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Kelvin Timeline all but confirmed

Thank you for saying that, and so eloquently. I was really trying to find a way to express what you said.

I feel like the novels really expand on Trek world-building, and really, with the exception of Tuvok, and maybe Pazlar, everybody on the Titan is someone Riker served with who he would likely have asked for (like Sariel Raeger and Ogawa, plus several novel-original characters).
I feel like this has always been the case. A lot of scripts start off with grand designs, but are cut down to almost unrecognizable states due to necessary budgetary limitations inherent in audio-visual media. The printed word has no such constraints and the mind's eye can envision visual effects far more spectacular than any CG server farm could produce.
 
I will whole-heartedly wave the flag of Elias Vaughn and Shar/Tenmei, hands down my favorite set of arcs from the books.

As someone who discovered the books less than two years ago, I can say with confidence that a Star Trek fan should at least give the books a try. I was a die-hard fan as a kid until the end of Voyager. I still loved Star Trek but there wasn't anything going into production that I liked (Sorry, Enterprise...I tried) Kelvin universe was exciting at first but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for. But finding the books and seeing the prime universe live on is what made me an adult Star Trek fan! The books are 90% of the reason why I joined the boards in the first place. The review threads are what pushed me over the edge to actually diving into the books when I was still lurking.
 
I will whole-heartedly wave the flag of Elias Vaughn and Shar/Tenmei, hands down my favorite set of arcs from the books.

As someone who discovered the books less than two years ago, I can say with confidence that a Star Trek fan should at least give the books a try. I was a die-hard fan as a kid until the end of Voyager. I still loved Star Trek but there wasn't anything going into production that I liked (Sorry, Enterprise...I tried) Kelvin universe was exciting at first but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for. But finding the books and seeing the prime universe live on is what made me an adult Star Trek fan! The books are 90% of the reason why I joined the boards in the first place. The review threads are what pushed me over the edge to actually diving into the books when I was still lurking.
My journey was something like this:

At age 5 my father took me to the theater to see Star Trek III and later brought home Star Trek II on video. At eight years old I read Voyage to Adventure and decided I needed to start watching Star Trek. It was airing where I lived in the early evening, and I began to watch regularly. I also watched the animated series when I visited my grandmother, who had cable. At the time, only Nickelodeon was showing it.

Then came a period of several years where I didn't watch Star Trek. I knew about TNG but I would only occasionally catch an episode. Then, in junior high, I started reading the novels and fell madly in love. I devoured the novels, and started watching TNG faithfully. DS9 was the first series I was there with from the ground up. By high school, Star Trek was practically my religion. Now that I'm a middle-aged man I realize it's just a TV show, but at the time I was more devoted to it than I was practically anything. And it was the novels that got me hooked.

I kept reading them throughout high school, but by then I realized the series and films weren't even considering the novels at all when writing. I guess I had been thinking of the novels, up until then, as just as much a valid part of Trek as the series and films were, and once I realized that the novels were utterly divorced from canon, I kinda wondered what the point was. After all, if they weren't canon and the televised/big screen version was going to repeatedly go against it, didn't that just make the novels licensed fanfic? I also didn't like how the novels would very often contradict each other. One novel (don't ask me which) explicitly stated that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet. Another (again, don't ask me which) had him reunited with a Vulcan Starfleet officer who had been at the Academy with him.

But in the years since Enterprise went off the air, like you, there was a void that needed filling, and a friend lent me a few books of the DS9 and VGR relaunches, and I realized that the books were actually starting to have an internally consistent world, and that they were the closest thing to films/follow-ups for those series as I was ever going to get. Even then, I wondered what the point was, as surely any series that came along was going to just run roughshod over them and conflict with them.

What changed my mind utterly was known that Kirsten Beyer, a writer heavily involved with the "novelverse", is a writer and producer on DSC who will be coordinating with all tie-in writing, not to necessarily canonize the novelverse or even the DSC-related material that's found there, but to sort of make sure there's a minimum of toes being stepped on between the two. That's good enough for me. I'm out to read the novelverse now.
 
Star Trek as a childhood religion was definitely me. My dad brought home the original movies and a lot of TOS on VHS and I didn't have cable as a kid, so I burned through those tapes over and over again. I was 3 when TNG premiered so I don't remember when I started watching it, but I remember as clear as day how devastated I was when I found out I'd have to wait all summer to see the conclusion of BOBW, and that was life through the end of Voyager. I read a single TNG book, Rogue Saucer when I was 10, but that was about it.

Then later as an adult I saw Ezri on a cover wearing a captain's uniform and had to do a double take. Finding out that the books had continued their stories like, over a decade after I thought the show was over was like finding out there was a whole separate series of MCU movies I never knew about.
 
I didn't start reading the novels regularly until around the time the DS9R started, before that I had read the middle grade books, and NF but that was it. The DS9 Relaunch instantly go me hooked and I slowly expanded from there to now reading most of the books. I don't think I would be anywhere near as big a Trek fan if I hadn't gotten hooked on the books.
Even if the books aren't canon, they are still a big part of my personal continuity, and until they are contradicted they are equal to the shows and movies in my mind.
 
You think TMP looks more advanced then TOS?

On TOS that had full color high resolution Graphics screens. On TMP a lot of these were replaced with CRT monitors going monochrome vector graphics <-- That's MORE advanced to you?

(And yes, I know production wise on TOS the 'monitor' displays were colored back lit plastic overlays - but the REPRESENTED high resolution flat color graphics displays 'in universe')

On my viewing of TWOK-DE in the theater, I was struck by just how much the earlier interior designs of the TOS movie universe were not too far removed from TOS... blinking jellybean lights everywhere, manual switches, a basic gray and black palette for the consoles. Especially the interiors of Regula I looked like something that could have showed up in TOS if it had continued for a couple more seasons. It definitely didn't look like something from a hundred years after the series.

Kor
 
Many of McCoy's movie-era instruments were straight out of TOS. See this little machine Chapel was using on Spock?
PmOEiQo.jpg

That and other such devices were seen in TOS many times:
T0STQKg.jpg
 
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Alright after seeing the "Prologue" (as that's what it was classified as in After Trek) for discovery, I'm kinda disappointed they didn't set this in the Kelvin Timeline.
 
Alright after seeing the "Prologue" (as that's what it was classified as in After Trek) for discovery, I'm kinda disappointed they didn't set this in the Kelvin Timeline.

How do we now its not? in the 2009 movie Vulcan gets destroyed in 2258, Discovery takes place in 2256 while Kelvin timeline Kirk would be in the first year at the Academy. Vulcan is obvious around in 2256 sin both the film and series, so what other indicators are there in Discovery (beyond tech, costumes and makeup) that this is not in the Kelvin timeline?
 
How do we now its not? in the 2009 movie Vulcan gets destroyed in 2258, Discovery takes place in 2256 while Kelvin timeline Kirk would be in the first year at the Academy. Vulcan is Obvious around so what other indicator are there in Discovery (beyond tech and makeup) that this is not in the Kelvin timeline?
The writers and producers saying it isn't.
 
How do we now its not? in the 2009 movie Vulcan gets destroyed in 2258, Discovery takes place in 2256 while Kelvin timeline Kirk would be in the first year at the Academy. Vulcan is obvious around in 2256 sin both the film and series, so what other indicators are there in Discovery (beyond tech, costumes and makeup) that this is not in the Kelvin timeline?

They should just have Captain Robau of the Kelvin call the Discovery.
 
Of course the tech, costumes and makeup are nothing like the classic series either, so maybe its in its own divergent timeline. ;)
 
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