Star Trek: Forgotten History (or Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History, as it’s still being billed on the Simon & Schuster sites) is the “origin story” of the Department of Temporal Investigations, a group whose founding date was established in earlier works as 2270. Naturally, the time-travel exploits of Kirk and the Enterprise are heavily involved in those foundational events. The main body of the novel begins in 2267, exploring the Starfleet/Federation response to Kirk’s time-travel discoveries, but the bulk of it takes place in the era following Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Yes, I’m finally getting to revisit the post-TMP timeframe I’ve previously explored in Ex Machina and Mere Anarchy: The Darkness Drops Again, and I’m very pleased about it. Additionally, the novel has a frame story featuring the 24th-century DTI characters from Watching the Clock — and several of the DTI’s older members, the characters established as having been alive at the time, will play at least small roles in the main body of the story as well.
So to some extent, Forgotten History is both a prequel and a sequel to Watching the Clock, and both a prequel and a sequel to Ex Machina. Yet I’m taking care to write it as a self-contained tale, something you can follow without having read either prior work.
