The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing - Discuss (SPOILERS)

By the by, getting back to that Canada/Mars Colonies thing for a second. Two mentions of the comparison constitutes grounds for getting on a reader's nerves?

One thing I got out of the references, though: Mars must've had a heavy Canadian contingent amongst its initial settlement waves. Probably Ontarian-born for the most part. Otherwise, the subject would never have come up at all.

 

There was a war for Martian independence mentioned, I believe. I wonder what was supposed to be so evil about the Earth government that compelled Mars to take up arms against it?

 

Maybe not so much evil as disorganized, preoccupied and who knows what else?

 

One possible rationalization: In ENT, she's speaking Vulcan, which the translators render as unaccented English, but in "Amok Time," she's speaking English with a heavy "Vulcan" accent.

Doesn't have to be evil. History is rarely about anything as simplistic as white hats versus black hats. Eventually colonies want to gain their independence, but the folks back home might have conflicting needs, such as relying on the colony as a source of revenue or a population relief valve.

 

Remember who you're talking to here.

Or perhaps it was Mars who was in the wrong? Maybe the Martians were just being pricks.

As for T'Pau...in TOS, I wonder why she would bother speaking English at all. By that point she clearly did not have a particularly high opinion of humans, so why would she stoop to the level of speaking their language?

 

And one of the two or three nearest and most convenient such relief valves at that point, out of all of those already in play, right? Luna, Mars, the Alpha Cent worlds...and likely ten or twenty others officially sanctioned by United Earth during that first post-First Contact half-century.

(We won't even get into the unsanctioned expeditions, which we know were also gearing up in no small numbers during those years.)

 

"Getting on my nerves" is a bit strong. It was a minor irritant -- I'm enjoying the book a lot, but minor things stick out in a book that's otherwise excellent.

I just tend to think that in the real world, Canada doesn't get the kind of respect it deserves (say, for the Canadian Forces contingent in Afghanistan, or for Operation Yellow Ribbon), and so when I see a TRW describe Mars as being less powerful and ignored compared to Earth in the same way Canada is to America, it just irritates me slightly, especially since it's my understanding that Canada is likely to become a more powerful country as the next century unfolds in real life.

It's certainly possible that the first Martian colonies had a Canadian contingent, but the comparison to Canada was made in terms of describing the relationship between Mars and Earth as being analogous to that between Canada and the United States.

The Martian war for independence was depicted as happening about 50 years before Beaneath the Raptor's Wings, so around 2105 or 2106 or thereabouts. Articles of the Federation established that United Earth wasn't established until 2130. So the Martian colonies were probably colonies of a pre-Unification state or collection of states on Earth, against whom they fought for independence, not United Earth itself. (Maybe this conflict was one of the reasons the Vulcan government decided to obstruct Earth's expansion into interstellar space before the launch of the NX-01.)

Though, bear in mind that it's entirely possible for a rebellion/revolution to occur and Martian colonists to be fighting for independence without either side being truly "evil."

EDIT:

Removed content in case I was giving a story idea. PM me for a scenario on how Earth and Mars might have come to blows without either side truly being in the wrong.

 

Good point. Forgot about that one.

Oh, you know where I stand on *that* little nugget.

 

What if both sides legitimately need something from the other but neither side understands that because they're so busy only thinking from their own POVs?

 

I finished the book on tuesday and loved the ending. That's a very interesting cliffhanger so far and can't wait to see what will happen in 2011 if there is a new book for the 10th anniversary of the series itself.

 

I was wondering. Couldn't Trip easily come back and serve on the Enterprise? Doesn't his "death" as shown in TATV take place ten years after his "actual death" as shown in the novels?

 

I always assumed that was part of the rationalization for doing it the way they did, but they seem to be taking their sweet time with getting Trip back to Enterprise. At this point, it's starting to look like we would've gotten more Trip as-we-knew-him, on balance, if they just proceeded normally and let him die once they got to six years after Terra Prime.

 

If they had meant to kill him in 2161, they would have never made a TATV fix in the first place...

BTW, "Last Full Measure" confirms that he's alive and well on NCC-1701's launch day anyway.

 

What I meant was, I figured they'd planted a seed so they could fake his death in TGTMD, have him do his James Bond thing, then get back to the Enterprise for some historically notable adventures, and then need, for some reason, to fake his death again in '61, at which point they'd just reuse the old cover story rather than stage a second, different death.

But Trip's been James Bond-ing it so much, now, it seems almost pointless to have unkilled him. I mean, he's not on the ship, he's not doing engineering... he may as well be a different character altogether. It's looking like TGTMD was more about saving the character's dignity than his life.

 

As far as I'm concerned, TGTMD accomplished this. I would go so far as to say that TGTMD saved the dignity of the entire series, after the fiasco that was TATV. We should look on Trip's life in TGTMD and beyond as his second life. It seems as though he'll never make it back to full duty as Enterprise's engineer, and that's okay. That part of his life is over. He's a supersecretsection31spy now .

 

He'll probably never get back on NX-01 again, but it doesn't mean he'll never get back to being an engineer. According to LFM, Larry Marvick was something of a protage of his.

 

I never said that he would never be an engineer again. Trip is an engineer. He'll always be an engineer. He just won't be the NX-01's engineer again. The part of his life that's over, is the part that had him on Enterprise as its chief...

 

Well, that just makes things difficult, then. If they had to unfake his death, that'd explain moving its date up in the records. If he never returns to the ship, they then had to falsify six years worth of NX-01 logs (including the entire Romulan War) to include Trip Tucker, as well as re-faking his death on paper so all the dates matched up. There'd need to be some pretty compelling reason to go through all that trouble. If Trip never comes back to the ship, that takes away the best excuse they had for why 31 wouldn't just have history recording Trip as dying when they actually faked his death.

Which brings me back to my original point. The longer Trip spends assing around the RSE, the more the death retcon seems like a quick-fix patch no one really thought through long-term which we now have to live with, despite the fact that in the natural order of things, we'd be well into the next decade before the books had to deal with TATV.

 

Am I the only person who doesn't have a problem with the idea of Trip not coming back to the NX-01 and doesn't see that as a problem needing to be fixed?

 

Seconded. Although David does make a good argument about the logs and such needing to be faked over a long period of time. Is it possible that S31 just supplanted the records from 2155 into 2161? Would the logs really be that hard to fake for S31? It may be tedious work, but not that hard for an organization with the access that S31 has. Or maybe Troi and Riker weren't as well versed in the era as they made it seem they were? hmmm...