Star Trek TOS: Reimagined

[SecretBrotherInLaw]

Hi. This is my remake of Startrek, I'm going for a more "hard" scifi, less dogma, less wank.

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The meteoroid swarm was a celestial event that marked the start of harvest for the villages it was a spectacular backdrop to the evening festival taking place.
As streams of cosmic debris streaked through the night sky above the crater, one out of the many thousands of objects deviated from the track, going on a lower angle and impacting into a lake, just outside the crater lip.

That the villagers would not notice this was fortunate, as the time of the meteor swarm was when the most eyes would be trained on the sky, but star-fleet had work to do, and loitering a front line vessel around the settlement was a drain on Kudos.

While vapor from the impact still whisped across the lake, A pink placenta floated just under the surface of the water, anchored by a fleshy umbilical. The rubbery bag began inflating until it stretched into a meter wide teardrop . At the center of the mass, a dark shape took form withing, rapidly increasing in size until all at once, !POP!, the bubble burst to the surface. A flume of water shot straight up, and with it, a blue grey avian resembling something between a loon, and a Pteranodon cut loose and took flight.

The creature, soared majestically in the updrafts along craters steep walls until it reached a spot near the cliff dwellings of the village. Here the creature landed on a boulder, sat down, vomited up a strange infestation, and seemingly died. From its stomach a cluster of bee analogues, centipedes and other insects unfurled. Most migrated in the direction of the village, but some of the larger ones stayed behind to devour the corpse of the biot. These insects then disgorged smaller insects and were themselves devoured until nothing remained but a writhing mass of ant analogues, which were made to dissolve in the sunlight, come morning.

From the bridge of the Starship "Enterprise", James T Kirk watched a composite feed of the signals being broudcast to him. The insects had by now, penetrated the dwellings, recorded the spoken language, and started sequencing the genomes of the all inhabitants. His avatar sat slumped in its chair, communicating a mixture of both deep thought, and subtle boredom. "Mr Spock. Conclusions?" He said, in calm demeanor. "Captain, The genome is a heavyworlder modified, like Klingon, but with an intersting mix of Andes thrown in. We couldsurmise that this is to allow them to survive on treks in the thin atmospheres above the crater. This genome was designed for this world, which essentially makes them indigenous by the standards of the Prime Directive."

"Any sign of a functional genesis device". "No captain, but there is a meadow where the chloriphyl is showing different in infrared. On a world this new, it's a good place to start." "Well then Mr Spock, we had better start digging, we don't want another bunch of Jihads coming our way in a thousand years. do we?" "Probably closer to 2000, but point taken captain."

The avatars of Captain Kirk, and Mister Spock walked towards the door to bridge, as they crossed the threshold though, the door acted like a mirror, with one set of Kirk and Spock walking away, and another set walking right back into the bridge, taking there seats again.

The set of Kirk and Spock walking down the hall disappeared in an infinite vanishing point.
"Mr Scott. Are we ready to send down two?" " Aye Captain, the signal is good." "Commence"

The lake bubbled again, and minutes later, a waterlogged pair of genetically engineered heavyworlders, called Klingon, emerged naked from the lake. They each held a fleshy placenta bag in their hands which they ripped open and dumped out a small heap of primitive clothes and belongings.

"Mr Sulu has a sense of humor, I forgot he landed the probe in a lake" The bumpy headed kirk said the bumpy headed Spock. "I don't suppose they thought to give us actual hunting implements as we are supposed to be a hunting party. "He Stuck them to me!" said a grumpy voice behind them. A soaked Klingon version of McCoy stood before them carrying two placental bags. One small, one long.

5 hours later, the trio, now dressed, dry and authentic looking party climbed down into the crater. Kirk and Spock carried a spear, and longbow respectively, and McCoy, a leather bag filled with dried plants. The convincing hunting party and medicine man, had tattooed each other with marks of a nearby, but known friendly tribe.
The three men joined in the festival, dancing, drinking, and making conversation when needed. McCoy headed straight for the local medicine man, giving him seeds and medicinal plants he designed himself, while Kirk and Spock spied around. Uplifting the culture would take many years for a dedicated team under deep cover, but that was not the mission. There's was to make first contact, determine threat level if any, leave behind a capsule for the uplift team, and bug out.

