Star Trek Books and Comics Timeline-ing Discussion

[Christopher]

I'm surprised at the question, actually: even if you put the Farragut incident sometime during the (early months of the) war, it looks like we're still in the same ballpark.

Clearly your scheme puts things earlier than the usual Okudachron scheme does. At about 2/3 of the way through season 2, "Obsession" would fall in early '68 by that scheme.

At the very least, the incident is in the past as of DSC's "present day." And it's entirely plausible to surmise that Kirk actually sat out all or most of the war.

The war begins on about May 12, 2256; the series then picks up six months later, in November, and the remainder of "Chapter One" of the season spans maybe about 6 weeks, through about the end of the year. If the Farragut incident was in early 2257, as per the Okuda scheme, it would fall during the 9 months that Discovery was missing due to its Mirror Universe jaunt.

 

[lawman]

Clearly your scheme puts things earlier than the usual Okudachron scheme does. At about 2/3 of the way through season 2, "Obsession" would fall in early '68 by that scheme.

Yeah, I do, by just a few months (per the framework I posted earlier in this thread). But IIRC correctly the Okudachron used the broadcast dates as breakpoints for the calendar years in TOS (per its "300 years from broadcast" rule of thumb), and "Obsession" was broadcast in 1967, so I'm surprised if the Okudas put it in '68. (It's one of the many books I have tucked away in storage, so I can't check right now. If they did, I wonder why so?)

 

[Christopher]

But IIRC correctly the Okudachron used the broadcast dates as breakpoints for the calendar years in TOS (per its "300 years from broadcast" rule of thumb), and "Obsession" was broadcast in 1967, so I'm surprised if the Okudas put it in '68.

Not exactly. They go by production order rather than airdate order, so it doesn't align to release dates except in terms of the seasons as a whole. They put "Obsession" as the second episode in 2268.

Still, the airdate was December 1967, so it's only off by a matter of weeks, too small a difference to matter. Either way, by their scheme, the Farragut's loss is sometime during the events of DSC's first season, probably during the Mirror Universe time jump.

 

[lawman]

Yeah, I suppose there had to be a lot of fudging around those Dec/Jan breakpoints given the way production order and airdates were jumbled up. (Just another reason why the "exactly 300 years" dictum seems kinda pointless to me.)

At any rate: no dispute that at this point, Captain Garrovick, he dead.

 

[ryan123450]

It is of note that the Legacies series, which begins in 2267 (Dec by my figuring) treats Obsession as having already happened.

 

[lawman]

Haven't read that one yet, but (does this sound familiar?) it's on my list.

(Heaven only knows when I'll get to that list, of course. I'm supposed to be spending my time working on a dissertation. Literally while I'm typing this, in fact.)

Anyway, FWIW, when it comes to my placement of FYM events and its difference from the Okudachron, it comes down to this: if I were to stick to their calendar dates, I'd wind up having to exclude either TAS, or a lot of novels I want to include. If I can accommodate those by nudging episodes a few months earlier, and still remain compatible with canon (and I can), then IMHO that's a thing worth doing.

 

[Leto_II]

It is of note that the Legacies series, which begins in 2267 (Dec by my figuring) treats Obsession as having already happened.

Although several other recent sources (like The Folded World and Greg's No Time Like the Past) all point to "Mirror, Mirror" as talking place around circa early-to-mid-August, 2267, with the first Legacies novel (Captain to Captain) occurring almost immediately after that episode, which would probably push it back to the autumn of that year.

It's also mentioned that C2C takes place "just prior to" the events of "Obsession," but this would push things into late 2267 according to the Okudachron, and since there are several concurring, consistent Litverse sources that all use the early August dating for "The Apple" and "Mirror, Mirror," that's the one I roll with, since it's such a key preponderance/linchpin-date, and since so many other dates are derived from it in other Litverse works.

The second and third volumes, though, I do have taking place across early-to-mid-January, 2268, immediately following "Obsession" (the very next mission of the Enterprise, in fact), so that works pretty well, although the in-novel reference to those two books taking place "six months" after the episode "Journey to Babel" doesn't really jibe with other Litverse sources, either (since that episode occurs in November, 2267, or just two months or less prior to Best Defense and Purgatory's Key).

 

[Christopher]

Anyway, FWIW, when it comes to my placement of FYM events and its difference from the Okudachron, it comes down to this: if I were to stick to their calendar dates, I'd wind up having to exclude either TAS, or a lot of novels I want to include.

Not necessarily, since they assumed the 5YM ended in 2269, but VGR later canonically booted that to 2270. I basically keep the Okuda dates for TOS, give or take, and I still have room for TAS and a number of novels in year 5. Though probably fewer novels than you want, since I'm more choosy about what "fits."

 

[lawman]

On average, I'd say most of my placements are about 4-6 months "earlier." Since we know the FYM ran from '65-'70, I put the earliest TOS episodes in late '65, anchored by that "Thanksgiving" reference in "Charlie X." Pushing that to a year later would make no sense. As I structure it, it allows a little more room to stretch things out early in the FYM, while also leaving more space for novels on the "back end" (where lots of authors seem to like putting them)... rather than having lots of unchronicled time at the beginning of the FYM, where relatively few stories are placed (or are likely to be).

