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Unofficial Literary Challenge 47 Discussion Thread

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  • julian#8673 julian Member Posts: 1 Arc User
    I've never posted any comment before so this might be an awkward start, but I just have to say that I really appreciate the "Masterverse" series. It's very well written, with intricate but compelling storylines and natural sounding dialogue (which is quite refreshing for anything that has the words "Star Trek" on it"). The characters are quite engaging and lively, even though they sometimes have a strong "sugar coating" applied to them.
    The best bit is the Machiavellian politcs, of course, and the realistic (relatively) social dynamics.
    But I have to say, I really, really despise the "Moab Confederacy" (from an in - universe point of view, of course).
    Their "values" are far too reminiscent of what many real life "social engineers" fantasize about. There is a certain rightist snobbishness going on in my country that is right up the same alley. You know, a sort of "let the refugees drown, the poor deserve to starve, only the educated deserve to vote" kind of thing. Even from otherwise kind and compassionate people.
    It seems you're propping up the Moabites (who have abandoned a free and fair existence in an advanced society with the express purpose of recreating the misery and exploitation of "ancient" capitalist societies) and framing them as the heroes, whilst also casting the Federation as the corrupt antagonists.
    I don't have any issue with this, mind you. I find it excellent . Fiction is certainly the place for this kind of thing. But, honestly, it kind of/sort of bugs me that no one points out (in the story) that their complaints against the Federation are utter hogwash. I mean, imagine if a group of "libertarians" from the US decided to establish a "free" colony in the Middle East, in the desert, right next to ISIS. Clearly, the fate of these colonists would go south very quickly. But the question that would naturally arise is whether the US should feel compelled to waste tax payer dollars and sacrifice the lives of its troops to shield these people from the consequences of their own stupidity. I personally would say "leave them to their fate".
    Correspondingly, the Moabites clearly deserve their fate and the Federation is under no obligation to arm them. In fact, it could be argued that the Federation is obliged to keep them disarmed, so as to protect potentially vulnerable civilizations from this obviously selfish and irresponsible group.
    This is the only little thing that keeps nagging somewhere at the back of my mind. I just want someone to tell these people off.

    I apologize if the scribbling above come across as rude/silly or misplaced. If that be the case, I shall obligingly delete this post.
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    edited July 2018
    I've never posted any comment before so this might be an awkward start, but I just have to say that I really appreciate the "Masterverse" series. It's very well written, with intricate but compelling storylines and natural sounding dialogue (which is quite refreshing for anything that has the words "Star Trek" on it"). The characters are quite engaging and lively, even though they sometimes have a strong "sugar coating" applied to them.
    The best bit is the Machiavellian politcs, of course, and the realistic (relatively) social dynamics.
    But I have to say, I really, really despise the "Moab Confederacy" (from an in - universe point of view, of course).
    Their "values" are far too reminiscent of what many real life "social engineers" fantasize about. There is a certain rightist snobbishness going on in my country that is right up the same alley. You know, a sort of "let the refugees drown, the poor deserve to starve, only the educated deserve to vote" kind of thing. Even from otherwise kind and compassionate people.
    It seems you're propping up the Moabites (who have abandoned a free and fair existence in an advanced society with the express purpose of recreating the misery and exploitation of "ancient" capitalist societies) and framing them as the heroes, whilst also casting the Federation as the corrupt antagonists.
    I don't have any issue with this, mind you. I find it excellent . Fiction is certainly the place for this kind of thing. But, honestly, it kind of/sort of bugs me that no one points out (in the story) that their complaints against the Federation are utter hogwash. I mean, imagine if a group of "libertarians" from the US decided to establish a "free" colony in the Middle East, in the desert, right next to ISIS. Clearly, the fate of these colonists would go south very quickly. But the question that would naturally arise is whether the US should feel compelled to waste tax payer dollars and sacrifice the lives of its troops to shield these people from the consequences of their own stupidity. I personally would say "leave them to their fate".
    Correspondingly, the Moabites clearly deserve their fate and the Federation is under no obligation to arm them. In fact, it could be argued that the Federation is obliged to keep them disarmed, so as to protect potentially vulnerable civilizations from this obviously selfish and irresponsible group.
    This is the only little thing that keeps nagging somewhere at the back of my mind. I just want someone to tell these people off.

