I guess I'm in the minority that doesn't CARE that these books don't "work" together. I take them as individual works, each playing with the characters and universe I want to immerse myself in. They don't all have to feed one giant timeline, as long as they are consistent to themselves (i.e. story works within the universe, page 50 doesn't contradict page 137, etc). I enjoy the current lineup mostly because it's a continuation of the shows/movies, so moving us past what we've seen. OTOH, I enjoyed all of the numbered TOS books as well, as each of them played with the characters I love. Don't matter if none of them work together, or that the 5 year mission would have to be about 80 years long to make them all happen, on their own, they are fun. Isn't that the point?
The Klingons as seen in The Final Reflection can also be seen in the FASA Star Trek RPG from the same time period. I believe Mr. Ford wrote quite a bit of FASA's Klingon supplement for the game, IIRC. At the moment, I do not recall if the game material saw print before the novel, or the other way around, though.
Well, the picures were pretty. Maybe with a bit of work, some of it could still be wedged into the gaps in the Okudachron.
The timing didn't work. Their theory was that TOS took place in the first decade of the 23rd century, c. 2206-9; this was an attempt to reconcile TWOK's "In the 23rd century" caption with the references in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "Space Seed" to the show being about 200 years from the late 20th century. However, it conflicts with Decker's line in TMP about Voyager 6 having launched over 300 years before (it would still have to be a bit under 300 years by modern understanding, but that's within an acceptable margin of error), not to mention the 2283 vintage of the Romulan ale in TWOK. Also, given that Zefram Cochrane disappeared 150 years before "Metamorphosis" at the age of 85, he would've had to be born in 1972 by the STSC's timeline. I'm not sure where the STSC put the invention of warp drive, but that seems unreasonably early.
There's another "first mission of Captain Kirk" story y'all missed-Strangers in the Sky. I believe there are dates in that that would screw with any "reconciling" as well.
IIRC, Spaceflight Chronology was published in 1980, long before specific details about TWOK (such as the "23rd century" title card) were even a twinkle in anyone's eye.
^Hm, you're right -- The Complete Starfleet Library says 1980, while Memory Alpha says December 1979. That probably means a January '80 publication date, hitting the shelves in December. It must've come out as a TMP tie-in. Then again, come to think of it, the 23rd-century setting for ST was an idea that had been around for a while before TWOK confirmed it; it goes at least as far back to The Making of Star Trek. (I haven't had time to make an exhaustive search of the text, but skimming through just now, I found a reference in TMoST to the need for the producers to try to stay three hundred years ahead of current technology.)
There were actually two editions. A squarebound trade paperback dated January 1980 (so, yes, it was in shops the same month as the film premiered), as a tie-in to ST:TMP, although its coverage of the TMP Enterprise is tantalizingly brief. For the UK market, a few months later, there was an edited-down, saddle-stitched trade paperback version of the book. eg. There was no unfolding diagrams, and lots of the text historical pieces were gone. I didn't bother with it, as I'd already picked up the more elaborate US edition.
I've got to get myself a copy of that book one of these days. The one time I read it, it was borrowed from the library. I wonder if the library still has it. (Goes off to check the library's online catalog) Yep, they still do. I wonder what condition it's in now.
Guy McLimore (then head of FASA's Trek line) had actually been roommates with Mike Ford in grad school, and Ford was the one who'd introduced him to gaming. Ford was also a big contributor to the RPG Traveller, and FASA got its start as a Traveller licensee, so there was already a lot of familiarity there. According to the editor's note in the first edition of the Klingon supplement (written by McLimore), Ford's novel and the game supplement had originated independently, but very early on they realized they were working on parallel projects, and got permission from Pocket and FASA to work a little more closely. The game used the Klingon cultural concepts that Ford created and fleshed out, and in turn Ford used some things from the game in the novel. (He never says what that was, but my guess would be it involved the ship combat sequences.) If there are any parts of the supplement that Ford actually wrote directly, it's probably the parts styled as excerpts from "An Informal Guide to the Klingon Empire, by E. Tagore and J. M. Ford". As it happens, on the SFC's Memory Beta page I've been working on a section comparing the two timelines and noting which parts are more (and less) adaptable to the standard timeline. http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/S...nology#Differences_from_the_Standard_Timeline The part I'm currently working on (and so is not up there yet), the timeframe in which TFR takes place -- the period between the end of the Romulan War and the commissioning of the Constitution class -- is actually probably the most readily adaptable, except for some of the obvious technical issues that were superceded by ST:Enterprise. It was 79 years in the SFC (2109 to 2188) vs. 84 years by the Okudachron (2161 to 2245). Canon references to that period are minimal (mostly of the 'this or that ship disappearing' variety), and not much Treklit goes there either (and most of it right at the end). Since that period is mostly a tabula rasa, a lot of political events could be "ported over" pretty easily (the Phi Puma supernova and related evacuations, the Tritium fiasco, the Back-to-Earth Movement and "Dissolution Babel", etc.). With a bit of reinterpretation, even some of the technical issues could be used. (In ENT ships had a "dilithium matrix". Is that the same thing as the dilithium crystal chamber used in TOS? Reinterpreting the SFC's "discovery of dilithium's properties" might provide an answer.)
By all means, check it out again, if only for the Rick Sternbach artwork. Yeah, a lot of it is obsolete, but there's good stuff too, and it'd be nice if some of it could live on (so to speak), instead of just death-spiralling down the memory hole.
Yes, I recall having a similar reaction at the time. Only about a handful of designs I either liked or was borderline on. The rest had odd shapes and just didn't seem very Trek-y (even though there wasn't much to compare it to back then). I think some of the designs have grown on me since I pulled the book out of a storage box to add information from it to Memory Beta. And for others I think I'm seeing the possibilities of giving them a more modern "facelift" than the original design as published. "There are always... possibilities."
I'll second what Christopher said! That is one critique I'd like to hear. (or read, whatever.) This would have been pretty early in Hollywood career, wouldn't it? After TMP, after or during your work on Cosmos?
Considering the book came out the same month as TMP premiered, and with a January 1980 publishing date, it wasn't "after TMP".
Note the context. Kalan wasn't asking if it was after TMP came out, but if it was after the time Rick Sternbach spent working on TMP, which obviously would've been much earlier. Preproduction on Phase II was underway as early as mid-1977, and TMP began shooting in August '78. As an artist, Rick would've presumably been involved at a pretty early point in the process.
I did some preliminary work on COSMOS in 1977 before the company moved to LA, did TMP in early-mid 1978, and then immediately moved back into COSMOS through late 1979-early 1980. The Chronology stuff was done before the movie was released, since I had access to photographs before they were made public. The book took some time to assemble and came out, I think, just after the film. Could be wrong; it's been a while. Rick Rick