2140-64 / late 2386
Section 31 has, of course, been a controversial addition to the Star Trek universe since its debut in Deep Space Nine's
"Inquisition." At the time, I was all in on it; as a teenager, it
appealed to my cynical view of the world. Of course, it seemed to me
(it's very easy to be cynical when you're young) the Federation had to
be as bad as all the other interstellar polities. That's how the world works.
My opinion has been changed by twenty years of further thinking, and
twenty years of further exposure to the Section 31 concept. I do really
like "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," a Section 31 episode that does what Deep Space Nine
did at its best, push our characters into interesting ethical
situations that tested Federation morality. And though I find some
aspects of DS9's "The Final Chapter" pretty badly done, I do like
that in the end, the Federation triumphs because of how hard people
like Bashir work to stop Section 31's attempt to genocide the
Founders. Attempts to do the right thing in trying circumstances are
ultimately what win the day. But I didn't care for the depiction of
Section 31 on Discovery, and overall I haven't cared for its depiction in the novels outside of the original Section 31
tetralogy. The idea that Section 31 has some kind of widespread
sanction within the Federation hierarchy, or that is somehow actually
necessary to the survival of the Federation, is just a non-starter for
me. Fundamentally, the appeal of Star Trek—to me anyway—is that
working together to do the right thing eventually pays off even when it
is difficult. (As I am forever telling my children, "If it was easy, it
wouldn't be worth doing.")
Star Trek: Section 31: Control |
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Published: 2017 Acquired: September 2024 Read: December 2024 |
All of this is to set up the fact that there is pretty much no way I could ever like Control. I find the premise of the book fundamentally misguided and misjudged, un-Star Trekky in its utter essence. This is what we learn here: according to Control,
back in the 2140s, an Earth computer programmer came up with an
artificial intelligence called Uraei that could monitor all
communications and data and use it to head off threats before they could
begin. As time goes on, Uraei gives itself more and more power,
eventually establishing "Section 31" within Starfleet to act on its
behalf. As Earth becomes integrated into the Federation, Uraei begins
acting on behalf of the whole Federation.
I have a couple big issues with the idea of Uraei. The first is that, as
much as Section 31 stories in the past had the organization claiming
the Federation owed its continued survival to Section 31, you didn't
have to believe it, because your only source for that claim was
Section 31, and as we saw throughout Section 31 stories, much of the
time they actually ended up causing more problems than they solved. But Control
makes it very clear that there would be no Federation without Uraei,
there would be no Federation without continued extrajudicial executions
and murders! Like, what the fuck? This is not what I want to read in a Star Trek book, it goes fundamentally against the entire ideal and appeal of the series premise.
Indeed, many of the "good" things our heroes have done over the years
turn out to just be the manipulations of Uraei in action. Oh, you think
Captain Kirk did a great thing by putting aside his prejudices and
bringing about peace with the Klingons? Well, it was really all part of
Uraei's masterplan. If you believe Control, the utopian aspirationalism that gives Star Trek its appeal is utterly impossible and can never happen. Sorry, suckers.
People complain about the "grimdark" nature of Picard and other shows of the Paramount+
era, but this goes further than any of them. Go write some other
science fiction story about a utopia that owes its existence to facist
violence, sure. I love me some Omelas. But as a Star Trek idea, it just sucks, I'm sorry, and should never have been approved by the licensor.
My other issue is that Uraei is so powerful that entire idea of Section
31 honestly doesn't even make any sense. Based on the things we see it
manipulate people into doing, why does it need this group of people to
work on its behalf in an actual organization complete with cheesy black
leather uniforms? What does it gain from them, other than people who can
go rogue? Why would Uraei let cockamimie plots like the Founder
genocide or Cole's in Abyss go forward? The book itself flags
this up in chapter 40, when we learn that Uraei itself has occasionally
gotten rid of Section 31 when it became a liability, but Uraei is
depicted as so powerful, I don't really get how Section 31 could become a
liability to it in the first place. Indeed, it doesn't really make
sense that Bashir could even defeat Uraei...
...and again, the book flags this up at the end, where we learn that all
the events of the book are part of its masterplan, and now its more
powerful than ever! Well, great, I do love reading Star Trek
books because I like reading books about how the security state can
never be stopped and all human action in pursuit of a more noble future
is futile, thanks.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the book? Well, as for the actual characters and story, putting aside all of the
above (and it's pretty much impossible to do, because without all of
the above, you don't have a book), I didn't find much to enjoy here. I'm
coming to think that most characters in David Mack's Star Trek
books are pretty much the same, I find them to be selfish and kind of
petty. It's how Bashir is written here; I don't see the conflicted,
passionate, optimistic man I loved on Deep Space Nine. It's how Data was written in Cold Equations, it's how Sarai was written in Fortune of War. It's how all the "bad guys" in this book and his other books like Fortune of War
are written too. One of the things that really defines Bashir on screen
are his friendships: with O'Brien, with Dax, with Garak. Unfortunately,
the Bashir plot in the Destiny-era novels has largely kept him
away from all them, making him not feel very Bashirlike, and I have
never bought into the Sarina relationship that provides the core of
these books. It's probably not a coincidence that the one time Bashir did feel right to me here was when he goes to Cardassia Prime and briefly hangs out with Garak.
