List of Trek Lit Alternate Universes

[Therin of Andor]

Maybe that's the first time it was used to refer to a TV show, but I think it started with names for music genres such as "nu metal", "nu Goth", "nu punk"... I don't know if those were meant to be derogatory or not, but there's certainly often used that way

I recall when TNG was starting, many fans used the then-current "New Coke" vs "Coke Classic" argument to compare the two ST shows. In early UseNet discussions, STC was a rather common designation for the original series (and STA for Filmation's animated series) before the popularity of TOS (and TAS).

 

[F. King Daniel]

I apologize for the vagueness of this post, but some half-remembered stuff came at me. I could research the exact answers at Memory Beta but I really don't want to spoil all the stories I'll have to crawl though in order to find them.

That James Blish/Blish's wife Harry Mudd story, "Buisness as usual...(somethingsomething)" ends with a jump back in time, presumably undoing the whole thing. I think. It was so long ago now...

A Strange New Worlds story (name unknown, sorry) featuring Data at the end of time going back to replace (or become? So long ago!) Lore. Possibly alternate to begin with if you believe Data isn't coming back after Nemesis.

 

[Stevil2001]

The former is "The Business, as Usual, During Altercations" and it does indeed go as you described.

The latter is "I Am Become Death", and it's not inconsistent with Nemesis because the Data at the End of Time comes from a reality where Lore was never recovered after "Datalore"; the conceit of the story is that Lore's appearances in "Brothers" and "Descent" were actually FutureData, creating the reality we know and love. Where, eventually, Data dies.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I just remembered Voyages of Imagination.

It's "Buisness as Usual, During Altercations" by J.A. Lawrence. Still got no idea what the Data story is called.

 

[Stevil2001]

^ Look up.

 

[F. King Daniel]

You beat me to it!

Thanks, Steve.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The alternate timelime from the (fantastic) DC comic "The Gift", where Q "un-kills" Picard's brother (who fell down a well when they were kids), who goes on to become the next Hitler and takes over the Federation.

John DeLancie wrote that one himself, didn't he?

what about nu-Who?

There is no such thing. The series technically went on a very long hiatus. It wasn't a reboot. It's the same show, in the same continuity (what little of it there is in Who ).

Do little pocket-universe "undo at the end" ones count? If so, an early DS9 book (whose name eludes me) had aliens storm the station and kill the principle characters one by one, before somehow going back and undoing it.

That would be Fallen Heroes by Dafydd ab Hugh. And yeah, it was really cool. There was even a passage that was told from the viewpoint of the Dax symbiont, which was still alive after Jadzia had been killed .

 

[Christopher]

Crossover's dark future may yet come to pass, so it may not be an alternate future at all.

I think you mean Crossroad. I always interpreted Chapel's actions at its end-- where she elects to stay in Starfleet and attend the Federation Science Institute, as killing off the Consilium future. In the timeline the future-people report on, she went to the Institute of Xenobiology.

Inspired by the recent discussion of Crossroad here, I re-bought it last week and just finished reading it for the first time in many a year. I'm surprised I ever parted with it. It's a good book, with interesting ideas and some nice lower-decks texture to the depiction of shipboard life.

As for Chapel's action at the end, I'm not sure which future it implies. After all, "Federation Science Institute" sounds like a civilian institution and is described as a university. The Institute of Xenobiology could be a department of the FSI. (Although we do know she returns to the Enterprise in TMP.) Also, the characters from the Consilium future know about the first Klingon in Starfleet serving aboard the Enterprise-D, suggesting that TNG is in their past.

However, the future timeline depicted in Crossroad must be an alternate from the one that now exists in canon and books, for two reasons. One is that the Consilium-era Federation doesn't have quantum slipstream drive; they went right from warp to psion drive. The other is that Romulus wasn't destroyed in 2387. Perhaps in that timeline Spock was able to save it in time.

I think the Consilium future could be an extension of the "Before and After" timeline. In that future, Kes never left Voyager and Seven never joined, so the events of "Scorpion" must've happened differently. So in that timeline, "Hope and Fear" might not have happened either and Voyager wouldn't have gotten slipstream drive.

 

[F. King Daniel]

That depends on how forgiving you're willing to be. I don't disqualify books just because a few details have been proven "wrong" by later canon. YMMV.
And just because a few details are different, it doesn't entirely preclude that future, or one very similar, from coming around. Just look at Star Trek XI, or even "Year of Hell", where Seven re-enacted Kes' actions in the original timeline.

If Chapel's choice at the end erased the Consilium future, it would have made the book a somewhat pointless exercise. Why save the telepaths and take them to the future if the whole thing is undone?

