How much literary content exists for the TOS film era?

[Quinton O'Connor]

Being a kid in the 90s, I'm one of those TNG/DS9/VOY-era plebeians whose firsthand experience with TOS is very limited by comparison. My grandmother had 'em running whenever they were on TV, so that helped, but what I'm really close to is the film saga. She had VHS recordings of II through IV and we owned a "real" copy of VI. As a result, I watched those four films as frequently as Star Wars.

Hell, I still remember the VHS label for IV. "Star Trek The One With The Whales."

One thing I've noticed over the years is that when I'm glancing at bookshelves (and seeing rather familiar names such as Greg Cox and Christopher and always finding that amusing) there doesn't seem to be much on this era. I know The Lost Era exists, but that's post-2291, isn't it? Or am I off-base here?

There has to be something good to at least come from TWOK's impact, yeah? Or are fans just that much more committed to the 5YM phase?

Italics!

Thanks in advance, y'all.

 

[ryan123450]

If I understand your question, then yes there is quite a bit of literature that's been set in the movie era. (And then there's The Lost Era which, yes, is considered from the launch of the Enterprise-B to the launch of the Enterprise-D).

From TMP to TWOK

• Ex Machina (a real standout for most of us, especially if you like The Motion Picture)
• Pawns and Symbols
• The Kobayashi Maru
• Home is the Hunter
• Enemy Unseen
• Firestorm
• Mere Anarchy, Book 4 (kind of a sequel to Ex Machina)
• The Final Reflection (considered by some to be one of the best Trek books ever)
• The More Things Change (a recent ebook)
• DTI: Forgotten History (one of my favorite Trek books, and another semi-sequel to Ex Machina)
• Ice Trap
• The Prometheus Design (considered by many to be one of the WORST Trek novels)
• Triangle (ditto)
• The Wounded Sky (This one and the next two are very much classics)
• Rihannsu: My Enemy, My Ally
• Spock's World
• The Better Man
• The Covenant of the Crown
• Doctor's Orders
• Rihannsu: The Romulan Way
• Rihannsu: Swordhunt
• Rihannsu: Honor Blade
• Rihannsu: The Empty Chair
• Shell Game
• Death Count
• Rules of Engagement
• Deep Domain
• The New Earth Series, Books 1-6
• Challenger: Chainmail
• The Pandora Principle (THE Saavik story)
• Dwellers in the Crucible
• Just Another Little Training Cruise (Enterprise Logs short story)
• Strangers From the Sky
• Time for Yesterday (sequel to Yesterday's Son)
• Infinity (The Lives of Dax short story)

From TWOK to TFF

• Probe
• Timetrap
• To Reign in Hell (sequel to The Eugenics Wars about Khan's time in exile)

From TFF to TUC

• Unspoken Truth (recent Saavik story)
• In the Name of Honor
• The Rift
• Foul Deeds Will Rise (recent Enterprise-A tale)
• Excelsior: Forged in Fire (amazing Excelsior epic)
• Mere Anarchy Book 5
• Miasma (upcoming ebook)

From TUC to the Enterprise-B

• Assignment: Eternity
• Best Destiny (sequel to Enterprise: The First Adventure)
• Sarek (a classic)
• Mind Meld
• Shadows in the Sun
• The Last Roundup
• The Ashes of Eden (from the Shatner-verse)
• The Fearful Summons
• The Captain's Table, Book 1
• Mere Anarchy, Book 6

In addition, I've been reading through the old DC comics which run from STII to STVI. The early ones are pretty odd, taking place between the movies with some outrageous events. But the later ones seem just like a new tv series set on the Enterprise-A. They are all very much worth the read.


In all there are far fewer movie era novels than 5YM ones, but the number isn't as small as it might seem. Honestly most aren't very memorable though. The ones that stand out really do stand out however.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Thanks as always, ryan. Truly, you're the guru of literary bookkeeping. :P

The number isn't quite as slim as I'd thought. That's good. I'll hop into some of the ones you think are strong when I'm done with the current queue!