    I apologize if the scribbling above come across as rude/silly or misplaced. If that be the case, I shall obligingly delete this post.

    First off I'll say this: the real-life political opinions of authors tend to leak into things they write, whether they mean them to or not. I have the impression from being a peripheral writer and worldbuilding contributor of the Masterverse for several years that the writing circle was a little bit top-heavy with conservatives in its heyday. Right-libertarians, granted (and to be clear, that's small-'l' libertarian as in devoted to protecting civil liberties, not necessarily economic libertarians), but some of the stuff that, for example @sander233 wrote (sadly he is no longer with us) wouldn't be out of place in Tom Clancy. And I admire Tom Clancy as probably the foremost writer of military fiction in the 20th century, but I have a lot of disagreements with his politics (especially as expressed in some of the later Jack Ryanverse novels like The Teeth of the Tiger). I'm a libertarian, too, but I'm a left-libertarian. And some of my focus in the new stories and rewrites has been to try and cast the Federation-Moab conflict a little more neutrally (without violating existing canon too much).

    So, there are things I like about Moab. There are also a lot of very significant things I don't like about Moab. Moab is intended to do some very morally ambiguous or outright wrong things, even by its originator @patrickngo. Thing you have to consider, though, is where they came from in-universe. Here's the thing about the "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few": what's viewed as good for the many isn't necessarily popular with the few. Rather like Diane Duane's version of the Romulans (see the novel series Rihannsu, which is highly recommended reading material anyway), Moab's ancestors were composed of several groups of people who didn't like the direction Earth was headed during the formation of United Earth and decided to get out while the getting was good. These most prominently included Israeli Jews displaced by the fall of Israel during WW3, a lot of Southeast Asian anti-communists (Vietnamese especially), and various economic and political nationalists including from the United States, all of whom had a bone to pick with the idea of United Earth for a wide variety of reasons (state secularism and hostility to religion, disgruntlement at other members, opposition to the idea of a world government supreme over nation-states). They were headed for Alpha Centauri, and if they'd gotten there that probably would've been the end of it for all intents and purposes, but they didn't: instead they fell through a wormhole that landed them in a borderline uninhabitable system on what was then the Klingon-Romulan border, and, oh, 150 years earlier than they left.

    So their culture grew up on this death world (think Grayson in Honor Harrington) and their nationalism took a collectivist bent, but for a very different reason and with very different effects than Federation-style collectivism. Restricting welfare and the right to vote, brutality towards lawbreakers and a willingness to go outside the law to accomplish? It's bred by the harsh environment that required everyone to pull together, except given the baseline right-wing bent of the settlers, instead of benefiting by contributing to the colony, you're penalized if you don't (negative reinforcement versus positive reinforcement). And this culture evolved separately from United Earth and later the Federation for a good 300 years, so they were for all intents and purposes an independent nation to begin with.

    And then they were recontacted by the Federation, and essentially annexed back into United Earth in exchange for medical and scientific advancements: Moab is, as previously mentioned, a poor world for most Earth-origin life and the average life expectancy had dropped to 40-ish. And United Earth, having been a founding and very influential member of the Federation for ~150 years, was now insisting that all the world had to conform to its norms (ref. Kirk and Picard's tendency to lecture people on how they're supposed to be, especially early-season Picard). That's gonna rankle.

