I adopt a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Policy when it comes to when the Eugneics Wars took place. This is the reason I think there should've been a complete reboot instead of partial one that only affects from 2233 on.
Dating the Eugenics Wars
- Thread starter EJA
- Start date
No. Braxton's crash, and the subsequent rise of Henry Starling and Chronowerx, was part of the real timeline.
Is this from some alternate universe where Chinese people have Japanese names and the U.S. government would abrogate its binding obligations to defend Australia and abandon the Republic of China?
Heck, if you dropped in briefly on Los Angeles during the height of World War II, you wouldn't have seen any battles or devastation. At best you might have seen a few "Buy War Bonds" posters and some newspaper headlines about the battles in Europe and the Pacific.
And if you were busy running around trying to save the timeline and return to your own era, you probably wouldn't pay much attention to those newspaper headlines unless they affected your mission . . . .
I'm fine with Trek keeping the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s. Trek has pretty obviously not been the same world as ours ever since the writer of Assignment: Earth (some guy named Roddenberry) made reference to the U.S. launching an orbital nuclear platform in 1968. I also wish that they'd kept the Eugenics Wars and WWIII as one & the same, as was the original intention.
I never read this dialogue as McCoy correcting Spock. If anything, he was confirming what Spock had just stated and was expanding on the information Spock had provided, the same way as if Spock had said "World War I" and McCoy responded with "The War To End All Wars." If McCoy was actually correcting Spock in this scene, he would've been a lot more snarky about it.
It does bug me that they couldn't have Spock state accurate casualty numbers for the first two World Wars, though.
I never read this dialogue as McCoy correcting Spock. If anything, he was confirming what Spock had just stated and was expanding on the information Spock had provided, the same way as if Spock had said "World War I" and McCoy responded with "The War To End All Wars." If McCoy was actually correcting Spock in this scene, he would've been a lot more snarky about it.
It does bug me that they couldn't have Spock state accurate casualty numbers for the first two World Wars, though.
The difference, of course, is that the United States could plausibly have launched an orbital nuclear platform in 1968, whereas serious genetic engineering in the 1970s and secret bands of "superhumans" secretly taking over major world governments in the 1990s is a shockingly less likely.
I mean, I have little problem accepting the USSR still existing and a long-term space voyage in 2010, but even when "Space Seed" was written it was preposterous.
For the American audience the second world war had ended a couple decades previously, in that time there had been around the world numerous revolutionary wars of independence, disaffected army officers depose some Emperor, multi-faction struggles, uprising by extremists, racial pogroms and assassinations, an America President had been assassinated less than a half decade before.
The general populace had also seen absolutely incredible advances in technology, polio, a horrible widespread disease had been cured
So the ideas put forward by Space Seed were really quite reasonable.
It'll do us no good to keep shifting the date of the Eugenics Wars every time history catches up with Star Trek. What will happen when we reach the 22nd century or the 23rd? Will we speculate in the year 2270 (the year Kirk's 5-year mission ended) that the Eugenics Wars really started in the year 2294 and attempt to move everything up 300 years?
All science fiction settings will eventually become alternate history, Trek is no exception. Star Trek had a good run as future history but that time has long passed, now it is time to embrace Trek as an alternate history and move on.
All science fiction settings will eventually become alternate history, Trek is no exception. Star Trek had a good run as future history but that time has long passed, now it is time to embrace Trek as an alternate history and move on.
"Space Seed" doesn't mention genetic engineering - only "eugenics" and selective breeding. Genetic engineering is retconned into Khan's background in ST-TWOK.
HEAR,HEAR!
Or Chekov was simply wrong in his statement.
Perhaps Chekov confused twentieth century supermen with twenty-second century augments, people on this board do it all the time.
Both groups were separately produced in Russia of course.
A few hipshots:
Our heroes in "Space Seed" don't specify that the Eugenics Wars would have happened in the 1990s. Instead, they discuss an event they already have dated to the 1990s, namely the construction era for the derelict they just found, and Spock offers insight on what else was going on in that period, the Eugenics Wars being among them.
The Eugenics Wars thus could have spanned the better part of a century, because all we know is that they were part of the 1990s, not that they would have ended with Khan's de-throning in 1996 or that they would have begun no earlier than the Augments' public debut in 1993. Perhaps the 1993-1996 period represented one of these multiple "Wars", explicit plural?
OTOH, we also know that the Eugenics Wars were a defining characteristic of the 1990s, because our heroes quickly become fixated with the idea that the Botany Bay has to be related to the Eugenics Wars specifically - and not, say, to the famous 1991 Space Domestication Initiative or the 1995 persecution of Sikhs or the 1997 Rubidium Rush to Iapetus. Or to any event from "our" 1990s, for that matter.
