I have this running theory that a lot of Discovery and Picard was written by people who haven't watched Star Trek, but do browse the wiki. I can just picture someone not really into Trek stumbling on the article for Section 31 and think, "Woah, this must be really cool and important!"
It's disappointing. DS9 was pretty unambiguous in its portrayal -- Section 31 is a violation of Federation ideals and shouldn't be allowed to continue. There is potential for an interesting story, but it's fundamentally not the story these guys are interested in telling. To them, Section 31 is just cool terminology to throw around; "I have the super-duper Q-clearance for top secret cool spy stuff!!!"
I agree, and i think 40k prefigured this. There are a lot of artists my age who remember how cool this stuff was when we were six, but they never learned why the slop was like that - they didn't go back and watch kurasawa and the battle of midway and the maltese falcon. They just like star wars. So when they try to make star wars we get jar jar's star wars. Like jj abrahms is a smart dumb guy so when he was given a big bag of money and told to make star wars he made star wars.
Rian johnson is a. Smart smart guy, so when he was told to make star wars he went and made, idk, casino royal and master and commander and a couple of other things, along with a meta-commentary on hero-worship that was frustratingly loyal to how Luke was portrayed (a petulant kid in over his head who kind of only won because of a moment of empathy when confronting a sith lord) and how the jedi were portrayed (a bunch weird old wizards living in exile who never told the truth straight and mostly fought by using clever misdirection.
Jj's movie sucked because it was star wars fan fic. Rian's movie had a bunch of good parts that didn't gel, i assume because he's in over his head. Subsequent star wars has followed the something vaguely like a pattern - when Mandalorian was Lone Wolf and Cub in space it was cool. When it started trying to be star wars it sucked. We're lurching in to simulacra and simulacrum territory where star wars movies are cheap copies of star wars movies instead of being cheap copies of some of the best movies ever made but with rubber aliens in space. Rogue one threaded the needle by being a cool wwii partisans doing a heist movie, andor isn't a star wars show at all and that's why it's the best star wars show, while a lot of the other stuff is increasingly fractally self-referential clone wars cartoon auto-eroticism.
Lotr? Peter Jackson made a Lord of the Rings movie. Then, idk, hbo or whoever said "well that made a lot of money let's drop the orcs, add a lot of sexual violence, and make our own pastiche of Jackson's movie and we got gambo. And then it started feeding on itself and we got epic fantasy shows that were trying to eb hbo's rip off of lotr instead of either trying to be a rip off of a better movie, which is where star wars is good, or an original adaptation of a good story, which is why Jackson's lotr worked.
I have hope for that gargoyles adaptation if it ever happens because gargoyles is a fun rip off of shakespeare and Branaggahs entire career has been making fun shakespeare movies, so he just has to do what he's good at but this time it's softcore cgi monsterfucker erotica, and he's a horny cornball so he'll be great at it.
But what's this war of rohan anime? That's the most boring fucking thing in all of lotr and i 100% gaurantee you that the tolkien estate gave it to them because they thought "there's nothing here for you to desecrate give us the check".
Idk what else is even happening out there, i very rarely watch tv shows and i've seen little to make me regret that lately.
The batman stuff does this too, all the cape shit. Batman was a standard costumed pulp adventure dude. 60s batman was a fun silly movie about comic books. 90s batman was a high camp celebration of how silly comic books had become. Nolan batman was fascist erotica and where the wheels really started to come off. Everything since have been batman movies trying really hard to be batman movies and have, accordingly, sucked ass.
Likewise with marvel capeshit - blade was a cool movie about how bad ass Wesley Snipes is, and was way better and more popular than the blade comic. Iron man was about look at this cool fucking guy. WInter Soldiers, for me hands down the best one was a 1970s political thriller and for authenticity they even got fucking Robert Redford. Subsequent marvel movies have mostly tried to be marvel movies and have been dogshit. A thing trying to be itself is going to end up being a poser, and as we all know a poser is the worst thing you can be. Then with dead pool we had a couple of marvel capeshit movies that were entirely about how silly and absurd marvel capeshit was, and that was fun. Idk if the new one was good, but it does seem to be a movie about how silly it's own success at being silly is so maybe it worked idk.
