I am still upset that none of the novels set in the Palais have acknowledged how the Eiffel Tower was destroyed by space voodoo in the 23rd century.
Old books, new continuity and the foggy window
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
I am still upset that none of the novels set in the Palais have acknowledged how the Eiffel Tower was destroyed by space voodoo in the 23rd century.
The problem with the "it's all parallel timelines" idea is that a lot of works of Trek fiction postulate incompatible laws of physics (like what Dark Mirror asserts about what happens when matter from one timeline is permanently shifted to another), different basics of alien biology (like Pawns and Symbols saying Klingons can't see red, which is hard to reconcile with all their red-lit bridges in later films and shows), radically different versions of history (like the elaborate Earth history David Gerrold's self-insertion character spends several pages expositing in The Galactic Whirlpool), etc. The farther back the changes are, the harder it is to rationalize them being alternate timelines. If human history had been so different centuries ago, it's unlikely to have ended up in the same place by the 23rd or 24th century. If the timelines diverged long enough ago that alien species actually had time to evolve differently, then the modern galaxy would probably be unrecognizable. And a universe that has different physical laws probably couldn't even have stars and planets and life at all, or would have them in radically different forms. Alternate timelines, by definition, are different quantum states of the same universe, and therefore must have the same laws of physics.
So I use the alternate-timeline idea sparingly, mainly for books that are close matches for the Prime/novelverse continuity except for maybe one or two things that don't fit. For instance, the Vornholt Dominion War duology is fine except for the incompatibility with Ro's story in Avatar, and Christie Golden's Seven of Nine is fine except that it overlaps some of the same ground as "Infinite Regress," and the same events wouldn't have happened twice, at least not without someone commenting on it. So I count those as alternate-timeline tales. And I recently shunted Faces of Fire to an alternate timeline because Vanguard: Storming Heaven conflicted with its depiction of Carol and David Marcus's situation c. 2270. (Also because its portrayal of the Klingons is hard to reconcile with modern portrayals, and I've kind of been applying the "foggy window" philosophy to that, but I now realize it just works better as an alternate timeline.) But if it's something more drastic, like the aforementioned examples, I just treat it as a work of fiction, pure and simple.
So I use the alternate-timeline idea sparingly, mainly for books that are close matches for the Prime/novelverse continuity except for maybe one or two things that don't fit. For instance, the Vornholt Dominion War duology is fine except for the incompatibility with Ro's story in Avatar, and Christie Golden's Seven of Nine is fine except that it overlaps some of the same ground as "Infinite Regress," and the same events wouldn't have happened twice, at least not without someone commenting on it. So I count those as alternate-timeline tales. And I recently shunted Faces of Fire to an alternate timeline because Vanguard: Storming Heaven conflicted with its depiction of Carol and David Marcus's situation c. 2270. (Also because its portrayal of the Klingons is hard to reconcile with modern portrayals, and I've kind of been applying the "foggy window" philosophy to that, but I now realize it just works better as an alternate timeline.) But if it's something more drastic, like the aforementioned examples, I just treat it as a work of fiction, pure and simple.
I've been slowly working my way through the DS9R and A Time to... to get up to Destiny, and have been working under the assumption that these were also necessary (or at least as necessary as anything else). Are they skippable for an impatient bastard like me who really wants to read Destiny? I mean, sure, I'll go back to them - I intend to read everything eventually. But being able to read Destiny sometime in the next year or so would be awesome.
If you're not skipping the DS9R or A Time To, then you don't want to skip these either. The good news is that they're all really quick reads. Resistance and Q&A, in particular, are tiny little books.
^For what it's worth, I wrote Greater Than the Sum (the immediate prologue to Destiny) as a jumping-on point for TNG, since it basically wraps up the leftover threads from the previous books and sets up the board for what comes next. So while this may smack of self-promotion, if you don't want to read all the TNG books before Destiny, you could just read GTTS and you'd be covered.
I wonder if there's room in Trek for multiple possible pasts as well as futures?
About the differing physical laws in Dark Mirror, it reminds me of something similar in Stargate SG-1 (I forget the episode name, sorry) where an alternate Sam Carter couldn't co-exist for long in the same universe as her counterpart. This was ignored in all subsequent Stargates where alternate universe characters crossed over.
^Which just goes to show how often canon itself needs to be treated as a "foggy window," instead of the inviolable gospel many fans mistake it to be.
