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
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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.
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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.
The Simpsons has also all happened during the same year. How many birthdays has Maggie had?
This really shocks me, I would think there be a lot of appeal to shorter stories that can be read in just a few short sittings. I know that anthologies are around the same length as a novel, but it's a lot easier to read one or two short stories in anthology and stop, than stopping in the middle of a full length novel.
I'm not sure that would work quite the way Year One is meant, I think the idea behind that is that they can just keep going from where Strange New Worlds ends. And the idea of jumping back and forth between the SNW cast, The Original Series cast, then back to the SNW cast, then back to the TOS cast again, would really mess with my head. At least with Year One, we'd pretty much a continual flow of the SNW cast into the TOS cast.
Believe it or not, we used to get angry letters from readers who picked up a short-story collection by mistake -- and demanded their money back because it wasn't a novel.
Never mind that the cover copy said something like "15 amazing journeys into the unknown by a master storyteller!" or even "These and many other unforgettable short stories . . . ."
I swear, some readers seemed to want warning labels on the books just so they wouldn't carelessly pick up a collection or anthology by mistake:
"Beware: NOT a novel. Short stories only!"
(For what it's worth, I enjoy anthologies as well. Among other things, they're perfect for bedtime reading. You can read a story or two before nodding off, without having to worry about staying up too late to find out what happens next!)
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I do kind of wish the canon had gone with that idea too, to make the time between the end of the series and the first movie more like the actual time span IRL. The characters look like they've aged more than 4 years between "Turnabout Intruder" and TMP. Not to mention it would work much better to fit in those novels that seemed to take place 7-8 years after a specific TOS event, but was still apparently set pre-TMP.
It's not like Star Trek has never ignored a single throw-away line before. This one can even be rationalized: Starfleet slang refers to their tours by mission duration. So a five-year mission is a "five-year". Kirk had two such missions before TMP, so his line was "my [two] five-years out there", meaning he had multiple tours with a five-year duration.
Yes, it's a little stretch, but it seems less than the contortion they twisted the language into with how SNW chose to interpret/justify Kirk's response to "You ever met Chris Pike?".
I know that the people making the shows/movies don't care about fitting the books in; I just think it would have been nice if it had worked out that way.
Honestly, I never really saw that much age difference, except in Nimoy. To my eyes, they seemed to age more between TMP & TWOK than between TOS & TMP. (I guess because the TMP makeup artists were trying to downplay their age while TWOK embraced it.)
And for what it's worth, the character designs in TAS were based on what the actors looked like c. 1973 (compare Shatner's "hair"style in his contemporary live-action appearances), so if we date from there, it works better.
Which were all written and published after TMP, so it would not have been a consideration to the people who wrote TMP.
I'm not talking about rationalizations, I'm talking about objective facts and chronology. I was responding to the assertion that the idea of a short passage of time between TOS & TMP was never introduced until the TNG era. That is factually incorrect, because it was introduced in TMP's own dialogue in 1979.
Some people around here seem to assume that the idea of a second pre-TMP 5-year mission was widespread or dominant back in the day, but that is a misapprehension. I was there at the time, and in my experience it was a minority view, only vaguely hinted at in a handful of books. The default assumption from 1979 onward, well before the TNG era, was that there was only one 5-year mission before TMP.
For instance, the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology puts "The Cage" in 2196, which would put "The Menagerie" 13 years later in 2209. It puts TMP in 2215 and claims that the Enterprise completed only 3 years of its last 5-year mission, which would have to be the 3 years of TOS given the dating, implicitly 2209-12. (I guess the Goldsteins were not TAS fans.) By contrast, the fan chronology in The Best of Trek #6 uses the SFC chrono as its baseline but makes some changes, dating the 5-year mission as 2207-12, with TOS encompassing 2207-10, TAS 2210-11, and TMP still in 2215. Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, oddly, keeps the 2212 date for the end of the 5YM but has the refit take 5 years, with TMP in 2217.
The SFC chronology was one of two competing TOS dating schemes before TNG locked down the chronology. The other was the one favored by Geoffrey Mandel & Doug Drexler in works like the USS Enterprise Officer's Manual, which put the 5-year mission in 2260-65 and stated that Kirk was promoted to Chief of Operations right afterward. So even though there were two competing schemes, they both agreed that Kirk was promoted to admiral right after the TOS 5YM ended.
This is just the nature of series fiction. How many years have Archie and Co. been in high school? How many mysteries did Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys solve in their teens? How many elaborate "perfect murders" would Columbo really encounter in his career? How many high-profile murder cases, featuring innocent people unjustly accused of homicide, did Perry Mason win?
Etc.
How many murders can one small town have, and how many times can the same amateur sleuths solve them before they get recruited by law enforcement and the world takes notice?
How many
I always found it interesting that the characters in Peanuts did, in fact, age, but only very gradually. Charlie Brown was around three when the strip started in 1950, maybe nine by the 1990s. Schroeder and Lucy started out as toddlers but got aged up and treated as contemporaries of Charlie Brown, and Linus started as a baby who also aged rapidly compared to the others, and eventually Linus gained a baby brother Rerun. And yet despite Charlie Brown aging no more than two years per decade of the strip, the characters still went through an annual cycle of the seasons, school years and vacations, Thanksgivings and Christmases, etc. in real time.
Arthur explains their 2 1/2 decades of childhood, I believe, by suggesting every summer episode took place in the same summer, etc.
I'll add that by comparison, the lack of promotions in ST seem hardly noticeable.
Plus the aesthetics are so much fun!
As an obsessive timeliner, I can genuinely say *do not try it*. That way lays madness. The Maquis tangle alone is paradox enough to drive a man mad; trying to reconcile the timelines to TNG, DS9, and VOY is an exercise in futility- even Voyager, internally, contradicts itself (there ain't no way Kes is 3 years, 2 months old in Before and After when at least 6 months of episodes have passed since she was said to already be 3...)
Trek does great, as a franchise, with some things. Trying to incorporate real-world science, for instance!
Thinking through their fictional timelines is not one of those strengths. In any era.
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