Godzilla minus one? Wasn't trying to be a godzilla movie. It was a movie about modern Japan's struggle between fascist nationalist revanchism and an attempt to finally move past that insane shit and let Shinzo abe and all his buddies, and the war, die. It was about how Japan is enslaved to the us at no benefit to itself and how it's government are inept, useless neoliberal cowards who can't find their asses with both hands. A bunch of civillians fight godzilla with crap they have lying around because neither their american overlords nor their captured, useless government will help, and the whole time they are looking directly at the screen saying "the war was a miserable failure that destroyed japan. There was nothing good or honorable about it except that some people were lucky enough to survive. We do not want to go back, we must not go back. The people of Japan must reject nationalist militarism, the US's geopolitical manipulations, and our shitty government and chart our own path or godzilla is going to wreck us".
Cool as fuck, best Godzilla movie sense the first one, all because it's a movie about contemporary Japanese culture and politics that uses Godzilla as a stand in for the threats facing Japan - as is tradition - instead of being about godzilla.no one being able to afford to have children in Japan's fucked up economy is a key plot beat. Excellent film.
Another Frank banger.
I loved Minus One. Great film
Then with dead pool we had a couple of marvel capeshit movies that were entirely about how silly and absurd marvel capeshit was, and that was fun. Idk if the new one was good, but it does seem to be a movie about how silly it's own success at being silly is so maybe it worked idk.
It triples down on the absurdity of capeshit in a way it's hard to see how they top it.
Blade gets a brief cameo.
Thanks for writing about the Godzilla movie. I had heard some buzz but didn't know about the depth to it's concept. I'll have to check it out!
Christ, right?i read gambo years before the show, got to the end at that time, and moved on. And then the show happened and i started re-reading it and was like "this is all miserable, all these people are horrible, only bad horrible things happen. Nooooooope" and put it down. All i remember about the show is that the armor looked awful. But i still got to hear about it for years while being unable to participate in any conversations because ir ead the books and knew what happened next! it was agony!
I'm glad we got lower decks. At least some group of artists out there "got" it.
: p
Yeah i would not want to see their star trek. JJ's Star Trek was bad enough.
Yeah, its lazy writing. At least in Deep Space 9, you get the sense that while Section 31 has enough connections to keep itself hidden, it wasn't all powerful. If I were gonna pick up the plot threads, I'd have it be what it was first stated to be: a small group of essentially vigilantes, high on their own mythology and exploiting the gaps and shadows of a huge organization like the federation.
I think in some ways, Star Trek let liberals indulge in American Exceptionalism. Like, here's all the values we purport to hold, being evangelized by a good democratic federal government and its space-navy! Yes, they're socialist; but its because of replicators! Don't worry about it! Obviously, this varied across episodes and writers. Some might be more explicitly socialist, some might have a little more yankee-brainworms. But New Trek feels like its all in on the American Exceptionalism. So now Section 31 is just Federation CIA and they do "critical work" whatever that means
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Angela's rant is great, but she also misses something. Season 2 of Picard is when this circus went from 'not getting it' and 'not wanting to make star trek' to being outright evil.
One of the most interesting aspects of Star Trek is how it evolves over time. Which includes how the canon evolves as well. What's key is how this happens in respects to how humanity built its utopia.
In the original series it was a complex trial by fire sort of thing. Fascist eugenics lead to WW3, and humanity got out of its hole with some alien solidarity from the vulcans. Its 1960s style alien messianism combined with cold war fears and the proximity to WW2 that lead to those ideas. 1990s Trek limited itself to calibrating where the emphasis was placed. All of those are still true and part of the story (TNG reminds us of it), but DS9 makes it clear that political struggle for equality and economic freedom were a part of it all while Enterprise reminded everyone that Humans did not achieve utopia by inventing replicators. They didn't even have replicators when they eliminated poverty, hunger and disease.
