At least until some cowboy gets a hold of a salvaged Bird of Prey and performs a slingshot maneuver around a star...
Spoilers NO SPOILERS FOR CODA - A Lit-verse Grand Finale...What We Know (Spoilers for Entire Lit-verse)
- Thread starter ryan123450
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At least until some cowboy gets a hold of a salvaged Bird of Prey and performs a slingshot maneuver around a star...
The Lit-verse will still be there in cold storage. A writer can pick up any character or element in general and give them new life. Nobody is erasing what happened: it’s only that nothing new will happen according to the original programming, or we would see evidence that it did. There is no alternate timeline, only one timeline that becomes the same one but different, if you know what I mean.
I never really read Trek books for the idea of "Here's another adventure of the crew of the Enterprise!" Before the continuity spearheaded by Marco and others, since I was young and poor, I only picked up the books that had an interesting premise from the blurb. The DS9 "relaunch" was what got me hooked. DS9 was my favorite Trek show and its semi-serialized storytelling was a big part of that. I picked up practically every Star Trek book that came out for several years, only skipping things like Enterprise novels (pre-cancellation) and TOS novels that took place during the 5-Year Mission (it helped a lot that my job gave me a 50% discount on Simon and Schuster books). Sometime around the release of the Cold Equations trilogy I started to drift away, and only came back occasionally. Two of those times were TOS books during the 5YM oddly; they had audio books and I could listen during my commute. I had gotten into audio dramas via Doctor Who. But even those had hooks: a story about the First Federation, which I had long been curious about, and a story featuring Number One, a character I'd always found intriguing. And yes, as Star Trek Discovery launched, I did see that the ongoing nature of the novel continuity would probably end at some point soon, so getting fully back in didn't seem worth it. I was sure there were plenty of good stories, but with all the media available for instant access, and my limited free time, I chose to mostly ignore Trek books. My occasional commute is now filled with podcasts.
I'll still pop in here from time to time to see what's coming out, but the future of Trek lit does seem pretty bland for me after Coda.
I'll still pop in here from time to time to see what's coming out, but the future of Trek lit does seem pretty bland for me after Coda.
I think that maybe that won't change so much going forward. I mean, what's made the novels distinctive over the past couple of decades is that they haven't just told more routine adventures between episodes, but have focused on fleshing out parts of the universe that we didn't see on the shows, whether post-series adventures like the "relaunches," filling in historical gaps like The Lost Era, or new casts and settings like S.C.E., Vanguard, Articles of the Federation, etc.
And if you think about it, that's the same thing the tie-ins to the new shows are doing. Since the shows' storylines are so serialized, there isn't any room for routine between-episode adventures, so pretty much everything we've gotten has been in that same spirit of exploring the unexamined gaps, and tying the continuity of the new shows into the old. It's not the same continuity as the novelverse, no, but it's the same kind of approach that made the novelverse engaging.
Well, that sucks - of course, my own library's collection has dwindled down from back where it was (pretty much throughout much of the Lit-verse, now that I think about it) to just the Discovery and Picard books, along with a few stragglers who've yet to be taken out of circulation and a handful of nonfiction books that're more about the history and/or behind the scenes of Trek than "true" reference books. Thank God California has a great inter-library loan program called Link+ that allows us to borrow books from other counties that still have their books in stock.
It's especially why I've been loving your last few TOS books, Christopher. I love how you have been exploring a huge chunk of TOS, in those years between TMP and TWoK. I loved Ex Machina, and I'm about halfway through The Higher Frontier., which has been outstanding so far. Your upcoming novel Living Memory is my most eagerly anticipated Trek novel of 2021. I really hope you continue exploring this big chunk of time. Isnt there supposedly roughly 7 years of time in between TMP and TWoK?
Actually 12 years per current assumptions, 2273 to 2285. Though my recent books pick up after the post-TMP 5-year mission, so I'm up to 2279 as of Living Memory (which pretty much fills the gap between The Higher Frontier and The Darkness Drops Again Part 2).
Yes, I've been enjoying them as well. I love movie era books and am glad we are seeing some new ones.
Christopher's novels are filling in a lot of that untold story, and the beauty of his books are that there is plenty of space in between for other stories to fit in, such as prior novels that took place after TMP. I mean, not necessarily every detail of other post-TMP books will fit in, but the general stories can fit, and of course, if another future author want's to fill in a gap using that continuity, there's plenty of room to do so.
Seems like with the popularity of streaming miniseries events, even trying to fill in the gaps is going to get dangerous. Think youre safely exploring the ‘captain sulu’ years, and then they announce a 6 episode show. Or Worf. Or people show up in Picard differently. The big, multi season shows were safer to work around...