 

[Greg Cox]

One minor correction: The bulk of Assignment:Eternity takes place during the 5YM. Thanks to some time-travel complications, the Prologue and Epilogue take place in the Movie era, but most of the book is set near the end of the TV series, not long after "Turnabout Intruder."

But thanks for including Miasma and Foul Deeds will Rise. Those are both definitely Movie era books.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Of course, "literary" can be a loaded word in certain circles. In certain circles, "literary fiction" is mutually exclusive with both "genre fiction" and "popular fiction."

My own response to such nonsense is that it is pure, unadulterated, elitist, bovine scat. There is no such thing as "non-genre fiction," because all fiction has a genre, even if that genre happens to be "contemporary realism," and just as the notion of composers writing music specifically to spurn popular appeal is a relatively recent (and thankfully, dying) phenomenon, writers writing intentionally-unpopular works of fiction is also recent, rare, and thankfully dying out.

The late Dr. Karl Haas (of Adventures in Good Music fame) asserted that there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. I would extend that to fiction as well. And the thing that separates the masterpieces from the run-of-the-mill is that the true masterpieces are the works that transcend, or even redefine, their genres, whereas the run-of-the-mill works tend to be completely circumscribed by their genre.

I will also point out that a goodly portion of the ST novels I have in hardcover (in some cases, the fruits of digging through the bowels of used book stores for book-club editions of books that never had a publisher hardcover) are from this era, including publisher hardcovers of Spock's World, Probe, and Best Destiny, and book club hardcovers of My Enemy, My Ally and The Wounded Sky. And that The Final Reflection, despite the fact that nearly everything it established has been contradicted, is indeed a book that transcends its genre, and one of the ones I wish had been issued in hardcover.

Wasn't The Entropy Effect also post-TMP era? The original cover art certainly places it as post-TMP.

I would also say that there are plenty of novels that could easily be classified as either pre- or post-TMP, and that especially with earlier releases, how any given opus fits into the chronology is a matter of conjecture.

 

[Kor]

I always enjoyed Dayton Ward's "In the Name of Honor."

I think he used to post around here, but I could be remembering wrong.

Kor

 

[Christopher]

Wasn't The Entropy Effect also post-TMP era? The original cover art certainly places it as post-TMP.

Nope. The first half-dozen original Pocket novels all used movie-era art, and the next several used a hybrid of movie-era uniforms and TOS-era ships and settings, because TMP was still recent and they wanted the cover art to tie into it. But only a few of the early novels were actually set post-TMP -- The Covenant of the Crown, The Prometheus Design, Triangle. The rest, including The Entropy Effect, were all pre-TMP no matter what their covers showed.

I would also say that there are plenty of novels that could easily be classified as either pre- or post-TMP, and that especially with earlier releases, how any given opus fits into the chronology is a matter of conjecture.

Well, not quite, because Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov are all one step higher in rank post-TMP, and Chekov is security chief. Granted, there are some post-TMP novels that forgot that and made him the navigator again, but if it mentions Lieutenant Uhura or Ensign Chekov -- or anyone wearing a miniskirt or a red, blue, or gold tunic -- then that pretty much pegs it as pre-TMP.

 

[David cgc]

From TUC to the Enterprise-B

• The Captain's Table, Book 1
  

I would've put that one in "TFF to TUC," myself. The framing story takes place soon after TUC, but the actual narrative is set mostly in the TFF-to-TUC period (it's told from Kirk and Sulu's perspectives. Sulu's section takes place entirely in the latter period, while Kirk starts with a TOS-era prelude before joining with his part in Sulu's movie-era story.)

It occurs to me that with the movie era taking up so much story-time with so little of it chronicled, it'd be possible to do something like the ongoing TNG-era post-finale continuity (albeit more like "A Time To..." with its canonical waypoints) for the TOS crew if it was set in that era. I figure that the reason it hasn't happened already is that one-shot TOS novels are more popular than movie-era stories, and with only twelve books a year divided among something like seven or eight series, space for a new one is pretty slim, but it's an interesting notion to mull over.

 

[Leto_II]

Actually, the hardcover novel Probe is set following the events of The Final Frontier, due to numerous references to the Sybok/Nimbus III incident, the Enteprise-A's "recent" systems failures, etc.

