It seems that they got the Romulan War novels wrong, according to the novels made by Michael A. Martin.
Did The Federation: The First 150 Years Contradict the ENT Relaunch Novels?
- Thread starter VulcanMindBlown
- Start date
There's no "right" or "wrong" in the tie-ins. Only screen canon is binding; different tie-ins are free to acknowledge or contradict each other as they see fit, so long as they stay consistent with onscreen material. Even the Pocket novels don't have a single all-encompassing continuity; there have been books that were incompatible with other books, such as the Shatnerverse or the Crucible trilogy. And of course, for most of the '90s, before the current continuity came along, the books weren't even allowed to reference each other, and so they contradicted each other constantly.
After all, it's more likely that a typical reader is familiar with canon than that they're familiar with all the various tie-ins out there. A coffee-table collectible book like Federation: The First 150 Years isn't intended for the exact same target audience as the paperback novels from Pocket, although there is some overlap, of course. So if it had acknowledged the novels' version of events, that would've confused a lot of people who hadn't read them. Instead, it offered its own conjectures on what happened in the gaps in canon, just as other novels have done. That's all any of it is -- conjecture. So it's not "wrong" if different tie-in authors offer different conjectures on how the same event might have happened. Indeed, that's part of the fun of Trek tie-ins -- getting to see how different writers imagine interestingly different ways for the same events to have unfolded.
After all, it's more likely that a typical reader is familiar with canon than that they're familiar with all the various tie-ins out there. A coffee-table collectible book like Federation: The First 150 Years isn't intended for the exact same target audience as the paperback novels from Pocket, although there is some overlap, of course. So if it had acknowledged the novels' version of events, that would've confused a lot of people who hadn't read them. Instead, it offered its own conjectures on what happened in the gaps in canon, just as other novels have done. That's all any of it is -- conjecture. So it's not "wrong" if different tie-in authors offer different conjectures on how the same event might have happened. Indeed, that's part of the fun of Trek tie-ins -- getting to see how different writers imagine interestingly different ways for the same events to have unfolded.
True, although I had some issues with the credibility of IDW's portrayal. It showed the United States and the USSR being pretty thoroughly devastated by the Eugenics Wars, which is hard to reconcile with the canonical portrayal of the late-20th or early-21st-century US in episodes like "Future's End" and "Past Tense." True, the story was told by an unreliable narrator, but his listeners didn't immediately debunk that part.
I also found it rather contrived that it used the names of two of the historical dictators namedropped by Kirk in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" -- Ferris and Maltuvis -- as Augment rulers alongside Khan. Kirk mentioned those names after Genghis Khan, Caesar, and Hitler, so clearly he was talking about conquerors from various different eras, so why would he mention two from the Eugenics Wars? And why would he consider those two more worthy of mention than Khan, when "Space Seed" later established that Khan was the most infamous of the Eugenics Wars' conquerors? It would make more sense for them to be from other periods of history. (Which is why I made Maltuvis the name of a Saurian dictator in Rise of the Federation. As far as I can tell, it's not an actual surname used anywhere on Earth, so I assume Robert Bloch intended it to be an alien name.)
Well, the humans in that ep waxed poetic about how Khan was the "best" of the tyrants, and how there were no massacres under his rule, etc. So for his list of superbads, Kirk only included the *really* bad Augments!
Plus, the IDW Khan series portrayed the ENT augment Malik as a loyal follower of Khan in the 1990s. And in addition to making no mention of the embryos which would be left over from the conflict to resurface in the ENT era, it made it rather improbable that the anti-augment forces would be willing to allow any augment DNA to remain in existence.
Also, Khan and his contemporaries were grown children kidnapped from poor regions and then genetically modified, not modified from before birth, which would be much easier and more realistic in the late 20th century.
I'm somewhat disappointed that Federation: The First 150 Years chose to call NX-03 the Excalibur and not match the portrayal of the Challenger from the novels. Poor old Captain Roy Dunsel got shafted for another appearance in fiction.
