A Lit-verse based TOS chronology

[ryan123450]

This is a great question. Another set of dates to work with! (Though they may end up changing alot of what I thought I had all worked out.)

 

[Christopher]

Related enough to the topic of this thread I guess, I was doing some stuff with my timeline recently, and I wanted to check: Christopher, what dates (or months, at least) did you have in mind for "Ex Machina"? I was wondering largely because of the various "X.Y years since Z" references that Spock made throughout that book; they seem self-consistent with one another from episode spacing, and it looks like they point towards May 2273 for "Ex Machina" or thereabouts? But your annotations for "Forgotten History" (and the in-text duration of "Ex Machina" itself) put "Ex Machina" as spanning October-November 2273 or so. (I'm asking mostly because those references would be a handy way to get months for "Changeling", "Bread and Circuses", and "FTWIH", but if you use the latter date for "Ex Machina" then none of them really fit without moving them.)

I have Ex Machina in my personal chronology as spanning October 7 to November 8, 2273. But I think I've changed my TOS dating since then in response to Vanguard's assertions, so any precise numbers given in ExM for the time elapsed since specific episodes may no longer be accurate.

 

[Idran]

Related enough to the topic of this thread I guess, I was doing some stuff with my timeline recently, and I wanted to check: Christopher, what dates (or months, at least) did you have in mind for "Ex Machina"? I was wondering largely because of the various "X.Y years since Z" references that Spock made throughout that book; they seem self-consistent with one another from episode spacing, and it looks like they point towards May 2273 for "Ex Machina" or thereabouts? But your annotations for "Forgotten History" (and the in-text duration of "Ex Machina" itself) put "Ex Machina" as spanning October-November 2273 or so. (I'm asking mostly because those references would be a handy way to get months for "Changeling", "Bread and Circuses", and "FTWIH", but if you use the latter date for "Ex Machina" then none of them really fit without moving them.)

I have Ex Machina in my personal chronology as spanning October 7 to November 8, 2273. But I think I've changed my TOS dating since then in response to Vanguard's assertions, so any precise numbers given in ExM for the time elapsed since specific episodes may no longer be accurate.

Okay; I kind of thought that might be it, since I remembered you mentioning that at one point. If nothing else, the relative span between episodes (0.15 years between Changeling and Bread and Circuses, 0.98 years between Bread and Circuses and FTWIH) still holds up pretty well compared to production codes, so with Bread and Circuses right before Journey to Babel in Mid-November there's at least that.

 

[lawman]

And the fact that multiple stories frame themselves as Kirk's "first" return to the Guardian is no real surprise either, if the author's intent in each case was to avoid requiring readers to be familiar with any stories outside of onscreen TOS.

Except that "Yesteryear" was onscreen too.

Well yes, but TAS wasn't TOS. The book came out in what, 1983? TAS wasn't running in syndication like TOS; it wasn't available on any form of home video (which was itself in its infancy). Gene Roddenberry was on the record as saying he didn't even like it. The only way you'd seen it was if you caught it on Saturday mornings a decade earlier, and otherwise the only way to familiarize yourself with it was to dig up a copy of Bjo Trimble's Concordance (which was out of print) and read about it. Crispin could count on her readers being familiar with TOS, but not TAS.

It's amazing sometimes just how much modern home electronics and especially the internet have changed our lives!...

 

[Christopher]

Well yes, but TAS wasn't TOS. The book came out in what, 1983? TAS wasn't running in syndication like TOS; it wasn't available on any form of home video (which was itself in its infancy). Gene Roddenberry was on the record as saying he didn't even like it. The only way you'd seen it was if you caught it on Saturday mornings a decade earlier, and otherwise the only way to familiarize yourself with it was to dig up a copy of Bjo Trimble's Concordance (which was out of print) and read about it.

That's not true. It was available as syndicated reruns on various local channels, though not as constantly and universally as TOS was. Growing up in the '70s and early '80s, I caught reruns of TAS a number of times in the years after it stopped airing on NBC. You're also forgetting about Alan Dean Foster's Star Trek Logs adapting the animated episodes. Those books were perennially available alongside other Trek novels on bookstores' science fiction shelves, and they were frequently reprinted, with at least two distinct cover editions (the originals had episode clips on the covers, while the later editions had paintings of the Enterprise from various angles against solid-color backgrounds).

Granted, its exposure was intermittent, and not everyone was equally familiar with it or equally inclined to count it. Still, a number of other novels did count it. David Gerrold included Arex and M'Ress in The Galactic Whirlpool from Bantam. Howard Weinstein used choriocytosis from his own "The Pirates of Orion" in his first novel, The Covenant of the Crown. The Vulcan Academy Murders featured a le-matya and other elements from "Yesteryear." It was the inconsistency of it that bugged me back in the day, the way some books acknowledged TAS and others ignored it.