There is something like a quick reference or two in the very first chapter to the story being set just "a few weeks" following the Cetacean Probe's visit to Earth, but these are pretty far outnumbered by the post-TFF dating-placements, and are clearly artifacts of multiple rewrites by multiple authors over several years (originally the novel was indeed set immediately following Star Trek IV, but was then moved "up" the timeline to be more current with Star Trek V).

In addition, I've been reading through the old DC comics which run from STII to STVI. The early ones are pretty odd, taking place between the movies with some outrageous events. But the later ones seem just like a new tv series set on the Enterprise-A. They are all very much worth the read.

This. In terms of sheer numbers, probably the vast bulk of all licensed, published stories set aboard the Enterprise-A occurred in the pages of the two DC Comics runs; the second series in particular, as ryan mentions, covers most of the years between TFF and TUC (part of the first volume was set between the events of the fourth and fifth movies), and it almost does feel like a new TV series featuring the TOS cast.

Certainly its overall flavor and texture was definitely influenced by TNG to an extent, which had already premiered by that point, and one gets the impression that the writers (Howard Weinstein and Peter David in particular) were trying to bring a bit of that sensibility to that series, which could sustain much longer, serialized story-arcs featuring the original cast much better than a single two-hour movie every two or three years could do, and could explore certain themes and secondary characters much more deeply, as well.

There has to be something good to at least come from TWOK's impact, yeah? Or are fans just that much more committed to the 5YM phase?

Speaking of which, there was an excellent thread started by Christopher himself this past spring which examined this very recent cultural propensity to focus more upon the 5YM (and, really, the 1960s TV series itself) over the movie era over these past several years...there was some terrific discussion there, and there were several interesting conclusions drawn as to why this likely is the case:

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=266170

It's peculiar, because, back in the day, and for some time following when the TOS movies were finally finished being produced, there were still a rather sizeable statistical number of both novels and comic books set during the movie era. Today, however, is a very different story, with only the rare outlier tale coming out on an extremely occasional basis (for example, Greg Cox's Foul Deeds Will Rise and Miasma) set during the period of the movies.

It's almost as if, culturally, we're more nostalgically-driven to focus upon that very first, progenitor TV show over its later motion picture descendants, although granted, I have absolutely no scientific evidence to support that theory. It's more a feeling, an impression, than anything else; that those younger incarnations of those TOS characters now seem to grip authors' imaginations more than the older versions do. Certainly the popularity of the recent J.J. Abrams movies have helped this trend a bit, although marketability also undoubtedly plays a big role there, as well.

Still, it kinda saddens me that we now get so few new stories set during the TOS movie years compared to the 5YM era, and it makes me treasure the ones we actually do receive.

 

[Greg Cox]

I confess: I tend to default to the 5YM unless there's a specific reason I need to venture into the movie era. Foul Deeds had to take place several years after "Conscience of the King" for the story to be believable. In Miasma, I needed Saavik, so . . . .

Of course, once I commit to doing the Movie-era, it's fun to take that specific setting and run with it . . . like taking advantage of Chekov's role as security chief, making Spock more comfortable with his emotions and human heritage, etc.

 

[Leto_II]

It's OK, Greg -- we forgive you. We'll still be buying Child of Two Worlds next week regardless (and Miasma in February).

But definitely, as you mention, there are certain advantages brought to the table in terms of storytelling capabilities by the movie era, perhaps the chief of which (like you said) is the ability to have the characters play different notes than they're capable of doing during the 5YM era (Chekov and Sulu being two of the biggest examples of this).

The slightly older, wiser, and more experienced (and perhaps more introspective) versions of these characters are my absolute favorites, and the more exploration they can receive in a medium like prose, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Wanted to say, thank you again for writing the recent movie-era stories you've done lately. I can't get enough of those, frankly.

 

[Christopher]

Actually, the hardcover novel Probe is set following the events of The Final Frontier, due to numerous references to the Sybok/Nimbus III incident, the Enteprise-A's "recent" systems failures, etc.

