No one here is saying they were canon.
The Continuity of Days Gone By
- Thread starter ryan123450
- Start date
They were saying they were "replaced," which wrongly implies that they had some kind of authoritative standing that was removed.
@F. King Daniel made no such claim, he merely said the works he mentioned were "ignored" by the people producing the shows. As most tie-in works are.
I wasn't talking about what Daniel said, but was clarifying my earlier point in the conversation and why Daniel's comment wasn't relevant to it.
I asked for speculation on the timeline if Roddenberry had not been involved in TNG and the timeline established in the 70's/80's Lit verse and Official tie in books like Spaceflight Chronology and the Starfleet Manual had been chosen to be followed for TNG.
Regardless of if they where 'screen canon' or not the fact that these Reference works where licenced by Paramount, and used by multiple authors gives them more credence as the accepted timeline for the universe. Hence my question, how would things have worked out if SFC et all where used as the basis for TNG?.
Forget what happened in real life with Roddenberry's jealously about how much he was or was not getting from the sales and speculate on the What If....?
Regardless of if they where 'screen canon' or not the fact that these Reference works where licenced by Paramount, and used by multiple authors gives them more credence as the accepted timeline for the universe. Hence my question, how would things have worked out if SFC et all where used as the basis for TNG?.
Forget what happened in real life with Roddenberry's jealously about how much he was or was not getting from the sales and speculate on the What If....?
As I've been saying, I don't think there's any causal relationship between those two things. Roddenberry probably was not responsible for choosing the 2364 date in "The Neutral Zone," because we know his preference was to keep the timeline as vague as possible, and because that episode was filmed from a first-draft script during a writers' strike and thus could not have been adjusted by the producers. If not for the strike, I strongly suspect that date reference would have been expunged and we wouldn't have gotten a firm calendar date until sometime later, when Roddenberry and his handlers were no longer involved in the writing process.
I've also been trying to get across that the SFC timeline was not the default, just one of two main competing theories. Presumably the reason "The Neutral Zone"'s writers chose a date consistent with the later timeline is because they were already aware of it from the tie-in works in which it was used, like Star Trek Maps. So there is no reason to assume that different creators would have chosen the SFC model instead. It was basically a toss-up between the two main schools of thought, and they simply happened to choose the other one.
That is simply untrue. Again: Licensing means nothing except that the publishers paid the studio for permission to legally sell the work for profit. It does not represent any opinion on the content of the work; it just means it isn't bootleg merchandise. Star Trek Maps, which put TOS in 2261-3, was every bit as much an officially licensed publication as the SFC, which put TOS in 2207-9, and they came out only months apart and thus would've been under review by Paramount at around the same time.
As someone who ravenously collected Trek novels and reference books at the time, I can assure you there was no single "accepted" timeline. I favored the SFC model back then myself, but I knew it was just one of the two main competing schools of thought.
I don't see how it would make any difference. Even if they'd chosen the 2200s date for TOS, I doubt they would have actually incorporated the specifics of the SFC's conjectural timeline into the show, because that's not how it usually works. The makers of a show need creative freedom to tell the stories they need to tell, so they can't let themselves be bound by conjectures from past tie-ins.
I mean, Rick Sternbach illustrated the SFC and then joined TNG's art staff, but he didn't reuse any of his SFC designs in TNG -- something I remember being surprised by at the time. Instead, he chose to create new designs as needed by the production, and of course it would've been the showrunners and directors who decided which of his designs to use. It's possible that Sternbach did propose using some SFC designs but they weren't accepted. Or it could be that, 8 years later, he'd moved on as an artist and had better ideas.
So the only difference I can see is that the dates would've been 60 years earlier. Which is probably why they didn't go with that scheme, because it would've meant that Zefram Cochrane was born in 1970, and that would've seemed pretty ridiculous to the makers of a show in 1987.
I would be surprised if the people working on the TV show delved that far in the minutia to pick a fictional date. But regardless… is that any more a ridiculous notion than a genetically-enhanced tyrant born in the 60s or early 70s to the makers of a movie in 1982?
