Ok this comes with some caveats and explanation, but Agents of Influence will be the 100th five year mission, TOS branded, original book published by S&S! This counts every full length novel set in the 5YM, plus Constellations, both 5YM ebooks which have been published under the TOS brand, and the two YA novels from the 80s. This doesn't count novelizations, or any other non-original publications, nor does it cover novellas or short stories published as part of a larger work. And I didn’t count In Tempest's Wake, which was branded Vanguard. You can see the exact listing on my revamped "How Many Five Year Mission Adventures Are There?" page here. Congrats to @Dayton Ward for a cool milestone!
There's something reassuring in contemplating that the five year mission can go on forever, in spirit, in all these different forms. I can keep reading the novels and comics, but I won't ever run out of new stories to experience that are set during that ongoing mission.
Looks like it's the two "Which Way" Choose Your Own Adventure-esque books, Voyage of Adventure and Phaser Fight.
I find it hard to believe the number of 5YM books is so low. Pocket's been publishing TOS novels for nearly 40 years now, typically around 4-6 of them per year. Which suggests that 5YM novels constitute only around half of the total TOS output, which doesn't track with my perceptions.
That's really cool that this will be novel TOS 100th adventures of the 5 year mission. Congatulations!
I was surprised to see a significant number of the 97 numbered novels were not set during the five-year mission.
It's not like the rest are 100% movie-era, though. There's also pre-5YM stuff that's not in the count either (e.g. My Brother's Keeper #1-2, Inception, anything with Pike). I feel like the weight towards the 5YM is more recent, versus when the movies were current - would be interesting to run the numbers for each decade...
I wouldn't say that. While there were a fair number of movie-era books in the first few years, they were never the majority. And it was quite a few years before we started getting pre-5YM things like Keeper. Okay, one quibble I have with the list is that it doesn't count Diane Duane's novels. While The Wounded Sky, My Enemy, My Ally, and The Romulan Way were chronologically ambiguous in some ways, their original editions were clearly meant to be set before ST:TMP, though more than five years after the start of TOS. So maybe strictly speaking they're "extended mission" rather than "5-year mission," but they weren't retconned to post-TMP until their Bloodwing Voyages reprints. And Doctor's Orders was unambiguously 5YM; Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov had their TOS ranks and Chapel was off pursuing her doctorate. The only reason the Pocket Timeline counts it as movie-era is because of its reuse of characters from earlier Duane novels like Lia Burke and Harb Tanzer.
Just gonna have to stick with the Timeliners’ placement on those. I see the case you’re making, but I needed some way to stay consistent. That placement of Doctor’s Orders was originally suggested in the Timeliners’ document by KRAD, interestingly enough.
I just think that if the goal is to enumerate the total number of 5YM books that S&S has ever published, that ought to cover the whole history of publication, not just the current perception. Thus, it should include those books that were intended and presented as 5YM (or at least pre-TMP) books when they came out, regardless of changes made more than two decades later.
Although was it not that, for Duane and a few other authors, the ship had already returned from its TV 5YM, and now Duane was covering a new (previously unknown to us) mission that was between the 5YM and Kirk accepting a position in the admiralty? I guess she was attempting to make sense of the age discrepancies of the actors, etc. Yep!
No, that was never actually stated in the books. The whole "second 5-year mission" interpretation for the discrepancy in novels like Corona and the Duaneverse is an after-the-fact fan theory, and there's zero evidence that it was intended by the authors themselves (beyond the implication that the ship in Duane's novels has undergone some refitting and modernization since TOS). I adopted that theory in the "Continuity of Days Gone By" thread as my own attempt to construct a vaguely systematic chronology for the loose '80s continuity, and I'm rather dismayed that I may have played a part in propagating the false notion that it was the original intention. No, I think Diane Duane was following the "sliding timescale" approach of a lot of series fiction, allowing time to pass without worrying about the internal inconsistency. She did the same thing in her Young Wizards novels, which came out over the course of two decades and were always set in the present day with computer technology and other aspects of culture keeping pace with the year of release, yet whose adolescent main characters aged no more than a couple of years over the series. (Although she did later revise the early novels to modernize their tech and cultural references and make them more consistent with later ones, much as she did with the Rihannsu novels.) It's worth keeping in mind that the phrase "5-year mission" was never actually spoken in TOS or TAS outside of the title narration, which means it wasn't really an in-story fact. Only Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Voyager: "Q2" ever actually mentioned it in dialogue as the duration of the Prime-universe Enterprise's mission depicted in TOS (although it's since been used as an explicit mission duration for the Kelvin Enterprise and for Pike's Enterprise in Discovery). So for the '80s novelists, there was nothing aside from a single throwaway line in TMP that obligated them to stick to a rigid 5-year timeframe. I think some of them just ignored or overlooked the TMP line and assumed the mission just kept going. (Indeed, Roddenberry's intention was that Kirk had already been in command of the Enterprise for several years at the start of the series, which means that even he was ignoring the title narration just by making a third season, let alone TAS.)