Picard meanwhile made everything including Climate Change reliant on finding a microbe in space. It's not humanity that overcomes difficulties. It's magic. And that's the showrunner's worldview. It's not just bleak and hopeless. It is that fascism is inevitable because there's no other option other than magic.
I feel like i could sit across a slowly cooling basket of shitty diner fries with this woman going "right?" "Yes!" "I agree!" "Omg thank you!" Etc etc for like, idk, six, maybe eight hours two or three days in a row. I feel pretty much the same way about star wars, fallout, lotr, and when microsoft announces the Elder Scrolls series at some point in the next 18 mos i'll feel the same way about that, too.
We're entering some bold new hell. Capital is trying to turn very big, unwiedly, difficult entertainment products like massive shows, games, and movies in to something like paid per line victorian era pulp slop that can be churnned out endlessly on a tight schedule, while also trying to strip all the craft and expertise out of it and turn the helm over to "ai", while also trying to meet their state mandated propaganda goals and their marketing goals and shore up the declining rate of profit. More and more parts moving faster and faster in ever tighter circles. And there's no bottom so it will go on getting worse, faster, in more perverse ways, until something drastic happens.
In the mean time please join me in declaring yourself a co-equal owner, creator, producer, and writer of lord of the rings, star slop, or whatever other story you love, and start making your own slop and refusing to call it fan-fic and just saying " fuck you, this is the true and authentic cup of christ because if a welsh story about a cool guy can turn in to fucking Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and speilberg doesn't have to call it fan fic then I can write my own stories about random elves and I don't have to be fake humble about it."
If we don't steal our stories back from them they're just going to keep doing this shit until they wring all possible joy out of them. Lancelot is a self insert slash fic character and so can you!
Oh shit that universal monsters... universe thing! I forgot about the bad tom cruise mummy movie.
but I truly sincerely believe that "to each their own" is a particularly potent cognitohazard cliche
It's in gaming, too. "There's no wrong way to play if you're having fun!" Yes their fucking is! It's a game. Games by definition have rules. If you're not playing according to the rules in good faith in a multiplayer game you're fucking over the other players. If you're doing it to yourself in a single player game you're ruining your own fun. A game without rules is either you cheating, or imaginative play. Neither is a proper game. It's fine to cheat in sp games if you want, but people keep bringing this up as a justiication for demanding changes in the way sp and coop games are designed, implemented, and maintained and once you peekl back through the layers of people arguing about things they don't understand - difficulty systems, artist intent, the relationship between player and dm, there's a startling number of people who just fundamentally do not understand what "play" is. Like not playing games, or not being able to explain the different between play behavior and a game, they don't know how to play because of the monetized restricted entertainment hell we're all trapped in. They don't know how to have fun. They can't engage with a toy it it doesn't have skinner box systems and victory condtions, nor can they even in theory recognize why a game might place rules and restrictions on the player. Like somehow the inborn human ability to play, imagine, and experience fun has been destroyed in a big chunk of the population and all that's left is skinner box dopamine chases.
Treatbrains that bully "defaults" in Fortnite come to mind there. I've been around kids in school that did exactly that toward other kids, offline, tormenting them for being "defaults." Teenage enforcers of monetization.
That's awful. We had pressure to have cool clothes and spending money back in the day, but not pressure to buy mtx. : p the most pressure i had to look cool in games was from the ultima online bank squatter crowd and most people would give you
Double replying but whatevs - i think the "too each their own" thing, people don't have enough outside referrents to discuss media. All the star wars and marvel and bat slop are all made by JJ, Gunn, and like four other dudes so all the stories they've seen for the last ten years are the same man children telling the same stories the same way with the same actors. All that changes is how saturated the colors in the sweat-shop forced labor last minute cgi is.
