Spoilers TOS: Living Memory by Christopher L. Bennett - Review Thread
- Thread starter Kilana2
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Thank You most kindly!
May I please ask if you have any thoughts on what a Starfleet hospital ship ought to look like? More specifically, may I please ask if you imagine such vessels would differ in external appearance from starships of the same class?
I am moved to ask this by virtue of a personal interest in the USS Prospero which appears in this novel - a name included in the book and specifically attached to a hospital ship at my request, following a donation to your own good self - a vessel which I am currently planning to commission an illustration of, in token of my fondness for your published works and my personal delight at having played a part in supporting these works, however small.
May I please ask if you have any thoughts on what a Starfleet hospital ship ought to look like? More specifically, may I please ask if you imagine such vessels would differ in external appearance from starships of the same class?
I am moved to ask this by virtue of a personal interest in the USS Prospero which appears in this novel - a name included in the book and specifically attached to a hospital ship at my request, following a donation to your own good self - a vessel which I am currently planning to commission an illustration of, in token of my fondness for your published works and my personal delight at having played a part in supporting these works, however small.
I'm also plotting to work up (or at least work out) a dedication plaque for NCC-1801, so might I please ask if you would be willing to vet my choice of dedicatory quotes for same?
Thank You very much for your consideration and thank you very much for having written your novel in the first place!
Thank You very much for your consideration and thank you very much for having written your novel in the first place!
Well, my assumption is that a ship named Prospero would naturally be a Miranda-class ship. Hence the NCC-1801 registry number, presuming that if NCC-1800 was the class namesake, the one named after Miranda's father would logically be the next in line.
But if it's a hospital ship, I figure it wouldn't have the torpedo launcher on the roll bar. So maybe a Miranda variant without a roll bar, or with something more benign in place of the launcher (maybe an extra deflector array?).
Starfleet medical ships in canon include the Hiawatha from Discovery and the Pasteur from "All Good Things...". We didn't get a good look at the former, but the Pasteur had the Starfleet Medical logo on the side.
I don't want to get in the way of your creativity. I'd probably go with something from The Tempest, but it's up to you.
Very enjoyable book but SNW completely negates it.
Oh well...
All science fiction will eventually be "negated" by reality catching up with it. It doesn't matter, since it's all just conjecture anyway. The point is not to make correct predictions, but to explore interesting possibilities.
Thank you for these suggestions - I imagine that, if anything, the interior would be much more dramatically different than the exterior (and it's interesting to wonder how the crew dynamic would be altered by the nature of this vessel as a flying hospital; I assume that there would be a degree of creative tension between the need for a Ship's Captain to be Master-after-God and the requirement of a working hospital to be rather more porous than a Ship of the Line's captain is comfortable contemplating, especially if the Ship's Captain is command division, rather than sciences*).
Also, may I please ask if we should imagine NCC-1801 as having become a 'refit' Miranda, in the style of USS Reliant or as a vessel of the older type seen in THE ORIGINAL SERIES?
*I am, of course, assuming that a Starfleet Hospital Ship is literally a mobile hospital and not just a medical transport or a MASH unit; also that it's equally possible for a hospital ship's captain to be drawn from the Sciences division as it is for them to be a standard-issue Gold Shirt.
One must admit that when I originally submitted the name Prospero I was quite tempted to instead request that a ship of the Hiawatha-type appear and be designated the Methuselah-class (with the exact name left to your discretion); sheer patriotic pride and a concomitant fondness for Shakespeare won out, but I still like the latter notion (Since the latter name suggests longevity - and, by inference, unusual good health - while also being associated with a 'Father of Nations'**).
**Not to mention one of those giant sequoia trees; from the opposite coast to Hiawatha, but in their own way as much a legend of their continent.
I admit to having been tempted by the Lure Shakespearean, but wanted to try coming up with something a bit more out of the left field: My current candidates are two quotes from the late Florence Nightingale (A rather famous British medic with an Italian name seemed quite a sensible homage to the Anglo-Italian nature of a play starring the fictionalised shade of an Italian Duke, albeit one from Milan), one dark horse candidate borrowed from the least STAR TREK setting imaginable and my own best effort to come up with something that might sound as though it had been thought up either on another planet or in the course of the two-and-half centuries between ourselves & NCC-1801.
