Spoilers TOS: Lost to Eternity by Greg Cox Review Thread
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Or the Temporal Cold War.
That's actually reflecting reality. The humpback population has bounced back in real life. I see the contradiction, but it would have been strange (and bordering on misinformation) not to report that accurately in a book set in "our" 2024.
And, yes, apparently more whales are killed by boat strikes than whaling these days.
Why would it be strange? This is a fictional book about an alternate 2024 which leads to the Trek universe we all know. I get wanting to keep some things the same as ours so the reader could relate to but things like that which have been stated in canon should be kept intact.
You could always add a disclaimer at the start of the book.
The end of the book confirmed that Harpo was the first humpback whale born on Earth in "three centuries", so even if the population had bounced back by the 2020s, it still sounds like they went extinct not too much later.
All these time travel differences just make me think of Dragon Ball. The Star Trek timeline is like Future Trunks’ timeline and every time they go into the past it’s actually an alternate timeline. Changing things in the past don’t actually change anything in the future.
I don't think of it as an alternate 2024. I think of it as our 2024, aside from the obviously fantastic elements, like time-traveling Klingon spaceships or top-secret Augment programs. You'll note that I don't have Melinda living in some alternate world where the kidney pill has been reverse-engineered, revolutionizing modern medicine as we know it. Or where Gillian's absence changed all of history, a la Edith Keeler.
When it comes to portraying real-world stuff, like the actual whale population in 2024, I think reality trumps "canon."
In a pinch, we can always rationalize that, okay, something happened between 2024 and Kirk's time to render the whales extinct.
As it should be. Hardcore fans tend to forget that we're not the exclusive audience. The goal is for the show and its tie-ins to be accessible to new and casual audiences as well, so any depiction of the present is going to reflect the present that audience is familiar with. It's the same reason "Journey's End" didn't mention the Eugenics Wars, and the same reason modern Doctor Who portrays a present like our own instead of the one the original series depicted where there were crewed Mars missions in the 1980s and Moon bases and global weather control by the early 2000s.
Shouldn't our Earth and the PU Earth continue to diverge from ~1950s onward?
Indeed. Note that the whale movie, which is the primary inspiration for this particular book, contains no indications that it takes place anywhere except the present day of audiences at the time. It's not remotely a movie about Kirk and Co. visiting an alternate 1986 subtly different from our own. There are no ominous warnings about the coming Eugenics War or references to Saturn missions or whatever.
A big part of the movie's appeal, and the reason it was so popular with both Trekkies and the general audience, is the fun of seeing Kirk and Co. running around in "our" time. (See also classic eps like "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "Assignment: Earth.")
So, no wonder I took the same approach when revisiting "the one with the whales."
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I think it was fine with Star Trek IV since 1986 was quite a long way out that you could use the real 1986 but for today I just think it would be more interesting creating a more accurate prime universe 2024; where technology was more advanced than ours in some areas and there were multiple factions at odds with each other which lead to World War 3.
Speaking about the Saturn stuff, didn’t Picard season 2 have something similar? Picard’s ancestor went out there and found the “Protomolecule” or something like that.
Speaking about the Saturn stuff, didn’t Picard season 2 have something similar? Picard’s ancestor went out there and found the “Protomolecule” or something like that.
Huh? A long way out from what? The movie was set in the same year it was released.
What does "accurate" mean when it's all make-believe? It's the prerogative of an imaginary universe to revise and update itself -- just ask James R. Kirk and his part-Vulcanian science officer of the UESPA ship Enterprise. By that standard of "accuracy," present-day Marvel Comics would have to portray Peter Parker as a 77-year-old man whose superhero career began in 1962.
Besides, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" canonized the fact that the 20th- and early 21st-century timeline has been modified by Temporal Cold War hijinks. So that is the "accurate," canonical state of affairs now. It's not an error, it's an in-universe change.
From world war 3 and the other big events.
That would be one approach, but that wasn't what this particular book is about. This 2024 Trek novel is set in "our" 2024 the same way that 1986 Trek movie was set in "our" 1986. Which, I like to think, better captures the feel of that movie.
And, honestly, 1986 was only six years before the Eugenics Wars supposedly started in 1993. Not exactly "quite a long way out."
Indeed, when you think about it, this is basically the same approach I took with my Eugenics Wars books back in the day. Sure, we could have tossed real history aside and written an alternate history novel involving an apocalyptic global conflict that bore no resemblance to the actual 1990s -- or I could fall over backwards to try to work the Eugenics Wars into "our" 1990s.
Both approaches are valid ones, and I'm sure another writer could have written a cool military-flavored Trek novel set in a "more accurate prime universe" 1990s. But, at the time, it seemed more fun and challenging to stick closer to 1990s we'd all just lived through.
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And I greatly enjoyed those novels and how you interwove the story of Khan and his followers with the real-life events of the 1990s. It did indeed make it seem far more real.
Star Trek IV took Kirk and crew back to his 1986 past, which mostly resembles the past of our Earth.
And, seriously, would that movie have been improved by including ominous references to Khan or Shaun Christopher or Gary Seven or whatever, in order to clearly set it in the years leading up to Eugenics Wars of the 1990s?
I think not.
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Anywho,I very much enjoyed this book.
The Melinda character was spot-on,I could almost hear her eyes rolling when she was dealing with “old fogies”like Bob Briggs.All the while she was interested in very little except gaining likes and income from her podcast.
“A proper little madam” my late mother would call her and not too kindly either.
The Melinda character was spot-on,I could almost hear her eyes rolling when she was dealing with “old fogies”like Bob Briggs.All the while she was interested in very little except gaining likes and income from her podcast.
“A proper little madam” my late mother would call her and not too kindly either.