You have to have seen some kurasawa movies and some wwii battlefield footage to appreciate and discus Star Wars and those who disagree can take a number, i an currently fighting the prior wrong person and will be with you shortly. You can't talk about why star wars ships do that if you haven't seen gun pod footage from the battle of midway. You can't talk about lightsaber fights (forms, barf) if you haven't got at least some idea that samurai cinema exists.
And people don't. Their whole life they've been trapped in this world where since harry potter came out in 1997 every media product is part of an all fronts scorched earth campaign to take all of your attention all the time every day.
Star wars began the great work, hp completed it, and now every media project at least aspires to be a 24 hour all encompassing life style of food, clothing, cars, artifacts, apps. I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of pages analyzing how often apps and ads should interact with your customers per hour based on their age, gender, etc. You're not supposed to go outside. Each group of media products is supposed to be a walled garden that is at least capable of being some people's entire living experience outside work hours. And, like, yeah, i'm exaggerating, but the combined effect of all these enshittifying products trying to take all your attention all the time, is they're undergoing fierce evolutionary selection leading to convergence on a few forms, meaning people live in these horrible frankenstein prison's stitched together from the rotting flesh of whatever media property group manages to grab their attention. They go from marvel to dcto star wars to potter to gambo to whatever, and it's all the same plots presented the same ways by the same writers, actors, and show runners reinforcing the same messages, just this horrifying cybernetic hell cave out of plato's most derranged dying multiversal ayahuascu death nightmare. The cave is inside us, around us, everywhere. There is no end to the cave. If you go outside the cave you only see yourself staring back. You cannot escape the cave. The cave is all. The cave loves you. Look at the shadows on the wall, consume, be upset in the ways the cave wants you to be upset so you buy more cave shit to assauge the case upset the cave caused you so it could sell you cave theme'd anti-cave upset cave products cave cave cave cave cave cave cave cave cave!
I'ma. Little concerned that my covid lead to an opportunistic strep infection actually...
I firmly believe that everything is cannon and there is no such thing as fan fiction, but I have difficulty conveying why I believe that. I completely agree, and very well said.
Watch all four hours cowards.
But yes, I loved her analysis of how Section 31 existing fundamentally ruins the entire setting of Trek.
I really liked the Lower Decks episode where they take apart some of the worse parts of DS9, like the gold pressed latinum.
I tapped out after 2 or 3 episodes. It's not dignified to trot this old man around.
bat'leth 
remember bat'leths!? remember worf?!Ya know I might watch a four hour video about star trek, but I sure as hell won't watch a four hour video about Star Trek: Picard, a show that I have not watched, that I have no interest in watching and really couldn't care less about what it "does" to Star Trek.
The only actually interesting thing about Star Trek is how it reflects reality and the times it was made in. NuTrek doesn't ruin the original Star Trek, it doesn't even do anything to it. It's just some other random thing that some other random people made because some random company decided is going to increase the value of the "intellectual property" that is the Star Trek™ brand. And the fact that it is bad television made only for profit, that it is a sad and depressing turn for the original vision of the future that Star Trek used to be sometime back in the 60s is kinda sad, but it's also nothing but a reflection of the state of the world in its least creative, visionary and hopeful iteration. Any part of your heart that you put into that nebulous thing that is Star Trek over the years should flow freely from thing to idea to thing and back and not be exclusive to what really amounts to nothing but a brand. It's high time to get over it.
If anything Star Trek has been the poster child of cultural stagnation and reaction for all of its life, it being after all the original "show that got cancelled but then uncancelled after the fandom complained about it for a decade". It's not even just that, it's the original "fandom" show, the show that originated "fanfiction" and everything that comes with it.
