Indistinguishable from Magic/Plagues of Night problems?

Okay, so I've read all this stuff on the boards about how IfM has all these continuity mistakes, and the author got shafted etc etc. So I skipped that book for the time being.

Now I'm almost finished Plagues of Night, and I'm seeing a lot of stuff being referenced from, I'm assuming, IfM.

I've seen reference to Geordi captaining his ship, Nog having left DS9, and a couple of other things I can't recall off hand.

So what exactly is it that makes IfM not fit, because I'm not seeing it? Is it the whole Leah Brahms thing? Is that it? Because seems to me that can be explained away rather easily. They tried it out and it wasn't working out, so Geordi ended up back with that woman he was with before. (Sorry, can't remember her name, but I think I heard someone say they broke up in IfM, but I know they are back together in David Mack's new trilogy, which I have read. And yeah, that might be a 'grasping at straws' explanation, but come on. This IS Geordi we're talking about. He's always screwing up relationships. )

Anyway, what else?

 

As far as I know, the biggest contradiction with IfM is with Leah Brahms, and as you note that isn't necessarily a contradiction. Many of the key events are namechecked by different characters--Sela, for instance, is grateful to be back inside the Milky Way Galaxy.

There might be a subtler sort of contradiction in the things not described, the trans-slipstream aliens being key.

 

There are no 'mistakes' in IFM - most of the continuity problems are due to the author doing things at the behest of the publishers who changed their minds after the fact. Despite events already being referenced elsewhere, the decision was then made to ignore them.

It could (and should) have all been retconned fairly easily had they wanted to. There would have been no issue.

I find the decision baffling but there's nothing you can't retcon yourself.

It would be nice if the fate of a major character was addressed at some point though, even obliquely...

 

Ah yes, the Ogawa thing. That was the other big one I couldn't think of. ugh. Although, wasn't she assigned as CMO of the Challenger? And wasn't that ship destroyed? Maybe she just decided to go back to her original posting on Titan afterwards.

What's the next Titan book?

 

The issue with Ogawa is as much about what happened before IFM as what happened afterward. Her last appearance as a nurse aboard Titan was far too short a time before IFM to allow her to earn an MD in the interim.

 

From what I recall, in IFM she basically says she was already qualified as an MD, and they just made it official at that point, rather than her going back and doing med school.

The line specifically was:
"The training for all medical staff, doctors and nurses, has been standardized since the Dominion War, to make it easier to put someone in the right gap, wherever. So, I'd already done the training."

 

You shouldn't have skipped IFM, it's a good read. It's continuity errors are no worse than those between other novels still supposedly in-continuity - just try and reconcile the Q-Space trilogy with The Eternal Tide, for example.

I'm still waiting to find out...

Spoiler: IFM

Where Scotty materializes. Going by what the new movies established about transwarp beaming (which the author confirmed was Scotty used at the very end), he could materialize anywhere.

Sequel! Sequel! Sequel! Sequel!

 

Okay, so I'm not the only one who thought TET was much worse continuity wise than IFM -> Plagues of Night.

 

It doesn't even have to directly reference IFM to resolve the issue - just feature the character in a new novel and mention him still working on refining transwarp beaming after having tried it himself under less than ideal circumstances...

 

I wasn't aware that the Q-Space trilogy was counted as part of the current novelverse. I thought that subsequent Q books had gone in distinct directions from it.

 

Oh, I'm still gonna read it. I just put it to the side. It was a combination of the discrepancies and the fact that I'd just read 4 or 5 TNG books prior to it. So I switched to something else.

 

^Understood. It's much more of a Geordi/Scotty novel than a TNG one. Picard's in it a little, but otherwise it's mostly the Challenger crew.

I might be thinking of Q&A, which is definitely part of the post-Nemesis continuity (although I'm sure Q-Space has been referenced once or twice). There's a podcast with Kirsten Beyer where she admits she deliberately ignored all the prior Q novels while writing TET.

 

I know the characterizations of some of the other non-corporeal life forms in the Q trilogy have been used in other Lit-verse works. Or at least names.

And I was under the impression that Q&A referenced all the previous Q novels.

 

I haven't read Q-Space in forever, but what conflicted with TET?

 

^If I recall correctly, the whole reason for the Q existing is completely different.

 

Hyper-learning. Uhura was basically blanked out by Nomad. She resumed her career quickly enough.

 

I thought we agreed never to speak of that again?

 

Is there any in universe reason that she couldn't have been training as an MD whilst still nursing ?

 

Err, because she was busy serving on a starship way out on the frontier at the time? I'm not sure earning an MD is something you could do as a correspondence course.

Besides, as I just pointed out in another thread, Ogawa's most recent appearance to date as a nurse on Titan (Fallen Gods) is set just two months before her appearance as a doctor on Challenger in IFM, in which it's stated that she joined Challenger's crew "some time ago." Given the lengthy travel time from Titan's survey area back to civilization, that's quite difficult to reconcile.