Tales of the Eugenics Wars?
- Thread starter EJA
- Start date
I don't see it as likely, honestly. Pocket would have to be convinced they could make money off such a book, and it lacks major series characters. You have Khan, Gary Seven, and that's about it....
There was Tales of the Dominion War, so this could also work for the Eugenics wars.
Except TotDW dealt with events that directly affected main characters from most of the series. The only people we'd see in a Eugenics Wars anthology would be guest characters. And Greg already pretty much used every established Trek character who was alive in the late 20th century in the EW duology. So who'd be left?
Explain?
What isn't self-explanatory? You would not see a main character in a story set during the Eugenics Wars.
Barring time travel, you're not going to see Kirk or Picard or Sisko or Janeway any of the regulars from any of the tv shows.
Unlike the Dominion Wars, which were sent during the same era as TNG and DS9 . . ..
(Not that my own Dominion War story featured any main characters!)
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And it defies plausability to shoe-horn in the other series. The idea that characters from the various eras of Trek could ALL have adventures tied to the EW would be unbelievable.
Honestly, thanks largely to Mr. Cox I think I know all I'm really interested in knowing about the Eugenics Wars. 
Really, it's sort of more about how they impact characters we already know than it is about the wars themselves.
I did appreciate the Myriad Universes take on it though, and would be curious to see more of that timeline.
Really, it's sort of more about how they impact characters we already know than it is about the wars themselves.I did appreciate the Myriad Universes take on it though, and would be curious to see more of that timeline.
I dunno, the Vanguard books are proof you can have a popular & successful series without much involvement from any of the TV show characters.
Kirk and company do what amounts to an extended cammio in Book One, and five books later it's still going strong without them. In fact I think its the best TOS era storyline going right now.
New Frontier launched with a similar cameo, too. But who could we use for Tales of the Eugenics Wars? Archer's ancestor?
Also, Khan was apparently one of the good guys, Kirk's champion out of the lot. If that's our hero, what sort of villains do we need? Who gets our sympathies? Perhaps we're better off not thinking of the Eugenics Wars as a period of heroic adventures; stories of the WWII Eastern Front don't make for easy reading, either.
(OTOH, if nu-BSG could succeed with heroes that were worse than the villains, why not TotEW?)
Timo Saloniemi
Also, Khan was apparently one of the good guys, Kirk's champion out of the lot. If that's our hero, what sort of villains do we need? Who gets our sympathies? Perhaps we're better off not thinking of the Eugenics Wars as a period of heroic adventures; stories of the WWII Eastern Front don't make for easy reading, either.
(OTOH, if nu-BSG could succeed with heroes that were worse than the villains, why not TotEW?)
Timo Saloniemi
^Interesting idea. I've often thought I'd like to see an "alternate history" approach to the EW to complement Greg's "hidden history" approach. Or something based on my old theory that Khan was a 5th-generation product of a selective breeding program that began in the 1880s, soon after the concept of eugenics was coined.
That's pretty much my feeling on this, it's a topic that was mined pretty thoroughly in the Cox books.
I'm sure our clever authors and editors could come up with some new and interesting approaches but considering the limited editorial resources and holes in the schedule I think I would rather see Pocket spend its time on other subjects.
You can read a "Tale of the Eugenics Wars" in Strange New Worlds 9. My story, "The Rules of War" has Col. Green, Stavos Keniclius, and Capt. Archer's grandfather in North Africa.
I would ABSOLUTELY love this. The best way to do it would be to ignore Greg Cox's fiction. With all due respect to Greg Cox his fiction on the EW is good but it ignores canon facts established in TOS and reinforced in ENT-the Eugenics Wars were overt not covert. An alternate history themed tales of the eugenics wars would be awesome!
^Greg's novels don't ignore anything from TOS, they merely finesse its interpretation in order to reconcile it with real 1990s history (at least as perceived by Americans). It is possible that 23rd-century historians could see the events of the 1990s very differently from those who lived them, because of the secret knowledge they've since become aware of and the efforts intervening historians have made to organize and systematize what people at the time might've experienced as a series of seemingly unrelated events.
And I still say that it's entirely possible to interpret the Eugenics Wars novels as depicting an overt set of events. There's not too much emphasis in the text on efforts to keep these events secret -- some here and there, but not pervasively -- so it's easy enough to read it as a reasonably open conflict. I mean, even if we Americans weren't aware of Khan's rise to power (and there's plenty of precedent for the American public being almost completely uninformed about major world events that don't affect them directly, such as the civil wars that devastated much of Africa in the 1990s), surely the people he ruled knew about it. And there were some things in the book that couldn't have been kept secret, like the nerve gas attack on the Palais des Nations.
That said, though, I agree (as I said earlier in the thread) that there could be value in exploring an alternative take on the Eugenics Wars. Not because there's anything wrong with Greg's version, but because there's room for multiple takes on the same concept, and no reason all Trek Lit has to be in a single continuity.
And I still say that it's entirely possible to interpret the Eugenics Wars novels as depicting an overt set of events. There's not too much emphasis in the text on efforts to keep these events secret -- some here and there, but not pervasively -- so it's easy enough to read it as a reasonably open conflict. I mean, even if we Americans weren't aware of Khan's rise to power (and there's plenty of precedent for the American public being almost completely uninformed about major world events that don't affect them directly, such as the civil wars that devastated much of Africa in the 1990s), surely the people he ruled knew about it. And there were some things in the book that couldn't have been kept secret, like the nerve gas attack on the Palais des Nations.
That said, though, I agree (as I said earlier in the thread) that there could be value in exploring an alternative take on the Eugenics Wars. Not because there's anything wrong with Greg's version, but because there's room for multiple takes on the same concept, and no reason all Trek Lit has to be in a single continuity.
I agree with most of that.Its just that I feel strongly that the information provided about the Eugenics Wars in TOS and ENT indicates that it was an overt,worldwide,alliance - counter alliance kind of conflict whose events would have been on the front page of the paper daily.
For example this would include common knowledge of the the very existence of the eugenic supermen/augments but in Gregs books this is also a secret.
The thing I think I like the most about Enterprise is that it firmly establishes the Eugenics Wars were overt and took place in the 1990's!