Well, technically. It was always pretty obvious to me that it was meant to come after The Voyage Home but was delayed until after TFF and thus had some pro forma references to TFF tacked on. They're there, but they don't feel like they belong to the story. Much like DS9: Valhalla, which had a passing reference to the Defiant tacked on due to its delay, even though it's a prequel to the early 2nd-season novel Betrayal. I never understood why Pocket found it so necessary to tack on anachronistic references to pretend that novels were "current" even when they were clearly meant to come earlier. I mean, there were always novels coming out set during the TOS 5-year mission even decades after the fact.

In terms of sheer numbers, probably the vast bulk of all licensed, published stories set aboard the Enterprise-A occurred in the pages of the two DC Comics runs; the second series in particular, as ryan mentions, covers most of the years between TFF and TUC (part of the first volume was set between the events of the fourth and fifth movies), and it almost does feel like a new TV series featuring the TOS cast.

Well, I wouldn't say "most of the years." There aren't nearly enough storylines to fill out that whole period. I have issues 1-29 covering about 6 months after TFF, then I assume there's a sizeable time jump with issue 30 (the start of the storyline where Sulu gets promoted to captain) picking up in late 2289, and then the rest of the movie-era portion of the series taking place in 2290. I put some of the later standalone fill-in issues in the gap, along with In the Name of Honor and Foul Deeds Will Rise, but it's mostly pretty empty. And there's another big, mostly empty gap from 2290-93. So there's still plenty of room to fill in.

Certainly its overall flavor and texture was definitely influenced by TNG to an extent, which had already premiered by that point, and one gets the impression that the writers (Howard Weinstein and Peter David in particular) were trying to bring a bit of that sensibility to that series, which could sustain much longer, serialized story-arcs featuring the original cast much better than a single two-hour movie every two or three years could do, and could explore certain themes and secondary characters much more deeply, as well.

I don't think Peter David was trying to emulate TNG. He was just approaching it the way he approached his comic-book writing in general, the same kind of soapy serial/episodic hybrid that's characterized comic-book writing since the '60s. Which is much more serialized than TNG ever got -- closer to the approach DS9 would use in its later seasons, years after PAD's tenure on the Trek comics ended. Basically, the way TV is written now is the way Stan Lee wrote comics in the '60s. Which may be why comics and TV are fitting so well together these days.

 

[ryan123450]

It's OK, Greg -- we forgive you. We'll still be buying Child of Two Worlds next week regardless (and Miasma in February).

But definitely, as you mention, there are certain advantages brought to the table in terms of storytelling capabilities by the movie era, perhaps the chief of which (like you said) is the ability to have the characters play different notes than they're capable of doing during the 5YM era (Chekov and Sulu being two of the biggest examples of this).

The slightly older, wiser, and more experienced (and perhaps more introspective) versions of these characters are my absolute favorites, and the more exploration they can receive in a medium like prose, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Wanted to say, thank you again for writing the recent movie-era stories you've done lately. I can't get enough of those, frankly.

I second those thoughts!

 

[Trimm]

I for one think that the Movie era is still pretty ripe for good stories, assuming they sell well. Ex Machina and Foul Deeds Will Rise are both among my favorite TOS novels. The 2290-2293 era in particular would seem to lend itself well to the heavily interconnected stories that the post NEM novels have taken now.

 

[Leto_II]

Well, I wouldn't say "most of the years." There aren't nearly enough storylines to fill out that whole period. I have issues 1-29 covering about 6 months after TFF, then I assume there's a sizeable time jump with issue 30 (the start of the storyline where Sulu gets promoted to captain) picking up in late 2289, and then the rest of the movie-era portion of the series taking place in 2290. I put some of the later standalone fill-in issues in the gap, along with In the Name of Honor and Foul Deeds Will Rise, but it's mostly pretty empty. And there's another big, mostly empty gap from 2290-93. So there's still plenty of room to fill in.

I was mostly going off of the Memory Beta timeline, there, but even stripping out some of those DC stories, it seems like 2290 is still pretty stacked, storyline-wise; it's more when we get to 2291 that things start to thin out a bit, and 2292 remains pretty sparse, as well. We could also theoretically slide a few of those 2290 tales into 2291, which would beef up that year substantially, so it's really 2292 and the first six months of 2293 that's the fallow-zone (the Praxis explosion occurring in June 2293, and the Khitomer incident taking place in mid-August).

