But surely the aesthetic change between TOS and TMP is far greater than that between TMP and TWOK. So in that respect, at least, it would've made more sense for TMP to be later (although of course that contradicts the "my 5 years out there" line in TMP itself). It should be fine. I think Trek Literature is generally more tolerant of thread resurrections than other forums, because people are always discovering older books for the first time.
I figure there needs to be some time for the ship to get to function post refit before it becomes a training cadet vessel.... I always imagined some big untold story near the end of the second 5YM that results in the later seen status of the ship, Kirk and Spock, possibly leading into a more militaristic atmosohere with the Klingons, monster maroons, etc.
I understand the rational. When I first heard the theory about a 5 year mission before TMP, it kind of weirded me out. It took time to get used to and accept. I think there's a tendency to think of the Enterprise going on 5 years missions, but for the sake of argument I think that in spirit TOS (and TAS?) are the 5 year mission; with others maybe started out and not necessarily finished. So, hypothetically Enterprise gets a little bit of a refurbishment after the end of the original mission, and goes out for a second, but doesn't finish that one. And then after TMP again starts a new 5YM and doesn't finish that one, either. Just a little bit of fun speculation. I agree there is something to what you say, given how drastically the Enterprise becomes "A totally new Enterprise" in TMP, and then by TWoK/TSFS she's now on her last legs. And yet the appearance changes sooo much between TOS and TMP, which seems to want more time. When the 80's books were being written, there was a lot of TOS to draw on, while the movie era was still unfolding and probably full of unknowns. From a story telling standpoint, I can see the gap between TOS and TMP as fertile ground for stories were new characters and situations can be introduced and played out, and avoiding contradicting and being contradicted by the movies. I think the idea of the pre-TMP 5YM is just in the minds of some of the authors. I'm not an expert, but the ones I've read so far don't overtly state and only very lightly and subtly hint. If it hadn't been conceptualized at all I wouldn't be bringing meta-knowledge to my read through. And so far I don't get the impression Enterprise did do a full additional 5 years before being refitted. They do feel like they take place a year or two or three after TOS and/or the original 5YM, at least some of the individual ones do. I'm kind of feeling, too, that these books can work well as a window into a timeline or continuity that is parallel and related to Star Trek, but with it's own identity and idiosyncrasies. For the actual TOS prime continuity, I don't assume there was a pre-TMP 5YM, and I'm not that keen...for prime timeline stuff. For these books though, given room to be an alternate continuity...well, it makes for a fun alternative! From that standpoint, I've found the idea has grown on me and I do like it in the books' alternative realm.
Which is weird, if you think about it. We have evidence for exactly one 5-year mission for one ship, the Enterprise -- and even that evidence is not from TOS itself (title narration aside), but strictly from TMP and Voyager: "Q2" (and the latter two Kelvin movies). And yet fandom has always taken that one isolated example as "proof" that every starship mission ever had to be five years, which is nonsense. With only one example, there's no way to know whether it's the norm or the exception. And it doesn't make sense that all mission profiles would be the exact same length, with no flexibility. Sometimes fandom takes really dumb ideas for granted. What I've posited in a couple of my TOS novels is that five years was the maximum recommended mission duration for a Constitution-class ship before coming in for maintenance, refits, and crew rotation, so that there was room for shorter mission profiles. Exactly. The whole "second 5-year-mission" thing is more of a fan interpretation than something clearly codified in the novels. As I said, the 5-year duration was mentioned only in the narration and never, ever mentioned within the actual story of any work of Trek fiction prior to TMP. So the writers of those novels may have simply disregarded the narration and decided to treat the mission as open-ended, without any fixed duration -- which, really, is probably how TOS itself would've handled it if it had gone on long enough. (See other examples from the era including Run for Your Life, a 3-season show about a man with no more than 18 months to live, and M*A*S*H, an 11-season show about a 3-year war.) The largest gap specified, IIRC, is The Romulan Way being 8 years after "The Enterprise Incident." Which just about works out to two 5-year missions if you assume "Incident" was near the start of the third year of the first mission.
I may be off base here, but as I was working on the Litverse Reading Guide today, I realized something. I had never included novelizations on the site until recently, and I was adding the TMP novelization today. If I am not mistaken the name of Lori Ciana's character is not from the film itself, or even the script. It originated in the novelization. Since it was used in The Lost Years era books, that provides a definite link for the TMP novelization to the Original Litverse. Then branching off from there I noticed that the New Humans were referenced in the two Marshak and Culbreath novels, Triangle and The Prometheus Design. I wasn't able to see any links from there back to their older works. Does anyone know if there are links between their other novels? Am I off base here? I didn't see this mentioned anywhere else in this thread.
Yes, at least one of their Pocket novels (probably Prometheus) references Omne from the Bantam Phoenix novels.
Ok thanks! I will look thru it to confirm. After I add those I will have 44 novels in the Original Litverse, considerably more than the 34 originally listed on page 1 of this thread.
If you're adding novelizations, the McIntyre ones should be there, too, I think, since The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock draw on elements of The Entropy Effect. And then I think Dillard's TOS novelizations mention stuff from McIntyre's? (It's been a long time, so I'm less certain about that.)
Well, nearly every Saavik story in the novels has used the Hellguard backstory McIntyre invented for the TWOK and TSFS novelizations.
