By the time of the UFP/Klingon war in DS9, such childish storylines about the ugly realities of war and the intervention of mysterious, all-powerful to the point of being supernatural entities had been gracefully pushed aside for more “mature” plots and themes—just ask DS9 writer/producer and Galactica 2003 developer and producer, Ronald D. Moore!
Blish’s book is incorrect since it set in a steady state, not Big Bang universe, and was written long after Blish should have known better.
As for the Organians not interfering, I figure it’s like this. If your kids are playing and you hear only a random squeak or two, you leave them alone. When the wailing starts you take action. The wailing never started.
Except in the alternate Yesterday’s Enterprise universe. Maybe the Organians were actually responsible for cleaning that muddle up.
Well in the Justice League/Star Trek crossover RPG game I ran last Saturday (Using ICONS assembled) they had decided by the time of Next Generation to back off direct intervention but hand out tools of power to a few individuals who could be trusted to further the galactic good.
Which is how one of my players came to be playing Hal’el Jor’dunn of Andorria, a Lensman Legionaire.
It brings to mind a complaint of writers through the entire Reign of Roddenberry on all the shows: People In The Future Do Not Fight, They Work Out Their Conflicts Peacefully. I seem to recall any number of writers griping about how they wanted to do conflicts between the Federation and the Klingons, but were stymied by that Organian Peace Treaty.
David Gerrold managed to get a good story off that (The Trouble With Tribbles), but even he later had some pretty hairy things to say about Roddenberry’s control freak tendencies… and habit of not keeping his promises.
I am told that the entire reason the Future Enterprise in “All Good Things…” had three warp nacelles was because Gene Roddenberry insisted that all spaceships had to have them in multiples of two.
Well, as already noted, the Organian Treaty, which started out with good intentions with the development of Sherman’s Planet, got derailed with that unanticipated trouble with tribbles, and the Treaty had little effect ever since. But finally, the Organians met their match in the Metrons and that was the end of them.
More than once, I have wondered about how all those godlike aliens managed to coexist in a universe that seemed to have so many of them. Organians, Trelane’s parents, the Metron, that thing Sybok worshipped, Nagilum, those guys that rewired Barclay’s brain…
Before VOY effed it up by saying the Q had ben around billions of years…I liked to think they were a group of Espers who intentionally went through the Great Barrier.
Once they reached a certain point, they cleaned house which is why in TOS, Kirk alone is always tripping over vastly advanced species…but by DS( it’s “Some aliens in a wormhole and others in a fire cave”)
They finally DID have enough of the ongoing hostilities in the Galaxies. And like vengeful gods they took it out on the Federations innocents. They wished Kes to a cornfield in Tennessee. And don’t even think about looking at what they did to her.
DC Comics had the Trek franchise through the 1980s and 90s. They started their TOS run shortly after the events of The Wrath of Khan, with some mysterious force manipulating the Klingons and Federation toward war. The force turned out to be the Excalibans, looking for a larger-scale version of their “good vs. evil” experiment from The Savage Curtain. Kirk manages to alert the Organians and they and the Excalibans end up cancelling each other out, explaining their lack of involvement from that point onward.
As good an explanation as any, I suppose.
they all were written hastily, mostly from scripts and the show bible, and IIRC he did not see most of the episodes he (what’s the word for making a short story from film, since “novelize” seems sort of incorrect)ed before writing them.