Curious how well the Discovery novels tie in with what's been canonically depicted onscreen!

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Of course, in-universe, the Enterprise was, by the end of Kirk's first 5-year mission, several decades old (how many decades depends on how much time had passed between Robert April taking command out of the shipyard, and Christopher Pike going to Talos IV). There are only so many technology refreshes that can be done out in the field.

Of course Roddenberry, Coon, Justman, Solow, Jeffries, et al. didn't set out to make TOS look like it was done in the 1960s; that was a natural consequence of the fact that it was done in the 1960s. Just as the fact that TMP looked like it had been done at the end of the 1970s because it was done at the end of the 1970s.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

. . . close enough that we're willing to suspend disbelief and play along.

Tolkien despised the phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief" (preferring what he called "literary belief," or "secondary belief") and I tend to agree with him.
From his essay, "On Fairy Stories":

. . . That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief.” But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. . . .

 

[Christopher]

Tolkien despised the phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief" (preferring what he called "literary belief," or "secondary belief") and I tend to agree with him.
From his essay, "On Fairy Stories":

I think that quote is entirely compatible with what I'm saying. The reader or viewer is not merely a passive absorber, but a co-creator. Some people get furious at any flaw or imperfection in the illusion, demanding that the creators convince them utterly or else it's a failure. But it's really an interactive process, with the audience doing some of the work too. When we read a book or listen to a radio play, we create the whole visual world in our minds. When we watch live theater, we imagine the various places that the stage is meant to represent. So when we watch TV or movies that have imperfect effects or that recast actors or that redesign things, then we can look past the unreality in the same way, choosing to make our own effort to fill in the gaps. We don't have to do as much of the work ourselves as we do when reading prose or watching theater, but we still have the capability to do it when it's called for.

 

[fireproof78]

Tolkien despised the phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief" (preferring what he called "literary belief," or "secondary belief") and I tend to agree with him.
From his essay, "On Fairy Stories":

I have always loved Tolkien and his perspective on telling stories. I think he is on to something in terms of that willingness to enter in to a world and participate in it. Which is probably why worlds like Star Trek and Star Wars persist long after their original creators thought it would persist. Reminds me of an article that discussed Tolkien's legacy and how he appeared at a film premiere with an actress and yet few would remember the actress now, but still remember Tolkien.

I think Star Trek, as a world, has had that effect, owing as much to the books as the shows themselves because it engages the imagination and the audience participates in the world building. And I think that's where I find Star Trek still engaging. I don't need the production team to explain everything or fill in all the gaps. The point of the world is to engage the imagination, not tell a complete history.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Though it's funny, the explanation given in ENT, was a combination of the two theories O'Brien and Bashir threw out in that episode. Generic manipulation and a viral mutation. I wonder if that was just a coincidence.

I akways thought it was done on purpose.

Fans have long debated whether the difference was due to genetics or viruses (long before "Trials and Tribble-ations"); so ENT just decided to combine the two.

 

[Tuskin38]

Of course, in-universe, the Enterprise was, by the end of Kirk's first 5-year mission, several decades old (how many decades depends on how much time had passed between Robert April taking command out of the shipyard, and Christopher Pike going to Talos IV). There are only so many technology refreshes that can be done out in the field.

The long speculated (and literary canon) launch date of the Enterprise being 2245 is canon now thanks to Discovery (if you take computer screen graphics as canon).

So the Enterprise would be around 25 years old at the end of Kirk's 5 year mission.

 

[Damian]

The long speculated (and literary canon) launch date of the Enterprise being 2245 is canon now thanks to Discovery (if you take computer screen graphics as canon).

So the Enterprise would be around 25 years old at the end of Kirk's 5 year mission.

Where did 2245 originally come from. I know it was mentioned in the occasional novel but was it also one of those things from Enterprise: "In A Mirror, Darkly" that was featured on the unseen screen shot (the same one that noted Archer lived long enough to see the Enterprise from the original series launched). Did it ever come up before that in a novel or quote?