Kevin Riley's time as Kirk's assistant (The Lost Years) is mentioned in Deweese's Probe. His sketchy beard is mentioned in both books, too. Not sure if that info is relevant to the current conversation, but I'm passing it along nonetheless.
TFF novelization mentions Kirk trying to talk with Carol Marcus, IIRC, but he can't reach her, implying (to me anyway) that she's still visiting family members of her Genesis team. I think Sulu's Sybok-flashback was maybe drawn from The Entropy Effect background established for Sulu...? I haven't revisited that sequence since reading Entropy yet, I confess.
TMP novelization seems to have provided a lot of material for the novelverse as I understand it. Nogura, Lori Ciana, the Vulcans' seventh sense. I gather that Strangers From the Sky has a couple Easter eggs from it, from the reviews on the Deep Space Spines review blog. There is stuff in TMP book that are referenced in other books, that just seeing the movie won't help. It's an assumption I've been making; however I've now added it to my list, I really feel with so much TMP specific material in there, it belongs.
I’d be really interested in confirmation about anything that would would provide a reference link to TFF. It’s the only TOS film I don’t have linked yet.
I took a look through The Final Frontier novelization, to try and lock in on what I remembered or thought I remembered. There's a short moment where the book mentions Kirk feels depressed that he can't get a hold of Carol Marcus, but there isn't anything beyond her silence to remotely hint about her visiting relatives of her research colleagues, so that's a little too vague. The book mentions that Mr. Sulu has asked for a temporary reduction in rank to commander to serve for a period of time with Kirk on the Enterprise, he finds it strange after becoming used to being referred to as a captain. This is during the scene while he and Chekov are lost in a forest. The forest makes him think fondly of being a young kid on Ganjitsu (which is the colony world introduced in The Entropy Effect). The later "Share your pain" flashback to Sulu is a tragedy that occurred while he was living on Ganjitsu, which is introduced and set up with similar language as it's introduction in Entropy: a colony world which is uncomfortably close to the Klingon Empire, where pirates attacks are frequent (the pirates are Klingons that the Klingon Empire dismiss as renegades, for the purpose of diplomatic denial). TFF novelization makes use of the close friend/dear relative/brother/lover cultural concept, usually spelled t'hy'la in other books, starting with TMP novelization. In TFF novelization J.M. Dillard is spelling it t'hyla. She connects the "Qual se tu" greeting as a more familiar/intimate greeting reserved for one's t'hyla. Readers might consider it controversial that Dillard develops the idea that Spock and Sybok were t'hyla, before Kirk and Spock later became t'hy'la. Mr. Scott's "Share your pain" flashback revisits the death of Peter Preston, which maintains the family relationship between Peter and Scotty, which was deleted from the original theatrical release of the Wrath of Khan, but is utilized in Vonda McIntyre's novelizations for the second and third films. I thought there was a reference somewhere in TFF to the Enterprise being able to cloak, but if there is the reference is too elusive. This is an idiosyncrasy in Dillard's novels and novelizations, that the Enterprise is outfitted with a cloaking device and will make use of it on occasion, it is definitely used in her novel, Mindshadow. I remember a reference to a character wondering why the Enterprise doesn't cloak when she approaches Khitomer in TUC, but I couldn't pin down any similar references in TFF's starship confrontations.
I'll admit, I was a bit bothered by how much 5YM is used during the original series era. I went with the assumption that the original series/animated series was a 5YM because of the title narration (and later series confirmed it as Christopher noted). But I never really bought into the idea that there was 5YM and 5YM over and over again. I actually initially thought the 5YM during the original series was the first (and maybe applied to other Constitution class ships of the time). I have nothing to base that on, but I never thought Captain Pike, or April before him, had to be on their own 5YM. I just sort of thought it was more ambiguous before that. Maybe they'd be sent for an exploration mission and returned for maintenance and shore leave when finished. Maybe it'd be a year or two. There's no reason to assume it had to be 5YM. I actually thought 'Where No Man Has Gone Before' predated the 5YM (partly because in the syndicated release there was no voiceover---and partly because the Enterprise was obviously refit between that episode and 'The Corbomite Manuever', which I assumed was to prepare it for the 5YM). And after TMP I never thought it was necessary the Enterprise went on another 5YM. Maybe in that case there was no set time period. Or maybe it was a 7YM. I used to just assume the 5YM was more or less a one time thing. That at other times it was more ambiguous based on necessity and Starfleet priorities. Now future shows may 'canonize' repeated 5YM's, but personally I don't think that should be a requirement.
You know, I actually like it sometimes when someone resurrects an old thread. I'm a relative newcomer to trekbbs, coming on board in 2017. There are tons of threads going back years and it gives me a chance to see some older threads that I may have never actually come across. Plus, since you're name is Phoenix, I figure you're allowed an occasional resurrection now and again
The discussions about FYMs, when they were, which ships were on them.....has always been pretty neat. I have always been in the school of thought that it would be pretty weird to assume there was just one, and that other ships were sometimes assigned to them. It depends on how you are wired....what your tendencies with your trek fandom are. Discovery certainly has established that there was more than one. At least for the Enterprise. One point that has fascinated me since the beginning of this thread is the concept of a 2nd FYM pre-STMP and I enjoy the discussions and data points that explore that concept. Much of it has to do with the trek writing at the time. TOS and STMP have a pretty significant break, and I think many of the authors were trying to explain the age of the characters.