From here the mission was straight forward. Find the malfunctioning genesis device which put the people here and repair or destroy it. Using ant bots, dig deep down into the earth and plant fake fossil evidence without disturbing the primitives. In another 2000 years, when there society discovers the wormhole left by the genesis devices, they won't be creationist zealots bent on killing everyone else in the galaxy.

It was going very well too, until Spock noticed that the Klingon villagers were celebrating with roast targ. Targ was not in the standard template of the genesis devices that landed here. Which meant that Enterprise, was not the first contact......

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Hi. This is my remake of Startrek, I'm going for a more "hard" scifi, less dogma, less wank.

You need to focus on "more grammar" and "better writing" before you try doing more of anything else.

As streams of cosmic debris streaked through the night sky above the crater, one out of the many thousands of objects deviated from the track, going on a lower angle and impacting into a lake, just outside the crater lip.

This is a giant run-on sentence glued together with commas. It is painful to read.

That the villagers would not notice this was fortunate,

Meteorite strikes are a fortunate thing?

as the time of the meteor swarm was when the most eyes would be trained on the sky, but star-fleet had work to do, and loitering a front line vessel around the settlement was a drain on Kudos.

And here we have another failure to properly break up sentences. Starfleet, being the name of an organization, probably should be capitalized.

"Any sign of a functional genesis device". "No captain, but there is a meadow where the chloriphyl is showing different in infrared. On a world this new, it's a good place to start." "Well then Mr Spock, we had better start digging, we don't want another bunch of Jihads coming our way in a thousand years. do we?" "Probably closer to 2000, but point taken captain."

Very painful to read. I would implore you to read a book, or at least a better-written fanfiction, to see how to properly break up conversations. The rest of it displays similar structural problems. It also displays an alarming lack of hardness for something advertised as being "hard." For example, you seem to have substituted technobabble wank with biotech wank. Don't get me wrong; from this cursory teaser you've provided, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with your premise. It just needs a little more thought and better grammar.

I feel I have to ask two questions of you? First is: How old are you? The lack of polish and structure are suggestive of typical high school writing. Failing the first hypothesis, the second question would be: Is English your first language?

[SecretBrotherInLaw]

Yes. Thank you, English is not my first lanquage either!
I'm practicing fiction in english to better help my technical writing at work. Also, this is the first fiction in any lanquage I've written since secondary school.

Sadly the biowank is borderline. I can fix the wank factor by slowing down the processing time. Birthing an avian, or cloned bodies in days or weeks instead of hours. I will rewrite to slow down the time-frame. I had the characters in a hurry, but now I think I do not need to.


Here is my story outline.
1. No nearby Aliens: all bumpy forehead people are genetically engineered humans put there by colonizing probes. Adapted to environment. There can be aliens, but only on the other side of a wormhole. There's and ours wormholes stopping each others expansion spheres due to the chronological protection conjecture. These xenos will be very very alien.
2. No transporters. Replicators are a sort of printing. Many biological robots are birthed in artificial womb sacks or eggs.
3. No strong AI. The AI crew is Starfleet individuals insilico.
4. Federation not communist, but based on reputation economy. Kudos instead of credits.
5. Klingon empire started by heavyworlders. They developed a theocratic government based on creationism. Main antagonists for this story.
6. No Warp drive. Everybody uses wormholes, but wormholes here are cheap.
7. Enterprize is the size of a fullyloaded Energia. Most crew are software. Ship has fabrication technology to reconfigure itself. Some parts are biological where it makes sense, but most are not. Everything but the commguage wormhole is expendable.
8. No Telepaths.
9. The Prime Directive is a treaty between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. Otherwise Kirk would have simply planted a modern colony seed and left.
10. The Borg are not "Space Vampires".

Thank you for criticism.

What is the etiquette here, should I re-post a changed story, or do I somehow edit old post?

[NecronLord]

This story suffers a problem. That problem is that at a fundamental level, TOS isn't broken, it doesn't need fixing.

Also, all the biotech feels outrageously out of place.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

This story suffers a problem. That problem is that at a fundamental level, TOS isn't broken, it doesn't need fixing.

Also, all the biotech feels outrageously out of place.