 

[Tuskin38]

Where did 2245 originally come from. I know it was mentioned in the occasional novel but was it also one of those things from Enterprise: "In A Mirror, Darkly" that was featured on the unseen screen shot (the same one that noted Archer lived long enough to see the Enterprise from the original series launched). Did it ever come up before that in a novel or quote?

Earliest reference I can find on Memory-Alpha at least, is a making of book from 1977
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Making_of_Star_Trek

Prior to the Enterprise's launch date of 2245 eventually being made canon in the DIS episode "Brother", multiple production sources, including an unseen display screen intended for use in ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II", the Star Trek Encyclopedia (? ed., p. ?), and The Making of Star Trek, gave the same launch date.

According to a computer display that was created by production staff of Star Trek: Enterprise but never used on screen, Jonathan Archer was present at the Enterprise's launch and died the next day. This information remains non-canon, because it was never photographed on film.

 

[Damian]

Earliest reference I can find on Memory-Alpha at least, is a making of book from 1977
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Making_of_Star_Trek

Actually that book was originally from 1968 (I was lucky enough to snag a first printing of that). I don't remember that little tidbit though, unless it was in a later edition (I guess a 1977 edition).

 

[Tuskin38]

Ah so you're right I missed that. It could also be the 1991 reprint.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I think that quote is entirely compatible with what I'm saying.

And I was only bringing it up in response to your choice of phrase (and I freely admit that the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" is, despite Tolkien's objection to it, so common as to be downright banal). As it happens, Tolkien's objection comes to mind whenever I see or hear that phrase anywhere, from anybody (including whenever it came up in writing classes I've taken).

And my copy of The Making of Star Trek is so old, I've had to reinforce the cover, and yet I cannot recall ever seeing any specific Enterprise launch date being mentioned.

A 2045 launch date would also require that Robert April's command was rather short, in order to account for canonical lines in "The Menagerie," but then again, as I recall, Diane Carey herself suggested that (1) April took the ship out unfinished, under a skeleton crew, on a classified mission, and (2) knew he wasn't suited for command of an extended mission.

 

[Damian]

Ah so you're right I missed that. It could also be the 1991 reprint.

The first edition was a bit ambiguous about dates, though I do remember it noted Star Trek took place in the late 23rd century, one of the few things from the 60s that gave any indication when it took place. The series was pretty ambiguous, though here and there you would get a hint ("Miri" being the biggest when they noted the planet was equivalent to 1960's Earth and 300 years had passed since the distress signal was sent...if you assume everything about that duplicate Earth was equal to ours, including time, and maybe 2 or 3 other hints during the series). It never gave any exact years in that edition though.

But I believe others have noted later editions had updates, so it might have been added later.

 

[Christopher]

The 2245 launch date for the Enterprise absolutely does not come from The Making of Star Trek. Memory Alpha is very much in error on that point. At the time TMoST came out, the time frame had not been locked down any more specifically than sometime in the 23rd century -- if anything, probably very early in the century based on the "200 years" references in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "Space Seed." If a firm 2245 launch date had been established as early as TMoST in 1968, then the 1979 Spaceflight Chronology would not have been able to claim that TOS took place in 2207-10. (There were two competing schools of thought in fan works, the SFC version putting TOS in the 2200s and the Geoffrey Mandel version putting it in the 2260s. It wasn't until TNG: "The Neutral Zone" that we were given an explicit Gregorian date, and it was consistent with the Mandel scheme. A lot of us had to bump our SFC-based chronologies six decades forward the week that episode debuted.)

The 2245 date actually originated in the Star Trek Chronology by the Okudas, originally published in 1993. They explained in the book that this was an assumption based on Gene Roddenberry's opinion that the Enterprise was around 20 years old at the time of "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

 

[Tuskin38]

I fixed that error then.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

Still fan driven.

Why would it be fan-driven if a showrunner happens to be interested in tying up a loose end? If a writer finds an apparent inconsistency and an interesting way to explain it, why would that be merely something for the fans? It’s just writing.

Was the Kessel Run any less exciting because L3 calculates a shorter route and helps save the mission in Solo, in accordance with George Lucas’s 1977 note on Han’s “in less than twelve parsecs” line? (It’s still not actually certain that was originally an error, but people tend to interpret it as a unit of distance being misused as a unit of time.)

