Pre-fed, pre-Enterprise literature?

[trash80]

Are there any books (or even parts of books) that cover some of the pre-Federation and pre-Enterprise human space exploration efforts such as the SS Valiant?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Michael Jan Friedman's The Valiant is one. It deals, in part, with the Valiant's mission to the galactic barrier.

Federation and Strangers from the Sky both deal with 21st century Earth.

 

[trash80]

thanks i'll check them out

 

[Cicero]

^ Federation's work with mid-20th Century Earth is excellent; it's perhaps the only literary dystopia I've ever enjoyed.

 

[captcalhoun]

mid-21st century...

it's worth noting for the persnickety, both of these deal with the events of First Contact and are inconsistent with the movie depicting said events and whether you enjoy it or not is contingent on your bearing that in mind...

 

[Cicero]

^ I'm not clear why, but the frequency of mistakes on my part dramatically increases in this forum. And they're always off-by-one errors.

 

[foravalon]

The Eugenics wars, the first 2 stories of Enterprise Logs, and Mestral by Ben Guilfoy from SNW 9, best ones off the top of my head.

 

[foravalon]

Apparently I too, failed to read the small print, sorry.

In chronological order the published stories (or parts of stories) that take place in the time period roughly between 2003 and 2151 are as haphazardly follows:

-2045 Strangers from the Sky
-2053-63 The Sundered
-2053 Mestral (ENT, SNW 9)
-2053-63 The Immortality Blues (ST, SNW 9)
-2063 Star Trek: First Contact (TNG novelization)
-2063 A Private Victory (TNG, SNW III)
-2063 Almost . . . But Not Quite (VGR, SNW II)
-2063 Preserver (TNG)
-2065-2119 Federation
-2069-70 The Valiant
-2075 First Steps (Lela, TLOD)
-2079 Encounter at Farpoint (TNG novelization)
-2079 All Good Things . . . (TNG novelization)
-2093-98 Surak’s Soul (ENT)
-2121 A Girl for Every Star (ENT, SNW V)
-2121 Broken Bow (ENT novelization)
-2135 Preconceptions (ENT, SNW VI)
-2139-40 Daedalus (ENT)
-2149 Egg Drop Soup (ENT, SNW 8)

 

[HIj'Qa]

2150
Universal Chord (ENT, SNW 10)

 

[foravalon]

I did say it was a haphazard list.

 

[Christopher]

2150
Universal Chord (ENT, SNW 10)

I'm not sure I'd count that as pre-Enterprise, because it revisits and expands on an incident in T'Pol's life that was shown in flashback in an ENT episode ("Fusion," I believe). And it's only a year or so before the beginning of ENT.

 

[HIj'Qa]

2150
Universal Chord (ENT, SNW 10)

I'm not sure I'd count that as pre-Enterprise, because it revisits and expands on an incident in T'Pol's life that was shown in flashback in an ENT episode ("Fusion," I believe). And it's only a year or so before the beginning of ENT.

but it references Human pre-Fed space exploration [hopes and dreams]

 

[William Leisner]

2150
Universal Chord (ENT, SNW 10)

I'm not sure I'd count that as pre-Enterprise, because it revisits and expands on an incident in T'Pol's life that was shown in flashback in an ENT episode ("Fusion," I believe). And it's only a year or so before the beginning of ENT.

Well, if we're gonna get nitpicky, "Almost... But Not Quite" spends all of about two pages in 2063, most of that dealing with bears (still the number one threat after 55 years!) And "A Private Victory" takes place inside one man's mind in Earth orbit, with very little insight into the pre-Federation era.

 

[foravalon]

I was just cuttin' and pastin' right from the timeline, I've read very few of these stories except for The Sundered and the other three I erroneously mentioned earlier.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Talking about pre-UFP, pre-ENT books:

(and don't anyone even try to tell me that this is a "story idea" and thus worthy of banning; it's a legitimate question, dammit, and I'm not getting into specifics, so leave it alone already. ):

I would love a full-out World War III epic series of novels.

We know very little about Trek's version of it. All we really do know is that the war ended in 2053, the bad guys were called Eastern Coalition, and they used soldiers with hand-mounted machine guns who were controllable via drugs. Oh, and Colonel Green was involved in the aftermath (he ordered the execution of radiation victims, as ENT showed). There's a lot of room to play with those ideas.

Also a lot of unanswered questions. How did the war start and end? What was it about? Who was Green? Who did he work for? Who were the major factions, besides the ECON and the USA? Who, besides the USA, were the surviving governments? How did the recovery manage to take so little time (less than a hundred years, which is pretty odd for such an apparently apocalyptic war)? What is the "Eastern" in Eastern Coalition?

(Actually we can pretty much guess that the ECON was China, or based around it; it sure looked that way in 'Encounter at Farpoint'. Also I believe the commentary for the ST:FC special edition says that all references to the ECON were supposed to *be* China, but changed at the last minute)

And speaking of WW III and its aftermath: I direct all TrekBBS members to Fan Fiction, where there is an excellent series on this point called First Contact: The Iron Horse. I highly recommend it. Hasn't been a new episode in awhile, but still very entertaining.

 

[Christopher]

To clarify, it's not a story idea if you ask a question about how an event happened in the Trekverse -- only if you suggest a specific answer.

 

[Mistral]

I have been poking around in pre-Fed times and most of the stories/novels mentioned are pretty cool. The 2 volume Khan Noonian Singh stories are full of pre-Fed info and Strangers From the Sky is a really fun look at an interesting point in Earth history.

That fanfic you mentioned, Baba, I tracked it down the last time you brought it up-and now I'm hating the author for not keeping up with it!

What was the basic plot of Mestral? I haven't seen it before....

 

[Vastator]

To be honest, the Eugenics Wars interest me the most and yeah I know there are some novels on it but I just find the Augment idea quite interesting. Was checking Memory Beta and read that one of the short novel stories had something about an Augment Alliance being led by that guy who cloned himself in the animated series which seemed quite interesting.

 

[foravalon]

RE "Mestral" It's a story set in mid WWIII depicting a meeting between Mestral and Zephram Cochrane,.

RE WWIII itself, it's briefly touched on by M&M in one of the flashback scenes in the Sundered.

 

[Timo]

All we really do know is that the war ended in 2053, the bad guys were called Eastern Coalition, and they used soldiers with hand-mounted machine guns who were controllable via drugs.

Depends on how you define "bad guys", I guess. The drug-controlled warriors sounded like a universal phenomenon when Q introduced them to us, even if we only saw them in action once and on behalf of one party - three decades after the war, in a court where the judge was just as western-looking as his armed goons.

ECON was never defined in terms of "good/bad" or "winner/loser". For all we know, they were the East Coast states of the (briefly dis-)US, and won WWIII fair and square, subjugating the Montana rebels among others. There is no indication that the United States of America would have participated in WWIII as such, even though the existence of this political entity is confirmed both before and after the war.

So, in essence, there is even more room for imagination there than one would at first think...

...Especially if one accepts Spock's "Space Seed" opinion that Khan's antics in the early 1990s were part of WWIII already.

Timo Saloniemi