Indeed. To address the OP, this could work if polished up and presented as a wholly-original universe. As it is, I don't understand the need to attach the Star Trek name to it.

[Simon_Jester]

Hmm. I voted "good" and "ugly."

The "good" part is that you've got a fairly good science fiction premise. The "ugly" part is that you've lost the Star Trek aesthetic, and of course the sentence structure.

Easy uploading of personalities and the creation of biotech avatars change the feel of the setting- at some point you're doing a variation on the movie "Avatar," not a reimagination of Star Trek. For a really good writer, it might be possible to keep the characters the same in this very different setting... but I wouldn't recommend it as a starting project in a foreign language. Frankly, GrandMasterTerwynn's latest suggestion might be a good one; make it a completely different universe rather than trying to pass off Klingons as genetically modified heavy-worlders.

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As for the sentence structure, I didn't dislike it as much as GrandMasterTerwynn did, but there are still some problems. I'll try to walk you through them one step at a time.

The first problem I see, one that hurts your readability more than everything else put together, is a rule. One that I suspect you simply didn't know. In English typesetting, when people speak, every person's lines get their own paragraph. You do not combine the speech of two or more characters into a single paragraph. Thus, instead of writing:

"Any sign of a functional genesis device". "No captain, but there is a meadow where the chloriphyl is showing different in infrared. On a world this new, it's a good place to start." "Well then Mr Spock, we had better start digging, we don't want another bunch of Jihads coming our way in a thousand years. do we?" "Probably closer to 2000, but point taken captain."

You should write:
"Any sign of a functional genesis device".
"No captain, but there is a meadow where the chloriphyl is showing different in infrared. On a world this new, it's a good place to start."
"Well then Mr Spock, we had better start digging, we don't want another bunch of Jihads coming our way in a thousand years. do we?"
"Probably closer to 2000, but point taken captain."

That makes your writing much easier to read, and makes it more clear who says what.
_________

Looking at that paragraph further, there's another problem: punctuation:
-The punctuation at the end of a spoken sentence goes inside the quote marks.
-Questions should always be marked with a question mark.
-Short remarks at the beginning of a sentence like "well then" should have commas after them, to indicate that there is a pause in speaking.

Thus:
"Any sign of a functional genesis device?"
"No captain, but there is a meadow where the chlorophyll is showing different in infrared. On a world this new, it's a good place to start."
"Well then, Mr Spock, we had better start digging, we don't want another bunch of Jihads coming our way in a thousand years, do we?"
"Probably closer to 2000, but point taken captain."

(Spelling correction added)
_________

Now, look at the second line, in the second clause of the first sentence: "a meadow where the chlorophyll is showing different in infrared." This is grammatically incorrect. I'm not sure what the name of the rule in question is, I'd ask whoever was teaching me English if I were you. But to write it correctly:

"a meadow where the chlorophyll is showing differently in infrared."
or:
"a meadow where the chlorophyll looks different in infrared."
_________

Then we have a few problems with sentence structure. People who are talking to each other will often string together several unrelated clauses into one sentence. In writing, this is a bad idea. I have problems with it myself. But to try to fix that:

"Any sign of a functional genesis device?"
"No captain, but there is a meadow where the chlorophyll is showing differently in infrared. On a world this new, it's a good place to start."
"Well then, Mr Spock, we had better start digging. We don't want another bunch of Jihads coming our way in a thousand years, do we?"
"Probably closer to 2000, but point taken captain."
_________

Finally, a few minor formal details:
-"Captain" is a mode of address, and a respectful one. In writing, when one person is speaking to another and calls them 'captain', it's best to capitalize it.
-The mode of address at the end of the last sentence is a subordinate clause, one that indicates who the sentence is spoken to. It is not directly part of the message. Therefore, it should be separated from the rest by a comma.
-When representing a character's speech, if they use large round numbers (such as 2000), it is usually better to write it out. Thus:

"Any sign of a functional genesis device?"
"No, Captain, but there is a meadow where the chlorophyll is showing differently in infrared. On a world this new, it's a good place to start."
"Well then, Mr Spock, we had better start digging. We don't want another bunch of Jihads coming our way in a thousand years, do we?"
"Probably closer to two thousand, but point taken, Captain."