The New Humans

Yet aside from all these megastructures, we also see innovations in microtechnology. Starfleet officers might not have mobile phones, but what they do have is “senceivers”, brain implants that allow Starfleet to send messages that appear in the recipient’s brain like a memory. In a nod to near future history, Roddenberry points out that Starfleet keeps these telepathic brain chips a secret to avert associations with the “Mind Control Revolts” of 2043 to 2047.

But the thing is “mind control” seems to be… a grey area, in the paradise of the 23^rd century.

Throughout the Starfleet canon, from TV to movies to videogames, books and comics, from the canon and approved to those annuals where the Enterprise bridge had seatbelts, the depiction of what a Starfleet officer is has remained the same. Starfleet officers are the bravest, the smartest, the most adaptable. A Reginald Barclay on the Enterprise is a 10 anywhere else. Whichever way you slice it, if you wear Red, Gold and Blue (or the beige, white and pale blue if we’re in the Motion Picture era) you are the absolute cream of humanity’s crop. Not that humanity has a cream of the crop, you understand, because we have done away with all forms of discrimination. Ahem.

But in his novel, Roddenberry pitches things… a little differently.

In Kirk’s preface to the novel, he notes that his masculine name is unusual in most circles, but not in Starfleet. “We are a highly conservative and strongly individualistic group. The old customs die hard with us,” he says, while conceding that “Some critics have characterized us of Starfleet as ‘primitives’ and with some justification.”

Kirk goes on to explain that early space travel for humanity was disastrous, full of ship disappearances, crew defections and mutinies. For all the dead redshirts in his wake, even Kirk stands out as exceptional for having returned from a five-year mission with so much of his ship and crew still intact. By the time of Star Trek, it is accepted those early disastrous missions were because Starfleet’s standards were too high.