Well, the difference is that the date of the Eugenics Wars was given onscreen in "Space Seed" so TWOK's makers just stuck with the established precedent, whereas the competing timelines we're talking about here existed only in tie-in and fan publications, so the writers of TNG were free to choose a more reasonable dating scheme.
Of course, we'll probably never know why the writers of "The Neutral Zone" picked that date, but I really don't see how it would've made much difference if they'd picked a different one. It would've still been the same interval relative to TOS; the assumption that TNG took place 78 years after the movies was announced in the first publicity about the upcoming show, and it remained through Generations, where Kirk jumped forward 78 years through the Nexus. So the only effect it would've had would be relative to our history, and there are very few, if any, episodes where the actual interval between now and then has any real story significance. I don't see how the plot of "The Neutral Zone" or "Up the Long Ladder" or First Contact or any other episode dealing with Earth history would've unfolded differently if the intervals were 60 years less. There would just have been a few insignificant dialogue tweaks here and there. Clare Raymond would've had a couple of fewer generations of descendants, but that's also an insignificant tweak in the script.
I still remember when that episode came out, how significant it was in being able to date Star Trek at that point. We had an onscreen date, and being told before the show came out that it was 78 years after The Voyage Home (then the most recent movie) it basically allowed fans to figure out when the original series and the movies took place. At least down to +/- 2 to 3 years (since there was still some dispute about exactly when TMP took place, and when TWOK took place at that time).
Though I recall in TWOK when Kirk read the year off the Romulan Ale he said 2283. But all that told us was the film took place after 2283 and the movie did start off by telling us it was the late 23rd century already.
Then later Voyager gave us another year, when it took place, and when Kirk's 5 year mission ended, which allowed fans to further pin down dates.
Now, of course, there's tons of dates available so it's no longer really any question. But that first time in "The Neutral Zone" was big for those of us fans that always wondered what year things were in the Star Trek universe.
Assuming 2283 was even a Gregorian calendar date instead of a stardate, a Romulan year, or something. Also, TWOK only said "In the 23rd Century," not "late."
Although TMP set itself some 300 years after the loss of a putative Voyager 6 probe, which would seem to have put it in at least the 2280s-90, given how long it would've taken for a) 4 more Voyager probes to be launched and b) the sixth one to travel far enough out to fall through a black hole. Heck, that last one should've taken centuries or more, given that V1 & 2 have only made it as far as the Sun's heliopause or thereabouts in nearly half a century. So Decker's line doesn't really fit with the modern dating of TMP as 2273, though he could've just misremembered his history.
That was just a year off from the earlier Star Trek Chronology's date of 2269 for the end of the 5YM. I appreciated the change to 2270, because it allowed TAS to be included.
Oh yeah. Don't know why I thought it said 'late.' At the time 2283 could have meant multiple things as you noted, which made the year being given in "The Neutral Zone" more significant. In retrospect now, 2283 would seem to fit, as I believe TWOK took place around that time, though it's still possible it's some other calendar, or maybe a Stardate (which is possible as well, since that would mean the ale is several years old, dating to around the time of the 1st or 2nd season of the TV series I believe). Though would a Romulan drink really use a Stardate. Unless it was date stamped by someone else....ok, I'm starting to overthink things I think LOL.
Yes, that's the one thing that really doesn't fit all that well. Even if you generalize it still always seemed a bit off. Then in TWOK you have Khan saying he ruled on Earth 200 years ago. And the Voyager 6 would have had to have been launched around the time Khan was on Earth, give or take a decade. That's a 100 year discrepancy. And in retrospect for Khan it's the opposite problem. 200 years does not seem to be enough.
For continuity purposes, it probably would have been easier if they had established a timeframe for the original series from the getgo. There's a lot of inconsistencies in that regard I think because there was no standard. There were at least 2 competing timeframes based on the Chronology and Maps.
Could've been a label stamped on it by the importers/smugglers. Or else Kirk was mentally converting the Romulan date into a stardate.
One thing I've never been sure of is whether McCoy's "It takes this stuff a while to ferment" was meant literally, making it an older date, or ironically, making it a recent date. The tone of the line made it seem like the latter to me somehow. How long does it usually take ale to ferment, anyway?