 

[lawman]

You're right, I did forget Foster's novelizations of the TAS episodes. Mea culpa; and quite an oversight considering I read them all as a kid, courtesy of my local library. (Although I don't recall being aware at first that they were adaptations of anything that had been aired.)

Same library where I first found Trimble's Concordance, BTW. A well-stocked collection at that library!

Then again, I didn't say Crispin couldn't have chosen to reference Yesteryear in YS (or at least been consistent with it) had she chosen to. I just said she might reasonably have expected her readers to be less familiar with it than with TOS itself, upon two episodes of which her plot relied.

 

[Christopher]

Then again, I didn't say Crispin couldn't have chosen to reference Yesteryear in YS (or at least been consistent with it) had she chosen to. I just said she might reasonably have expected her readers to be less familiar with it than with TOS itself, upon two episodes of which her plot relied.

That's basically true, but you overstated the case. TAS was less ubiquitously available at the time than TOS was, but it was hardly obscure, and disregarding it was more a matter of choice than necessity.

Although the odd thing about Yesterday's Son is how similar Crispin's character of Doctor Vargas, the cheerful, stocky, gray-haired woman in charge of the archaeologists studying the Guardian, is to Alan Dean Foster's character (in his "Yesteryear" adaptation) of Doctor Vassily, the cheerful, stocky, silver-haired woman in charge of the historians studying the Guardian. It seems it must have been a coincidence, given that Crispin was evidently either unaware of or uninterested in TAS. But back in the '80s, IIRC, I disregarded YS's claims about it being the Enterprise's first return to the Guardian and pretended that Vassily and Vargas were the same person. (Although I didn't have a fix for the Bob Wesley issue; maybe I just assumed he gave up the governorship and returned to Starfleet, though that would've been a very short tenure in office.) Of course, there's no way to reconcile the characters of Vargas and Vassily if you put YS before "Yesteryear," since

Spoiler: Yesterday's Son

Vargas dies.

 

[ryan123450]

Okay; I kind of thought that might be it, since I remembered you mentioning that at one point. If nothing else, the relative span between episodes (0.15 years between Changeling and Bread and Circuses, 0.98 years between Bread and Circuses and FTWIH) still holds up pretty well compared to production codes, so with Bread and Circuses right before Journey to Babel in Mid-November there's at least that.

Wow, those numbers don't line up with anything I've ended up with. I suppose I will simply ignore them entirely since Christopher acknowledges that they don't work under the current dating paradigm. Luckily I don't have to rearrange basically my entire timeline to add those three specific dates to the mix.

Also, it was brought to my attention through an email that Where Sea Meets Sky has Pike claim the date to be October 3rd or 7th, 2266. He is very unsure about converting Stardates to Gregorian dates. I'll have to think about what moving that would mean, since it has to stay several months before The Menagerie. If it doesn't make sense to accept that date, at least there is an easy out for ignoring it, because Pike did a quick stardate to calendar date conversion in his head, and was unsure of the result.

Oddly, that book also claims to be 5 years after Pike left the Enterprise, 1 year or so after Where No Man Has Gone Before, and that the Pike-Kirk refit period was 2 years. That would mean the Kirk commanded the Enterprise for around 4 years before WNMHGB. I seriously have trouble accepting that.

ETA: I think I'll have to assume Pike got the date wrong, and basically just ignore it. It's probably based on the idea that the stardate is just before Charlie-X which the author assumed was set at Thanksgiving. But we already concluded that based on the preponderance of evidence, the Thanksgiving date must be ignored for Charlie-X anyway. There's not really a logical way to accept the stardae, and the October date and still have several months of rumors about Pike's accident before The Menagerie.

 

[Idran]

Also, it was brought to my attention through an email that Where Sea Meets Sky has Pike claim the date to be October 3rd or 7th, 2266. He is very unsure about converting Stardates to Gregorian dates. I'll have to think about what moving that would mean, since it has to stay several months before The Menagerie. If it doesn't make sense to accept that date, at least there is an easy out for ignoring it, because Pike did a quick stardate to calendar date conversion in his head, and was unsure of the result.

Oddly, that book also claims to be 5 years after Pike left the Enterprise, 1 year or so after Where No Man Has Gone Before, and that the Pike-Kirk refit period was 2 years. That would mean the Kirk commanded the Enterprise for around 4 years before WNMHGB. I seriously have trouble accepting that.