It doesn't have to be alternate timelines, it could be alternate universes that never branched off the "prime" universe. When they were created they were similar but not exactly the same. Perhaps some of the Enterprises we saw in Parallels were from alternate timelines (like Riker and the Borg universe) and some were from separate universes. It's all doublespeak to tell a cool story, and isn't the story the thing we really want?
Thanks for the reply Chris, Zarkon and rfmcdpei
I think I may add it to my queue
I think I may add it to my queueSteve, where is this quote from? And yes I know "WHO" the quote is from, but not where..
Mike
In what way was the portrayal of Klingons off? Nothing seemed to leap out as me and I am curious as to what subtelties I missed.
Mike
It depicts the Klingons as having two rival factions, the Kamorh'dag and the Gevish'rae -- which I suspect may have been originally meant to be the two rival factions that Vonda McIntyre used in her ST III novelization, but renamed due to '90s continuity restrictions. (I can't remember the names of the factions McIntyre posited.) But I've always taken them to represent the smooth-headed and ridged Klingons, respectively, since the latter group includes Kruge. I had the impression that Friedman was trying to imply that they were "smooth" and "bumpy" Klingons respectively, but couldn't quite get away with acknowledging the change outright. Yet the explanation of their respective status and background doesn't mesh with what we now know about the two varieties of Klingon, and we now have other names for those groups, the QuchHa' and HemQuch.
(Then again, in the My Brother's Keeper trilogy, Friedman implied that the ridged Klingons were created by genetic engineering. So either I misread his intent in FoF, or he changed his mind between books.)
At any rate, Klingon culture and history have been thoroughly enough explored by now that there doesn't really seem to be a place for this deep-seated factional divide that, according to FoF, stretches back more than ten generations and completely dominates Klingon internal politics, yet which we never heard a single word about anywhere else.
There's also the fact that the novel depicts a Klingon emperor in the 23rd century, when "Rightful Heir" established that there hadn't been a Klingon emperor since the late 21st century (300 years before the episode). I've fudged that over by replacing "emperor" with "chancellor" in my mind, but putting it in an alternate timeline spares me the need to do that and lets me take it as it's written.
Really, I should've moved the book to an alternate timeline much earlier, but I haven't read it in years and I guess the Klingon stuff kind of slipped my mind. Sometimes that happens -- I count a book in my continuity, then I don't revisit it for quite a while, and when I do, I find that some contradictions have accumulated.
It's from the Doctor Who novel The Gallifrey Chronicles.
Here are some numbered novel questions (as I've been on holiday and reading a few):
1) Is it the novels that first make the suggestion that Kirk and Spock knew each other at the academy or does that appear somewhere else first -in the show bible, the cartoon?
2) Triangle picks up on the idea advanced in the adaptation of the Motion Picture, that Kirk and most of the fleet are throwbacks and that a group-mind (and not a particularly nice) one might be evolving out of humanity - the situation is not really resolved at the end of the book - did anyone else play with this idea?
1) Is it the novels that first make the suggestion that Kirk and Spock knew each other at the academy or does that appear somewhere else first -in the show bible, the cartoon?
2) Triangle picks up on the idea advanced in the adaptation of the Motion Picture, that Kirk and most of the fleet are throwbacks and that a group-mind (and not a particularly nice) one might be evolving out of humanity - the situation is not really resolved at the end of the book - did anyone else play with this idea?
Diane Carey's Starfleet Academy: Cadet Kirk from 1996 has Kirk, Spock, and McCoy all meeting as cadets. But other than that, as far as I can recall, the only time that was postulated prior to the 2009 movie was in the abortive Starfleet Academy movie that Harve Bennett tried to get produced after ST V. There are various tales of Kirk at the Academy, but most of them don't have Spock in them, and the tales we've gotten of Kirk's first mission on the Enterprise have him meeting Spock for the first time there.
No, the New Humans idea hasn't been revisited. It's one of the things I've thought about pursuing if I got to do more post-TMP fiction, though.
It appears much earlier than this but only in a very brief reference - I'll pose it as a trivia question - anyone want to identify the numbered book that has Cadet Kirk and junior officer Spock encountering each other at Starfleet academy?
That would be super awesome, Christopher! I'd love to see you do more post-TMP novels anyway, but the New Humans would be a great concept to revisit.
If you do end up pursuing a storyline related to a "New Humans" group consciousness emerging on Earth, I'd recommend checking out at least one recent novel featuring the emergence of human telepathy. It may be useful to know what directions other authors have gone in if you write it.
Triggers by Robert J. Sawyer.
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