I was wondering this, because there is still a lot of disagreement on things as basic as how big the new Enterprise is (~300m+ vs. ~700m+). There is even disagreement amongst fans on things like whether Spock Prime was the original Spock or not. While its easy to just ignore things that don't make sense, it could impact internal consistency a lot - did JJA and Co. provide a 'bible' for the new setting, or something?
As always, it's the job of the studio licensing department to ensure that Trek novels are kept consistent with screen canon. Bad Robot also has approval over the Abramsverse books and comic tie-ins. In my case, I've based
Seek a Newer World on what I saw in the film and read in articles and interviews, and I expect that if the folks at Bad Robot feel I got something wrong, they'll ask for it to be changed.
As for the size of the new
Enterprise, though it does reportedly vary from shot to shot, the official word from the filmmakers and ILM is that it's somewhere around 2000 feet, comparable in size to the
Enterprise-D. There are inconsistent reports as to the exact figure, but all I need to say in the book is that it's a very big ship, since the exact figure is irrelevant to the storytelling.
I'm not sure what your question has to do with the thread title, though, because nothing you're asking is about future films. As for those, it's impossible to know what they'll hold. Even the filmmakers themselves haven't yet decided what story they're going to tell, and it's a foolish writer who tries to lock everything down in advance. Even if they thought they knew such-and-such a thing about the state of the Abramsverse and wrote it down in a "bible," they might decide a year from now that they have a better idea that requires contradicting that. If you look at the original series bible for just about any TV series, you'll find that much of it ends up getting ignored or contradicted later on. For instance, according to the original TNG bible, Data was built by mysterious aliens, "Bill" Riker was prejudiced against Data, Geordi was the liaison with the ship's children, and Worf didn't even exist.
So the risk of contradiction is just an occupational hazard. Heck, we're writing science fiction. Sooner or later, every SF story ever written is going to be contradicted, whether by new scientific knowledge or just by the calendar catching up to it. So you can't worry too much about that -- just tell the best story you can based on what you know now.
The most we can do is try to minimize the risk of contradiction by avoiding stories that are likely to be contradicted. To cite an obvious example, we wouldn't pitch a story where McCoy got killed, because that would surely be contradicted by the next movie. Nor would we do a story with something really huge happening like peace breaking out with the Klingons. Just in general, the goal is to tell stories that don't alter the status quo.
I guess a more specific question is, will you treat the new setting as a blank slate, or heavily reference continuity from the old setting?
The new movie has created a whole new audience of Trek fans, people who weren't fans of the franchise already. The expectation and hope is that a lot of those people will be curious enough to pick up the Abramsverse books once they hit the shelves. So these books are designed to be accessible to people who know
Star Trek only from the movie, or who have only a casual familiarity with the Prime universe. They won't be exercises in continuity porn or extended apologias for the film's interpretation of the Trek universe. They're standalone adventure stories building on the continuity of the film -- just as if they were tie-ins for an original movie.
That said, the working assumption is that, as the film assumed, this is an alternate temporal branch of the same reality, and that everything before the attack on the
Kelvin was the same in both universes. So there are some acknowledgments of that shared background in my manuscript -- no lengthy diatribes on "Here is why this looks different than it did before," but simply casual acknowledgments of things that exist in the Trek we know, like Andorians, Klingons, and the like. Maybe the occasional passing reference to a familiar name, like how the movie had McCoy speaking to an off-camera Nurse Chapel, or how it had nameplates for Admiral Komack and Captain Chandra at Kirk's Academy hearing.
At least, that's my approach. This is part of the same multiverse, but the storytelling doesn't dwell on that fact, it just tells self-contained stories in the spirit and continuity of the film. My depiction of the characters and their world is based principally on the film, but implicitly informed by the rest of Trek canon. (For instance, I mention at one point in my book that Sulu likes botany, something that didn't come up in the film but is something we know about him from the Prime universe. But it's a passing detail, not an exercise in comparative continuity.)
For example, life in the Federation looks radically different in the new movie - with Star Wars-style mega-structures dotting the skyline of Earth, etc - it looks more like something out of Iain M Banks 'Culture' novels - so referencing a planet from TOS having the same settlements and lifestyle in the new setting, could go against what 'the powers that be' have in mind for the re-imagined setting.
How do you know it's different? When have we ever seen 2250s Earth in prior Trek canon? How do you know there weren't massive arcologies in the middle of Iowa in the Prime universe?
Besides, you can't take visual interpretations too literally in a work of fiction. It's hardly the first time geography has changed. Here's Ex Astris Scientia on all the various inconsistent depictions of Vulcan and other major planets over the decades:
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/planet_mutations.htm
It's just poetic license. The various Trek productions have been made by different directors, different producers, different production designers. They bring their own sensibilities to what they create. It's not inconsistent reality, just variant artistic interpretations of something that's imaginary anyway. (Kind of like how different artists working on, say,
Spider-Man comics may have radically different ways of drawing the characters even though they're supposed to be the same people in the same continuity.)
