Official Description and Cover up for DTI: Watching the Clock

[JD]

I was just on S&S.com and they have put up the final description for DTI: Watching the Clock, and the cover. Here's the description:

There's likely no more of a thankless job in Starfleet than temporal investigation. While starship explorers get to live the human adventure of traveling to other times and realities, it's up to the dedicated agents of the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations to deal with the consequences to the timestream that the rest of the Galaxy has to live with day by day. But when history as we know it could be wiped out at any moment by time warriors from the future, misused relics of ancient races, or accident-prone starships, only the most disciplined, obsessive, and unimaginative government employees have what it takes to face the existential uncertainty of it all on a daily basis . . . and still stay sane enough to complete their assignments. That's where Agents Lucsly and Dulmur come in—stalwart and unflappable, these men are the Federation's unsung anchors in a chaotic universe. Together with their colleagues in the DTI—and with the help and sometimes hindrance of Starfleet's finest—they do what they can to keep the timestream, or at least the paperwork, as neat and orderly as they are. But when a series of escalating temporal incursions threatens to open a new front of the history-spanning Temporal Cold War in the twenty-fourth century, Agents Lucsly and Dulmur will need all their investigative skill and unbending determination to stop those who wish to rewrite the past for their own advantage, and to keep the present and the future from devolving into the kind of chaos they really, really hate.

I love time travel (or time travel related) stories, so I am really looking forward to this one.

[Thrawn]

Yeah, this is gonna be great. Couldn't be playing to Christopher's strengths more beautifully - massive continuity porn with a scientific bent coupled with dryly sarcastic characters that need some serious fleshing out.

Perfect.

[Sxottlan]

Great cover.

And I like the idea of the TCW threatening to re-open in the 24th century. That's the kind of continuity that I enjoy.

[Dancing Doctor]

I'm almost as excited about this as I am for Cast No Shadow.

(And since CNS is *the* one book I've been looking forward to the most, this means that WtC is a very, very close second,)

[Smellincoffee]

Glad they stuck with that cover. It's a beaut.

[Emh]

This, Blind Man's Bluff, Indistinguishable From Magic, and Cast No Shadow are the only books I'm looking forward to. I wasn't even sure if I was looking forward to this one until now. Something just clicked with me.

[captcalhoun]

sounds cool.

i'm looking forward to this, IfM and new Vanguard.

[JoeZhang]

Pass.

[USS Intrepid]

Very much looking forward to this one.

[Mage]

Sounds very intruiging, but the fact that it involves the Temporal Cold War does bug me a bit, since I wasn't a fan of the concept in ENT.

[RonG]

Personally, one of, if not *the* most anticipated Trek novel of 2011 (and of 2010, for that matter..).

A great concept, perfectly tailored for CLB

[Admiral_Young]

Have been looking forward to this, and the cover looks snazzy. However wouldn't the most thankless job in Starfleet be as agents of Section 31

[RonG]

Admiral_Young wrote:

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Have been looking forward to this, and the cover looks snazzy. However wouldn't the most thankless job in Starfleet be as agents of Section 31

More like the most thankless job in Section 31 is being Starfleet officers

[Bishop76]

I'm a bit torn.

I really find time travel obnoxious for the most part (and usually it leaves some pretty big plot holes laying about) and I'm not a big fan of the TCW (unless the nature of it is explained in this novel, I'm still not even sure what the hell it was supposed to be about). Also, I wish we could have gone with different characters. Mulder and Scully... really? It was cute in one episode, but I'm not sure about them as main characters of a book.

On the other hand, Christopher's world-building skills and attention to detail are very well suited to writing a novel of this type.

Odds are I'll give it a try, but will be really Lucsly about it.

[Christopher]

Smellincoffee wrote:

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Glad they stuck with that cover. It's a beaut.

If that is actually the final cover, I'm surprised. It was supposed to be just one image element of a more elaborate cover.

Admiral_Young wrote:

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Have been looking forward to this, and the cover looks snazzy. However wouldn't the most thankless job in Starfleet be as agents of Section 31

I don't know, but that first sentence in the blurb contains an error. DTI is not in Starfleet. It's a branch of the civilian government of the Federation. Hopefully that'll get fixed in the final cover.

Bishop76 wrote:

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I'm a bit torn.

I really find time travel obnoxious for the most part (and usually it leaves some pretty big plot holes laying about) and I'm not a big fan of the TCW (unless the nature of it is explained in this novel, I'm still not even sure what the hell it was supposed to be about).

Well, that's the idea. This book is about filling in a lot of those plot holes, making more sense of the physics, logistics, history, and politics of time travel.

Also, I wish we could have gone with different characters. Mulder and Scully... really? It was cute in one episode, but I'm not sure about them as main characters of a book.

Aside from the letters of their surnames, the characters of Lucsly and Dulmur as seen in "Trials and Tribble-ations" bear no resemblance to Scully and Mulder. They're more like Joe Friday and Bill Gannon from Dragnet -- and maybe a bit like Spock and Kirk if they were equal in rank (and if it's the no-nonsense early first-season Kirk). I also drew from such literary pairings as Holmes & Watson and Phileas Fogg & Passepartout. I did not draw on Mulder & Scully in the slightest degree. I understood from the start that if these characters were to carry a novel, they needed to be more than an in-joke. Besides, I was never much of an X-Files fan.