ETA: I think I'll have to assume Pike got the date wrong, and basically just ignore it. It's probably based on the idea that the stardate is just before Charlie-X which the author assumed was set at Thanksgiving. But we already concluded that based on the preponderance of evidence, the Thanksgiving date must be ignored for Charlie-X anyway. There's not really a logical way to accept the stardae, and the October date and still have several months of rumors about Pike's accident before The Menagerie.

That also outright contradicts "Burning Dreams", for what it's worth; the 2320 events in "Burning Dreams" are "54 years, 2 months, 16 days" after "Menagerie" according to the last 2320 section, which means "Menagerie" has to be somewhere between October 16, 2265 and October 15, 2266. So there's no way for a date in October 2266 to be several months before "Menagerie" if you accept that datapoint.

Granted that depends on if you include "Burning Dreams", of course; I know there's some question about it conflicting with "One Constant Star" due to showing Sulu in command of the Excelsior in 2320, though some have handwaved that as a second ship or some such. (There's also an in-text contradiction in that earlier in the book in a 2320 section, Spock refers to "Menagerie" as being "52.753 years" earlier, but there's no way to get that to fit so I think it can be ignored.)

 

[Enterprise1701]

Hey, ryan123450, I don't know if you've read The Folded World or The Shocks of Adversity, but they have decent bits of reference info if you're including them in your chronology.

The Folded World begins with Kirk starting but canceling a log entry and then Sulu giving the Gregorian day as August 6 but doesn't give the year. However, one of the characters is a survivor of the "Balance of Terror" incident, which is stated to be "a year ago".

The Shocks of Adversity has Spock reflecting on the events of "Balance of Terror" being 17 months prior.

 

[ryan123450]

Also, it was brought to my attention through an email that Where Sea Meets Sky has Pike claim the date to be October 3rd or 7th, 2266. He is very unsure about converting Stardates to Gregorian dates. I'll have to think about what moving that would mean, since it has to stay several months before The Menagerie. If it doesn't make sense to accept that date, at least there is an easy out for ignoring it, because Pike did a quick stardate to calendar date conversion in his head, and was unsure of the result.

Oddly, that book also claims to be 5 years after Pike left the Enterprise, 1 year or so after Where No Man Has Gone Before, and that the Pike-Kirk refit period was 2 years. That would mean the Kirk commanded the Enterprise for around 2 years before WNMHGB. I seriously have trouble accepting that.

ETA: I think I'll have to assume Pike got the date wrong, and basically just ignore it. It's probably based on the idea that the stardate is just before Charlie-X which the author assumed was set at Thanksgiving. But we already concluded that based on the preponderance of evidence, the Thanksgiving date must be ignored for Charlie-X anyway. There's not really a logical way to accept the stardae, and the October date and still have several months of rumors about Pike's accident before The Menagerie.

That also outright contradicts "Burning Dreams", for what it's worth; the 2320 events in "Burning Dreams" are "54 years, 2 months, 16 days" after "Menagerie" according to the last 2320 section, which means "Menagerie" has to be somewhere between October 16, 2265 and October 15, 2266. So there's no way for a date in October 2266 to be several months before "Menagerie" if you accept that datapoint.

Granted that depends on if you include "Burning Dreams", of course; I know there's some question about it conflicting with "One Constant Star" due to showing Sulu in command of the Excelsior in 2320, though some have handwaved that as a second ship or some such. (There's also an in-text contradiction in that earlier in the book in a 2320 section, Spock refers to "Menagerie" as being "52.753 years" earlier, but there's no way to get that to fit so I think it can be ignored.)

Well, despite the fact that Burning Dreams apparently has some quirks about it, that does give one more peice of evidence in the direction of ignoring WSMS's claim. Thanks.

Hey, ryan123450, I don't know if you've read The Folded World or The Shocks of Adversity, but they have decent bits of reference info if you're including them in your chronology.

The Folded World begins with Kirk starting but canceling a log entry and then Sulu giving the Gregorian day as August 6 but doesn't give the year. However, one of the characters is a survivor of the "Balance of Terror" incident, which is stated to be "a year ago".

The Shocks of Adversity has Spock reflecting on the events of "Balance of Terror" being 17 months prior.

I don't have The Folded World on the list since it has no links to the Litverse, but based on that info it must take place in August 67, since BoT is April 66.

I do have The Shocks of Adversity 17 months after BoT.

 

[ryan123450]

Ok I moved The Entropy Effect to just before The Infinite Vulcan. The other changes you can see below.