But those were both generated by fans and writers outside the production. Within Trek canon itself at the time, there was nothing beyond the few conflicting dialogue mentions they got. And as I said, that was pretty much by design, since Roddenberry didn't want to pin down a specific date, for fear that the show's predictions would turn out being either too optimistic or too conservative. (Although they turned out to be both, since we didn't have sleeper ships in the 1990s but we have much more advanced handheld computer-communication devices -- and more advanced gender equality -- than they had centuries in our future.)
I know that was by design. Just retrospectively it might have made things easier for future writers. But then 20/20 hindsight and all. Roddenberry couldn't know then how much Star Trek would take off and that at some point the time frame of Star Trek would become more important.
I did find it interesting that The Making of Star Trek did note the intention was that it was sometime in the 23rd century. And there were occasional hints in the original series. Kirk saying in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" that 200 years would be just about right (which obviously wasn't enough time, but Kirk was just being a bit ironic there). And I think the biggest hint was given in "Miri" when they note it's been 300 years since the plague, and that 2nd Earth was at a mid 20th century development when the plague broke out. And while it's not explicitly stated, I assumed that was a duplicate Earth in everything including time (after all it would seem odd that it was a duplicate in everything but one). And of course we learned now that was true in the continuity.
I often think they should've set Trek considerably further in the future, given how far-flung humanity seemed to be in TOS, compared to the modern smaller-Federation model that took over once DS9 required the Federation's neighbors to be able to travel to each other's territories in a matter of days. And certainly that seemed to be the implication at first, since the Valiant was lost 200 years before and made it near the edge of the galaxy, implying that space travel had been around much, much longer than 200 years. It's hard to reconcile that with later chronology, and I never bought the Okudachron's insistence on making it exactly 200 years before the second pilot so that it had to be launched just 4 years after Cochrane's first flight -- heck, just two years after the revised First Contact dating for that flight, which is nonsense.
Growing up, it often seemed to me that American SFTV seemed reluctant to push further into the future than the 25th century. Certainly quite a few shows have been set in the 21st-25th centuries, but looking back on it now, I see there were more exceptions than I thought at the time. Apparently the 1954 Flash Gordon TV series was set in 3203 instead of the present. The Starlost was set in 2790 according to Wikipedia, and the Planet of the Apes TV series was more than a thousand years in the future. Filmation's Space Academy and Jason of Star Command were said to take place in "the star year 3742." Which online sites often interpret as 3742 CE, which makes no sense, since why call it a star year then? The term implies that it's 3742 years after the establishment of some spacegoing civilization's calendar, not to mention that there's no reason to assume a "star year" has the same length as an Earth year. So it's probably 4000 years or more in our future.
They went farther afield in British sci-fi of the era. Doctor Who often jumped thousands or millions of years into the future, and Blake's 7 was at least 700 years ahead, probably more. And of course Red Dwarf is set 3 million years in the future, though that came along a bit later, in 1988.
Growing up, it often seemed to me that American SFTV seemed reluctant to push further into the future than the 25th century. Certainly quite a few shows have been set in the 21st-25th centuries, but looking back on it now, I see there were more exceptions than I thought at the time. Apparently the 1954 Flash Gordon TV series was set in 3203 instead of the present. The Starlost was set in 2790 according to Wikipedia, and the Planet of the Apes TV series was more than a thousand years in the future. Filmation's Space Academy and Jason of Star Command were said to take place in "the star year 3742." Which online sites often interpret as 3742 CE, which makes no sense, since why call it a star year then? The term implies that it's 3742 years after the establishment of some spacegoing civilization's calendar, not to mention that there's no reason to assume a "star year" has the same length as an Earth year. So it's probably 4000 years or more in our future.
They went farther afield in British sci-fi of the era. Doctor Who often jumped thousands or millions of years into the future, and Blake's 7 was at least 700 years ahead, probably more. And of course Red Dwarf is set 3 million years in the future, though that came along a bit later, in 1988.