Looking at the Memory Beta chronology, I think a lot of those 2290-placed stories are grouped together based upon stardate, with several stories confirmed to be set in 2291 (Mere Anarchy: The Blood-Dimmed Tide, the Captain Sulu audio adventures, etc.) taking place amidst several of the DC Comics tales.

 

[Christopher]

I was mostly going off of the Memory Beta timeline, there, but even stripping out some of those DC stories, it seems like 2290 is still pretty stacked, storyline-wise;

Not really. Most of the entries in their 2290 list are multi-part comic stories, so the list is shorter than it appears. I count only 16 distinct comics storylines (since "Bait... and Switch" is a prologue to "Rivals"), and two of them, "No Compromise" and "The Alone," are flashback tales with only brief frame sequences in the post-TFF era.

Plus the list includes entries in different continuities. Forged in Fire, Crucible, and "The Tabukan Syndrome" offer three separate accounts of the start of Sulu's captaincy, and I don't think they're compatible.

 

[Leto_II]

Forged in Fire and The Tabukan Syndrome actually fit together pretty well, since the DC storyline leaps ahead a bit to show Excelsior's change-of-command ceremony at Earth Spacedock, which fits neatly after the novel's final scenes involving Sulu being informed of his full, official captaincy of the ship just after New Year's Day, 2290. Basically, the Excelsior returns to Earth from Xarantine, and Sulu receives the big, gala sendoff aboard the bridge from his old crew that we see depicted in the comic book.

The Crucible chapter set during this time (when McCoy runs into Tonia Barrows during the ceremonies at Earth) is slightly more problematic, with the second half taking place after Sulu departs for the three-year Beta Quadrant survey mission, but that second section is set days after the ceremony itself -- it could theoretically occur just after The Tabukan Syndrome, depending upon how much time that particular storyline covers. It's more of a standalone vignette than anything else.

 

[Christopher]

Forged in Fire and "The Tabukan Syndrome" actually fit together pretty well, since the DC storyline leaps ahead a bit to show Excelsior's change-of-command ceremony at Earth Spacedock, which fits neatly after the novel's final scenes involving Sulu being informed of his full, official captaincy of the ship just after New Year's Day, 2290. Basically, the Excelsior returns to Earth from Pacifica, and Sulu receives the big, gala sendoff aboard the bridge from his old crew that we see depicted in the comic book.

I'll have to look into that, but I had the impression they were inconsistent in some way -- like the crew being different. In any case, it's also tricky to reconcile Forged with the immediately preceding comics storyline, "Veritas," since that has Sulu promoted to Excelsior captain at the end, while Forged starts him out as just its first officer. I reconcile them by assuming Starfleet changed its mind about his promotion -- maybe there was still some political fallout from his role in stealing the Enterprise.

The Crucible chapter set during this time (when McCoy runs into Tonia Barrows during the ceremonies at Earth) is slightly more problematic, with the second half taking place after Sulu departs for the three-year Beta Quadrant survey mission, but that second section is set days after the ceremony itself -- it could theoretically occur just after "The Tabukan Syndrome," depending upon how much time that particular storyline covers. It's more of a standalone vignette than anything else.

Of course, Crucible is deliberately inconsistent with the other novels, since it was meant to tie solely into the screen canon.

 

[Christopher]

Okay, looking at Forged in Fire again, I see it actually meshes perfectly with "Veritas," because it says outright that Sulu was expecting to become Excelsior captain but that Styles changed his mind about retirement at the last moment, so Sulu had to settle for being first officer.

Over the course of the book, Styles is taken out of the picture so Sulu becomes captain. The chief engineer is killed and an officer named Tim Henry takes over that post. Commander Meredith Cutler is XO, Janice Rand is communications officer, and Dmitri Valtane is science officer. CMO Judith Klass is badly injured, but recovers. The book ends with Cutler's and Klass's status up in the air and the Excelsior's immediate future open-ended.

