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How many continuities are there in Trek Literature?

Christopher said:
but I can't recall ever seeing a story about Kirk's time aboard his first command, and that's a surprising oversight.
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It's not part of the novel continuity, or even published by Pocket, but a portion of The Autobiography of James T Kirk does take place on another starship he commanded before the Enterprise and even served with a number of officers who would end up assigned to the Enterprise like McCoy and Uhura.
 
Christopher said:
And it's implied in the second pilot. "Gary told me that you've been friends since he joined the service, that you asked for him aboard your first command." That would be an oddly distant way of phrasing it if the Enterprise had been his first command. Implicitly, Dehner is referring to a different ship.
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I actually like the idea of Kirk commanding another ship before the Enterprise. That being said, I'm not really sure what the problem would be with this phrasing even if Enterprise was the first command in question. A person today could easily say something like "I wanted a finished basement in my first house", while still living in that house.

Plus there's the fact that Mitchell is *on* the Enterprise. Unless we were to assume that Michell got assigned there randomly, and Kirk had nothing to do with it, then why wouldn't Dehner say something like "You've asked for him aboard every command you've held!" or something like that.

Christopher said:
And, tie-ins aside, we don't really know for a fact that he went directly from the Enterprise to the Excelsior. Canon leaves room for him to have had a smaller command before then.
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Well, there was the Heinlein, but I hear that didn't go so well...
 
Christopher said:
Kirk was at most 33 when TOS began. He had much less experience, so it would've most likely been more significant experience, a faster rise through the ranks as opposed to a slow-and-steady accumulation of seniority.
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Something closer to the captaincy in eight years suggested by Pike in Star Trek, perhaps?

TC
 
There are so many assumptions that seems to stick with fans and writers. I've also wondered why people assumed that the Enterprise was Kirk's first command. There is no indication of that scenario in the series and movies. Also, why is it assumed that there are only five-year missions during the 23rd century era? Sulu was assigned a three-year mission on the Excelsior.
 
I've never bought into the notion that the Enterprise crew turned around and did another five year mission, either before or after TMP. As setups go, it's the least imaginative option. There are plenty of other sorts of missions/assignments the ship and crew could've been given.

As for Kirk commanding a ship prior to the Enterprise, of course that makes sense. I only pointed out that there's never been anything definitively established in the almighty "canon" about it. :)
 
Admiral Rex said:
Also, why is it assumed that there are only five-year missions during the 23rd century era? Sulu was assigned a three-year mission on the Excelsior.
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Yeah, that one's bugged me for a long time. Canonically, we have evidence for exactly one 5-year mission undertaken by exactly one ship. A single example cannot possibly prove a pattern.

Indeed, STID did establish that the Enterprise's upcoming 5-year mission of exploration was something new and different, something Kirk was excited about because it hadn't been done before.

What I've suggested in my books is that 5 years is simply the recommended maximum time for a Constitution-class ship to spend in the field between major overhauls. So it's not like every ship is guaranteed to be out in the field for exactly 260 weeks to the day; it's more that the goal of this exploration program was to keep the ships out in the field for as long as feasible, but more than 5 years was not recommended. So in practice, it'd be a lot more flexible than that. And maybe the reason Kirk's 5-year mission is considered significant enough that Kirk called attention to it in TMP and Icheb in VGR is because it was so unusual to stay out so close to the maximum time. Roddenberry's TMP novelization claimed that no other ship succeeded in making it the whole 5 years with ship and crew mostly intact.


Dayton Ward said:
I've never bought into the notion that the Enterprise crew turned around and did another five year mission, either before or after TMP. As setups go, it's the least imaginative option. There are plenty of other sorts of missions/assignments the ship and crew could've been given.
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Well, for better or worse, it's part of the novel continuity, since it's stated outright in The Captain's Daughter and a number of later books have referenced that. But per the Pocket Timeline, there's a whole 12 years between TMP and TWOK, so after that second 5-year tour ends, there's another 7 years' worth of room for the Enterprise to have other kinds of mission. As I established in my Mere Anarchy installment, the E became Admiral Kirk's flagship under Spock's command, and they occasionally took it out on special missions. (And at some point I should really pitch a novel set in that period.)
 
For years, I've been wanting a series of books that take place between TMP and TWOK. I know there are books during this time, but I'm talking one big continuity thread over multiple books, similar to the post-DS9, VOY and ENT series.
 
The New Earth books are one-third excellent (Rough Trails, Challenger), one-third okay (Wagon Train to the Stars, Belle Terre), one-third utterly terrible (The Flaming Arrow, Thin Air). Beautiful covers, though.
 