Even if Roddenberry wasn’t interested in explaining the TMP change to Klingons, TOS was ultimately referenced literally, so it was only a matter of time and opportunity, and an opportunity came when TPTB hoped to save ENT by calling forward to TOS.

 

[fireproof78]

Why would it be fan-driven if a showrunner happens to be interested in tying up a loose end? If a writer finds an apparent inconsistency and an interesting way to explain it, why would that be merely something for the fans? It’s just writing.

If a showrunner is a fan and decides that their fan interest would be satisfied by explaining it then I would think that is still fan driven, even if it becomes official, it started at a certain level.

Not sure what the Kessel Run has to do with this discussion.

Even if Roddenberry wasn’t interested in explaining the TMP change to Klingons, TOS was ultimately referenced literally, so it was only a matter of time and opportunity, and an opportunity came when TPTB hoped to save ENT by calling forward to TOS.

But, even if it is literal later on doesn't mean it has to be the rule in every single instance of a franchise's representation of the visuals. The Klingon explanation came decades after Roddenberry just said "They always looked like that/" Mileage will vary if that explanation was additive to the world.

 

[Christopher]

If a showrunner is a fan and decides that their fan interest would be satisfied by explaining it then I would think that is still fan driven, even if it becomes official, it started at a certain level.

Yeah... The pitfall with fans growing up to become the showrunners is that the stories can become too much about re-examining and celebrating and explaining and deconstructing the franchise's own past rather than building its future. Like how when Steven Moffat took over Doctor Who, it became less a show about the Doctor exploring the universe and more a show about how amazing and special the Doctor was and how everything revolved around the Doctor. And how most things in Trek since season 4 of Enterprise have been heavily driven by revisiting past continuity, as opposed to previous shows that were mostly about building new continuity with only occasional nods to the past.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

If a showrunner is a fan and decides that their fan interest would be satisfied by explaining it then I would think that is still fan driven, even if it becomes official, it started at a certain level.

I would use that term only if the argument can be made that a writer has surrendered their storytelling skills and priorities to serving their inner fan and by extension other fans. If the end result is unobtrusive, like a Kessel Run of 12(+) parsecs’ distance, then it doesn’t matter if the writer also had fun addressing that (perceived?) inconsistency.

(To be fair, I don’t think that entire season of ENT fits the bill, but I’m more interested in the general principle of tying up loose ends in a franchise with a shared continuity.)

 

[fireproof78]

I would use that term only if the argument can be made that a writer has surrendered their storytelling skills and priorities to serving their inner fan and by extension other fans. If the end result is unobtrusive, like a Kessel Run of 12(+) parsecs’ distance, then it doesn’t matter if the writer also had fun addressing that (perceived?) inconsistency.

(To be fair, I don’t think that entire season of ENT fits the bill, but I’m more interested in the general principle of tying up loose ends in a franchise with a shared continuity.)

Here's my larger thing though is that it becomes far to meta to be a shared continuity. It is basically going back in time to glaze over what wasn't thought about at the time, such as the Klingon make up. The Kessel Run is one that doesn't stand out because, well, it wasn't that important of a detail to me to begin with. Klingon make up stands out more, but again, not enough to try and go back in time and correct it.

I think trying to tie up loose ends in a share continuity is not for creating good stories. It feels like insisting that the details of the continuity, it's history, are more important that telling stories about characters.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

This latest turn of the discussion is starting to remind me of how I invariably respond to those who distinguish "literary fiction" from "genre fiction": I argue that there is no such thing as "non-genre fiction"; even "contemporary realism" is a genre in itself. There is only fiction in which the story is slave to the genre, and fiction in which the genre is servant to the story. And paradoxically, it is the latter that serves not only the story and the reader better, but also the genre.

Likewise, when continuity is even an issue in fiction (and by fiction, I include prose, poetry, and drama) there are stories that exist only to serve the continuity, and stories that are inspired by the continuity without being its slave. And the latter, paradoxically, serves the continuity better than the former.