Spoilers NO SPOILERS FOR CODA - A Lit-verse Grand Finale...What We Know (Spoilers for Entire Lit-verse)

A quick question the @Dayton Ward, @David Mack, and @James Swallow, are there any specific books you guys would recommend before starting Coda? I'm caught up on TNG and Titan, I'm in the process of reading To Lose the Earth, and I haven't read any DS9 books past The Fall.

 

It sounds to me as if you're pretty much ready. Have you read the Section 31 novels that led up to TNG: COLLATERAL DAMAGE? And the 24th-century Mirror Universe novels and stories?

 

I decided to cancel my Amazon order of these three and reordered them through the local independent bookshop (and the only one) in Kilkenny.

I imagine they won't be showing up til a few days after the "street date".

 

Fun Fact: Ever since Star Trek (2009), which is now TWELVE YEARS ago, I've been waiting for how the Romulan supernova would affect the Litverse. It's kind of hilarious and sad in equal measures because I always wanted to see how things like the Typhon Pact and other powers would react to it. I got most of my fill about the political realities of it from THE LAST BEST HOPE but that still wasn't the Lit verse.

 

All of it.

 

I have a great Idea!
I am going to start reading the Coda books after I have ordered the third book, so I can read the books back to back.
And if everybody here does that we can talk about the books the same time! .

And I don't have to read through the hundred of pages of the topic

 

I was planning on doing that.

 

What are the chances this thing's gonna smash the fourth wall and be a Benny Russel thing, but about Dayton, James and David with the Trek crews only having cameos?

 

So a bit like the first Lego Movie. That might work and hopefully will work if that what happens.

 

Well, I am waiting to read them when they start arriving (all preordered through B&N), but that’s because my current cycle through my collection is still well away from that point in the timeline - I’m just about to hit the Mission Gamma mini-series, so it’ll probably be about a year or so before I reach the Typhon Pact era of the timeline, let alone Coda.

Somehow, I doubt the discussion posts will wait for me to catch-up, though.

 

Yeah, me too. I remember one novel sometimes after the movie came out had Picard thinking about his future and whether he might consider being an ambassador someday (which he was in the Countdown comics leading up to the film). I thought maybe that was the very beginning of them working towards covering that angle. I think that was not long after the Borg attack, maybe 2381 or so.

I thought it was good the Romulan supernova was still several years away, which would give the novels time to start working that in. This was long before Star Trek: Picard and at the time I don't think many of us had any expectations of a show taking place after Nemesis so I thought the books would be a great way for more of that part of Star Trek (2009) to be fleshed out. Since that part of the movie was in the Prime timeline I just assumed the novels would incorporate that part of the story into the relaunches.

But sadly that never happened. And now the novels are in 2387 and I can't think of any plausible way for the supernova to happen at this point. I don't know if there was some legal reason behind it (I know there's been some confusion among fans about novels incorporating elements of the Kelvin-verse into the books), or if it was an editorial decision, or something else. But it just never happened.

And like you, I thought there was several ways it could benefit the litverse. What impact would that have on the Typhon Pact? The Breen and Tzenkethi were already maneuvering for dominance, the loss of Romulus and the severe impact that would have on the Empire would have been ripe for more Typhon Pact intrigue. Plus how would it have impacted the Khitomer powers? The Romulan Empire under Kamenor was a moderating influence in the Pact. Would hostilities increase between them?

And now that Star Trek: Picard is out and we saw the Federation response there, I wonder how the Federation of the litverse would have responded? In many ways, by 2387, the Federation in the litverse seems more enlightened again, more hopeful. But that Federation is still recovering from the devastating Borg attack that wiped out entire worlds. Also, there was all the shenanigans with Section 31. Not to mention, despite the Romulans being a moderating force in the Pact, they are still in a rival coalition. And what role would the Pact take a role in helping their allies?

There's a lot of great stories to be told there that we'll never see. Not just the supernova itself and the immediate affects, but the impact on the entire Quadrant on so many levels (two if you consider the Alpha and Beta Quadrants).