 

[Leto_II]

Not necessarily, since they assumed the 5YM ended in 2269, but VGR later canonically booted that to 2270. I basically keep the Okuda dates for TOS, give or take, and I still have room for TAS and a number of novels in year 5. Though probably fewer novels than you want, since I'm more choosy about what "fits."

Yeah, the revised 2270-dating from Voyager gives more wiggle-room for additional late-5YM stories to take place during than the previous 2269 date, though like Christopher I'm fairly particular about which ones get chosen -- for myself, it's Litverse-consistency first, followed perhaps by other mitigating factors second.

At this point, I mostly have "recent" continuity-works in the final year alongside TAS and afterwards, with the number of "older" stories (from the '80s Pocket continuity, for instance) now being virtually nonexistent aside from Melinda Snodgrass's The Tears of the Singers. Barbara Hambly's Crossroad (from 1994) is only the second-oldest (non-RPG) source that I've placed in 2270, if that gives everyone an idea of how very few older tales are in there (simply due to continuity-consistency reasons, not story-quality value judgments) -- I think everything else is from 1996 or '97 and later, right up to the present day; just stuff that works more cleanly with modern-day continuity assumptions.

EDIT: Wait, just remembered that I also have "The Enchanted Pool" placed in 2270, which I slotted during the two months where Hikaru Sulu is offship, serving aboard the U.S.S. Courageous (per Allegiance in Exile).

 

[lawman]

I haven't made any real effort to incorporate short stories like that from SNW into my timeline. Nothing against them per se; I just haven't ever read them and have little or nothing to go on.

 

[Leto_II]

^ Yeah, many of them are very difficult to reconcile with the modern continuity (one story, "Mind Sifter," spans two whole years of the 5YM, or something like that), and I only have a couple of those stories/efforts in my main continuity ("The Enchanted Pool," "Surprise!", "The Face on the Barroom Floor," and the poems "Elegy For Charlie" and "Sonnets From the Vulcan: Omicron Ceti III"), simply due to those works being slightly less conflict-ridden and more self-contained overall than most of the others, and being easily placeable without stepping on any other continuity-toes.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Thanks for the link to the other thread, BTW; I'm giving it a look! (One minor question: how the heck do you figure that Carol could get three or four months into her pregnancy before she discovered it?)

Umm... I didn't, did I? IIRC, I just indicated a date for David's birth in early October (derived from Merritt Butrick's birth date), and tracing that back led me to think that having Kirk propose on New Year's Eve might be cool. AFAIK, I just had Carol calling off the engagement in early 2260. It doesn't particularly matter when that happens, just as long as she isn't showing yet.

If I wrote something like "She calls off the engagement when she discovers that she's pregnant" that's probably just sloppy phrasing on my part.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Taken at its most literal, aligning Jane Wyatt's age with the Okudachron means that Spock was conceived when Amanda was 19 and Sarek was 64.

Yeah, on my timeline, working from June Wyatt's actual age, Amanda worked out to just 18 at her marriage to Sarek. At least he waited until she was legal...

I'm willing to think of Amanda as a phenomenal-looking woman in her eighties in "Journey to Babel," if only to reduce the cringe factor.

Yeah, I suppose a bit of fudging there is certainly justified.

 

[lawman]

Umm... I didn't, did I? IIRC, I just indicated a date for David's birth in early October (derived from Merritt Butrick's birth date), and tracing that back led me to think that having Kirk propose on New Year's Eve might be cool.

You had him born on September 3, actually... and had Carol discover the pregnancy in April. That's what puzzled me.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

You had him born on September 3, actually... and had Carol discover the pregnancy in April. That's what puzzled me.

<Looks at the entry in my original Word file> ...Yeah, that's either just bad phrasing on my part or I didn't bother to do the math on where Carol would be in her pregnancy. Possibly both. I don't have any kids myself, so I didn't have a personal point of reference there for when she'd likely start showing. I suppose I'll back that up to March or February on my next revision.

Good catch! Thanks.

 

[lawman]

Not to belabor the obvious, but Carol (or any woman) is pretty likely to discover she's pregnant long before she actually starts showing. There's a little matter of a change in an expected monthly routine!...

 

[trampledamage]

Hello As one of the resident women in these parts, I'll just interject

There are many reasons why a woman can miss a period, so if Carol wasn't expecting to get pregnant - and even more so, if she was desperately hoping she wasn't, there's a lot of ways to put that thought off for the first couple of months.

 

[Christopher]

Also, I gather that the idea that regular periods are even necessary is kind of a myth resulting from the ideology of the guy who invented birth control pills (and who, ironically, was a very religious person who believed strongly in the rhythm method). There are some more modern birth control methods that pretty much eliminate periods altogether, or nearly so. Historically, most adult women would spend much of their time pregnant or else miss periods due to inadequate nutrition or other factors, so if anything, it was normal for most women in the past to have far fewer than 12 periods a year, and some doctors (so I've read) question whether it's healthy for women to have that many.

So it's quite possible that future birth control methods would be period-free, so if Carol's birth control failed and she got pregnant anyway, she wouldn't notice lack of periods as a symptom.

 

[lawman]

Interesting speculations. However, I'm struggling to wrap my mind around the concept of a futuristic birth-control method that's perfectly effective at eliminating monthly hormonal cycles without side effects, yet somehow still not effective at preventing actual pregnancy!...