January 2270 (Note 1)

• 4x11- The Terratin Incident
• 4x12- The Time Trap
• SCE: Where Time Stands Still (Note 2)
• 4x14- The Slaver Weapon
• 4x15- The Eye of the Beholder

February 2270

• 4x16- The Jihad
• 5x01- The Pirates of Orion
• 5x02- Bem

March 2270

• 5x03- The Practical Joker
• 5x04- Albatross
• 5x06- The Counter-Clock Incident
• Romulans: Schism (Note 3)
• The Abode of Life (OrigLit) (Note 4)

April 2270

• Corona (OrigLit)
• Mindshadow (OrigLit)
• Demons (OrigLit)

May 2270

• Chain of Attack (OrigLit)
• Bloodthirst (OrigLit)
• The Final Nexus (OrigLit)
• Yesterday's Son (OrigLit) (Note 5)

June 2270 (Note 6)

• 4x13- The Ambergris Element (Note 7)

July 2270

• 5x05- How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth (Note 7)

August 2270

• Allegiance in Exile (Note 8)
• None But the Brave (Note 9)
• Crossroad (Note 10)

September 2270

• The Eugenics Wars, Volume One (Note 9)
• The Eugenics Wars, Volume Two (Note 9)
• The Rings of Time (Note 11)
• No Time Like the Past (Note 12)
• Savage Trade (Note 13)

October 2270

• Dreadnaught! (OrigLit)
• Battlestations! (OrigLit)
• Where Everybody Knows Your Name (Note 14)

November 2270 (Note 15)

• (Forgotten History)
• The Lost Years (OrigLit)

1. Still spacing evenly from the last solid date (Yesteryear October 2269). For this I did count all the stories from both continuities, because to only count from the modern Litverse would have ended up spreading things thinner, which would have had TAS take up alot more time. (Ending in mid-March vs late-May). TAS ends up taking right at six months, which seems fitting for 22 half hour episodes.
2. Takes place soon after The Time Trap.
3. Claims to be "Season Five" era, so that means post-TAS to me. Also doesn't seem like too much time has past since The Enterprise Incident, so I put it directly after TAS.
4. I basically started with the Voyages of Imagination timeline and moved some things around and added here and there for the rest of the timeline. I had just enough space to fit in this stretch of the Original Litverse books before Yesterday's Son had to take place.
5. Yesterday's Son had to take place before July 22 according to Forgotten History's statement about the Guardian.
6. Allegiance in Exile has the seventh and eighth months of the last year of the 5YM mission be without Sulu. Those months would be June and July under this timeline. So we have a two month gap where most of these stories can't take place. I did find two stories which could conceivably be moved to this time period.
7. No Sulu in either of these episodes.
8. Allegiance in Exile starts on the first day of the 5th year of the 5YM and ends about 8 months later.
9. I basically did end up just randomly assigning a few stories to places in the timeline. I basically put the things without specific timing clues in order by release date as places for them came along.
10. Takes place 3 months before the end of the 5YM.
11. Set toward the end of the 5YM.
12. 2270, and after Yesterday's Son.
13. Set two years after The Savage Curtain. I put this in the latest time slot possible, and fudge the 2 years to 18 months.
14. Set very very late in the 5YM. I left it right at the end where it was in Voyages of the Imagination.
15. I left this entire month available for any-and-all final mission stories that anybody would want to accept, especially the official modern Lit-verse version in Forgotten History.

 

[ryan123450]

An email correspondence I've been having with a follower of this thread has yielded a few more data points. In the first section of Allegiance in Exile, which takes place according to this chronology in Dec 2269, there is reference to Commodore Wesley having recently returned to command of the Lexington after a period of being governor. So One of Our Planets is Missing must take place at least some time before Dec 2269, which according to what I have, it does (about 6-8 weeks before).

Also reference is made to the events of The Time Trap having occurred not too long before. So I had to move The Time Trap backwards from where I had it in Jan 2270. Instead of cramming at least the first 12 episodes of TAS into the span of October and November '69, I just moved The Time Trap out of order. I ended up placing it about a month before Allegiance in Exile.

One final question I've been thinking about. Christopher, am I remembering right that the dates you have in Forgotten History are after you rearranged things due to Vanguard? Because if I am going to ignore the dates in Ex Machina because they don't line up, I wanted to make sure you don't now consider the Forgotten History dates to be in error as well.

I am going to put the final version of this timeline on my site this afternoon, so I'll come back and put a link to it once it is up.

 

[Christopher]

One final question I've been thinking about. Christopher, am I remembering right that the dates you have in Forgotten History are after you rearranged things due to Vanguard? Because if I am going to ignore the dates in Ex Machina because they don't line up, I wanted to make sure you don't now consider the Forgotten History dates to be in error as well.

