When I write fan fiction I make a point out of exploring parts of the Trek universe we have not seen at all or only very little of. It’s very fun, especially because you can finally subvert some of the more illogical things, like why almost every species seems to be monocultural under one flag and name with one home planet that’s named after the species, why humanity is so over-represented in the Federation, why there are no spacefaring nation states, and all.
Moneyless society doesn’t mean a post-scarcity society. There’s clearly poverty on some Federation fringe worlds. Only Earth and the other core worlds really are paradise. The others have always been implied to work towards their bettering but not being quite there yet.
@A_Chilean_Cyborg@ValueSubtracted You might be interested in Ursula K. LeGuin’s book THE DISPOSSESSED. In one scene, the character from the anarchist planet explains to a character from the capitalist planet how they get people to do the dirty or dangerous jobs.
They are excellent negotiators and traders. If you need something like an ionized plasma channel or even a prototype phase cloak, the Ferengi can find it for you.
I own a Morn action figure, have Mark Allen Shepard's autographed Morn card as well, because of his character being a Cheers reference. I even have a metal die cut Morn card somewhere I think.
TNG Ferengi were more interesting. DS9 they just felt like filler B characters and any Ferengi episodes were inane. But then, I think DS9 sucked.
I mean, the Ferengi were a total flop. They were meant to be the big bad guys in TNG but their appearance was deemed too humorous. That’s how we got the Borg - needed a big bad guy.
@ValueSubtracted I don't think so, the canon has a lot links to possible stories without starfleet. i would find stories about living under the Dominion interesting.
Plus given the track record of how the Federation is represented in recent Trek especially, I don’t trust them to portray actual paradise.
In Picard we see car-centric Americanized cities, the FNN just being a thinly veiled once-again American CNN clone, everything’s about the West and its culture again (this was already bad in old Trek, like why San Fran and Paris are the most important cities and how the Xindi weapon fucked up the USA instead of literally any other place on Earth). It’s like they think being in space and having technology makes paradise, and culture wouldn’t change at all.
I trust single novel authors more than huge production companies and writing rooms.
Absolutely. Star Trek writers are in no way immune to capitalist realism themselves, especially when they’re beholden to studio execs and budgets.
I didn’t make it more than a few episodes into Picard before giving up in disgust, and this only validates my choice there. It’s not just Picard though. Strange New Worlds is generally quite good, but the colony shown in the most recent episode was explicitly modeled on a mid 20th century American small town, a place Federation citizens should know better than to emulate.
Are there any novels or fanfics you’d recommend that do an actual good job of portraying a properly post scarcity Federation culture?
That’s difficult, honestly. Most of the novels I read don’t put much of a focus on the societies they live in, more on the characters or cool phenomena. I personally liked the depiction of Earth in the Department of Temporal Investigation novel series (which, by the way, is excellent anyway), but even that wasn’t very specific.
As for fan fiction, I personally try to write much more plausible fiction that doesn’t take “human-ish” patterns for granted; e. g. some of the species we explore don’t even form nation states, I put more of a focus on non-humanoids, I try to make Starfleet and Federation names and representation equally distributed among member species (e. g. no USS Einstein, but instead like USS Rogra jav Baur, after the Tellarite diplomat), and look at super underrepresented peoples, subcultures, professions and areas to flesh them out a bit. I also assume that in the future we are talking about, important places are all over Earth, not just in the USA and Europe. Like, the hero ship freighter that I am writing about currently is called the SS Kyakhta, after the Russia-China trade route in the late middle ages. The Captain is a non-binary elderly Kaferian. And the only human crewmate is from Daşoguz, Turkmenistan; which developed into quite a bustling center for high-quality engineering schools.
But I haven’t read much other fan fiction with the same values; most Trek fan fiction is centered around the main characters of the shows, usually in a romantic or sexual manner. Not that that’s bad, I just wish there was more general, plausible-for-a-show fiction too.
A solarpunk Star Trek would be amazing! Tell the story of civilians living in a post-scarcity economy, building a colony, farming, and running restaurants. The “Articles of the Federation” idea of “The West Wing in Space” made my heart skip a beat.
I want to see more of Federation life, through a lens other than the military!
Exactly what I was thinking about. Though I think if you wanted to do a series, you’d probably want a little more conflict than a paradise planet could offer.