It probably would have made things easier. Until Strange New Worlds revised some of the dating for Star Trek history, the writers either had to twist themselves in knots to make sense of things, or gloss over it. I did like Greg Cox's The Eugenics Wars novels for giving a possible explanation of how The Eugenics Wars 'could have' happened in the 1990s using real world events. It's not perfect, but I give him credit for tackling that story within the confines of the established continuity at that point. I always joke he'll have to make sure he lives until the 2060's so he can write a novel series explaining how World War III happened and nobody knew about it
(though I suppose WWIII is still very possible, but I'll try to stay optimistic 
). I'm happy Discovery jumped ahead to the 32nd century. That really opens up the storytelling without having to worry as much about established continuity. I really wished they had done that from the beginning, especially with the spore drive, which never made sense to me as a 23rd century technology, but it makes much more sense in the 32nd century. However, I know the focus of Discovery has changed considerably since it started.
Well, no, that's not what I was thinking. Even if they had put the main time frame of TOS much further in the future, that doesn't mean "Space Seed" would've automatically moved forward with it; after all, at the time "Space Seed" was written, the show's time frame was still very much in flux, from 200 years ahead in one episode to 700 years ahead in another. At the time, the 1990s seemed quite far ahead, and a reasonable, even conservative prediction for the time frame of a Third World War. And despite the later "genetic engineering" retcons, "Space Seed" said Khan's people were created through traditional selective breeding, so I suspect that Carey Wilber's intent was that their eugenics program was a continuation of the real-world eugenics movements that were undertaken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the Nazis. So a relatively near-future time frame made sense by the episode's internal logic, and thus I doubt it would've been set further ahead even if the overall setting had ended up closer to what "The Squire of Gothos" suggested or even further ahead.
I hope no one minds my post revisiting some of the earlier posts in the first couple pages of this thread, which I had a lot of fun compiling for a reading list, to experiment with the idea of a version of TOS continuity that is exclusively TOS and it's movies (my usual disclaimer, though, I still follow and catch up on new ST television and streaming shows as much as I can).
There are some books that I've added to my reading list that aren't necessarily included in some of the really long lists compiled. I haven't reviewed them on my readthrough thread, and they've come up in conversation on other threads.
I've felt it beneficial to include The Motion Picture novelization. There are small, subtle things it establishes that are continued in many of the novels I've read through, it really turned out to be rewarding to include it.
Eyeballing the book of the fifth film, The Final Frontier, indicated that it follows up on much of Vonda McIntyre's work, and not just her novelizations of TWoK, TSFS, and TVH; there's a scene that expands on Sulu's childhood as established in The Entropy Effect and Enterprise: The First Adventure. An exchange with another poster in another thread indicated some synergy between The Final Frontier novelization and The Lost Years.
An article on Memory Beta helped me discover Timetrap had a small connection to Crisis on Centaurus.
I haven't reviewed A.C. Crispin's Time For Yesterday yet, but it really does connect the dots to a lot of the novels assembled in the early pages of this thread. I had been particularly curious about the connection to Jean Lorrah's novels; which I was glad to have read both, but it's mainly The Vulcan Academy Murders that is referenced. I was surprised to see the elaborate, experimental medical technology from TOS-era Academy Murders re-appear as somewhat standard starship medical equipment in the movie-era!
One surprise I came across while reading Time for Yesterday was a paragraph where Uhura gets some encouragement to help a character in need because she has a reputation for extraordinary empathy; there was a somewhat expected reference to Uhura's Song (which left me wishing I had read that book beforehand, rather than have it separated out as something to visit later). The other reference I didn't expect was to an alien race that appears in Tears of the Singers.
The references to both books are very brief, but I think that's been the way with a couple? Anyway, as it happens, I had decided to get a copy of Tears of the Singers before I came across the nod to it while reading Time for Yesterday. That worked out nicely, so I've happily added that to my reading list.
The final thing I've wanted to comment on was a small detail I picked up on when reading Spock's World (which was such a great read!). There's a lot of assumption that Spock's World takes place a little after The Motion Picture. There is one brief reference strongly indicating that it happens after the movie-era framing events of Strangers From the Sky; the setting of that framing narrative was more of what I regard as pre-TWoK as opposed to post-TMP.
