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A thread about older novels and continuity (that lacks a good name)

His [Sulu's] lover was Lt. Commander Mandala Flynn, the Enterprise's security chief. By McIntyre's movie novelizations, she'd become captain of the Magellanic Clouds, an extragalactic explorer.

The movie novelizations give the impression that the Magellanic Cloud is a new ship class with new capabilities, and that Flynn is a new captain, like Sulu. I noticed that the Magellan and Flynn are reference in Dreadnought! as well, but that books seems like it's set during the 5-year mission. Kind of curious.
 
The movie novelizations give the impression that the Magellanic Cloud is a new ship class with new capabilities, and that Flynn is a new captain, like Sulu. I noticed that the Magellan and Flynn are reference in Dreadnought! as well, but that books seems like it's set during the 5-year mission. Kind of curious.

Dreadnought! is definitely set during the 5-year mission; The Lost Years, which shows the end of the 5YM, refers to the events of Dreadnought! as fairly recent. Diane Carey must've simply misremembered the chronology of Flynn's promotion in McIntyre's books.
 
My instincts told me there was something of a curiousity there, but I wasn't sure. It's not off-putting, it's part of the charm of reading through the 80's novel continuity, although I almost want to put the word continuity in quotation marks. For me, it would be more accurate to say the charm is seeing authors draw inspiration from TOS and each other's story ideas, characters and situations, pre-TNG. I'm not looking at it from the standpoint that Diane Carey got the details wrong, it's more like it's fun to see those elements drawn from Vonda McIntyre's work and acknowledged, and yet they are flexible in where they are in place and time. The impression of continuity, without being concrete continuity. Narrative malleability.
 
My instincts told me there was something of a curiousity there, but I wasn't sure. It's not off-putting, it's part of the charm of reading through the 80's novel continuity, although I almost want to put the word continuity in quotation marks.

Yeah, the continuity was very loose back then. Mostly novelists would just keep continuity with their own earlier works, and sometimes pay homage to another book they'd liked, but it was scattershot, and the references weren't always consistent.
 
I'm not sure about Kahless.
Personally, I'm skeptical of its claim that the person cloned in "Rightful Heir" was actually an ally of Kahless rather than Kahless himself, since "Heir" showed us a portrait of the original Kahless, and he looked like the clone. But maybe that could be rationalized if you wanted.

Caveat: I could be completely misremembering Kahless. That said,
wasn't it Kahless's brother Morath that was the clone? If so, that could explain the resemblance.

No -- The Entropy Effect's felinoid character "Snarl" (too lazy to check the spelling of her full name) is referenced a number of times in Uhura's Song, since it's a book about a disease affecting a felinoid species.

Is "Snarl" the same character as, um, Snanagfashtalli (sp? I just winged it... :lol:) That was a felinoid character too, IIRC, but I thought they abbreviated it as "Fashtall" or something?

Did they ever give a species name for that species?

And I'd love to see Captain Hunter make an appearance or three in modern TrekLit!
 
Caveat: I could be completely misremembering Kahless. That said,
wasn't it Kahless's brother Morath that was the clone? If so, that could explain the resemblance.

I'm not sure if that was the guy, but in the novel,
Morath isn't actually Kahless's brother, just a friend.


Is "Snarl" the same character as, um, Snanagfashtalli (sp? I just winged it... :lol:) That was a felinoid character too, IIRC, but I thought they abbreviated it as "Fashtall" or something?

"Everyone called her Snarl, but never to her face." (The Entropy Effect, p. 50.) Mostly they called her Snnanagfashtalli (you almost spelled it right), but I do recall "Fashtall" being used on occasion -- I guess that's the more polite nickname.

Did they ever give a species name for that species?

Apparently not.
 
Kahless was really fun. I loved to see ancient periods on alien cultures. I read it straight before delving into KRAD's Klingon Empire series. It is not outright contradicted but there were many situations where the truth about Kahless, son of Kahless, should've been a point. Maybe the myth is so entrenched in Klingon thought that they employ double-think when dealing with Kahless II.
 
Wasn't there a Gorn crewmember in some novel, also? Maybe Diane Carey referenced one in the Lt. Piper books?
 
Caveat: I could be completely misremembering Kahless. That said,
wasn't it Kahless's brother Morath that was the clone? If so, that could explain the resemblance.
Not his biological brother, just a really close friend who history/mythology recorded as being his brother.
 
Just to be clear, my assessments are only about continuity, not whether the books are worth reading. All the books discussed here range from interesting to really good. So I wouldn't advocate "ignoring" any of them in the sense of not reading them. I may have a small issue with the credibility of Kahless's premise, but I liked the idea behind the story being told -- it had sort of a thematic similarity to Monty Python's Life of Brian, in a way.

Honestly, my biggest problem with Kahless is that it jumped back and forth between the present and past stories far too frequently, alternating them with an average of less than 8 pages per chapter. It was disorienting and didn't seem necessary, since the stories barely interrelated. It would've been better to have fewer, longer chapters, like in Spock's World. I'm inclined to recommend reading the two storylines separately -- maybe starting with the 24th-century one, since the past storyline is stronger.
Honestly, I was bit bemused when people started talking about how I had "restored" the Yesterday Saga to the "modern continuity." I wasn't aware that it had ever gone missing, or that there was an official list somewhere of what books we could or couldn't reference anymore. :)
After thinking about it for a few days (and quite honestly kinda forgetting about this thread) I decided to read Greg Cox' Q Continuum trilogy, Voyager: The Escape and First Frontier. Next I'll read Kahless, in the order that you suggested and then precede with the 80s continuity and the Rihannsu novels (plus No Time Like the Past :D ) in the order from ryans website.
 
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