Kirk's Second Five Year Mission - Lack of Books about it?

[Christopher]

If only Pocket Books could publish a new timeline book and re-issue 2270s-era novels with edits to all the dating details within so that for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek in 2016, they could cleanly start a new novel series/miniseries for a second five-year mission in 2274/2275.

I already tried to start a new novel series in that setting with Ex Machina. It apparently didn't sell well enough to justify doing more (except what I could sneak in via Mere Anarchy and DTI), even though it was critically acclaimed and popular among those who did read it.

 

[Enterprise1701]

If only Pocket Books could publish a new timeline book and re-issue 2270s-era novels with edits to all the dating details within so that for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek in 2016, they could cleanly start a new novel series/miniseries for a second five-year mission in 2274/2275.

I already tried to start a new novel series in that setting with Ex Machina. It apparently didn't sell well enough to justify doing more (except what I could sneak in via Mere Anarchy and DTI), even though it was critically acclaimed and popular among those who did read it.

Agh.

 

[Jsplinis]

Now, that I agree with. Another reason I was so eager to do Ex Machina is that so few of the post-TMP books (other than the Graf ones) really felt like they took advantage of the setting.

In what way did the L.A.Graf books have the TMP feel? Did any of their solo novels capture that feel?

And what about Home is the Hunter and Enemy Unseen?

I just read Howard weinstein's three novels set it the 2nd 5-Year Mission and felt that even though over all the characters didn't seem too distinctive to the time, Kirk did. He was more mature and responsible and seemed to see the bigger picture possibly because of his time in the admiralty, but he didn't have the regrets disappointments of the TWOK-TUC era.

 

[ClayinCA]

If only Pocket Books could publish a new timeline book and re-issue 2270s-era novels with edits to all the dating details within so that for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek in 2016, they could cleanly start a new novel series/miniseries for a second five-year mission in 2274/2275.

I already tried to start a new novel series in that setting with Ex Machina. It apparently didn't sell well enough to justify doing more (except what I could sneak in via Mere Anarchy and DTI), even though it was critically acclaimed and popular among those who did read it.

It just kills me that Ex Machina sold that poorly; to this day, it remains one of my favorite TOS novels. I love the sense of "newness" and scale that TMP had, and Ex Machina captured that feel perfectly. It remains my hope that someday Pocket will (perhaps against all odds) allow Christopher to write more books set in that period.

 

[Christopher]

In what way did the L.A.Graf books have the TMP feel? Did any of their solo novels capture that feel?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Graf novels focused heavily on Chekov in his role as security chief. That's what I meant by taking advantage of the movie-era setting.

And what about Home is the Hunter and Enemy Unseen?

My impression is that those are two of the kind of books mentioned before, books that were set post-TMP without really needing to be.

I just read Howard weinstein's three novels set it the 2nd 5-Year Mission and felt that even though over all the characters didn't seem too distinctive to the time, Kirk did. He was more mature and responsible and seemed to see the bigger picture possibly because of his time in the admiralty, but he didn't have the regrets disappointments of the TWOK-TUC era.

Howie may well be the one person who's written the movie-era crew the most, since he's not only set all his TOS novels post-TMP (going all the way back to Pocket's third original novel, The Covenant of the Crown), he also wrote the post-TFF comic for most of its run. The only pre-TMP stories he's ever written are his animated episode "The Pirates of Orion," his Constellations story "Official Record," and the comics stories "No Compromise" and "Star-Crossed." But most of his movie-era stuff tends toward the later years.

 

[trevanian]

I was just thinking of something else as well, that a lot of people seem to overlook. According to TMP, there was about a year prior to when the Enterprise was in drydock where Kirk was not even in command of the Enterprise. Again, in TMP, it is stated (by Decker during the scene in Kirk's quarters/office) that Kirk had not logged a single star hour in "two-and-a-half-years", and yet Scotty had mentioned during the shuttle drive to the Enterprise that the ship had been in drydock getting overhauled for "18 months" (or a year-and-a-half).

As I look back at all the books that have been written about the post-Counter Clock Incident and the pre-TMP era (i.e. The Lost Years, Prime Directive), a lot of authors seem to have assumed that Kirk's promotion to the Admiralty and the start of the Enterprise's drydock refit seemed to have occurred at the same time, when the actual dialog in TMP seems to indicate that the pre-refit Enterprise was still out in space for at least a year prior to it's 18-month refit, without Kirk in command.

Wow, you may be on to something here. A year of the Enterprise zooming around WITHOUT Kirk as captain opens the door to so many possibilities and offers so many questions. Nice deductive work, tomswift!

IF you can buy into the last year being without Kirk, then it follows they are cruising w/o McCoy as well, since he quit over Kirk's promotion. So you have Spock w/o any of his human support system in command or as exec to another guy, or you have Spock returning to Vulcan ... so how does the ship survive a whole year without the principals aboard and in top form? The ENTERPRISE would be like any other starship then (meaning, dinner for the next amoeba/planetkiller/antimatter guy who came along.)