And even in its best, most hopeful and visionary form, Star Trek has always really been a terribly limited show: What has it ever been besides "Wagon Train to the stars"? Always taking place at the imagined "frontier", always marching west. Sure, the show might have told you it took place in a post-scarcity quasi-communist utopia, but have its stories and its form ever felt like it?
It's a testament to the sheer force of reaction that followed the 60s (and also and maybe even more the short-sightedness of the 60s themselves) that ever since we have lost not only our ability to imagine a better future, we've even lost the ability to imagine a better television show.
section 31 is based and it's just cold hard reality that such an agency would have to exist for the Federation to exist
i mean this is literally my defense of China/the USSR/DPRK etc etc, you literally do need some clandestine bullshit intelligence agency when you're beset by those of others
this isn't a section 31 defense because I'm not enough of a nerd to know all the holocausts they've done for liberalism
Hehe, reluctant agreement, my favorite kind of agreement
But yeah no i agree, it's just lib shit if it's used to handwave away "we did a genocide" or whatever. Nutrek sucks, it's just action schlock and it's not even good it's all shaky cam action schlock
It is possible to complain to much about gambo, but only in so far as there are much more interesting things to complain about where there is more productive discussion to be had.
I've heard house of dragon is okay - much less awooga and sexual violence for it's own sake, more dragons.
Good news and bad: the Section 31 show has been cancelled, but it's gonna be a movie instead now
I look forward to parsing through your many emojis if this terrible fate you've predicted does come to pass
Some of the morally questionable things in DS9 are more justifiable. Like In The Pale Moonlight, where Sisko and Garak assassinate a Romulan Senator to trick Romulus into joining the Dominion War on the Federation's side. Hell, I expect that when the Romulans eventually find out about that they'll respect it as a very Romulan sort of plot. Notably, Section 31 wasn't involved in that one.
My favorite part of Discovery was the episode where the anthropologist yells "holy shit Klingons! You have to punch them in the face as hard as you can right now or we'll all die!" And then they don't listen to the anthropologist and they don't ship-punch the klingons and then they do all die. Idk if the other episodes were good.
Yeah, that was especially egregious. I also hated the time Sisko poisoned an entire planet because Eddington was being too antifascist near him
Somewhere in another universe there's a version of DS9 where the focus was on rebuilding Bajor and all the complex post-revolution politics that inevitably happens, and not on technobabble and CGI space battles. We got glimpses of what it could have been like with episodes like "Duet", "Shakaar", "Progress" and "Past Prologue". What could have been.
To be fair he made the planet toxic only to Humans after Eddington tried to make it toxic only to Cardassians
I mean its a bit outta pocket, but there's a million planets and he was trying to make a really funny point
Yeah but there's a difference here - Communist intelligence units are full of commies, and can be a net good and continue to be a net good as long as they continue to be full of commies. Their goal is to defend the star trek future. Their enemies are the guys who think that Section 31 make cool protagonists.
If you look at the cold war, one thing I'm amazed by is how cheap you can by an American patriot. It's fucking chump change, beer money. And it's always because America's spies don't have financial stability and a good quality of life.
Meanwhile the Russians had guys inside Hoovers toilet counting the boils on his ass.
You'll find endless discussion on why, but i'm pretty sure at the end of the day the commies were fighting for an idea, and the americans, regardless of what they believed, were fighting for a roof, braces for their kid, cancer treatment for their mom.
The section 31 these show runners have created aren't hard nose old revolutionaires who have seen and done terrible things in the name of a good and honest ideology. The show runners are all end of history kids. They grew up after the world of ideology and belief had ended. For them there's only the status quo, forever.
Starfleet can't boldly go because they've already arrived at the end of history. Starfleet is america, section 31 is the cia and fbi and army, the only conceivable goal is to maintain the status quo forever. And int he world of the show runners that means that as the status quo decays for reasons they are ideologically not allowed to understand the intelligence services, the section 31s, use increasingly mask off violence to keep the wheels on.