- "How very little can be done under the spirit of fear"
- "I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse"
- "There is no sin but ignorance" (The first two are from Florence Nightingale; this quote is actually from WARHAMMER 40,000 - the aforesaid least STAR TREK setting imaginable, though in my defence it was attributed to magical and dispossessed prince from a planet named 'Prospero' so I trust you will understand my temptation).
- "To die is hard, to heal is difficult, but to help others heal is hardest of all" (My own contribution: Alternate form "To die is hard, to heal from injury is always difficult, but to help others heal is hardest of all").
For the record I have always found your work to be a stimulus to my own creativity, so you need have no fear in that regard - I would, in fact, be very grateful were you to help me by picking one of these options (As I like them all and would appreciate a tie-breaker).
Thank You for your consideration and for your assistance!
Huh? What "Miranda . . . of the older type"? The only Starfleet vessels I can recall ever seeing in TOS were Constitution class and shuttlecraft. (After all, they barely had the budget for those, let alone for even a kitbash of the AMT Enterprise kit [I've done kitbashes of two of FJS's ship designs, from the Tech Manual].)
Many fan artists over the decades have postulated the existence of a TOS-era version of the Miranda class. A number of them have been portrayed in comics, RPGs, and video games, and novels including Vanguard (and I think at least one of my own TOS-era works) established their existence in the novel continuity.
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Miranda_class_starships#Pre-refit
Chalk this one up to my getting the stuff of Memory Beta confused with Memory Alpha, as Mr Bennett suggests (I must admit to having only watched the revamped version of THE ORIGINAL SERIES, so I may gave gotten visions of a TOS-era Miranda tangled up with ships actually seen in canon).
I'm quite fond of it myself, since it brings to mind Prospero's henchmen (well, "familiar spirit and unhappy neighbour" at least) without actually referring to same.
Thank You for cutting this particular Gordanian knot, Mr Bennett.
And I haven't seen all the remastered/updated TOS episodes by any stretch of the imagination, so it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if a TOS-era Miranda-class ship did turn up. After all, the remastered version of "The Enterprise Incident" has two Klingon-made ships and a "Balance of Terror"-era warbird where the original had three Klingon-made ships, and that was hardly the only case of a change in ship design slipped into the new FX footage.
Nope. They did briefly consider changing out one of the ships in "The Ultimate Computer," but decided that changing one of the canonical Constitution-class ships was a much bigger can of worms than redesigning the Wodin or Aurora. Though they did change around the window arrangements on a couple of them, which I appreciated. I like the idea that two different ships shouldn't be perfectly identical except for the names painted on them.
So that's how it happens!
As part of a fundraising effort, I offered donors the opportunity to suggest names for places, ships, etc. that I'd incorporate into the manuscript, since I'd already done the more basic Tuckerization thing (inserting donors' own names) in The Higher Frontier and the Arachne duology and I wanted to try something different.
I wish the books I owned would last longer in plausibility. As you say, oh well...Very enjoyable book but SNW completely negates it.
Oh well...
I read Living Memory when it first released, so i dont remember all the details. But i'm guessing the book was negated by all the new backstory we got of Uhura in SNW?Very enjoyable book but SNW completely negates it.
Oh well...
Yeah, basically. But again, none of this is real anyway. Readers today still enjoy Trek novels that were contradicted by canon decades ago, like The Final Reflection or Federation. I'm disappointed that I probably won't get to continue the post-TMP series from this point, but I hope readers will still enjoy Living Memory as a story on its own terms.
At this point, given that Coda has defined pretty much the whole novelverse after First Contact as distinct from the canon timeline, I'd say my only books that could still be considered consistent are Rise of the Federation, my TOS books other than Living Memory (though Forgotten History is iffy due to its 24th-century DTI elements), The Buried Age, and arguably Places of Exile, as well as my short stories in various anthologies. That's still the majority of my Trek output, but less than 2/3 of the total. And it's probably only a matter of time before canon contradicts more of it. I knew that going in, like all tie-in writers to ongoing franchises. It's just the nature of the business.