I think so, yeah.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

I am going to put the final version of this timeline on my site this afternoon, so I'll come back and put a link to it once it is up.

I'm sure I'll find that extremely useful for my purposes, since my TOS/TAS rereading/rewatching order is still a very shaky work-in-progress.

You - and others in this thread - do all the hard work and I come to profit from the result.

 

[ryan123450]

I think so, yeah.

Ok, thanks!

I am going to put the final version of this timeline on my site this afternoon, so I'll come back and put a link to it once it is up.

I'm sure I'll find that extremely useful for my purposes, since my TOS/TAS rereading/rewatching order is still a very shaky work-in-progress.

You - and others in this thread - do all the hard work and I come to profit from the result.

Glad it will help! You're thread is a fun and impressive undertaking. If you ever see anything that doesn't seem right or find anything to add, let me know.

Here's the new page with the full results of this thread in their (at least for now) final form. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped make this happen! At some point I will post my thoughts on the movie era, so there's still that to discuss as well.

http://startreklitverse.yolasite.com/the-five-year-mission--month-by-month.php

 

[ATimson]

Also, it was brought to my attention through an email that Where Sea Meets Sky has Pike claim the date to be October 3rd or 7th, 2266. He is very unsure about converting Stardates to Gregorian dates. I'll have to think about what moving that would mean, since it has to stay several months before The Menagerie. If it doesn't make sense to accept that date, at least there is an easy out for ignoring it, because Pike did a quick stardate to calendar date conversion in his head, and was unsure of the result.

Oddly, that book also claims to be 5 years after Pike left the Enterprise, 1 year or so after Where No Man Has Gone Before, and that the Pike-Kirk refit period was 2 years. That would mean the Kirk commanded the Enterprise for around 4 years before WNMHGB. I seriously have trouble accepting that.

I don't agree with your math.

2266 - 1 year = WNMHGB in 2265
2266 - 5 years = Pike left in 2261
2261 + 2 years refit = Kirk took command in 2263

Leaves Kirk in command 2 years before WNMHGB, not 4 years. Still seems a bit long, but not as long.

Agree that October 2266 for the book is probably wrong, though.

 

[Idran]

For what it's worth, Vanguard has it in the same spot. That is, the Historian's Note for Harbinger says it "begins in early 2263, shortly before the promotion of James T. Kirk to captain of the Enterprise". Burning Dreams goes with around that too.

 

[Christopher]

A lot of these references may go back to Kirk's biography in The Making of Star Trek, which said that as of the second season (when Kirk was 34 as per "The Deadly Years"), he had been captain of the ship for more than four years. Which would seem to put it in 2263-4 by modern dating. Although TMoST's bios are not canonically binding (as evidenced by the fact that TWOK gave Scotty a nephew despite TMoST calling him an only child).

 

[ryan123450]

Also, it was brought to my attention through an email that Where Sea Meets Sky has Pike claim the date to be October 3rd or 7th, 2266. He is very unsure about converting Stardates to Gregorian dates. I'll have to think about what moving that would mean, since it has to stay several months before The Menagerie. If it doesn't make sense to accept that date, at least there is an easy out for ignoring it, because Pike did a quick stardate to calendar date conversion in his head, and was unsure of the result.

Oddly, that book also claims to be 5 years after Pike left the Enterprise, 1 year or so after Where No Man Has Gone Before, and that the Pike-Kirk refit period was 2 years. That would mean the Kirk commanded the Enterprise for around 4 years before WNMHGB. I seriously have trouble accepting that.

I don't agree with your math.

2266 - 1 year = WNMHGB in 2265
2266 - 5 years = Pike left in 2261
2261 + 2 years refit = Kirk took command in 2263

Leaves Kirk in command 2 years before WNMHGB, not 4 years. Still seems a bit long, but not as long.

Agree that October 2266 for the book is probably wrong, though.

Yes, I noticed my typo but it was too late to edit the post once I went back to fix it.

For what it's worth, Vanguard has it in the same spot. That is, the Historian's Note for Harbinger says it "begins in early 2263, shortly before the promotion of James T. Kirk to captain of the Enterprise". Burning Dreams goes with around that too.

Well, I might interpret that "shortly before" as meaning a year or two. "Shortly before" in the grand sweep of Trek history. I just can't wrap my head around Kirk commanding the ship more than around 6 months before the official start of the 5YM. In TMP he says he spent "five years out there", so I interpret that to mean that he commanded a starship for five years, not seven.