Well, as the writers around here will always note, that's always a risk. You just do the best you can with the information you have on hand.
And if you know the show is going to do something as an author, I suppose you'd wait to do something if it is a similar story. Like if you knew Picard season 2 was going to tackle some of Picard's history on the Stargazer, I guess you'd probably want to wait to do a Stargazer ere book until you see what they do.
But otherwise you probably just take your chances. There is probably enough collaboration nowadays with the tie ins that if the show knew an author was planning on writing a book on a topic the show was going to cover, there's probably some way to let them know these days.
All science fiction set in the future will be contradicted by the calendar eventually, or by new scientific discoveries. You can't paralyze yourself worrying about it. Just tell the stories. If someone later on tells a different version of the story, there's nothing wrong with that, because it's all just speculation anyway.
Well, at least we don't have to worry about that for a while when it comes to Star Trek
(well, for the most part anyway).
Well, at least we don't have to worry about that for a while when it comes to Star Trek
Aspects of TOS became 20th century technology.
Well, at least we don't have to worry about that for a while when it comes to Star Trek
We've already missed Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, four Voyager probes, the Eugenics Wars, cryogenic satellites and sleeper ships (which were supplanted by faster interplanetary drives in 2018), the Millennium Gate, the Nomad probe, Shaun Geoffrey Christopher's mission to Saturn, and the founding of the Sanctuary Districts. We're three years from the Bell Riots, four years from the reunification of Ireland, 11 years from Ares IV's trip to Mars (implying three earlier ones), 12 years from the admission of the 52nd state to the US, 16 years from the Charybdis launch, etc. The calendar started catching up with Trek decades ago, and it's still chipping away.
There's nothing to day that in the Trek timeline the first 5 voyagers were ever built -- perhaps they were scrapped before production like SN12/13/14 have been.
Sounds about right. Brexit (an act of economic and social terrorism) leads to the unification of Ireland by 2024. Data told us this back in 1990.
(Well actually he told everyone but the UK back in 1990, the BBC didn't broadcast it until 2007)
19 years to TV starts to fade as an entertainment medium too.
Plausible, DC could well become a state in the next year or two.
Greg already explained that one. Come on Christopher
But in all seriousness, I was mainly talking about the series' propers in the 22nd centuries on.
It's kind of sad in a way how far along science fiction thought we might be by now in space exploration. I mean look at 2001: A Space Odyssey. By 2001 a trip to an orbital station was as routine as taking a trip to London.
Honestly, I think the key to meaningful space travel is finding a way to break the light speed barrier. Star Trek is probably spot on with that. You can't really do much if you are limited by the speed of light. Space is just too vast. And of course we're probably decades away from anything on that scale (I do happen to believe we'll find a way to break that barrier, and I've read in the past Star Trek may not actually be too far off base with some of their ideas--obviously not in the specifics but some of the general ideas of using anti-matter and subspace..and of course finding a way to 'warp' space because even in Star Trek, the ships themselves are limited by the speed of light). It is one thing I always loved about Star Trek. They did try to think of things like that, and as the years went by they refined the narrative to at least try to make it sound more scientifically plausible. You can't actually go faster than the speed of light, so they warp the space around the ship to make it possible.
The film Event Horizon actually tried to make it sound plausible as well, by creating a singularity that the ship traveled through (unfortunately for them they traveled through Hell and back to get there, quite literally
--oops).
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That's not really a Star Trek thing so much as a legit science thing.
Right. It's just Star Trek didn't make things up in a vacuum. Sure, the played fast and loose because the story came first, but they at least gave things like that consideration. It was actually later shows that probably gave things like that more consideration (the so called "technobabble"). Not always factually true, but they tried to make it sound plausible if nothing else. And it seemed there was at least some basis in science. Warp speed in Star Trek might not literally be true from a scientific standpoint as presented, but the idea of warping space to go faster than light may not be far from what you really need to do.
That will probably always be prohibitively difficult. A more realistic approach is a long-term, centuries-long process of "island-hopping," making shorter trips to the various rogue planets and planetoids that probably populate interstellar space at separations of light-months, and gradually migrating from star to star. Or we could just send swarms of miniature chip-sized robot probes to survey other star systems while we focus on building artificial habitats out of the millions of cometary bodies that constitute the Kuiper belt, scattered disk, and Oort cloud, which could support thousands of worlds' worth of human habitation with no need for interstellar travel.
I explored another option in my Analog story "Abductive Reasoning," which is reprinted as a free sample on my Patreon site: https://www.patreon.com/posts/41459524
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