To an extent, but there are far fewer short-fiction magazines now than there used to be.
A serious question...
- Thread starter Emissary of the Prophets
- Start date
To an extent, but there are far fewer short-fiction magazines now than there used to be.
Any time a new TOS novel comes out, William Shatner's Agent buys a million units, just to keep Bill out of a bell tower with his rifle, for one more day.
Someone should do a timeline of every TOS novel, comic, video game, with day for day placements (doing '24' Jack Bauer style cramming where necessary) ever made for the past 60 years (yes I'm including Gold Key comics in this count even) alongside TOS and TAS. (Contradictions can be handwaved with Q showing up for a mindwipe every time the crew goes on their "final" mission of the 5 years) I have a feeling that it'll all come out to a LOT more than what you can fit into 5 years
IIRC, back in the eighties, it was a common fanon idea that, after the five year mission of TOS, there was a second one, that fans used to account for the real life aging of the actors come TMP. Then official canon, come TNG and on, settled on there only being about eighteen months between TOS's five year mission and TMP, which ultimately threw a lot of the "second five year mission" stories back into the TOS time frame, only adding to that potential headache.
Basically, the idea of actually making that kind of timeline is basically asking for someone to go mad in the attempt.
I always assumed that the "second five-year mission" came between TMP and TWOK.
And as for short stories, well, if you don't give a damn about getting any revenue for it, you can always put it up on your web site. Which I've only done for the one "free sample" short story. (Note that the "free sample" is not ST, and not even science fiction, that I've put nothing in this thread itself that can be construed as a "story idea" (unless giving away a free sample is itself a story idea), and that it's already a published opus, and not just by being on my web site; it's also in the PIPORG-L archives, and in at least one AGO Chapter Newsletter.
And as for short stories, well, if you don't give a damn about getting any revenue for it, you can always put it up on your web site. Which I've only done for the one "free sample" short story. (Note that the "free sample" is not ST, and not even science fiction, that I've put nothing in this thread itself that can be construed as a "story idea" (unless giving away a free sample is itself a story idea), and that it's already a published opus, and not just by being on my web site; it's also in the PIPORG-L archives, and in at least one AGO Chapter Newsletter.
Last edited:
This should actually be the setting for any Paul Wesley led SNW sequel show, not the Year One that the SNW showrunners keep tossing around, to be honest. It's just wide open room after TMP for stories to go wild I think.
I'd second that. Except that there's a <we don't have that emoji>-load of novels also set in that period. So it's not quite wide open.
Well, not really. It was TMP itself that had Kirk mention "my five years out there," not ten, followed by two and a half years as Chief of Starfleet Operations. So the fan notion of a second pre-TMP mission was revisionist to begin with.
The 18-month figure also comes from TMP, mentioned by Scotty as the duration of the Enterprise's refit (which means the refit didn't begin until Kirk had been an admiral for a year). Official TNG-era canon never addressed the issue; the Star Trek Chronology claimed that the 5YM ended in 2269 and TMP was in 2271, but despite the assumptions of fans who skipped the introduction, the Chronology explicitly stated that it was not official canon, that its conjectures beyond canon were nothing but conjectures to be taken with a grain of salt. As was proven when First Contact put the first warp flight in 2063 after the first edition of the STC had put it in 2061, and when Voyager: "Q2" canonically established 2270 as the end date of the 5YM. Which means TMP can't take place earlier than late 2272 given Kirk's 2.5 years as an admiral, more likely 2273, which is the generally accepted date today.
Yes, there's often assumed to be a 5-year mission after TMP, but that's distinct from the second pre-TMP mission that some fans and novelists conjectured because they assumed the in-story interval between series and movie corresponded to the real-world interval.
I've put up a number of my unpublished stories on my Patreon, for a low subscription price (and they recently started allowing them to be purchased individually), but I have very few subscribers and haven't made much money that way. Still, every little bit helps.
Proportionally, the quantity of TOS novels set post-TMP is actually quite small; there are vastly more set during the 5-year mission. Also, of course, none of the novels are canonical, so yes, the post-TMP period is entirely wide open as far as canon is concerned.
Similar threads
- Poll
