Friday, October 19, 2012

Star Trek Eugenics Wars Timeline, With a Joke

On my alternate-history forum, the user whose handle is JSmith started a project to create a fan timeline of the Eugenics Wars from the Star Trek universe. Different board members contributed written material, with others (like me) offering suggestions.

Here's the link. Nobody liked the "secret Eugenics wars" book series written by Greg Cox, so it's a full-blown alternate history starting in the 1930s that builds to the Eugenics Wars as a nuclear Third World War (with another worldwide conflict a generation later as a spinoff) rather than a "secret history" depicting various events of the 1990s as part of a covert war by the Augments against the rest of the world. It's got some really interesting stuff, like excerpts from memoirs of the illegitimate daughter of one of Khan's inner circle (who can basically be described as an evil Bono) who was part of the Australian army fighting against the Augments and an explanation for why, although Khan is Indian, the other Augments aboard the Botany Bay were all white people.

I am seriously considering submitting original material of my own--in the show Enterprise, Captain Archer references a great-grandfather who fought in North Africa during the Eugenics Wars. Apparently he parleyed with an Augment commander to get a bunch of kids who were trapped in a crossfire zone out of harm's way. I know I'd vowed not to do anymore fan-fiction and focus on real work, but this wouldn't take very long.

(However, there's a short story in a Star Trek anthology depicting the incident, so maybe I won't.)

Now for the joke. One of the later posts is the prison memoir of a member of Khan's inner circle who was not sentenced to death--someone resembling Albert Speer of our own world. I disagreed with the assessment of Khan as a man who had no friends, only servants and rivals, based on how fiercely he became attached to Lt. Marla McGivers, the Starfleet officer who turned traitor out of love for him and eventually became his wife.

Some of the other board members said the writing was from a limited point-of-view and like real history, it has its biases. McGivers' diary would paint a rather different picture of Khan.

My response: Would McGivers' diary, if published in book form, be titled...

(drumroll)

Fifty Shades of Red(shirt)?

For those of you who don't get it, Marla can be credibly described as a redshirt based on her uniform, her limited appearance, and her ultimate demise, while both she and the female lead of 50 Shades of Grey are both weak women in thrall to dominant, unusual men. I think it works.

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