I assume Greg Cox is stoked to hear this announcement, given that he's had a lot of fun playing in this particular sandbox. Perhaps John Jackson Miller can follow up on his fleshing-out of the crew from The Enterprise War? Between TOS, KEL, and SNW, Spock's going to be in virtually every novel... Thoughts on the potential new series? Any pockets of the universe you'd like to see SNW novels address (a la Christopher L. Bennett working the Aenar into the TOS era in The Higher Frontier), provided you don't provide forbidden story ideas?
Pretty cool news, that lots of fans have been clamoring for since Discovery season 2. They did an amazing job with the look of the Enterprise, giving nods to the classic while updating it while still staying true to certain things. Does this make The Enterprise War novel retroactively a SNW series tie-in as well as a Discovery tie-in?
I hope they take inspiration from DC Fontana's Vulcan's Glory. I really liked that book. My favourite part of the Early Voyages comics was Nano, the pyrokinetic crewmember. And they could 100% do that nowadays in live action, jusy sayin'. Also they need to steal from Peter David's The Rift and have Number One make herself the computer voice, that would be hilarious.
My cynical assumption is that SNW will ignore The Enterprise War just as DIS ignored Desperate Hours.
I wouldn't call that cynical, just realistic. There's nothing morally wrong with a canon disregarding its tie-ins; that's traditionally more the rule than the exception. All stories are equally speculative anyway, so there's no right or wrong to it, just the exploration of different possibilities. Anyway, I think the two situations are different. Desperate Hours was specifically about the interaction between Burnham/Georgiou and Spock/Pike, so that created a conflict when the show featured the same interactions. But The Enterprise War was about sidelining the Enterprise during DSC season 1, keeping it busy with a situation that avoided interactions with anything from screen canon until it dovetailed with the start of season 2. And season 2 did explicitly establish that the Enterprise was not involved in the Klingon War because Starfleet ordered it to stay on the frontier in reserve, so the book is already consistent with that. So I'd say the odds of any major contradictions arising are small.
There’s apparently a minor contradiction in some licensed guide to the Enterprise that’s just out, explaining the refit of the bridge as something done in case the ship was needed for the war. But that’s pretty small, and indeed there’s a window in Enterprise War when such fixes could have been made. I do try to remain consistent with what I see in licensed works from other publishers, but I don’t see them all, and I don’t expect they see all of mine.
That kind of seems unnecessary, I thought what they came up with for Discovery was a terrific modernization, needing no justifications for it's differences. It was instantly recognizable, with enough recognizable iconic elements (captain's chair, science station viewer, colors). Yet some of it's innovations feel like something that I could almost pretend were always there (access space behind the stations, multiple turbolifts). I don't know if I want to imagine that Starfleet removed those safety features so that Kirk and Spock have to deal with a less safe bridge to use for TOS. I think I prefer a more forgiving perspective that TOS approximated that actual bridge with the production resources they had available in the late 1960s.
Yes. I don't need a story explaining that Saavik got plastic surgery after Spock's funeral. Sometimes it's okay just to pretend that two different depictions of the same thing are really the same in-universe, that what we see is just an artistic approximation of them. Like how Spock Prime recognized young Kirk and Scotty on sight in the 2009 movie. In-story, they looked the same. A difference in presentation does not have to be a difference inside the narrative.
There are certainly versions of things I prefer, but I have absolutely no difficulty accepting re-castings, new designs, etc. - no more so than accepting warp drive or transporters as part of that universe's fabric. I mean, if you love The Next Generation, how many different iterations of Worf's makeup did you come to accept over the years? And if the new version doesn't look as awesome as the old one, nobody went back and destroyed your copies of them. (Heck, I prefer the way some of the old SFX look on TOS to their presentation in the remasters, and I'm lucky enough to own both. If I want to watch the version where the NCC-1701 is a physical model, I can. I begrudge nobody their new toys.) I'm very impressed by the caliber of actor Strange New Worlds already brings to the fore, and can't wait to see which characters the series invents. (I don't need young versions of every TOS mainliner, especially given the chance to expand this series' cast beyond the human-centric model. Almost everyone in Discovery's main cast is human, too, so here's hoping for some different Federation species represented here!)
I suspect at least some of the people in the long Facebook thread bringing this up believe we are, or should be. What currency do Thermians get paid in?
The Eaglemoss book was between a rock and a hard place. All indications are the Discoprise is a full retcon, but the machinery of the franchise isn't set up to deal with visual content being variable like that, as some franchises are. You can't sell a guide to the TOS Enterprise that doesn't include anything from TOS in it on both sides of the equation; the fans will want to see it, and half the reason for the book existing is a way to keep the old Fact Files illustrations available, so it'd make it impractical if they slashed the potential content (and the only available depictions of sickbay, engineering, the normal briefing room, quarters, the shuttlebay, essentially everything but the bridge and the Cage-style briefing room). And since the text is written in an in-universe style, they can't just say "This chapter is how it looked in TOS, this one is how it looked in DSC," so they have to pretzel themselves up to explain how it does all fit together, Thermian-style. Personally, I think Star Trek's reliance on library content made it a bad fit for all the reinvention and retconning that's characterized the CBSAA-era, and they should've either stuck to the Thermian model, or done a ground-up remake of Star Trek, but no one asked me, so now we've got poor Eaglemoss trying to figure out how they can justify in-universe keeping half a book's worth of stuff that's been retconned away.
No refit ideas work anyway. The recent Short Treks were set pre-"Cage" and feature the DSC Enterprise and costumes. "Ephraim and Dot" goes so far as to feature the Discoprise in place of the TOS version during events from the classic series.
Which just goes to show that these are simply variant artistic renderings of what's meant to be the same thing. It's best to look on these as stage plays rather than transmissions from a "real" future. They're dramatizations, and they use the available resources, whether it's TOS using 1960s technology to simulate 23rd-century technology, or Short Treks reusing an active production's sets and costumes to save money and be recognizable to its audience. It's like how in Doctor Who, whenever the Master showed up, the interior of his TARDIS was an exact match for the interior of the Doctor's TARDIS aside from a different paint scheme or whatever, even though there was no logical reason why the Doctor's arch-nemesis would repeatedly remodel his console room to match the Doctor's various upgrades, especially since they were time travelers and didn't even live in sync with each other (though they always seemed to encounter each other in chronological order). The real-world explanation is that they had to use the sets they already had, and we were supposed to focus on the story rather than the details of the scenery.
In-universe, that animated episode was a fictitious animation for children, since it uses the "Enterprise-A" designation on the ship that Kirk blew up in ST III.
Not to mention puts "Space Seed" before "The Naked Time," has a window in sickbay where there was a solid wall onscreen (plus "Elaan" said sickbay is the most protected part of the ship, so it wouldn't have windows), and oh, is obviously a silly comedy that can't possibly be taken literally. But I doubt it could exist as a work of fiction in-universe, given that everything about spore drive and mycelial space was classified at the end of season 2. Why can't it just be what it actually is, a work of fiction in our universe, created for our entertainment? When did that stop being good enough?
If anyone tries to suggest to me a space tardigrade playing cat and mouse with a DOT7 maintenance droid for 15 years isn't canon...