You are waiting for more borg and romulans? Are you interested in a new enemy of the federation to appear or have another re-encounter like the cardassians?
You are waiting for more borg and romulans? Are you interested in a new enemy of the federation to appear or have another re-encounter like the cardassians?
How about something like The Culture?
Highly advanced multi-species civilization ruled by benevolent AIs?
I have a nagging feeling that something like it should have appeared in Trek at some point.
This is interesting, even without the benevolent AI, though that could be interesting as well. But what happens when The Federation runs into essentially another Federation? Do they combine and double their knowledge and territory or do they clash over differing ideals? There’s no way humans were the first species to say “hey, let’s work together,” but if they ran into, say, space capitalists, we could wind up being the USSR of a new galactic Cold War.
This is another thought experiment that Kirsten Beyer took on in her Voyager Full Circle sequence in the Relaunch Treklit novelverse.
There were a lot of questions about whether their ethics were in fact shared or parallel with that of the Federation as well as whether they really were who they claimed to be on the surface.
Another Relaunch Treklit exploration involved a very different Breen society than Discovered unveiled. Instead of a single species, Breen turned out to be a multiplicity of species with different environmental requirements who all spent all their lives in environmental suits other than in their own homes. In the Relaunch universe, the Breen achieved species, race and gender equality by completely hiding their physiology and masking their voices.
Ship the size of a continent slips out of the skein alongside a Federation starship and immediately runs a scan that siphons up all the art and science records onboard.
“Science officer, wtf?”
“Hey there! We are The Culture! We’ve been partying for the last few hundred cycles, and this month has been particularly wild. Everybody thinks y’all seem cool. Wanna get fucked up, go lava surfing, and chat about life? Just park that thing anywhere.”
I’d love to watch that one.
I mean, The Culture is just The Federation if it actually followed through on post-scarcity utopianism.