This makes me wonder how New Earth would read today in light of the last twenty years of American politics. Would I be rooting for Kirk to say to the colonists, "Peace out," after the second time he and his crew have to save them?
New Frontier book series and New Earth. Anyone else like them?
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This makes me wonder how New Earth would read today in light of the last twenty years of American politics. Would I be rooting for Kirk to say to the colonists, "Peace out," after the second time he and his crew have to save them?
I have the first two books and book 4 of the New Earth series. I read the first two books like last year or so and I thought they were pretty good but yeah those colonists are kind of ungrateful when Kirk and gang do try to help when things go wrong like the colonist planet having bad stuff going on or that one alien race that also keeps getting involved.
I never even bothered with the e-books, at that point my interest had dropped pretty low and I had a ton of other stuff coming out that I wanted to read more.
If it ever crops up on a Kindle sale I would almost be tempted to buy it and reread it again to see how it holds up twenty years later. Am in no rush though to dig out my physical copy.This makes me wonder how New Earth would read today in light of the last twenty years of American politics. Would I be rooting for Kirk to say to the colonists, "Peace out," after the second time he and his crew have to save them?
I tried reading Wagon Train several months back and just... I reading couldn’t handle Diane Carey’s prose or attitudes draped across the page. My current read of my Trek novels has really soured me on her writing in general, I have jumped right over several of her books altogether. Considering that she bookended the New Earth series, I just skipped the whole thing entirely.
I don't have a problem with Carey's writing style, although I agree that her penchant for hard-libertarian rhetoric (especially when she puts it in a Vulcan's mouth) can be a bit hard to take.
And I rather like her sense of humor. Which is to say, the secret of reading her works is to not take them too seriously.
And I rather like her sense of humor. Which is to say, the secret of reading her works is to not take them too seriously.
Yeah, she's a lot like Poul Anderson in that respect -- the writing style makes up for the libertarianism. It's weird how many SF writers have had libertarian leanings, though.
I think Shucorion is one of the all-time great Star Trek book characters, and for him alone it's a shame Challenger came to a premature end. Books 4 and 5 of New Earth were awful.
(There's a Blood Many in The Future Begins, if I recall correctly.)
(There's a Blood Many in The Future Begins, if I recall correctly.)
Never read New Frontier. Probably didn't help that the first Star Trek tie-in novel I read had a different fate for Dr. Selar that I liked a lot better then the NF (adopting a blind Andorian girl vs. falling into madness and getting herself killed). Have gathered that they are more or less considered part of the novel-verse continuity, but I think they'd make a more interesting RPG campaign then just straight reading.
Read the New Earth series. As noted before, practically all the books were the same plot; something threatens the colony and they need exactly every single ship in the operation to solve the problem (despite ships getting destroyed right and left each time). Only the last one, with the new ship and crew, actually stood out to me. That was a great premise with some memorable characters. Too bad the series it was meant to kick off never got off the ground.
Over the course of the novel, they dramatize the change from the TMP uniforms to the TWOK ones, if that's any help. (I have gathered that the dating of the first couple movies is a bit uncertain, at best and it's all built on assumptions that don't fit every single piece of info in the films proper.)
Read the New Earth series. As noted before, practically all the books were the same plot; something threatens the colony and they need exactly every single ship in the operation to solve the problem (despite ships getting destroyed right and left each time). Only the last one, with the new ship and crew, actually stood out to me. That was a great premise with some memorable characters. Too bad the series it was meant to kick off never got off the ground.
Right, that's what I meant. I was a bit clumsy with my wording (I was making a bit of an assumption that TMP is generally accepted to have occurred in or around 2272 and using the years instead of 'soon after' TMP). But yeah, it was the historians note that placed it soon after TMP when it was pretty clearly later. The year itself was not stated in the book if I recall correctly, Memory Alpha places it around 2278 I believe, which makes more sense if TMP is around 2272 (give or take a year).
Over the course of the novel, they dramatize the change from the TMP uniforms to the TWOK ones, if that's any help. (I have gathered that the dating of the first couple movies is a bit uncertain, at best and it's all built on assumptions that don't fit every single piece of info in the films proper.)
Not really. TMP makes it pretty clear that it's about two and a half years after the end of the 5-year mission, while TWOK is explicitly 15 years after "Space Seed," so there can't be fewer than about 8 years between them, and the currently accepted interval is 12 years (because the Okudachron inexplicably put TWOK 18 years after "Space Seed"). So it works out to about a decade between them plus or minus 20%. There's some uncertainty, but not enough to allow for placing them close together.
