They have meditations they can do with a group of fellow Vulcan's to help suppress the urge in the case of not being able to procreate with their mate. It comes up in Voyager.
In “Sarek” from TNG melding with Picard resolves Sarek’s emotional control.
In this case, at least, it was less a cure, and more temporarily offloading it to someone else to deal with. Basically the equivalent of Lwaxana affecting the entire Enterprise when she was going through The Phase, or someone with an injured leg leaning on another person to use as a crutch. Except that Sarek was relying on Picard’s emotional processing capabilities.
Presumably his symptoms would return when he ended the psychic connection.
From that voyager episode with horny belana we learn that Vulcans are basically assigned a mate, so the chances are slim that a vulcan would need release without an outlet. And aside from that, the ponfarr can also be dealt with through meditation and discipline, probably particularly created for the situations you mention where there actually is no partner available.
Vorik and Tuvok both claim the problem can be dealt with through meditation, but both of them also fail to resolve the issue in this way, so we don’t know if that’s actually an effective treatment.
There’s also lots of ways a Vulcan could end up single, not to mention we’ve seen at least two instances of Vulcans rejecting their arranged marriages (T’Pol and T’Pring), so there’s no guarantee any given Vulcan has a mate, despite their customs.
In the T’Pring case, we also see that sex isn’t the only outlet. A fight to the death is just as effective, with Spock ending up not needing to bed T’Pring, having resolved his Ponn Farr by fighting Kirk.
While the cultural custom is a fight to the death, it is possible that some form of extended, high-stakes physical combat might be enough to relieve things, but Vulcan sensibilities might simply prevent them from choosing that as an option.
I think you might be able to draw a parallel with long-running serials like comic books, or even Star Trek itself. They tend to revisit old themes and revolve around a certain status quo.
They tend not to involve multigenerational obedience to an authoritarian regime, though…
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. It tells the story of a man who lives his life over and over again. Very interesting story and while not exactly like Garak’s repetitive epic its definitely in the same vein.
I feel like repetitive epic is like a Cardassian version of the dubious literary idea of The Hero’s Journey, adapted for the Cardassian heroic ideal of selfless sacrifice to the state. I think Garak would appreciate the “Rememberence of Earth’s Past” series (Three Body Problem) for the way that individual heroics take a backseat to the glory and survival of the state.
As far as I know, the directive mainly applies to officers who are sent back in time and/or given the opportunity to change established history. I don’t think it would prevent someone from making an arrest in their “proper” time.
At most, it might limit their ability to interrogate the prisoner, if they can verify that the intruder is from the future and possesses knowledge that the contemporary officers can’t have.
Starfleet personnel ends up back in time on a Starfleet vessel. We both serve the same organization. My duty is to protect the timeline I come from. Your duty seems, implicitly, to aid a fellow Starfleet officer in their mission (to protect the aforementioned timeline).
It seems like Starfleet should have a dedicated Temporal Security crew on every starship and starbase for such an occasion. You find a supposed time traveler, you immediately call this team. They sequester the intruder and go through a careful interview to verify their claim as cleanly as possible, then render what aid is needed to secure the timeline and get them home (or, barring that possibility, get them somewhere isolated where they can’t contaminate the timeline). Then, maybe memory wipe the Temporal Security team (and possibly anyone else who interacted with the traveler). On the flipside, if you end up back in time, it’s expected you should immediately attempt to contact the local Temporal Security crew.
The unspoken thing about the Prime Directive is that a Federation Captain’s most solemn duty is deciding when to ignore it, and the same goes for the Temporal Prime Directive.
I don’t know what the most similar novel to The Neverending Sacrifice might be, but I think the exact opposite is probably the 1970s novels satirizing the British Raj called The Flashman Papers. They are incredibly funny, highly offensive, beautiful assaults on the landed gentry, set during one of the most incompetent, badly failed military expeditions to Afghanistan in the history of badly failed military expeditions to Afghanistan–the British one.
No, not the American one with British help–the actual British one, from way back in the seventeenth century.
I love this question. My first thought was not a book, but Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse which depicts the repetitive life of a Hungarian farmer and his daughter. Each day is essentially the same, with similar but ever-changing frustrations, and no hope for change in sight. The audience really feels their frustrations, but the characters also appear to have fully accepted the situation. The title is a reference to the horse-whipping that allegedly drove Nietzsche insane.
Not quite an “epic” in the usual sense, but absolutely repetitive and a surrender to economic powers beyond one’s control.
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