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

[DEWLine]

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?

[Sci]

DEWLine wrote:

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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.

[Christopher]

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.

[DEWLine]

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.)

[Deranged Nasat]

Christopher wrote:

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

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).

[Christopher]

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.

[Markonian]

The manuscript is finished! Christopher reported in his blog (http://christopherlbennett.wordpress...6/done-almost/) that he finished the raw writing process on the 6th of December, only revisions remain(ed).

Tomorrow is the deadline, so the book enters its next production stage (i.e. editing by the editors?).

[Christopher]

^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.

[Markonian]

Thanks for the update!

[E-DUB]

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

[Nerys Myk]

I thought that was resolved years ago.

[Markonian]

Santa Kang wrote:

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I thought that was resolved years ago.

Indeed. For example, A Singular Destiny deals with Alpha Centauri, a founding member of the Federation yet also Human colony.

[Christopher]

I've always gone with the Earth-colony idea and I've never been given any reason to change my mind. The idea that the nearest star system to us in the whole universe just happens to have a civilization of beings virtually indistinguishable from us is so contrived a coincidence that I've always found it distasteful. And it's based on a ridiculously literal and erroneous interpretation of the "Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri" line from "Metamorphosis" -- which requires ignoring the preponderance of other evidence from "Metamorphosis" proving unambiguously that Cochrane is an Earth human. (Cochrane asked if his visitors were "humans from Earth," he said his asteroid was "not Earth, but it's liveable," McCoy explicitly said he scanned as human, he was called human by Kirk, Spock, and Cochrane himself, he was initially distressed at the idea of a relationship with a nonhuman, etc.) So the idea was never anything more than an ill-considered mistake and I've never been the slightest bit inclined to believe it. And it hasn't been given any credence in the novels since the 1980s; even Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, who were proponents of the native-Centaurian idea in Memory Prime, had given it up in favor of the Earth-colony interpretation by the time they wrote Federation.

And there's never been a trace of evidence for native Alpha Centaurians in canon. What little has been revealed about the system makes it pretty clear that it's a human colony. Obviously if Cochrane is an Earth human but "of Alpha Centauri," then humans must've colonized it in Cochrane's lifetime. ENT's depiction of Cochrane is consistent with this. "Twilight" also establishes that Alf Cen is a human colony (because it's one of the Xindi's targets in their campaign to exterminate humanity).

That said, in The Buried Age, based on the real-life evidence that the Alpha Centauri system is 2 billion years older than Sol, I posited that there had been native Centaurian civilizations in the remote past (at a time when the star was much more distant from Sol), but they hadn't survived long enough to reach the stars due to the frequent asteroid bombardments caused by Proxima Centauri's gravity disrupting the system's debris disk. Other than that, though, TBA makes it clear that Alf Cen is a human colony system through and through, so the question has already been answered within my own body of work.

ROTF:ACOF does contain a bit of discussion about the origins and history of the Alpha Centauri colony, and a few of its characters (though only one major one) are from there.

[King Daniel into Darkness]

Christopher wrote:

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And it hasn't been given any credence in the novels since the 1980s

And Dave Stern's far more recent Rosetta!

[Christopher]

King Daniel Into Darkness wrote:

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And Dave Stern's far more recent Rosetta!

Oh, yeah. That's a bit of an odd one, because it also has Hoshi's professor mention the Preservers, even though "The Paradise Syndrome" set well over a century later was evidently the Federation's first introduction to the Preservers. (Unless somehow Spock had managed to avoid hearing of any prior references to their existence, which seems unlikely if evidence had been around for that long.)