Although Harve Bennett has subsequently said that he intended there to be a 6-month shakedown cruise between TVH and TFF.
This makes sense -- Scotty gives a "shakedown cruise report" in TFF, but some people I've spoken to seemed to think that ST V takes places just days after ST IV (Kirk gets command of a brand-new starship and then
immediately goes on shore leave?). Although some type of massive systems failure taking place mere hours or days afterwards might explain such a thing, it's also equally unlikely.
Leto II said:
It's actually onscreen dialogue in the TNG episode "Evolution" which canonically places the events of The Final Frontier in 2287, at least nine months (and possibly longer) after the launch seen at the end of Star Trek IV; the Okuda Chronology reflects this, too.
Umm, the only thing I can find in "Evolution" that might be what you're thinking of is Data's line "There has not been a systems-wide technological failure on a starship in 79 years," which comes out to early 2287 give or take. But at most, that only demonstrates that TFF can't be any
later than 2287. The line doesn't preclude it being earlier -- since there are other starships besides the
Enterprise.
True, although it's pretty obvious that the writer(s) of the episode intended it to be a direct reference for casual viewers to the NCC-1701-A's systems failure in the (then-) most recent movie (having released just two or three months before the episode premiered).
What kinda annoys me about the TV dialogue reference is that it automatically assumes that (A) Starfleet's overall strength is exceedingly small, and (B) that, as you mention, there hasn't been ANOTHER starship besides the two
Enterprises that has experienced a major malfunction over the past eight decades? On the various TV shows before and since, such malfunctions hit seemingly every other week, but suddenly Starfleet enjoys a massive 80-year holiday period of perfect operational efficiency?
(And across presumably
hundreds of major fleet ships over the better part of a century, no less?)
But there's no way they could've built a brand-new ship during the trial and had it ready to go shortly afterward. So either it was a ship already in service before the trial or a ship already under construction before the trial but not launched until afterward. Either way, it would've undergone a name change/assignment to Enterprise rather late in the game. (Although I think a lot of ships are only given names at the time of commissioning -- not sure, though.)
This was something Shane Johnson's guide went into, IIRC -- the USS
Ti-Ho had been undergoing its deep-space trials for weeks leading up to the Whalesong crisis when it became stuck in Earth Spacedock upon its return, along with the rest of the fleet there.
The implication from the movie is that more weeks and maybe even months go by between the HMS
Bounty's return with the whales and the re-launching of the
Enteprise-A, possibly between the final ocean-scene and the trial sequence. Starfleet would've needed at least that much time to repaint the hull (whether new-build or recommissioned) to reflect the new service registry, etc.
Well, actually, it was stated at the start of the movie that it was the crew that was slated to "stand down" in three months, and at the end Uhura just said that "we" were "to be decommissioned." After which Kirk's log entry said "This ship and her history will shortly become the care of another crew." So I don't think TUC explicitly stated that the ship itself would be decommissioned. That line implies that they were at least allowing for the possibility that the ship could continue under a new crew. It wasn't until Generations that it became unambiguously clear that the ship itself had been mothballed and replaced with a new Enterprise.
Good point, and that's an interesting way to look at the ending, there -- hadn't quite considered it in that light (that the crew, not the ship, would be "decommissioned"). Although Diane Carey did include that final bit at the very end of
Best Destiny with President Ra-ghoratreii announcing to Kirk's crew that the decision to mothball the starship had been "reversed," along with a reprieve for the entire
Constitution class itself.
Still, again, that works for me, and subsequent novels (except for a couple, including
The Fearful Summons) used that little proclamation to keep the
Ent-A in service a little while longer until it was certain that the
Ent-B would soon be debuting.
No. Definitely not. That's what I'm trying to tell you: the creative process in the novels is not "top down" like so many fans seem to mistakenly believe. They don't tell us what to write. We come up with the ideas, individually. That's what they hire us for. Why would they spend money to hire creative people and then not let us do the creating?
Besides, DC had already been doing movie-era comics for over five years at that point, and Pocket had been doing books in multiple eras for even longer. So why would they have needed some special "summit" to "decide" to do what they'd already been doing all along?
I phrased that incorrectly -- I wasn't implying that Pocket or Paramount were pre-dictating storylines to authors to go off and write on their own; I know that you and other writers submit your own personal proposals to them, not the other way around. Was typing that in a rush, and I got sloppy with my wording, there.
In that post, I was merely recalling something Peter David once recounted in one of his CBG columns about there being a licensee "summit meeting" at Paramount, similar to what Lucasfilm used to do for
Star Wars, in the summer of 1989 (right after TNG finished its first season), where the entire licensing arrangement was significantly redefined -- like most, I have no hard information as to the exact nature of what was said by whom and where at the meeting, including whatever decisions/agreements were made between Pocket and Paramount, apart from a few generally-known facts.
Pocket had certainly no small experience in multiple-era storytelling (expanded even further by the addition of the TNG era), but in previous posts I bring up the possibility you mentioned that the authors of the time simply weren't as interested in telling post-TVH movie-period stories as they were in TOS television-period ones. I get what you're saying, and all that; I think I got misunderstood a bit, there, is all, which is fine (and was my fault...apologies for that).
Or it could be much, much simpler than that. It could just be that a lot of the writers straight up didn't like TFF and thus weren't interested in exploring that period. That's probably part of the reason why there's been so little post-TMP fiction over the years. Most authors are drawn to the more popular parts of the franchise: TOS itself, TWOK, TVH, and TUC. So a lot of authors have gravitated to those periods -- there's a ton of TOS books, most of the post-TMP stuff gravitates toward the period shortly before TWOK, and there's a disproportionate number of post-TUC followups. Sure, the E-A era is nominally post-TVH, but the influence of TFF probably sours it for a lot of people. It's only the occasional writer who's motivated to fill in those less popular areas -- Dayton with TFF, myself with TMP, that sort of thing. We'd probably see a lot more E-A novels if TFF had been a more popular movie. That strikes me as the simplest and most likely explanation.
Same here. Had similar thoughts myself occasionally, that
Star Trek V was the catalyst for a backlash/reaction against pitching further stories set in that post-
Voyage Home era (it wasn't exactly a favorite of mine for some years afterward, either), and it's something that makes sense.
While the DC Comics runs both covered the time period pretty adequately, they were also pre-established and up-and-running (1989 reboot notwithstanding), and presumably had enough sales success to justify a continuation in working in the immediate post-TFF period, despite the lukewarm reception the movie itself had recently gotten.
It was due in no small part to the talents of the writers involved (David, Weinstein) that the era was kept as relatively vital as it was, creatively-speaking, during a time when fans were calling into question the very possibility of there even being a sixth feature film, period.