Also, Khan and his contemporaries were grown children kidnapped from poor regions and then genetically modified, not modified from before birth, which would be much easier and more realistic in the late 20th century.
I'm somewhat disappointed that Federation: The First 150 Years chose to call NX-03 the Excalibur and not match the portrayal of the Challenger from the novels. Poor old Captain Roy Dunsel got shafted for another appearance in fiction.
Last edited:
However the Romulan war, the Eugenics wars, World War III and the pre-TOS era went, it all ends up the same way. They're all "might have beens" leading to the same canon.
Oh, yeah, that too. Well, I suppose the Malik that Arik Soong raised from an embryo in the 22nd century could've been a clone of the original...?
Honestly, both are equally unrealistic, given that the first laboratory creation of a transgenic organism wasn't until 1973, and that was a bacterium. The script to "Space Seed" said that the supermen were engineered through selective breeding, not genetic engineering as TWOK retconned it; I think what Carey Wilber intended was that they were the product of one of the eugenics programs started in the late 19th century. In real life, those programs were just about "purifying" the white race, which was obviously not the way to produce superior beings, since any first-year biology student knows about hybrid vigor. But if one of those 19th-century programs had had a more scientific, less racist set of goals and had managed to breed the fittest humans they could find for four or five generations, and if they'd gotten really, really lucky, then maybe they could've produced Augments by the late '60s, so that they could've been adults in the '90s. Of course, that's implausible too, but it's the least unlikely option, and it's presumably the original intent. (Interestingly, it seems that the Orphan Black TV series is now positing a similar origin for its Neolution movement.)
Granted, though, assuming the existence of human genetic engineering in whatever era, you're right that germline modification -- engineering the genes prenatally -- is more scientifically plausible than transforming a living person's genes. Then again, "Affliction"/"Divergence" showed that a virus containing Augment DNA could mutate adult Klingons and humans (Archer) in a matter of minutes, so there is an onscreen basis for the idea, however unlikely it is.
That surprised me for reasons that have nothing to do with the novels. As soon as NX-02 was named Columbia, it was clear that the NX-class ships were being named in honor of the American Space Shuttle orbiters, so it stood to reason that they would be followed by Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour in that order. The novels just continued the pattern that was already established.
I never realised that.
Possibly, and cloning would make sense for army-building, but Archer's conversation with Udar made it seem like his biological parents had donated his single embryo to the augment program, no cloning involved.
Haven't bothered to pick that one up; even the current price (a borderline remaindering price, compared to the cover price) is a bit steep. But given the author and publisher, I would imagine the only prose work I wouldn't expect it to contradict would be The Autobiography of James T. Kirk.
Yeah... I was trying to be generous.
But where are the clones?
There ought to be clones.
Quick, send in the clones!
(Apologies to Sondheim, and to Melinda Snodgrass)
There ought to be clones.
Quick, send in the clones!
(Apologies to Sondheim, and to Melinda Snodgrass)
My opinion on this is that the Star Trek universe is not our universe, and the Star Trek universe has always been more technologically advanced in the 20th century than our real one. (Interplanetary sleeper ships in the 1990s, anyone?) So I have no problem believing that their biological sciences were more advanced than ours at any given point in that century, either.
Yeah, but I still think Wilber intended a more successful and sophisticated version of the eugenic breeding programs initiated in the 19th century, taking multiple generations to produce results, rather than just miraculously creating these advanced superbeings in a single step. I mean, that's still obviously more advanced than real life (because of course the real-life eugenics programs were based on racist ideology and had no actual scientific merit), but in a way that doesn't strain suspension of disbelief quite so much as doing it all in a single generation.