Aside from the brief nod to Strangers From the Sky, and the sense that Kirk and Spock have a new perspective on Human-Vulcan First Contact, Spock's World timing-placement was otherwise vague enough that I was left with an impression of it as existing wherever the individual reader wants it to go. It reminded me of one of Diane Duane's comic stories, where Dr. McCoy kind of mourns and lets go of the memory of Spock, as if it is set after Spock's death in TWoK...even though it is technically set after Spock has been resurrected. It was a comic book story where I understood what the story was in spirit, even though it technically didn't fit; it was easy to imagine the events of that story in a slightly different place in the timeline. It felt like it was similar effect with Spock's World, the technical details of exactly when it is set don't matter; it's time frame is somewhat nebulous.
There are some books that I've added to my reading list that aren't necessarily included in some of the really long lists compiled. I haven't reviewed them on my readthrough thread, and they've come up in conversation on other threads.
I've felt it beneficial to include The Motion Picture novelization. There are small, subtle things it establishes that are continued in many of the novels I've read through, it really turned out to be rewarding to include it.
Eyeballing the book of the fifth film, The Final Frontier, indicated that it follows up on much of Vonda McIntyre's work, and not just her novelizations of TWoK, TSFS, and TVH; there's a scene that expands on Sulu's childhood as established in The Entropy Effect and Enterprise: The First Adventure. An exchange with another poster in another thread indicated some synergy between The Final Frontier novelization and The Lost Years.
An article on Memory Beta helped me discover Timetrap had a small connection to Crisis on Centaurus.
I haven't reviewed A.C. Crispin's Time For Yesterday yet, but it really does connect the dots to a lot of the novels assembled in the early pages of this thread. I had been particularly curious about the connection to Jean Lorrah's novels; which I was glad to have read both, but it's mainly The Vulcan Academy Murders that is referenced. I was surprised to see the elaborate, experimental medical technology from TOS-era Academy Murders re-appear as somewhat standard starship medical equipment in the movie-era!
One surprise I came across while reading Time for Yesterday was a paragraph where Uhura gets some encouragement to help a character in need because she has a reputation for extraordinary empathy; there was a somewhat expected reference to Uhura's Song (which left me wishing I had read that book beforehand, rather than have it separated out as something to visit later). The other reference I didn't expect was to an alien race that appears in Tears of the Singers.
The references to both books are very brief, but I think that's been the way with a couple? Anyway, as it happens, I had decided to get a copy of Tears of the Singers before I came across the nod to it while reading Time for Yesterday. That worked out nicely, so I've happily added that to my reading list.
The final thing I've wanted to comment on was a small detail I picked up on when reading Spock's World (which was such a great read!). There's a lot of assumption that Spock's World takes place a little after The Motion Picture. There is one brief reference strongly indicating that it happens after the movie-era framing events of Strangers From the Sky; the setting of that framing narrative was more of what I regard as pre-TWoK as opposed to post-TMP.
Aside from the brief nod to Strangers From the Sky, and the sense that Kirk and Spock have a new perspective on Human-Vulcan First Contact, Spock's World timing-placement was otherwise vague enough that I was left with an impression of it as existing wherever the individual reader wants it to go. It reminded me of one of Diane Duane's comic stories, where Dr. McCoy kind of mourns and lets go of the memory of Spock, as if it is set after Spock's death in TWoK...even though it is technically set after Spock has been resurrected. It was a comic book story where I understood what the story was in spirit, even though it technically didn't fit; it was easy to imagine the events of that story in a slightly different place in the timeline. It felt like it was similar effect with Spock's World, the technical details of exactly when it is set don't matter; it's time frame is somewhat nebulous.
@Desert Kris I read this with great interest and was relieved to find I haven’t missed any of these links on my site.
https://startreklitverse.com/the-original-series-mobile.php
https://startreklitverse.com/the-original-series-mobile.php
I wouldn't leave you in the lurch, your line of inquiry and the results it got made possible the reading approach I've been taking for several years and it's been a fun collection of titles to make my way through. This is one of my favorite threads. Your Star Trek literature website also a lot of fun to wander around in.
It's sort of the Avengers Endgame of the 80s Star Trek novels--a number of characters from other novels get cameos or namechecks. Chris Claremont does the same sort of thing in Debt of Honor. Both stories involve a Big Crisis and a crew of lots of guest stars from the past are assembled for this mission. (There's no link in Debt of Honor to the 80s novels, though ISTR one minor character is named after Diane Duane.)
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