Whether Spock is being correct about the World War issue or not (that is, whether McCoy is correcting him and how drastic the possible correction is) is unclear. But Spock is once again speaking of this "era of your last so-called World War" overlapping with the mid-1990s that they have already decided is their timeframe of interest - not of defining the mid-1990s as the era of the last World War and thus implying that WWIII began and/or ended in the 1990s. See the big difference?
Since we don't know what WWIII was "about", we might just as well decide it was about eugenics, thus negating any "correction" aspect from McCoy's comment. For the people of the 2260s, WWIII and WWII might both have been about eugenics, while WWI might have been about imperialism - valid simplifications similar to saying that the US Civil War was about slavery.
In that interpretation, the plural of Eugenics Wars is already explained to a degree: there was Hitler's Eugenics War, then Khan's Eugenics War, then Li Quan's Eugenics War, then Green's Eugenics War - conflicts of varying scale but common theme, spanning a century or more. The first two are explicit, the Li Quan thing is pure speculation, the Green bit is ENT-supported extrapolation.
Or then WWIII began with eugenics disputes and, beyond the 1990s, evolved into something else, explaining how eugenics opponents in the TNG era always bring up the strictly 1990s character Khan Singh and never any 21st century eugenics proponent/product.
Of course, we don't know Khan's position on eugenics. Perhaps he steadfastly opposed the practice, if for no other reason then to keep competition down? Perhaps he was brought down by future Hitlers in 1996, and the rest of the mess involved getting rid of those characters.
Timo Saloniemi
Our heroes in "Space Seed" don't specify that the Eugenics Wars would have happened in the 1990s. Instead, they discuss an event they already have dated to the 1990s, namely the construction era for the derelict they just found, and Spock offers insight on what else was going on in that period, the Eugenics Wars being among them.
The Eugenics Wars thus could have spanned the better part of a century, because all we know is that they were part of the 1990s, not that they would have ended with Khan's de-throning in 1996 or that they would have begun no earlier than the Augments' public debut in 1993. Perhaps the 1993-1996 period represented one of these multiple "Wars", explicit plural?
OTOH, we also know that the Eugenics Wars were a defining characteristic of the 1990s, because our heroes quickly become fixated with the idea that the Botany Bay has to be related to the Eugenics Wars specifically - and not, say, to the famous 1991 Space Domestication Initiative or the 1995 persecution of Sikhs or the 1997 Rubidium Rush to Iapetus. Or to any event from "our" 1990s, for that matter.
Whether Spock is being correct about the World War issue or not (that is, whether McCoy is correcting him and how drastic the possible correction is) is unclear. But Spock is once again speaking of this "era of your last so-called World War" overlapping with the mid-1990s that they have already decided is their timeframe of interest - not of defining the mid-1990s as the era of the last World War and thus implying that WWIII began and/or ended in the 1990s. See the big difference?
Since we don't know what WWIII was "about", we might just as well decide it was about eugenics, thus negating any "correction" aspect from McCoy's comment. For the people of the 2260s, WWIII and WWII might both have been about eugenics, while WWI might have been about imperialism - valid simplifications similar to saying that the US Civil War was about slavery.
In that interpretation, the plural of Eugenics Wars is already explained to a degree: there was Hitler's Eugenics War, then Khan's Eugenics War, then Li Quan's Eugenics War, then Green's Eugenics War - conflicts of varying scale but common theme, spanning a century or more. The first two are explicit, the Li Quan thing is pure speculation, the Green bit is ENT-supported extrapolation.
Or then WWIII began with eugenics disputes and, beyond the 1990s, evolved into something else, explaining how eugenics opponents in the TNG era always bring up the strictly 1990s character Khan Singh and never any 21st century eugenics proponent/product.
Of course, we don't know Khan's position on eugenics. Perhaps he steadfastly opposed the practice, if for no other reason then to keep competition down? Perhaps he was brought down by future Hitlers in 1996, and the rest of the mess involved getting rid of those characters.
Timo Saloniemi
I think its very likely that since the root causes of WW2 were found in WW1, the roots causes of WW3 were found in the Eugenics War(s). It would be really fascinating to see a book that covered comprehenisvely covered Star Treks 20th and 21st centuries.
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Maybe without Khan's influence, the nations that had been part of his empire eventually turned on each other, and the confrontation became global. If most of the fighting took place in the Eastern Hemisphere, it could also explain why cities like Paris and San Francisco are still standing three hundred years later.
I have thought something similar. Also First Conatct confirms that the baddies in WW3 were the Eastern Coalition. Makes sense this is referring to some nations that were part of Khan's alliance in the 1990's.
Well, no, Star Trek: First Contact confirms that the combatants against the United States in World War III were the Eastern Coalition. That doesn't mean they were necessarily bad guys -- hell, for all we know, maybe the United States was the one who was the bad guy!
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