Whatever happened to the "Rise of the Federation" series?

There hasn't been a new book in some time and there were still unresolved story threads. Was it ever announced if the series was canceled or on hiatus or anything?

 

Well, Enterprise is still canon and unaffected by DSC, PIC, or SNW, all of which are set afterward.

 

Did wonder if the resurgence of post-Nemesis projects had something to do with it. On the other hand, we are getting that novel trilogy that's supposed to be a finale of sorts to the old novel-verse. Was that some kind of exception, too?

 

Seeing the parallel situation with Star Wars Legends, I can follow. Never really got deep into the novel-verse (some cool stuff I'd certainly borrow for RPG sessions), so I guess I didn't need a finale, but glad to hear that those who adopted it as a second canon or whatever will get it.

 

Yeah, I guess there was just a shift in priorities. The line was on hiatus for a while and then had to rebuild an audience when it relaunched as trades-only, plus there were just fewer books per year. So they refocused on the tried-and-true best sellers like TOS and TNG as well as the new series.

 

It's a shame because I was a huge fan of Rise of the Federation. I think the handling of the Ware was horrifying and depressing and amazing at once.

 

Remember having mixed opinions on some of the books, but was really curious about where the story was going to go.

Kinda thought I saw a something online about one of your TOS books having an offhand reference to the longer plot of the Rise books, a la Karen Traviss's Clone Wars and Legacy of the Force books for Star Wars. Was there one or am I mixing things up?

 

I have no idea if the Star Wars analogy is valid, but in Living Memory I alluded to how a certain story arc from ROTF eventually turned out.

 

I mean, DIS ignored Rise of the Federation other than using a roughly similar mindset. And in all likelihood, current Trek series will ignore Rise of the Federation because no one in the general audience will care about reading a bunch of text. I hate to admit it when I own all those books, but that is the methodology we face.

Actually, come to think of it, now that Trek is chugging along again with multiple canon projects via streaming television, the Romulan War may stand an actual chance of receiving a full-fledged screen project.

 

Did DISCO ignore anything? I mean, there's a huge difference in the time periods.

 

Well from a pure canon standpoint, I guess no.

But when factoring tie-in works, I just don't see DIS as compatible with Live by the Code and Patterns of Interference. Admiral Cornwell told the Discovery crew that they would be the first Starfleet crew to visit Qo'noS since Jonathan Archer's Enterprise. That can be finagled if one believes that Cornwell was being concise with her wording under wartime pressure, but it would still be a glaring discrepancy to omit how the Partnership cataclysm occurred concurrently with Khorkal's ascension to office. The Endeavour brought Phlox to Qo'noS at an early stage of the M'Rek succession conundrum!

And considering how well-established Section 31 is as Starfleet's special operations force, I don't see that as passing the bullshit meter of Archer's surviving loyalists less than a century after his presidency if we were to argue that Patterns of Interference can be compatible with DIS and SNW. And then there is the matter of canon Control having a completely different history from novel Control.

 

Meh. Of course, the show is under no obligation to pay any attention to its tie-ins, but I don't see this as anything close to a deal-breaker. Even canonical Trek has a ton of inconsistencies in details like that -- for instance, "Where Silence Has Lease" saying that no Starfleet vessel had ever encountered anything remotely similar to Nagilum's zone of darkness, even though it looked almost identical to the zone of darkness from "The Immunity Syndrome." Or DS9 ignoring virtually everything "The Host" established about the Trill. Or Data using contractions routinely until it was suddenly claimed that he didn't, and repeatedly showing emotion before it was claimed he couldn't. This one's fairly minor in comparison. Especially since it's just one person's assertion and thus could simply be inaccurate.

 

Bah, genocidal Control was wiped out but they fixed the problem with Control 2.0!

 

Yeah, even Discovery tripped over things - in the first episode, Georgiou says almost no one has seen a Klingon in a century, and then there’s a reference to the Battle of Donatu V. Like you can fudge around it - the Klingons didn’t communicate during the battle, that sort, but...

Or there’s how Discovery has synthehol on board during People of Earth, so well before the ship is upgraded by modern Starfleet, and Scotty had no familiarity with it as of Relics.

The side effect of fifty-five years of material is that you’re always going to find the little hiccups and inconsistencies. So far, I don’t think there’s any real “can’t reconcile these novel introduced/developed things” for anything from the Enterprise era.

And, even if it did, hey, that just opens the door for more new stories anyway - maybe you can reconcile things, or maybe it develops and offers a springboard for a whole new story just as interesting.

 

Also Scotty thinking Kirk was still alive, which was contradicted when Generations came out.

The synthehol bit bugged me. The original idea behind synthehol was that it was invented by the Ferengi, so the Federation didn't learn of it until sometime in the 24th century after they began to contact cultures who'd traded with the Ferengi (or who'd traded with trading partners of the Ferengi). But I don't think that ever made it into canon, so I guess it doesn't count.

 

I still think it was bad enough that ENT interpreted Spock as not speaking of the first cloaking device to be encountered by Starfleet, then DIS season 1 made it worse with Klingons deploying cloaking devices in a devastating war not long before TOS, and then as insult to injry, DIS season 2 upped the ante by giving Section 31 ships invisibility in open view! Boo hiss!

 

Well, they may have traded for Ferengi inventions without any official contact. I mean, Archer met them 200 years before the Enterprise D did (and apparently never told any one in Starfleet what they looked like).

 

This's where the release of accepting that Star Trek continuity is broken and is going to be a fragmented mess for the rest of its existence comes in; it doesn't matter any more. DSC is a continuity mess (in some cases, deliberately), but if we accept that it doesn't and was never going to fit perfectly with TOS and the previous worldbuilding, we can take it on its own terms. Seriously, I do like DSC and being able to set aside the discrepancies allows me to enjoy it. (I've seen what the alternative to accepting the new brokenness is, and I don't like it.)