushing the
good
> guys. That, to my mind, made _them_ the pseudo-Japanese (or was it
> Chinese? Someone inscrutable, anyway <g>), but the "characterisations"
of the
> two races that were established in TOS got scrambled when TNG came
along.

This goes to the heart of the "all aliens are monocultures" thing.

All aliens have inflexible codes of honour and tradition. Yawn. 

Oh, the Mimbari have an infleible code of honour that our
characters can expoit? I am surprised. And so do the Centauri, and 
Klingons and Ferengi etc. etc.

-- 
David Brewer