Jeff Offringa’s Journal

Well, Aromathians, it’s been a while, and this time my lack of posts is not my fault – honest! Our resident technical expert / research mouse, Yekcim, and his trusty assistant, our very own web master Mr, Lemurboy, assure me that some dastardly hackers got into the server that hosts my site and was using it to send spam e-mail (or worse) to lots of friendly people around the world. So, we needed to migrate the main site to a new server, and that has taken longer than anticipated. OTOH, it was pointed out to me that the site that hosts my journal wasn’t affected, and so I realized I should get off my butt and write a post or two.

So… saying that, I come to my topic for today: Utopia’s. I’ve been thinking about these for a couple weeks now for a pair of reasons. First, I’ve been participating in an ongoing discussion about Star Trek on a game message board I frequent. and as several posters there have pointed out, Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future was unabashedly utopian – no war, hunger, or money; everyone gets along with everyone else of all races, creeds, and ethnicities, etc. Heck, even all the other races of the Federation love everyone else.

Secondly, though, is a comment I saw in the back of the novel Divergent. Now, I haven’t read the book (or seen the movie), but that series has exploded in popularity with the movie coming out (at least amongst middle school kids), and so I picked up the book and was glancing at it the other day. What caught my interest was a question the author was asked in the “afterwords” interview. In it, she was asked why she writes about Dystopias rather than Utopias, and I found her response enlightening. To paraphrase, she maintained that utopias are inherently uninteresting things to write about. Why?

In a utopia, everyone wins! Sure, it might take some time, but you know the person will succeed. An obstacle or two might have to be overcome, but eventually, the protagonist will achieve their goal. Or, put another way, there is no real conflict. This is, in a nutshell, the biggest flaw of Star Trek. Sure, the vision of the future is appealing, but…in the case of classic Trek, you know that Kirk will make a speech, get into a fist fight or two, have some green alien sex, and in the end the monster of the week will be defeated because it is a Utopia. Kirk and crew HAVE to win.

Am I over dramatizing things? Sure, maybe a little. Most authors don’t want to kill off characters because their fans will get upset with them if they do (Consider how many people won’t read George Martin because of this…) OTOH, consider why Martin is so popular: People DIE in his novels. No one is safe.

It’s not just about death, though. Look at Next Gen Trek: The Federation has conquered war, famine, disease. The only challenges that Picard and crew have to face come from the bad, bad Borg and Dominion, or from within. And since you know Data will defeat the Borg, you only have internal conflict – the weakest form, I am told, of conflict in a story.

Sure, DS9 and Voyager change this up some, but…. even there you know the good guys are going to win. Yet there is more to it than that. Sure, I still love Trek; in fact, I am reading through the Trek EU “Typhon Pact” novels right now. These novels share with DS9 a vision of the Trek universe where everything isn’t perfect. The Borg have decimated large portions of the Federation. There is unrest on certain worlds. More importantly, the races around the Federation have joined together to oppose the aggressive, expansionist policies of the Federation.

Think about it: We always think of the Federation as the good guys. But are they? They ram the Prime Directive at all their members, and tell those who aren’t that “Our way is the best. No – wait – not the best, the ONLY way!”

Really? Look at it from the point of view of the Romulans, or any other race the Federation disagrees with. What is the Federation always doing? Exploring. But not just exploring – expanding. And if you don’t like the Federation, you’re cast on the way side, never to become a member of there…. AHEM…. Utopia.

I can see this point of view. It’s much the same argument that was and is made against America’s exportation of Democracy around the world. I don’t want to go further (and break into a political discussion), but suffice it to say that the Typhon Pact powers do have a point. To wrap this up, just consider for a moment what the writers of the Pact novels (And DS9) have done: They’ve made Trek more interesting by showing us a view of the future where Trek isn’t Perfect. It is up for debate whether they think this view of the future is desirable (let alone realistic), but the presence of things like Section 31 in the Trek universe do one thing: add drama. And while drama isn’t a good thing in real life (I like a nice tranquil life, thank you), in a story, it surely is.

So, for me at least, bring on the Dystopian stories…..