    As far as weapons, consider this: politics firmly aside, you don't necessarily need a gun for self-defense in a big city (I say again, gun politics aside, I'm talking about practical facts): the police are at most a few minutes away. Your house catches fire? Same thing. You've got a garbage truck that comes by to deal with your house's leavings. You've got buses and maybe a subway system to get around so you might be able to get by without a car. The government services are present and they work pretty well for the most part (again, speaking in generalities: I'm fully aware there's some pretty awful exceptions). But I live out in backwoods North Carolina. The nearest town to me is four miles away and has around 4,000 people. Emergency response time is in tens of minutes or more, the fire department is composed of volunteers (i.e. you'll probably lose the house), and you take your trash to the landfill/recycling center in the back of your pickup truck, which you need because there's no public transportation. And on the off chance your house is broken into, or if your neighbor down the road loses his marbles over his significant other leaving him, you might actually legitimately need a firearm to defend your family. And that's the problem Moab and other fringe planets are faced with: because space is big and warp drive is a fairly slow FTL method compared to other works in the genre (or compared to things like quantum slipstream drive), it takes hours or days for Starfleet to respond to an incident -- whether that's Orion pirates, Klingons going a-wiking, or a negative space wedgie -- so having local armed forces of their own to call on is a survival trait. Whereas in Federation core worlds it usually isn't because Starfleet is right there (and most nasties aside from the negative space wedgie or the Borg aren't going to travel that deep into Federation space anyway). Problem is, during the Maquis revolt in the 2370s, the Federation (led by United Earth) outlawed arming colony worlds for fear of more such revolts.

    Before I go any further, why all the focus in this explanation on United Earth? Out-of-universe, it's mostly an extrapolation of why most speaking roles are given to Earth-origin humans, as opposed to humans from colonies or aliens. It also doesn't hurt that people like Picard strike a blue-collar guy like me as fairly bourgeois, with coming from a prominent winemaking family, quoting the Bard in casual conversation, and being dismissive of musical forms newer than World War II as in "Suddenly Human" (which out-of-universe probably has a lot more to do with the show not having to pay royalties, like they would if they decided Janeway was a Doro Pesch fan). And DS9 excepted, the focus is all on the experience of the officers, the educated, the commanders, and not on the blue-collar grunts, squints, and snipes who actually keep the ship running.

    And that's why I designed the background I did for Kanril Eleya, i.e. kind of the anti-Picard. Small town working class background (they never had any trouble putting food on the table but they were hardly aristocratic), religious, prefers pulpier literature and more popular music, and quicker to violence and a lot more prone to thinking with her heart. I find the Bajorans useful as a point of comparison for Moab because I interpret them very much like red-to-purple state Americans: they've got that independent streak, they're suspicious of secularism, and they're deeply protective of the right to bear arms. But there's points of difference: one, they're a lot more okay with the idea of a welfare state and they're more internally unified, in part due to mostly all following the same religion instead of many different ones (compare to European Catholic nationalists, as opposed to American Protestant nationalists). Something I haven't said outright but I have in my head is that the Temple of the Prophets actually helps administer Bajor's welfare system (rather like the state government of Utah recently partnered with the LDS Church to tackle homelessness by constructing small dwellings for the homeless): one piece of evidence is that the major hospital in the city of Hathon is run by a Jesuit-like religious sect called the Brotherhood of Kern. Their militarization and support of the right to bear arms is born from defense of country (think of the Occupation, which deliberately paralleled the N*zi occupation of Europe), not necessarily defense of self. And, as mentioned briefly in The Burning of Berun's World things like restricting the franchise* are not well-thought-of.

    To be clear: that there's a well-thought-out reason for taking an action, doesn't necessarily make that action correct.

    * And in fact that's something that gets specifically targeted for deconstruction by @patrickngo himself: because the franchise in Moab is restricted to people who make enough to pay taxes on their income, a sufficiently well-funded organization can tip elections by setting up a shell company and hiring people likely to vote for their preferred candidate, which is demonstrated in the early part of the Moab Civil War arc (most recently discussed in Create Your Own Fate).
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • knightraider6knightraider6 Member Posts: 396 Arc User
    Just posted my take on the first prompt-though it's more in setting up a Dominion goodwill tour. of course, in light of certain developments in game...it may definitely be an intresting voyage.
    "It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier." R.A.Heinlein

    "he's as dangerous as a ferret with a chainsaw."