Granted, some fans (and novelists) did interpret TMP as taking place in real time, about a decade after TOS, by presuming a second 5-year mission between them, or just an extended mission of unspecified length. That interpretation would've put TMP & TWOK fairly close together, maybe as little as 3 years. But that required ignoring Kirk's line in TMP about "my five years out there," which pegs the intended interval pretty explicitly (and was the first canonical mention of the 5-year mission in actual dialogue as opposed to main-title narration). So I count that interpretation as an error rather than a valid alternative view of the timing.
I think that's the what I was half-remembering; I knew there was something about the fifteen-year figure that was at odds with other concepts.
Yeah, that's been an old idea (the Lost Years TOS novels way back when, the original Chronology slotting a spot for the canceled Phase II series, etc.) Also been an idea in some stuff that the TV show only covered the first three years and that there's two years missing, instead of the official position that TOS/TAS are spread out across five years instead of one year per season/cartoon series.
Correct me if I'm wrong, though, but, as I recall, looking at things pretty closely, it's "just" assumptions on the TMP dating. Yes, Kirk mentions spending five years in space, that he hasn't gone back in 2 1/2 years, that the refit was eighteen months, all stuff that would date the movie as 2 1/2 years after the end of TOS (now TOS/TAS, with the cartoon now being canon again), with the exact year being 2273, per the 2270 end time of the TOS/TAS mission.
However, all that assumes that all those things started right after the mission ended, which, as I recall, is never confirmed. We're just told that these events happened x number of years before the movie, not how they relate to the TV show. Even the Okuda chronology, based on these data points that started it all, in the second edition, made it clear that it was just a theory, not fact as of the time of writing. (Not to mention that all the official reference material still use the old 2271 year, despite that being based on the now-debunked conjecture that the mission ended in 2269 and this being known for some time now.)
The Novelverse books do refer to New Frontier, but the New Frontier books aren't consistent with the Novelverse. The best example of this is Peter David's comic book miniseries Turn Around and Rise Like Lions. They both split off from the MU NF stories in Obsidian Alliances and Shards and Shadows, but end up taking the characters in different directions from.
I can't remember for sure, but I think the NF novel Treason featured a take on Seven that wasn't consistent with Destiny.
Your forgetting that New Frontier was part of the Gateway’s series, which occurred before DS9’s “Unity”. I haven’t read “Treason”, but “New Frontier” was really the Pilot series for the Relaunch series.
Admiral Shelby and Starbase Bravo appeared in the TNG “Q&A” novel and then Calhoun and Excalibur also appeared in “Before Dishonour”.
Also we had Shelby and Korsmo in “Vendetta” and Soleta, McHenry & Tobias inthe SA Books with Worf.
The admittedly-vague way it described the recent Borg attack didn't quite fit with the one in Before Dishonor or the one in Destiny, but IIRC, all the post-BD New Frontier books take place in pretty quick succession, so I mentally slot them in as being pre-Destiny, which also solves the Seven problem.
So, the NF novels are a bit like the so-called "Shanter-verse," except more things are borrowed.
(As self-contained as they are, "Dartha" has been borrowed as the Romulan capital city and the first one was incorporated into the Cast No Shadow TOS novel, which was set in the novel-verse.)
(As self-contained as they are, "Dartha" has been borrowed as the Romulan capital city and the first one was incorporated into the Cast No Shadow TOS novel, which was set in the novel-verse.)
JD's first half-sentence was "The Novelverse books do refer to New Frontier," so no, JD isn't forgetting anything.
OK, I haven't read Treason since it first came out, so all I remember is thinking it didn't seem to fit with Destiny and the Beyer Voyager books.
Yeah, but it's all one way, we see elements of New Frontier in the other Novelverse series, but we never see elements of the Novelverse in the NF books.
Man, that's what I remember most, the colony needing help every 5 minutes but the whole point was they wanted to show the universe they didn't need anybody because the Federation was too oppressive or what ever. There were a couple books in the series I needed to set reading goals of pages per day just so I could finish.
I liked New Frontier for a long time but near the end I got a bit bored of the whole thing. After that final e-book trilogy came out and there was no follow up I was just fine with thinking it was over. My opinion here is the same as some TV series that go on too long; read them until you start to get bored then stop since it's not going to get better.
In “Gateways: Cold War”, as I remember, Kira Nerys, Elias Vaughn And Captain Picard and Riker appeared via holo conference to discuss the Gateways crisis. Captain Picard and Spock also appeared in the first book of the series. And as far as Voyager goes, I don’t think it’s had any missions near Thallonisn space since it returned. But “New Frontier” was also part of the “Tales Of The Dominion War” anthology and the Captain’s Table Series.
And the “Double or nothing” was released under the TNG umbrella, but it did feature the TNG cast in a New Frontier story.
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