At this point the only way there will be a Supernova in the litverse is if it comes with almost no warning. And it would obviously have to be featured in Coda. The only thing I can think of is there are some hints, esp. in The Last, Best Hope, that perhaps the supernova was not natural, but some sort of attack possibly (I didn't see that in the show itself, though the show really didn't get into the supernova itself, leaving the origins a mystery). Perhaps something in the way the attack happened affected the Romulan star of the litverse as well, either intentionally or not. I imagine a massive supernova, esp. one that was artificial, might have impacts across subspace and possibly across timelines. And if the Krenim are involved in some way, which after reading To Lose the Earth I have to think they will have a role in Coda, all bets are off. They are extremely dangerous and I can imagine all kinds of ways they could impact the timeline. And I do find it interesting that up above David Mack recommended reading the Mirror Universe novels. A hint perhaps? Well, we'll see. I'm up to date on the current litverse novels, including those, but I have to admit I hadn't considered the MU when it comes to Coda.

Something to think about.

 

There were indeed legal reasons preventing the novels from addressing the Romulan supernova that did not get resolved until the license was renewed in 2018. But by that point, Picard was already in development and therefore the only thing left for the Litverse was to bring it to an end.

 

An end which could have included the Litverse version of a Romulan supernova. But what we’re getting instead seems to much more interesting.

 

Yeah,

It's a shame but obviously not on the writers as this is the sort of thing that can't just be dumped on them after a decade of making their own stories as well as developments. The Federation of the Novelverse had suffered far more than the Picardverse but also had emerged in a more idealistic/enlightened place.

Would it turn against the Romulans or just be unable to help them? Una McCormack nicely illustrated that the problem there was that the Romulans were their own worst enemy well before they had a secret death cult blow up the rescue fleet.

The Breen and Tzenkethi are also the kind of awful-awful governments that wouldn't lift a finger to help evacuate Romulus, illustrating that the Typhon Pact's biggest problems was that it was made of some people who wanted to benefit their members while others who were just in it for themselves. Besides, as we know the Kelvinverse and Picard versions of the suipernova were irreconciable despite having some broad strokes similarities.

I liked STAR TREK: ONLINE'S early take on it as well that makes the sun exploding a deliberate attack and went the "action movie" route of it being a big artificial alien plot. The thing is that while a Yellow Star exploding is not a "natural" thing in our world, far weirder things happen in Star Trek all the time.

It could have been a plot of some nefarious mad scientist, alien race, or so on or it could have been a result of artificial singularities being used around Romulus in their engines (greenhouse gases!) or a randsom subspace anomaly hitting the Sun as random subspace anomalies are want to do.

Either way it's a shame that never got to be tackled. But I am glad that coda is wrapping all this up like Troy Denning's CRUCIBLE for Star Wars.

 

Spoiler: Romulan Supernova

Both Una's The Last Best Hope and James Swallow's The Dark Veil strongly hint that the Romulan supernova in the canon-Picardverse is indeed an artificially-induced event (by some as-yet-unrevealed cause), but are leaving this vague for the moment in case the TV show itself decides to tackle this subject.

 

That's not true at all. The Countdown tie-in comic and Star Trek Online made conjectural assertions about the supernova that Picard contradicts, but those sources are not canonical any more than the Novelverse is. And there's nothing in the actual film's exposition about the supernova that's incompatible with Picard's interpretation. True, the mind-meld sequence implies that the supernova happened before Spock took the Red Matter to Romulus and then somehow "accelerated" while he was en route, but it's very confused and vague, and we can assume that, as a mental communication, it's got a stream-of-consciousness quality and isn't in strictly linear order. The Picard version makes immensely more sense, that the supernova was predicted in advance and simply went off earlier than expected.

 

I don't think I could have sold that idea to the editors or the licensor.

 

Yeah. I can't see that happening. Perhaps for a book intended as a spoof. But not an official Star Trek novel LoL.

 

My take on the subject is the "Yellow Supernova" moves at a remarkably slow pace (cosmically speaking) so that while Romulus was destroyed, Spock Red Mattered the results to be able to somehow cancel out all the destructive force before it hit the rest of the system's colonies.

As little as that makes sense science-wise.

BECAUSE RED MATTER.