Sci fi is always about society in the present day. Picard is about america, no. With no soviet union who can the romulans or klingons be? There's no one left except competing "bad" capitalists. There's no revolutionary future, just a static liberal now. They can't tell star trek stories because they don't live in a world where kids can be allowed to dream star trek dreams, because that would be better than what we have. And better isn't allowed. The status quo must be defended, and that demands that the star trek future, the better future, the we came in peace for all man kind future, has to be killed. And it's most important that it be killed in the dreams of children.
I'd just like to remind everyone that Discovery S1 is completely plagiarized from some small indie game on Steam. Even though the poor guy lost the lawsuit, its pretty fucking obvious the writers had someone use literal google results for inspiration.
I loved her video and this is a great compilation but others have made the same criticisms for some time now. The RLM reviews go over most of these issues in a much shorter time.
I did not know about the Patrick Stewart biography thing but it only serves to show how much of a useless piece of shit he is. I do not care about the whatever good contributions he may have made or said, he can go die in a fire.
If you haven't already I recommend once again reading FADE IN: From Idea to Final Draft. PDF here. Its not like Michael Piller is a saint or anything but the Patrick Stewart letters should be put in any Trek museum IMO.
Again the quotes I love from PS
PS letter quotes
One deliberate change we made was to Picard. We toughened him up, chipped away at his smooth surface, roughened and intensified his feelings. Shifted him from Captain/ Diplomat/Philosopher to Captain/Rebel/Activist.
I feel that, in a sense, we had reinvented ourselves - or had begun to. The ‘story’ of the series was over and we were now telling a different story with our movies. That is what I want to see continue.
That is the background to the unease that I feel with this new story. It seems to reflect the series much more than where we were at the end of First Contact. This compounded by Michael referring back several times to aspects of the series you want to see in this film. That is what I see as retrograde and dangerous and, ultimately, dull.
The family building aspect of TNG is passed. Not dead, but the work is done. Most of our audience know who these people are and how they feel about each other and our new audience - the audience the studio are so eager for us to win and hold - don’t need to be told that. They will pick it up.
I don’t agree about our being explorers again. I think that is series material but not movie material. Heresy though this may be, I do not think our movie duty is “to seek out new life and new civilizations...” though it still is “to boldly go...”
I think there is real danger in the mindset that “there are certain things that our audience come to expect...”
And lastly - though far from leastly - sex and comedy. Two elements of life that I have come to think as critical in the TNG movies. I tell you I think our stories have got to be sexy. I don’t mean ‘sex scenes,’ God forbid, but a certain eroticism, a certain sexiness about our characters and situations is really helpful and fun. Let’s be honest, there is an inclination to stuffiness about our crew. For the same reason humor is vital and again I don’t mean set-piece scenes - though as I have said, Picard with the mariners could be a great sequence. I think our crew are adorable when they are witty, ironic, self deprecating, teasing, cheeky.
Yes, witty, ironic, self deprecating, teasing, cheeky are definitely traits that describe the TNG crew. God what a moron.
When she talks about Nemesis and the movies in general its important to realize just how terribly similar all of this is to the TNG movie era. You can read the nonsensical Patrick Stewart letters and how he so desperately wants to abandon the TV series.
Yeah they got PS because of Logan but Picard also turned out like this exactly because PS is an idiot that hates the TV series. If PS wanted it we could have had a more TNG relatable Picard series, but this idiot only wanted to make a statement about Brexit. The whole segment of why "Space Fox News" exist is exactly because of that mandate I'm 100% convinced. Yeah in the biography he brags about Season 2 but that was not his only input lol.
He said he didn't want a TNG "reunion". That was major bullshit, not only to shit on his fellow actors, but it would force the show back to the TV era. He always wanted to be a Movie StarTm like it was popular in the 90's and I fully believe that the Picard series was doomed from the start, PS would never come back to do actual real good TNG era Star Trek again, period. The success of X-Men did not change his mind, in 2018 he still wants nothing to do with the TV series.
