A Lit-verse based TOS chronology
- Thread starter ryan123450
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What did you think of it, I was not convinced of the plot device for why McCoy was the way he was with women, but it was plausible.
I enjoyed it quite a bit. It made me see McCoy in a new light, and I liked that it gave a new explanation to McCoy's instant attraction to Natira. And I'm a big Emily Banks/Yeoman Barrows fan, so I really liked her part in the novel. It's really tough to do new things with these characters after 40-50 years, but David R. George III pulled it off.
I didn't like the Spock and Kirk novels as much, though. Partly because they've been much more thoroughly developed than McCoy, and partly because they were based more in the movie continuity than TOS's.
I didn't like the Spock and Kirk novels as much, though. Partly because they've been much more thoroughly developed than McCoy, and partly because they were based more in the movie continuity than TOS's.
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I thought it was the best of the trilogy, and I thought its exploration of McCoy with women was fine, partly because of the mixed feelings I have about FTWIHAIHTTS....I was actually a fairly big fan of the episode when I was younger, but if I were showing a non trek fan an episode just to expose them to trek, I would stay away from this one. The McCoy having a deadly disease angle was just thrown at the audience and his marriage happened way to quickly. Still, I love the name of the episode and I like its place in trek lore.
It's been a while, but our intention was that A Choice of Catastrophes follows "Return to Tomorrow." At one point there was a reference; can't remember if it made it to the final draft.
It ain't no mistake! "Return to Tomorrow" ends on stardate 4770.3. The next stardated episode is "By Any Other Name," on 4657.5. So any story taking place between the two should have a lower stardate than "Return to Tomorrow."
Is 21 improbably young for marriage?
A Choice of Catastrophes places it immediately prior to McCoy's time on Capella IV. I can't remember if we invented that, or if we borrowed it from someone else.
yes 21 is young for a man to get married in Western society, as people live longer they are getting married at an older age closer to 30. If they choose to get married at all.
So if 21 is young in 2017 and not the norm, it would be even less of a norm in 2248.
In our society the younger you marry, the more likely you are to divorce especially for males since they mature slower than women
So if 21 is young in 2017 and not the norm, it would be even less of a norm in 2248.
In our society the younger you marry, the more likely you are to divorce especially for males since they mature slower than women
A norm is just the middle of a distribution. There's always a range of different values on either side of the norm.
Besides, McCoy has always been an old-fashioned kind of guy.
He probably got married cos he got his girlfriend pregnant lol
If we believe the Motion Picture novel (and related works, like The Lost Years), divorce seems pretty unstigmatized, though, to the extent that short-term marriage contracts are a thing people enter into.
Man, that title isn't even short when you abbreviate it.
Thanks! Any chance you have annotations for the novel? I want to make sure I know about all the references to other stories made in it.
That is a completely valid and unique take on stardates which I have never heard before. Interesting take!
TOS stardates were never in a consistent numerical order. Roddenberry handwaved it in The Making of Star Trek and replies to fan letters by saying that it was because of time being measured differently in different parts of the galaxy due to relativistic non-simultaneity and stuff like that.
No, we didn't do them. My memory is that references are all pretty minor-- our youthful exuberance of The Future Begins have been largely burned out. Some cross-references to our other work (e.g., Guidons) and small bits of detail (the Orion trading creole Yrevish from Red Sector, Star Trek's fake constellations being Berengarian [I think this is a @Christopher coinage?]). We tried to not invent first names for characters if they already existed. Bits of McCoy's backstory come from Republic, The Better Man, Shadows on the Sun, and some other stuff, though not always in ways consistent with those books!
Whatever magic they follow, clearly sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down, and somehow they work as a common interstellar reference anyway. They still ascend within the story, though, because we didn't want to get too nuts. (In fact, within the story, we went with the 1 stardate = 24 hours metric, though clearly that can't be broadly applicable.)
I've attributed fake constellation names to a couple of alien or Earth-colony sources, but I don't recall if Berengaria VII was one of them.
Googling shows me that Maxia is called a Berengarian constellation in The Buried Age.
Yes....using the stardates to place specific stories just does not work. All a fan has to do is take a look at the episodes and they'll notice they are generally in the right order, but there are glaring problems with this. Just off the top of my head....I believe there actually aren't that many eps in the 4000.0 range, and when the 4000.0s do start, a few threes "return". Too much weirdness to describe in a post. When placing a story I use them to narrow down a location, but rarely do I use them alone.
I have been thinking about this question a lot, and I could swear there is a chapter, somewhere, that deals with McCoy's reaction to the death of his father. I will think about it a bit more, and see what I come up with.
JB
Chapter One of My Brother's Keeper: Enterprise nails the timing down to between 2257 and 2265 (when Kirk and McCoy were serving aboard the Constitution together and before his assignment to the Enterprise post-WNMHGB).
My Brother's Keeper: Constitution narrows it down further to the early 2260s and has McCoy requesting reassignment to Starfleet Medical on Earth when his father became ill, partly to be near his father and partly so he would have the best care. There's no mention of duration, but shortly after his father's death, McCoy accepted the short assignment on Capella IV, his return from which leads to his assignment to the Enterprise. Taking all this into account, a 2264 date is a reasonable assumption, although personally I would go early 2265.
Yup -- I always go by internal storyline-cues first, then stardates a distant, distant second. If, like with some of the recent John Byrne New Vision comics, you can very broadly "ballpark" a placement between several potential episodes based off of a reference or two, but not any more narrowly than that, I then might finally turn to the stardate for "help," on the assumption that Byrne is going for at least some intentional proximity to certain episodes by picking the stardates he does.
Then again, none of this actually helped any with "Sam," with Byrne getting the opening stardate wrong relative to the rest of late TOS S1, and the stardate is now slated for correction in the inevitable upcoming TPB reprint...
You know, I read the Brother's Keeper trilogy back in the day and I totally forgot that part. Thanks!
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