18. "RE: UF Universe Trivia"
In response to message #15
>Roddenberry wrote the TMP novelization himself, IIRC, so I think it's >probably the most direct conduit to the frustration he must have felt >pretty much daily at the fact that literally no one else >involved in the development and production of Star Trek shared >the full extent of his idealized vision. He had to sell it to the >network as Wagon Train to the Stars and Wagon Train to the >Stars it has remained forevermore, in spite of his most >strident efforts to steer it back onto what he considered its >proper course, most notably in the early going of Next >Generation.
I have to wonder what he would have made of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, which take his ideals to their logical extreme. The Federation sometimes seems like a precursor phase of a Culture-like civilization.