 

[Christopher]

^Well, I wasn't saying that future couldn't happen, just that it's a separate branch of the multiverse from the Prime timeline. It could be one of various futures that branch off from the era of TOS, but we now know that it's not the same branch as the Prime timeline where Starfleet gets slipstream and Romulus is destroyed.

Maybe what you're saying is that similar events could still happen in the Prime timeline, that there could still be an era in the Prime future where the plague and the Consilium come about. That is possible, although it doesn't fit with the version of the mid-26th-century Federation seen in "Azati Prime." But it wouldn't be the same timeline that Arios and McKennon came from.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The "Azati Prime" future was changed when the expanse was destroyed in "Zero Hour". The "real" (sounds silly, I know) Enterprise-J may deviate from the one we saw in "Azati Prime" by several generations of differences each similar to the differences between the prime and alternate 1701's. For all we know the -J we saw was designed to fight the Sphere Builders in much the same way the alt-1701 was (re-)designed to fight Nero.

Although for the list there's ample evidence that the Consilium is an alternate future, I was saying that personally I'm happy to overlook all the little and large discrepencies between the various interpretations of Trek over the years.

 

[Stevil2001]

Crossover's dark future may yet come to pass, so it may not be an alternate future at all.

I think you mean Crossroad. I always interpreted Chapel's actions at its end-- where she elects to stay in Starfleet and attend the Federation Science Institute, as killing off the Consilium future. In the timeline the future-people report on, she went to the Institute of Xenobiology.

Inspired by the recent discussion of Crossroad here, I re-bought it last week and just finished reading it for the first time in many a year. I'm surprised I ever parted with it. It's a good book, with interesting ideas and some nice lower-decks texture to the depiction of shipboard life.

I think all of Hambly's books are underrated gems, overlooked in the brouhaha about Ishmael. Ghost-Walker shouldn't work... but it works so well! She really nails Kirk, I think.

As for Chapel's action at the end, I'm not sure which future it implies. After all, "Federation Science Institute" sounds like a civilian institution and is described as a university. The Institute of Xenobiology could be a department of the FSI. (Although we do know she returns to the Enterprise in TMP.) Also, the characters from the Consilium future know about the first Klingon in Starfleet serving aboard the Enterprise-D, suggesting that TNG is in their past.

I agree it's ambiguous, but I don't think the book would mean anything if Chapel didn't do something different, which is why I go with that interpretation. But the changes are small at first, so it makes sense the the 24th century would be largely unchanged.

 

[Christopher]

I agree it's ambiguous, but I don't think the book would mean anything if Chapel didn't do something different, which is why I go with that interpretation.

I can certainly see that. But another possibility is that the ending is supposed to be ominous, to suggest that there may be no avoiding this dark future. After all, the book made the point that there were positives as well as negatives to that course of history, that if Chapel didn't follow that career path, the outcome to the future might actually be even worse.

And I kind of like that idea. Every civilization goes through its rough patches, and it stands to reason that there will be times in the future when the Federation loses its way for a while.

And it wouldn't be meaningless, because the characters did help encourage the resistance movement, give it new members and sleepers within the establishment. So there was a ray of hope.

 

[Sxottlan]

Only if the explosion was natural.

Spoiler: The Needs of the Many

I'm only partway through, so this may be debunked later, but it seems that in the STO timeline the Hobus explosion was caused by Sela and some ill-conceived weapons testing.

I was thinking any development of the Hobus supernova in the books could explain this better. Some catastrophic combination of spatial anomalies or minerals in asteroid belts interacting with the wave, accelerating it or feeding it. Anything to make sense of the wave expanding without stopping.

 

[Christopher]

Anything to make sense of the wave expanding without stopping.

There's no reason why the wavefront of radiation from a supernova would stop, ever. It would continue to expand indefinitely, simply growing weaker with distance by the inverse-square law. What doesn't make sense is how that wavefront would propagate faster than light, or how creating a black hole way back at the origin point of the supernova would eliminate the radiation that had already spread out far away from that point.

 

[F. King Daniel]

It wasn't radiation that blew up Romulus, it was a wall of fire from an expanding sun.

I like to think the supernova was the result of tampering by an ancient super-race. In Countdown, Spock says the Hobus star is one of the oldest in the galaxy. Maybe it was due to die millenia ago, and the Preservers (or whoever) did something to extend it's life, with dire consequences for the Romulans in 2387? Maybe (and I'm in maximum-BS technobabble mode now) they rigged the star to draw energy from the vacuum-flux of a protouniverse (using technology we couldn't comprehend), which in 2387 exploded in it's big bang. The star exploded with a good portion of that energy funnelled though it, hence the FTL expansion and fireball several lightyears across.

