I really like the potential for this community to let us discuss and compare the broad scope of Trek against the broader cultural conversation of sci-fi. So, I’m throwing out conversation starter in case there’s anyone else ready to play…
Major Vanguard series book spoilers ahead! (Seriously, it’s a great series and I don’t want to spoil its puzzle.)
Star Trek takes a lot of heat as a franchise for taking and reworking concepts and tropes from any and all other literary and visual media works.
As recent examples, Picard season three’s final episodes have been criticized for ‘copying Star Wars’ while SNW’s season one episode ‘All Those Who Wander’ earns derisive comments along the lines of ‘It’s a straight up copy of Aliens!!!’
More famously, in the 1990s, Paramount had to defend itself against claims of IP theft in DS9 by the creator of Babylon 5 who had pitched a space station-based show at one point. (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to make their own judgement about how similar or different are the overall story arcs of the two shows.)
I’ve always thought however that Star Trek excels in taking ideas from other media and then reworking them in its own universe with its own characters. ‘The Cage’ owes a lot to MGM’s Forbidden Planet (as does some of the original visual code of Star Wars for that matter), but The Cage is very much an original work. Voyager’s ‘The Thaw’ is a retelling of the movie adaptation of King’s ‘It’ but I like Voyager’s rendition far better.
I was truly surprised then when I caught up with watching The Expanse to find that the central mystery, the ‘protomolecule’ seemed to be a direct lift of the Shedai meta-genome of the excellent Star Trek Vanguard novel series that had been rolling out over the previous decade.
I’d been wishing that CBS would adapt Vanguard into a serial streaming series, but when I binged through to the third season of The Expanse, I thought that anyone who didn’t know the Vanguard book series had concluded just as the first Expanse book was published, would see a Vanguard show as derivative of The Expanse. The later seasons of the Expanse just seem to go more in the same direction, even continuing with overlapping plots with some of the Vanguard follow-on Seeker books.
As it happened, I had tried reading the first book of The Expanse book series, Leviathan Wakes and its sequel, when they first came out but DNFd. I didn’t make the connection to the Vanguard books at that point.
I did nonetheless find the first Expanse novel Leviathan Wakes very derivative, seeming to tell stories of miners and exploitation that were better done in CJ Cherryh’s Company Wars. The protomolecule mystery wasn’t really clear enough for me to see its close correlation with the Shendai meta-genome at that point.
Trek tie-in authors (David Mack, Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore) created the meta-genome for the Vanguard Series to explain the basis of the Genesis project that first appeared in TOS movies. It also provides a genetic technical backbone across the Litverse, such as for later 24th century technologies like the dermal regenerator and other medical wonders.
Vanguard’s backdrop of vulnerable colonists and ancient technology is a classic going back to TOS, but Vanguard puts it in a long running suspenseful frame with inter species competition for new territories.
All of this has been percolating in my head for a few years.
Anyone game to discuss?
It’s been a while since I’ve read the Vanguard books, but unlike the protomolecule, the meta-genome doesn’t infect and convert people, does it? I can see some similarities, though.
Thanks for engaging!
In the Seeker follow on series, there was a planet with a Shedai installation. It seemed to have some ability to influence or control people. The Tholians clearly feared the Shedai’s ability to control their predecessors as slaves, and remake them.
Like you, it’s been a bit, but it’s not clear to me whether the meta-genome itself was part of the control mechanism, or if it just had the capacity to make a species vulnerable to the telepathic Shedai.
That said, Memory Beta offers this bit about the Shedai, which really seems at least a conceptual forerunner to the protomolecule:
Their attack could also infect their victim with a form of crystalline substance that would slowly spread through the body until it reaches the internal organs.(VAN novel: Harbinger)
I haven’t read the Vanguard series. So, while I have nothing to add to this conversation, I want to post support for this type of topic.
Appreciated sincerely.
Having a place where we can toss out and get into the cross-franchise discussions seems a long unmet need. Or, discussions about how some of the other older science fiction shows may intersect with Trek story wise or in visual code.
There aren’t that many from the old trekbooks and Treklit subs here as yet. And I recognize that the book and comic readers are always a relatively smaller slice of fandom. So this topic may be a stretch to find takers. (I encourage everyone to give Vanguard a read if they’re into books.)
But among Relaunch Litverse fans Vanguard is a favourite so I thought to put this here an example of the kind of discussion Quark’s can foster. Perhaps it won’t fall down so far that we can’t keep it percolating as new folks join.
Hopefully, we’ll get more subscribers for this new community and a larger base of subscribers for the communities on this instance overall.
Having a place where we can toss out and get into the cross-franchise discussions seems a long unmet need.
I will say that this sort of topic would generally be considered appropriate for c/StarTrek, as long as the discussion is heavily Star Trek-focused (like, a roughly 50/50 split would make sense for a discussion like this). The point at which it becomes better-suited for Quark’s is when the Star Trek connections are incidental to the discussion. It’s a bit of a fine line, but given the current size of the instance, we’re not too worried about it.
There aren’t that many from the old trekbooks and Treklit subs here as yet. And I recognize that the book and comic readers are always a relatively smaller slice of fandom. So this topic may be a stretch to find takers.
The mod team is very interested in supporting conversations about novels, comics, and other Trek material. As you say, it will probably take a while to reach critical mass, but we’re hopeful.
The clarifications are appreciated sincerely.
Understand a compare and contrast can ride the line in the main sub, especially as we’re at relatively low numbers as yet. Even so, a place where we can be less conscious of avoiding getting off topic can make these kinds of explorations a bit more free flowing.
