Coming July 2013: STAR TREK ENTERPRISE — RISE OF THE FEDERATION

I can't wait for this book. I loved the idea of a show predating the Federation, and while I really enjoyed Enterprise (a lot actually) the first three seasons were wasted when they all should have been season 4.

I'll be picking up the book day one.

 

I don't think the first three seasons were a waste. I thought season 1 did a great job conveying a sense of the pioneering days of Starfleet, and recapturing the pure exploration that Star Trek was originally about. I felt it did as good a job in its own way of laying the foundations for the Trek universe as season 4 did. The difference is that S4 was focused more on interstellar politics and blatant continuity porn while S1 was more about the process of discovery -- both the discovery of alien worlds and interstellar politics and the discovery of the methods and practices of exploring deep space and making alien contacts.

 

Kirk's fight with Gary 7 occured on some other pad then?

 

If you're refering to canon Trek, Kirk never fought Gary 7 on any pad...

EDIT: Well, except for the transporter pad, I suppose...

 

^Unless you count people watching it on their iPad.




I'll get me coat...

 

One thing that I hope you do address is what exactly the aliens brought to the Federation and Starfleet and what they felt they got out of the union.

One of the things that REALLY bugged me about Enterprise was the fact that Earth was not given a unique identity and instead everything that was Starfleet and the Federation in the 23rd/24th century was assumed to have derrived exclusively from Earth. To me that creative (or lack there of) decision by the creators seriously undermined what unique institutions Starfleet and the Federation would become.

One of the things I like about both Babylon 5 and Stargate is that Earth ships essentially look like very bare bones flying bricks. They are not elegant, but they are what you would expect real world space craft designers to build. No frills ships that get the job done but have little concern for asthetics. On B5, once Earth joins the Interstellar Allaince, the ships progressively get sleeker and take on less of a flying brick look as they adopt more of the techology and design concepts of their alien allies (especially the Minbari and the Vorlons). The ISAS Victory and Excalibur look like what they are...ships built with the influence of multiple races. The same is true of the Valen later on.

The same idea was true on Stargate where the first USAF Space crafts were just blatant rip offs of Gould technology, and then they started to take on the contours or more human designs...and eventually incorporate elements of Tokra, Ancient and Asgard designs.

On Enterprise...everything about the NX01 screams that this is a basically a Federation ship. Hell Doug Drexler's upgraded season 5 NX-01 is a constitution class ship in waiting.

 

On the other hand, Enterprise clearly established that Vulcans and Andorians had deflector shields and tractor beams before Earth did. And the Andorian cruiser's bridge had paired helm and navigation officers at the front like the TOS bridge. If you look beyond the surface, the alien influence is there.

 

Wait, why is IFM not in continuity?

 

That's unclear. All we really know is that Dave was told to disregard it when writing his current trilogy -- which I think has been blown out of proportion, since, based on my conversations with Dave, I think that applied specifically to reconciling his plans for Geordi with what IFM established about Geordi and Leah Brahms. I know he was planning on finding a way to reconcile them, but apparently the editor said not to bother explaining the change.

Although there are a couple of things about IFM that are hard to reconcile with other books -- mainly that the Titan novels have Alyssa Ogawa on Titan as a nurse just months before she's seen on Challenger as a doctor.

 

Ah, thanks Christopher. I just tried reading that thread, and it was a hard to get the gist. I had no idea. I haven't yet gotten any of the new trilogy yet, so I didn't know of any discrepancies.

While it does seem a little silly, I will just do my usual rationalizations and ridiculous hypotheses to reconcile them until it is done in-story, if ever.

Sorry, Lonemagpie...

On the actual topic of this thread, I am ecstatic about this novel! I hope it is established here the status of Danobula in/about the Federation. I like to assume Danobula was an early member, but I think its membership has only been hinted at all.

 

I'm surprised that they didn't decide for Denobula being a charter member, personally. I know: tradition says "these five star nations founded it, and no else in addition to those five".

But when the UN started up, they had about 40 charter members, right? And how many other "star nations" besides United Earth, Tellar, Andor, Vulcan, Romulus, and Qo'noS were there on the field, known to one another?

 

ENT and earlier series have established that there were plenty of other, smaller worlds active on the interstellar stage (for instance, in the Interspecies Medical Exchange) in the 2150s, even if they weren't as powerful as the ones you list. There's Coridan, there's the Rigel system, there's Draylax, there's Vissia, there's Risa, there's Axanar, there's Paragaan, there's Tandar, there's Delta, there's Xyrillia, there's Ithen, there's Mazar, there's Tiburon, there's Dekendi. And there are worlds whose distance from the Federation core may not be far, including Bolarus. Plus, there are worlds that may have declared independence from Earth very early on and established themselves as independent polities, including Mars, Alpha Centauri, and Deneva.

Any number of these worlds could have joined the Federation in the early years after the Founding. I personally like to imagine that Denobula was the first world after the initial five to join.

 

Memory Beta gives a 2180 date for Denobula joining the UFP, but it's unsourced.

Denobula's status in the 2160s will be touched on in the book.

 

Very good, that.

And what happened to the ex-Heliopolitans of Archernar after the war?

(And I think I'm going to shut up about this sort of thing from here on. It's already turning into a shopping list thread of sorts, and I'm as guilty as anyone else of that.)

 

Very glad to hear it. Will we actually get to visit?

Funnily enough, I don't think any of the novels have yet confirmed Denobula as a member of the Federation, though plenty have implied its membership (including the Vanguard novels, several times).

 

There's no such star as "Archernar," though an IDW comic did give that name to a star system in its Mission's End comic. The real star, and the one where Heliopolis was located (Alpha Eridani), is named Achernar, and is pronounced to rhyme with either "Laker star" or "hacker bar."

We know that as of the 24th century, Achernar is within Romulan territory; it was briefly the capital of the Imperial Romulan State. So we can assume that the Romulans retained the system after the war. Which makes it a good thing that the Mission's End writers made that mistake, since it means "Archernar" would have to be a separate star system.

Other than that, I can't say. I know some people feel there are threads that the Romulan War novels didn't address to their satisfaction, but it's not my job to play cleanup or to write The Romulan War Book Two and a Half. I'm telling the next story, making a new start.

 

^Well, almost finished. My report there was a bit premature, since I realized afterward that there were some significant adjustments I had to make to the epilogue and a few other bits -- for instance, a conversation near the beginning that turned out to work much better near the end, and a conversation at the end that turned out to work better in the middle since then I could do something different at the end and advance the story more substantially, things like that. Which had the effect of nudging me a bit over my maximum word count, so now I'm doing a streamlining pass and making other little improvements as they occur to me.

 

Without revealing too much does the book resolve (or even address) the issue of Alpha Centauri? Human colony or just extremely humanoid aliens?