Well on the other hand, Federation: The First 150 Years gave us some background on Le Kuan [sic] and the role he played in the Eastern Coalition and World War III. I suppose it's not too unrealistic that East Asian nations would band together after someone's political machinations and in response to a common foe. Real-life China is courting close ties with South Korea, and maybe if the U.S. pulls some stupid stunt again on the world stage then Japan will set aside its historical rivalry with China in favor of defending against a common enemy.
I dunno, it seems more likely that local rivalries of such long standing would remain at least as strong as rivalries with more remote nations, so that there would be some Asian nations on both sides -- in the same way that China and Japan were opposed in WWII, and for that matter in the same way that Germany and England were opposed in WWII. The sides did not break down on racial lines in the Second World War, so I don't see any logic in assuming they would in the Third. The power might call itself the Eastern Coalition, but that doesn't automatically mean that every "Eastern" nation would willingly align with it in lockstep, or that it wouldn't include allies from farther afield. The names that such powers choose for themselves are often more aspirational than factually precise.
True, and sf stories have assumed that mad geniuses were way ahead of conventional wisdom since the days of Captain Nemo at least. See also the transporter device in the THE FLY back in the fifties, the artificially intelligent computers in 2001 and Colossus: The Forbin Project, and time machines in Victorian London. But, yes, it does take a plenty of suspension of disbelief to accept that genetically-engineered babies were being created early enough for Khan and his people to rise to power in the 1990s . . . .
And its two sequels, Return of the Fly and the obscure British-made Curse of the Fly, both of which I recently happened upon at the library. The former involves the now-grown son of Andre Delambre trying to recreate his father's work (and being fly-ified as an act of deliberate malice by the villain), and the latter being decades later with further generations of Delambres continuing the family's teleportation experiments. So that film would have to be in something like the '90s or early 2000s, but it still has the fashions, designs, and cultural mores of the '60s. (Curse doesn't even have a fly monster in it -- it's really more just a teleportation-horror story in general, with the "monsters" being the test subjects who were physically and mentally crippled by the process. The only fly-ish connection is that the Delambres have a degenerative rapid-aging condition and a dislike for cold that are somehow a lingering result of having fly DNA mixed with the family genes. It's a hell of a weird film.)
Well, to be fair, the former was set decades in the future. HAL was born in 1997 in the book, 1992 in the movie. In the former case, that was about four decades in the future of when it was written, so it wasn't unreasonable as a prediction. It's just that AI development has turned out to be much slower in real life than we once thought it would be, since there were unanticipated problems. Much like research into nuclear fusion, another technology that everyone in the '60s assumed we'd have by 2001.
As for Colossus, it might be one of the many genre films that's set in an unspecified "near future" that's far enough ahead to have the needed technological breakthroughs, but close enough that it can be made with present-day stylings. Films like that seem futuristic at the time, but when we look back at them later, they're dated by their cars and clothes and social mores and the like, so we tend to assume they were "present-day" films rather than "near-future" films. Like how the UNIT stories in Doctor Who were originally meant to be set in the near future (the first proto-UNIT story in 1968 said that a previous adventure in 1935 was "over 40 years ago," putting it in 1976 at the earliest), although a later story revisiting them mistakenly assumed they were set in the same years they were made, creating a continuity snarl that's never been satisfactorily resolved. (Although the snarl was there earlier. The first true UNIT story, later in 1968, was set 4 years after the previous one, which would put it in 1980 or after, but a 1975 serial years later in story time also claimed that its companion was from 1980.)
Which is why I've been stressing that the original line in "Space Seed" referred to selective breeding, not genetic engineering as TWOK called it. I do believe Wilber intended it to be the culmination of a eugenics program lasting generations, going back to the late 19th century when the eugenics movement started in real life. It's still implausible that an ordinary, Mendelian selective breeding program could produce such an improved strain of humanity in only 4-5 generations, given how much trial and error that process normally involves, but not quite as implausible as 1960s scientists having the gene-splicing tech to do it in just one generation.
Similar threads