At least, that's the best theory I could think up. "Sela did it" just doesn't work for me

 

[Christopher]

It wasn't radiation that blew up Romulus, it was a wall of fire from an expanding sun.

Which is even more nonsensical and physically impossible. I prefer to treat that visual as figurative. The only thing that could possibly look anything like that is if Romulus' own sun went supernova, and that can't have been the case, or the planet would've been destroyed in mere minutes and there wouldn't have been any time to request Spock's help.

It's just a basic fact of life that you can't take Trek special-effects shots literally. They frequently contain imagery that's physically impossible or that contradicts the descriptions in dialogue. They're symbolic representations to convey an impression to the audience. (This goes right back to the TOS shots of the Enterprise following a visibly curving path as it orbits a planet. Consider that something moving along the surface of the Earth is following a curve so wide that it looks like a straight line to any nearby observer, at least until it sinks below the horizon. And a starship orbiting a planet would be following a much larger circle that would take far, far longer to give any sense of departure from a straight line.)

I like to think the supernova was the result of tampering by an ancient super-race. In Countdown, Spock says the Hobus star is one of the oldest in the galaxy. Maybe it was due to die millenia ago, and the Preservers (or whoever) did something to extend it's life, with dire consequences for the Romulans in 2387?

That was just one of the ways in which Countdown made the whole supernova thing even more nonsensical than it was in the movie. Old stars don't go supernova. The stars big enough to go supernova are the biggest, hottest ones, and thus the shortest-lived ones, with life expectancies of mere millions of years, even hundreds of thousands for the real monsters. The oldest stars in the galaxy are tiny red dwarfs, and it's impossible for them to go supernova. And it wouldn't pose much danger to anyone if they somehow could be induced to go supernova, because they just wouldn't have enough energy to create a very big bang.

 

[F. King Daniel]

If the star was really old, yet still burning bright as ever, and then starts giving signs of blowing up, surely that means it won't be a nova like any other? That what we know about novae may not apply in this case?

IMO it was a very, very unique supernova. One that, if it occured like Countdown or STXI depicted (and Nero did say something along the lines of "I watched my world smashed in two", supporting a physical blast rather than radiation death), perhaps "Supernova" would be the wrong word altogether, much like "black hole" was (although I personally prefer simple terms over the kind of meaningless doubletalk used in Voyager).

But we're all free to interpret it however we want, and discard or include whatever we choose. A simple rewording in the movie probably would have saved the internet much angst.

I like the odd insane/nonsensical thing in Trek. I like the idea that understanding it may be beyond the reader, viewers and characters - something wierd happened and they may never find out why.

 

[Christopher]

If the star was really old, yet still burning bright as ever, and then starts giving signs of blowing up, surely that means it won't be a nova like any other? That what we know about novae may not apply in this case?

Okay, the flawed assumption there is that stars get less bright as they get older. They actually get brighter and hotter over time. In a billion years, Earth will be uninhabitably hot unless we widen its orbit. Although red dwarfs age much more slowly, and the universe isn't old enough yet for any of them to have heated up much. A red dwarf star has a main-sequence life expectancy of one to twelve trillion years. The universe is only 13.8 billion years old. Every red dwarf star in the universe is still very, very early in its lifespan.

As for the rest, sure, you can put any pair of incongruous things together and say it's "unlike any other," but that doesn't mean the underlying idea is valid. If your kitchen sink starts giving signs of turning into an opera singer, surely that means it's a sink like no other, right?

Anyway, Countdown isn't canonical, so it isn't binding. If it postulates something that doesn't make sense, we're not obligated to accept it. The supernova as depicted in the movie is difficult enough to rationalize without the added nonsensical claim that the star was incredibly old. It simplifies the problem if we just ignore that.

(and Nero did say something along the lines of "I watched my world smashed in two", supporting a physical blast rather than radiation death)

What, Romulans can't use metaphor?

 

[F. King Daniel]

We're not obligated to take *any* of it seriously if we don't want to. Just look around, there are people who ignore Enterprise, STXI and a few who happily ignore anything that's not TOS.

I fail to see how you refuse to accept impossible supernovae (and I admit it was bad writing and zero research by the STXI writers) and yet happily accept other elements of Star Trek that are clearly fantasy, like warp speeds, bumpy headed human aliens and transporters. If you can make the leap to accept them, why not the rest? At what point do you draw the line and say "No, that's impossible and doesn't count"?