It's all very one note; really the only thing that distinguishes the
"good guys" from the "bad guys" are what side they're on. There's little
sense that anyone here is trying to do the right thing in trying
circumstances; even if that's technically what's happening, you don't feel
it the way you do in, say, an Una McCormack novel. There's probably an
interesting book to be written about Bashir grappling with the decision
of undoing Uraei, but it's a weirdly small component of the book. (Also,
the characters are like, "If we undo Uraei, the Federation will
collapse!"... yet when they do it, and the Federation doesn't collapse,
they don't seem to notice.)
The problem is, there's a core of a good idea here, but I think the book
blunders into a pretty common mistake. There's often a fundamental
misconception about AI. The danger of AI isn't that it will do things we
don't want it to do. The danger of AI is that it will do exactly what we tell it to do.
There's a group of people who like to worry about AI now who have this
idea of the paperclip maximizer—you tell an AI to make paperclips as
efficiently as possible, and soon its destroying humanity in its effort
to produce paperclips. What many of the people who worry about AI in
this way fail to notice is that paperclip maximizers aren't some
futuristic danger, they're a current one. Humanity doesn't need
AI to come up with systems that ruthlessly pursue a goal... these are
what corporations are! The past couple weeks' discourse around
UnitedHealthcare should make that patently obvious; insurance companies
are paperclip maximizers, pursuing shareholder profit at the expense of
everything else. Putting an AI in charge of insurance decisions would be
a problem not because the AI would go rogue and start pursuing profit
over people, but because the AI would do exactly what it was told to do and start pursuing profit over people.
I bring this up because I think Control doesn't really grapple
with the human complicity in the development of Uraei. A group of humans
designed and implemented Uraei, but weirdly, I don't think we ever get
the sense of why they did this, why they thought it would be a good
idea. The question of Control seems to be, "What would happen if
an AI went too far in sacrificing due process and civil liberties for
security?" but the question of Control ought to have been, "Why would human beings think
sacrificing due process and civil liberties for security was a good
idea?" But I don't think the book grapples with this question in an
interesting way, in either its twenty-second- or twenty-fourth-century
plotlines. Particularly with the inclusion of the more ruthless
post-resurrection Data, it seems there was room for an interesting
exploration of AI and the security state, but Data seems to be here
largely because, 1) Mack had written about the character before in the Cold Equations trilogy, and he likes sewing together threads from across his Star Trek oeuvre, and 2) Bashir needs a very powerful ally outside the Federation to make this plotline work, and where we left Data after The Cold Equations and The Light Fantastic is convenient for that.
I also think the idea of Uraei sort of misses the point of what the security state is actually about, which is not really
about protecting people, but about propagating its own power. Uraei
seems to actually believe in its own mission, and actually do things
that benefit the Federation. But I don't think the real organizations
and real people that Section 31 and Uraei are a science fictionalized
take on really have such goals, and thus any kind of a critique falls
flat.
I should be clear that I don't think this book was intended to be an endorsement of the security state... but if it's meant to be a critique, it's a pretty poor one. This thing is utterly terrible... but you can't have utopia without it! Yes, everything Uraei did is depicted as reprehensible, but the novel doesn't offer much of a counterargument to its claims. It has been suggested to me that we're not supposed to take Uraei at face value, but if so, there's little textual evidence to support this. If the author meant the reader to take the book a different way than I have, they have done a poor job in conveying their message.
Using Section 31 in Star Trek to criticize the security state: good, great idea. Using Section 31 in Star Trek
to say, well, the security state is a necessary evil and utopia is
utterly impossible: what the actual fuck, to be honest, and those are
words I don't use lightly. Thank god Picard obliterated this whole timeline.
Continuity Notes:
- Chapter thirteen gives us a little potted history of United Earth, which brings into aligment the various contradictory statements about the timing of this from sources like First Contact ("Poverty, disease, war. They'll all be gone within the next fifty years.") and "Attached" ("What if one of the old nation states, say Australia, had decided not to join the world government in 2150?")
- I think this is the first-ever "novelverse" reference to the book Memory Prime, an old favorite of mine, though I don't think the depiction of Memory Prime here has anything in common with how it was shown in the original book.
- There is a very small reference to Star Trek Beyond, as we learn Uraei had someone transferred to that film's NX-326 Franklin in 2164, the same year it disappeared.
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though those of us in Spinal Consistency Club didn't like how the horizontal stripe was handled in the original run, either |
- Those of us in the Spinal Consistency Club are grumpy about the lack of effort in matching the original 2001 tetralogy. But those of us in Font Club do appreciate the maintenance of Parsi (I think) in the logo, even if it's got some fancy embossing here.
- L'Haan disses another character by comparing them to an Orion socialator. Aside from this feeling like a very un-twenty-fourth-century move (so much for sex positivity, remember what I said about all the characters being petty), "socialator" was the sci-fi term for prostitute on the original Battlestar Galactica.
- My copy is an eighth printing; in all those reprints, apparently no one has ever caught that it should be "burying the lede," not "lead."
- I did not buy at all the idea that you would for some reason take an award-winning investigative journalist and turn her into a "Features" editor, nor do I believe that in the Federation the practice of noncomplete clauses would still be allowed.
- One thing that did ring true: Ikerson's graduate student who's in it all for the free food.
I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every
few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds by Dayton Ward
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