No great surprise I’m a fan of Star Trek. But there are some things about the world that has been built in Trek that are a bit disconcerting. This should not be a surprise given the sheer volume of Trek that has been put on screen, and how little control there has been over the “canon;” one movie or show will merrily steamroll the events or history put forward in another, so tryign to come up with a consistent narrative is pretty much impossible. Heck… watch the Original Series. What was Spock? For pretty much the first season he was a Vulcanian. Then he became a Vulcan. The ship ran on lithium crystals. Then it ran on dilithium crystals. It was an Earth vessel run by the United Earth Space Probe Agency, until suddenly it was a Federation vessel run by Starfleet.
Tack on another 50 years worth of writers cobbling together their own ideas and it’s no wonder than things don’t necessarily mesh. But one thing that has remained consistent: the only people you really get to know are Starfleet officers. So the world is seen from their perspective. This will of course color things. A long-running series based around the day to day doings at Vandenberg Air Force Base might lead people to think that the United States is all about launching satellites and missiles and little else.
Still and all, the glimpses of the world outside the various Starfleet vessels does often show a world that is a bit… disturbing. This video covers some of that. Note: the “pecan” joke right near the beginning made me laugh *far* out of proportion to jsut how funny I suppose the joke really is.
One thing the video seems to completely miss: the Maquis. Coupled with a whole lot of Deep Space Nine, the Maquis showed that a lot of humans, Starfleet and civilian, just didn’t like the Federation and wanted to be rid of it… and that the Federation didn’t want to let them go.
My own “Zaneverse” stories have a problem that “Star Trek” has: both are set in post-scarcity economies. Both feature essentially unlimited free energy, both feature machines that can replicate/fabricate anything you like from clothes to firearms to food at the press of a button. While these would be great to have, and would, at least theoretically, dispense with a lot of the motives for war and crime, they might also tend to make the world of storytelling pretty dull since they do away with many motives for conflict. Star Trek seems to deal with the problem by strictly rationing the technology. The only Federation citizens you ever see traveling are Starfleet members of Federation officials/employees; you get the impression that the rest of the Federation is populated by what are essentially serfs, but serfs believing they’re in paradise. That is one way to keep the peace, I suppose.