"The Tabukan Syndrome" uses a different crew -- Rand is XO, the engineer is named Lukas, and the science officer is a guy who's drawn to look like Valtane but is named Berger. It's written on the assumption that Sulu's promotion is something new -- at the sendoff ceremony, Scotty says he couldn't let Sulu leave without a certain gift, Saavik says she heard the Enterprise was in need of a helm officer, and McCoy counsels Kirk about his trouble getting used to thinking of Sulu as an equal. But I guess all of those could be rationalized as things that happen after FIF. Maybe the crew's plans for Sulu's big sendoff were scuttled when Styles blocked his promotion, so they waited until now, and Scotty's "couldn't let you leave" means leave on Excelsior's new mission rather than leave the Enterprise. There could've been an interim helm officer who rotated off just before the story. And Kirk's concerns could just be coming to the fore now because he's on a joint mission with Sulu.

The main problems, then, are Rand and Valtane/Berger. I can buy Sulu offering the XO slot to Rand after FIF, but then why would she be back to communications in time for TUC/"Flashback"? And should we assume "Berger" is really Valtane and mentally substitute the name? Or maybe Berger's just someone who looks a lot like Valtane. Hey, that could resolve the continuity error with Valtane dying in "Flashback" but someone who looks like him still being on the bridge at the end of TUC.

So, yeah, I guess they're not that hard to reconcile. It takes a bit of handwaving, but less so than some reconciliations I've made. And FIF seems to have been written intentionally to avoid contradicting other versions of Sulu's promotion and early command.

 

[Leto_II]

Great stuff, Christopher, and despite it being a few years since I last did a full re-read of Forged in Fire, very glad to see it still meshes up as well as it does with the second DC series. I remember sitting down to read it when it first released, and preparing myself for some massive contradictions with The Tabukan Syndrome, but it turns out that the novel deliberately seems to simply bracket that period, and never contradicts it outright.

As you mention, about the only real (and very, very minor) issues are a couple of crewmember inconsistencies, but the "Berger"/Valtane-thing can easily be chalked up to a possible naming-mistake on the part of the comics writer (I like your TUC/"Flashback"-fix too, BTW ), and I'd always just assumed that Janice Rand simply went back to communications during the three years in between 2290 and 2293 (and maybe she was stepping in as "temp XO" in Tabukan Syndrome because Cutler was on leave after Korvat, or something similar).

The Tim Henry/Lukas-thing could be Henry stepping down between the ending of the novel and the start of Tabukan, since Lukas also appears a bit later on down the road in the DC series, as well. (Which reminds me, how interesting would it have been to have gotten that proposed monthly Captain Sulu movie-era replacement series from DC, had they kept the license? They could've gone past 2293 quite easily, past the Enterprise-B launch, and well into the early years of the 24th Century).

Okay, looking at Forged in Fire again, I see it actually meshes perfectly with "Veritas," because it says outright that Sulu was expecting to become Excelsior captain but that Styles changed his mind about retirement at the last moment, so Sulu had to settle for being first officer.

Another very interesting thing that happens in the comic book is that it actually avoids depicting Styles in any way, shape, or form during that command-handover ceremony at Spacedock -- of course, this was because the second DC series had Styles slightly "downgraded" to the captaincy of the USS Exeter somewhere circa the events of The Voyage Home and The Final Frontier, and this would have contradicted this.

But luckily, the novel pushes Styles' resumption of his command of Excelsior to a bit after this, and the two works never go against one another. Basically, after warming Exeter's center seat for a couple of years, Styles gets his new ship back, then is finally killed in December 2289 at the Korvat Conference bombing, paving the way for Sulu to take command.

Also, yup, the novel definitely does make a pretty big deal about Sulu's role in the theft of the original Enterprise being a key factor in sandbagging his promotion to captain, with him on the receiving end of several pointed attacks from Styles and others (including Meredith Cutler, IIRC) about it. It was something that the movie novelizations themselves introduced as far back as The Search for Spock, which had the first political roadblock getting dropped in Sulu's path by Admiral Morrow even prior to the theft (regarding his role in the whole Khan/Project Genesis affair).