  • antonine3258antonine3258 Member Posts: 2,391 Arc User
    starswordc wrote: »
    Well actually, as far as Zapp Kagran was concerned, in this 'verse he pitched his idea of the frontal assault on the Herald Sphere... and was immediately relieved of command by Ja'rod and Chancellor Worf.* :tongue: (Eleya then redesigned the plan into one where the frontal assault was a diversion for a cloakship delivering a Romulan sunkiller bomb into the sphere's star.) So the part about Eleya understanding most Klingons not to be dumb ragers is still true. On the other hand, Prime!Kanril also didn't spend her entire career up to her story debut on the Klingon front: instead she was stationed on the Romulan border for a couple years, then spent a bit of time as a liaison officer on DS9.

    Just to confirm 'this 'verse' is referring to the Masterverse version (or at least the offshoot version)? Just on the phrasing. Not trying to be offensive to a big labor of love with the Masterverse (it's not my cuppa) but it's portrayals of the Federation as an entity are almost always as a cause of problems.

    Actually I generally can tell the difference between the two Eleyas - Prime always feels more reflective of herself as a 'hammer' solution to problems (not that they aren't creative solutions necessary, but her lack of diplomacy has had consequences)

    It's a very solid first part.

    Fate - protects fools, small children, and ships named Enterprise Will Riker

    Member Access Denied Armada!

    My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    edited July 2018
    starswordc wrote: »
    Well actually, as far as Zapp Kagran was concerned, in this 'verse he pitched his idea of the frontal assault on the Herald Sphere... and was immediately relieved of command by Ja'rod and Chancellor Worf.* :tongue: (Eleya then redesigned the plan into one where the frontal assault was a diversion for a cloakship delivering a Romulan sunkiller bomb into the sphere's star.) So the part about Eleya understanding most Klingons not to be dumb ragers is still true. On the other hand, Prime!Kanril also didn't spend her entire career up to her story debut on the Klingon front: instead she was stationed on the Romulan border for a couple years, then spent a bit of time as a liaison officer on DS9.

    Just to confirm 'this 'verse' is referring to the Masterverse version (or at least the offshoot version)? Just on the phrasing. Not trying to be offensive to a big labor of love with the Masterverse (it's not my cuppa) but it's portrayals of the Federation as an entity are almost always as a cause of problems.
    No, I was referring to Prime!Eleya's continuity. (I have a draft of a story depicting all that, but it's one of the several partially-written stories that have been sitting on my Google Drive for multiple years.) We haven't decided in detail how the arcs after the Borg/Undine one went in the Masterverse, a lot of stuff got derailed when Sander233 got sick a few years ago.
    Actually I generally can tell the difference between the two Eleyas - Prime always feels more reflective of herself as a 'hammer' solution to problems (not that they aren't creative solutions necessary, but her lack of diplomacy has had consequences)

    It's a very solid first part.

    Yeah, she is very direct in her problem solving. And there's definitely a darkness to both versions, something I'm exploring in more detail in the next segment of For We Should Grow Too Fond of It (which I'm hoping I can get out sometime in the next month).

    Part two of this story is in progress still. It's a little weird for me to be writing Eleya with the talky political plot and give the "action quotient" to somebody else entirely.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • antonine3258antonine3258 Member Posts: 2,391 Arc User
    I know it's been quite a while, but here's one for Prompt 2 Enjoy the Beauty of Godless Spaces
    Fate - protects fools, small children, and ships named Enterprise Will Riker

    Member Access Denied Armada!

    My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    I know it's been quite a while, but here's one for Prompt 2 Enjoy the Beauty of Godless Spaces

    That was extremely good. I especially liked the POV work.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • xungnguyenxungnguyen Member Posts: 233 Arc User
    edited July 2018
    Are there any improvements I can make in my queen's log for Sapph?
    Post edited by xungnguyen on
    temporal_lapras__royal_flagship__by_lapry101-dbutq96.png


    "Simba, you have forgotten me. You have forgotten who you are … you are my son and the one true king." (Mufasa)
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