It's easier for me to buy into Kirk completing the mission -- ESPECIALLY since the novel makes such an issue of this being the first time a Captain has pulled off a 5 yr mission and brought most of his crew (90+ dead maybe?) and ship home relatively intact.

Also, IN THE MOVIE, Kirk explains to Decker why Nogura gave him the job, saying specifically 'FIVE years out there dealing with unknowns.' I doubt he means 4 years on the Enterprise and a previous year at some point on the HOOD or the KONGO.

 

[Stevil2001]

You could have five years of Kirk on the Enterprise, a year of some other schmuck, and then 1.5 years of refit. And maybe it's not a mission of deep-space exploration, but patrol closer to home while the refit is organized.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Wait a minute, what was the Enterprise-A doing between The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country? All I remember is To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh, In the Name of Honor, and Mere Anarchy: The Blood-Dimmed Tide.

 

[JD]

There's also most of Vol. 2 of the DC TOS series.

 

[Christopher]

And Greg Cox's next novel is set aboard the E-A between those movies.

 

[Greg Cox]

And Greg Cox's next novel is set aboard the E-A between those movies.

Thanks, Christopher!

That would be Foul Deeds Will Rise, due out in December.

(Did some minor revisions on that book this afternoon, actually.)

 

[Enterprise1701]

And Greg Cox's next novel is set aboard the E-A between those movies.

Thanks, Christopher!

That would be Foul Deeds Will Rise, due out in December.

(Did some minor revisions on that book this afternoon, actually.)

That's great.

 

[Leto_II]

There's also most of Vol. 2 of the DC TOS series.

Plus the last 18 months or so of DC's first TOS series, the novel Probe, and the movie-era sections of The Rift and The Captain's Table: War Dragons (along with chapter-length cutaways set aboard the starship in Margaret Wander Bonnano's Unspoken Truth).

That said, however, the Enterprise-A era (post-TVH/pre-TUC) is still drastically underrepresented in the novels, compared to other TOS periods. You can pretty much count the number on one hand. Stoked that Greg is writing a new story set during that interval.

 

[Christopher]

Plus the last 18 months or so of DC's first TOS series...

Those were actually set between TVH and TFF, since TFF hadn't come out yet when they were published. So they don't count as stories between TFF and TUC -- although, admittedly, the difference is mainly a technicality.

the novel Probe

And this one was pretty clearly meant to take place shortly after TVH, but because it was delayed so long, it ended up with a couple of token references to TFF patched into it.

 

[tomswift2002]

It's easier for me to buy into Kirk completing the mission -- ESPECIALLY since the novel makes such an issue of this being the first time a Captain has pulled off a 5 yr mission and brought most of his crew (90+ dead maybe?) and ship home relatively intact.

Also, IN THE MOVIE, Kirk explains to Decker why Nogura gave him the job, saying specifically 'FIVE years out there dealing with unknowns.' I doubt he means 4 years on the Enterprise and a previous year at some point on the HOOD or the KONGO.

Problem is Kirk does not say when those "Five years" occurred. And the movie states, both from Kirk and Decker, that Kirk had not been out in space (or as Decker put "logged a single star-hour") in two-and-a-half-years. So it could be that Kirk finished his first 5-year tour of duty as Captain of the Enterprise, and then took her back out for another 5-year tour, but at the end of 4 years Starfleet promoted Kirk to the Admiralty and assigned another Captain to finish the tour. Maybe Kirk's second tour wasn't as eventful as his first, and that's why when Decker questioned his reason's, he only referred to his first tour.

 

[Leto_II]

Plus the last 18 months or so of DC's first TOS series...

Those were actually set between TVH and TFF, since TFF hadn't come out yet when they were published. So they don't count as stories between TFF and TUC -- although, admittedly, the difference is mainly a technicality.

Woops, yeah -- good catch. Was up typing that at midnight last night, and for some reason misread the earlier poster's question as pertaining to the 1701-A's entire service-length, there.

the novel Probe

And this one was pretty clearly meant to take place shortly after TVH, but because it was delayed so long, it ended up with a couple of token references to TFF patched into it.

Happened to re-read Probe about a year-and-a-half ago for a Memory Beta synopsis in the Enterprise-A entry (hadn't revisited it in years), and was highly amused in a retroactive sense by all the references to the novel taking place "just a few weeks" after the Cetacean Probe's Earth-visit (the heavy rains causing a sudden supergrowth in vegetation planetside), yet also clearly taking place after the events of TFF.

As you mention, it's pretty clear that a number of token Star Trek V references were inserted after the lengthy re-write process was wrapping up -- and I think the official Pocket chronology also places it in 2287.