I think my brother still might have the New Earth books around here somewhere. (he's a hoarder but he keeps his stuff in his room. The next time we clean it out I might look for it.) The only one I can remember from that series is the one about Sulu and Chekov but I can't remember the title.
 
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^ Sulu and Chekov were in Rough Trails.

I always felt the New Earth series used the Enterprise crew to set up a possible book series for the Challenger.
 
Idran said:
I was about to ask if it ever publicly came out what happened there, but after looking up the timing on Gateways and Carey's other Trek works to double-check a hypothesis, I think I just figured it out. :p
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Was Chainmail really so bad that they never let the author do anything Trek related again?

Also was Excelsior: Forged in Fire by an chance meant to be the "pilot" for an Escelsior series, but didn't do well enough?
 
Jinn said:
Was Chainmail really so bad that they never let the author do anything Trek related again?
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I was hinting towards the Broken Bow novelization that seemed to have ended Carey's Treklit career due to deservingly-poor reception from Berman. :p

(I didn't realize Challenger was almost right before it until I looked it up, I'd thought it was a year or two earlier than that.)
 
Admiral Rex said:
For years, I've been wanting a series of books that take place between TMP and TWOK. I know there are books during this time, but I'm talking one big continuity thread over multiple books, similar to the post-DS9, VOY and ENT series.
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I would love to see Christopher take that on, given that I like his TMP era material, but I don't want to see less Rise of the Federation in the near future.
 
Christopher said:
It's from The Making of Star Trek. I don't want any more cracks about The Book!
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Doug Drexler calling TMOST "The Book" like he was in "A Piece of the Action" was probably my favorite moment in the 50th Anniversary Special. :lol: I think that's how I'm going to think of it from now on.

Christopher said:
And it's implied in the second pilot. "Gary told me that you've been friends since he joined the service, that you asked for him aboard your first command." That would be an oddly distant way of phrasing it if the Enterprise had been his first command. Implicitly, Dehner is referring to a different ship.
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I think the dialogue is ambiguous enough that it could be interpreted either way, much like Kirk's "There are only 12 like her in the fleet" statement in "Tomorrow is Yesterday." But I agree that it does make a certain amount of sense for Kirk to have commanded another, smaller ship before the Enterprise.

Christopher said:
I don't see how that's awkward. Given how much changes between the end of TMP and the start of TWOK, it would be more awkward if only three years passed between them in-story. I mean, it's not just Kirk going back to the admiralty, Spock becoming a captain, the junior officers getting promoted again, and Chekov getting promoted twice and transferred to Reliant. It's all the changes in the setting itself. The ship that was brand-new in the last movie is now a training vessel. The uniforms have changed yet again. The crew is a lot less diverse. The feel of Starfleet as a whole is a lot more militaristic. Bringing TSFS into it, we have Morrow running Starfleet instead of Nogura. All that makes much more sense (relatively) if there's 10-12 years between movies.
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I agree. I personally would love to see a few more stories filling in the gaps between TMP and TWOK (and even a few between TWOK and TSFS). Did the entire crew stay on the Enterprise for the next five-year mission? Why did McCoy choose to stay in Starfleet again? Did Chekov transfer directly to the Reliant, or did he have another assignment in between? When exactly did he get promoted to Lt. Commander and Commander? Did Sulu or Uhura feel odd about suddenly not being Chekov's superior officer any more? Why did Kirk decide to give the Admiralty another try? Was Sulu really in line to command the Excelsior before the political fallout from Genesis happened? What happened to Nogura and why did Morrow take over? And what happened to Morrow after TSFS? Was Kirk stealing the Enterprise too much of a political embarrassment for his administration?

There have been a few stories offering answers to these questions, but I'd love to read a few more. The thing I find tantalizing about the movie era is that we really only get limited glimpses into the crew's lives every few years with only a few inferences as to what happened in between.

Christopher said:
That puzzles me, really. Why would people assume that the Enterprise was Kirk's first and only command just because it's the only one we knew of? The Enterprise was a capital ship, one of the most powerful and important ships in the fleet. They wouldn't give a command like that to a novice captain, as a rule. It's just logical that he would've gained command experience on a smaller ship before being judged worthy of commanding a heavy cruiser.
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Maybe they think that seeing a young Kirk commanding another ship might be confusing to casual fans? Heck, it's why we got Morrow's "The Enterprise is 20 years old" line in TSFS. People might wonder why the Enterprise is so special to Kirk if it wasn't his first command.

The way I rationalize it in my head canon is to imagine that Kirk assumed command of his first ship while he was still a Commander. That way the Enterprise can still be a bit special by being the first ship he commanded after his promotion to Captain (It keeps Kirk from being promoted to Captain too absurdly young, too).
 
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