Well, if we can't have more books per year, at least the ones we get can be long. I remember when I'd read Trek as a kid and books were like 250 pages or less. I much prefer the typical length of today's books.
Announcing STAR TREK: DTI and other CLB news
- Thread starter Christopher
- Start date
I don't know if you'd care to reveal anything about the content, Christopher, but did your background reading include DS9's Millennium Trilogy? It included a great deal of temporal musings.
Yes, and Millennium contains some of the most solid temporal physics discussions in all Trek lit. I tried to keep my model of temporal physics in DTI essentially consistent with what they established, as much as I could. And there are references to a few other time-related Trek novels as well, though some are merely passing nods.
which was also followed in First Contact, Trials and Tribble-ations and in TVH (well, ish, in FC, it's implied they're using the same method by the VFX at any rate)
Which wasn't really honored in the first time-travel episode, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," since they were thrown back by a slingshot around a "black star" but returned by a slingshot around the Sun. Same technique, but not the same actual "Feynman curve," as Millennium put it. It was also violated in ENT: "Shockwave"; Archer was brought forward by a device operated by Daniels, but that device was erased when the timeline shifted and they had to build a different device to let Archer connect to the Suliban's temporal communicator and use it as a pathway back. So it's evidently not an absolute rule.
Excellent.
Sounds like a novel to look forward to. I'm particularly interested in the humorless agents' personality development.
^To be fair, the early description doesn't explicitly say the whole story is focused on the TCW, it just doesn't mention any other aspects of the story.
I think it's safe to say that DTI:WTC touches at least briefly on essentially every Trek time-travel story ever told onscreen and several told in prose. Sometimes that's just a passing reference, but sometimes it's considerably more. But WTC is not about only one thing. The DTI is an organization with multiple responsibilities, and the book explores the whole range of them.
I think it's safe to say that DTI:WTC touches at least briefly on essentially every Trek time-travel story ever told onscreen and several told in prose. Sometimes that's just a passing reference, but sometimes it's considerably more. But WTC is not about only one thing. The DTI is an organization with multiple responsibilities, and the book explores the whole range of them.
I approached this as a detective procedural. A DTI agent's job is to investigate temporal incidents. As with criminal investigations in procedural fiction, that's basically a reactive profession, dealing with events after they occur, but often with an eye toward preempting further harmful events in the future. And of course, in procedural fiction, there can be cases where the investigators find themselves drawn into an ongoing crisis.
ProtoAvatar
Fleet Captain
Wouldn't the causality-breaking nature of time travel pevent the profession from being 'reactive'?
If the investigator limits itself only to reacting, not using time travel himself, while the perpetrator can jump back in time, refining its actions, then the investigator will never catch a perpetrator armed with such a powerful tool.
If the investigator limits itself only to reacting, not using time travel himself, while the perpetrator can jump back in time, refining its actions, then the investigator will never catch a perpetrator armed with such a powerful tool.
Nobody ever said the job was easy. And yes, it can often seem like a losing battle, for that and many other reasons. That's a theme that shows up in the book as early as page 5. Does the DTI really accomplish anything or are they just bureaucrats struggling to gain some illusion of control? And how do its members cope with that existential doubt and keep doing their jobs?
And will it be awesome again?