Still a great novel, though, and I don't care who actually wrote it (incidentally, Gene was one of my longtime favorite Trek novelists, and Margaret's tribute to him in her Music of the Spheres essay was touching).

 

[Christopher]

the novel Probe

And this one was pretty clearly meant to take place shortly after TVH, but because it was delayed so long, it ended up with a couple of token references to TFF patched into it.

Happened to re-read Probe about a year-and-a-half ago for a Memory Beta synopsis in the Enterprise-A entry (hadn't revisited it in years), and was highly amused in a retroactive sense by all the references to the novel taking place "just a few weeks" after the Cetacean Probe's Earth-visit (the heavy rains causing a sudden supergrowth in vegetation planetside), yet also clearly taking place after the events of TFF.

Well, to be fair, TFF was quite vague about the interval since TVH. It gives the impression that the ship malfunctioned right away and was taken back to drydock promptly for repairs. Harve Bennett's behind-the-scenes assertion is that there was a 6-month shakedown between films, but the Chronology's placement of TFF a whole year after TVH -- indeed, its whole dating scheme for TWOK through TFF -- is pretty much inexplicable, like putting TVH a year after TSFS even though it's explicitly just 3 months later. The best I've been able to figure is that they forced the movies forward so that TFF would be more than 20 years after "Balance of Terror" to accommodate the age of Nimbus III -- since heaven forbid the Chronology should ever treat any date as rounded up rather than exact. (Although for some reason they were willing to put TWOK 18 years after "Space Seed" instead of 15.)

But of course the Chronology wouldn't be published for years after TFF and Probe, so as far as anyone could tell at the time the book was published, there was no reason a story set just after TFF couldn't be just a few weeks after TVH.

 

[tomswift2002]

Every time that I watched STV, just from the dialog and the way the story went, I always assumed that five followed four by only a week or two (I just checked J.M. Dillard's novelization of STV, and on pages 20-22 she seems to have set Kirk, Spock and McCoy's vacation about a few days after the Federation Council's decision and the trial run of the E-A as seen in STIV).

 

[Leto_II]

Well, to be fair, TFF was quite vague about the interval since TVH. It gives the impression that the ship malfunctioned right away and was taken back to drydock promptly for repairs. Harve Bennett's behind-the-scenes assertion is that there was a 6-month shakedown between films, but the Chronology's placement of TFF a whole year after TVH -- indeed, its whole dating scheme for TWOK through TFF -- is pretty much inexplicable, like putting TVH a year after TSFS even though it's explicitly just 3 months later.

The Okudachron's 2287 placement for TFF likely comes from the onscreen dialogue reference in TNG's "Evolution" (set in 2366, where Data mentions that the last shipwide computer malfunction occurred "seventy-nine years earlier").

Michael Piller confirmed in at least one webchat that this was a reference to the events of Star Trek V, which hit theater screens just a couple of months prior to the broadcast of this episode.

The best I've been able to figure is that they forced the movies forward so that TFF would be more than 20 years after "Balance of Terror" to accommodate the age of Nimbus III -- since heaven forbid the Chronology should ever treat any date as rounded up rather than exact. (Although for some reason they were willing to put TWOK 18 years after "Space Seed" instead of 15.)

Probably to account for Kirk and McCoy's lines about the Romulan Ale fermentation ("2283?"). But agreed -- too many other dates are taken too literally at face-value, rather than accounting for the occasional ballpark rounding.

 

[Leto_II]

Every time that I watched STV, just from the dialog and the way the story went, I always assumed that five followed four by only a week or two (I just checked J.M. Dillard's novelization of STV, and on pages 20-22 she seems to have set Kirk, Spock and McCoy's vacation about a few days after the Federation Council's decision and the trial run of the E-A as seen in STIV).

I think I remember this from a few years back when I re-read that one; the onscreen dialogue allows for that interpretation (particularly Scotty's up in Spacedock), though this doesn't account for certain things like The Voyage Home bridge suddenly getting completely refitted and changed in such a brief span of time, etc. (the concept of removable bridge-modules notwithstanding).

The Dillard novelizations use all sorts of...interesting...dating assumptions, such as the TUC adaptation positing a ten-year survey mission for Captain Sulu and the Excelsior having recently concluded in the Reydovan Sector when Praxis explodes. And so on.

(Not unlike A.C. Crispin's Sarek, which puts a mere three years between TFF and TUC...)

That said, year-long shakedown cruises are a perfectly-canonical event in the Star Trek universe, as we see at the very beginning of ST: First Contact, and the NCC-1701-E's first year in space.

I've always chosen to interpret the bridge-chaos as seen in the opening of The Final Frontier to be the last phases of the overhaul/replacement of the "old" bridge from TVH after that year-long first cruise, with Scotty's men fitting in the last console components when the Nimbus III mission launches.