Kurtzman and all are still complete assholes but its not like they could have made TNG 2.0 with Patrick Stewart either. It all just sucks for 30 years now.
The TNG movies convinced me that Stewart no longer understood his most famous character. The series Picard convinced me that he never did in the first place.
There was a series of blogposts/reviews from when Picard came out where the author more or less convinced me that Stewart did understand character - he also didn't like him. The reason why Picard is filled with these unearned emotional moments is precisely because Captain Picard is a stoic character.
There was a lot of talk on that lawsuit but sadly it was taken by the anti-woke rw YT grifters. but here its his blog. Anas's personal life was quite sad actualy, but the blog is still online and the case story is absurd. The game was created years before Discovery and the theory is when Brian Fuller left the Kurtzman team was crunching for time so they just copied whatever.
Show
What makes it a slam dunk is not each one taken individualy obviously, but how everything just happens to be a coincidence.
The trial ended up being about the Tardigrades and that was what the CBS wanted to focus on because it was the only technicality.
Its funny because if you make a science fiction show with a French Captain, an Android, a POC engineer on a ship that has a particular disc shape section where they all wear red blue and yellow uniforms, where they work for an "alliance" of planets and end up fighting a sort of cybernetic enemy you know Trek lawyers would be on your ass.
I do like the concept of a Section 31, it was executed well enough in DS9 and offered something of a critique on the whole trope of "Hard shadow men doing what needs to be done" (the nu-trek version tho is pure post 911, 24-ass, tacticool brainrot that I personally consider anti-canon)
But the concept itself presents an interesting hypothetical; how would a future socialist utopia deal with the intelligence agencies of fascist interstellar empires? It's why I've never been particularly annoyed by the weirder poltical aspects of Trek lore, obviously they originate from the liberal politics of 90s era writers and producers and Genes idiosyncratic "maoism", but there's not much to do with that information besides mope about the dominance of liberal cultural hegemony
What's fun for me is taking the nonsense at face value and either subverting or deconstructing it with your own pet theories about how this socialist utopia presented to us on screen could work, it's utterly useless but fun daydreaming
I don't even mind when chuds get in on the action and come up with the dumbest interpretation of fiction known to humankind, their lore craft is easy to debunk and its fun to point out the contradiction in their self-identification with characters who would phaser or quarantine them on a deserted rock
Have you ever read the Culture novels, by Iain M. Banks? They explore a somewhat similar idea to "intelligence agencies of
fascistpost scarcity interstellar empires".I can't remember if the contacted civilizations are ever socialist, although there's definitely a more feudal one and the overall themes may be interesting to you nonetheless.
There are more than a few passing references to contacted civilizations that are pretty primitive in terms of technology but very advanced socially. The result being that they are contacted a lot sooner than capitalist societies, which have to be subtly pushed and nudged into being less shit.
I love the shirt story, State of The Art, where they decide to use Earth as a control and not get involved at all
Oh damn, I forgot that part about "Earth being the control". That's hilarious!
My favorite one of them is Excession. I found the relationships / culture between the ship AI's so interesting and frankly, better written than many human relationships in the series overall.
It was a fun book and definitely exposes the lib brained tendencies of the Culture ruling elite (the Minds).
Look to Windward is my favourite. I love its pace. We see more day to day Culture life in that one than any other, and we also get to see the consequences of their meddling when it all goes wrong. Ziller is a great character and he is played so well by Peter Kenny in the audiobook.
The Ideology of modern reboots often comes down to "it wouldn't have gone down like that if I was on that plane, I can tell you that much."
Gunna' check this out. After the Guys Podcast episode on Trek Guys the other week I've been craving Star Trek. I've never watched Voyager (outside like random episodes at my childhood friend's house) so maybe I'll watch that sometime soon too.
