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?