Star Trek: Discovery - The Enterprise War

[JJMiller]

Yes, it definitely functions as a stand-alone. Our preference always is for everyone to read everything, of course — but this stands at several intersections in the various lines, and should work for you whether you approach it looking for a TOS prequel, a Discovery novel, or a pure Pike novel. It’s all of the above.

 

[Ronald Held]

Too bad it cannot be released earlier.

 

[JJMiller]

It'd be nice, but an earlier release would have meant a novel written without the benefit of knowing as much about Season 2. The months between turn-in and release are irreducible, given how many proofing, design, and licensing passes there are.

 

[Tuskin38]

I'm guessing if this is treated like all the other DSC novels, the cover art will just be a publicity image from the show.

Probably a shot of Pike, or if we're lucky, the Enterprise herself.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I’m VERY interested in this. Wonder if there’ll be any attempt at explaining the visual discontinuities between Discovery Enterprise and The Cage, or if this will be fully in Discovery visual continuity mode.

It's a novel. Why would it need to be in either "mode"?

 

[JJMiller]

I don't want to go too much into detail about this yet, but getting Enterprise from one version to the next was as much a goal for me as turning Jeffrey Hunter's portrayal into Anson Mount's.

 

[F. King Daniel]

It's a novel. Why would it need to be in either "mode"?

When they scan something, it's the difference between a paper print-out from Spock's console and a 3D hologram on the bridge. When a chunk gets blown out of the ship, it's the difference between bulkheads sealing the breach and affected areas and a forcefield popping up, keeping the room inhabitable. That has a massive impact on the story they're telling.

 

[Christopher]

When they scan something, it's the difference between a paper print-out from Spock's console and a 3D hologram on the bridge. When a chunk gets blown out of the ship, it's the difference between bulkheads sealing the breach and affected areas and a forcefield popping up, keeping the room inhabitable. That has a massive impact on the story they're telling.

No, it doesn't, because a story is not about such superficialities. It's about events and ideas and characters. You might as well say that it has a "massive impact" to replace Kirstie Alley with Robin Curtis or to replace Steve Ditko's Spider-Man art with John Romita's. What you're talking about is the interpretation of the story, the way it's told.

Roddenberry himself encouraged fans to see Star Trek as a dramatic adaptation of the events it depicted rather than a documentary broadcast, and to see the changes in design between TOS and TMP as improvements in the accuracy of the dramatization. The way TOS looked didn't represent his perfect ideal; it represented the imperfect approximation of the future that he was able to pull off with limited budget, time, resources, and creative freedom. He would've been the first to upgrade those paper printouts to 3D holograms if he'd had the money and the means. Because it would've let the interpretation of the story come closer to the underlying intention of the story to depict a technology centuries beyond our own.

Think of two artists painting the same model, or the same artist painting the same subject a second time after years of training and honing their style. The two paintings will depict the same unique entity, but they won't look exactly the same, because they've interpreted it differently. Art is a representation of an underlying reality. Changes in the representation are not changes in the reality, merely in how it's filtered through the artist's style and capabilities.

 

[F. King Daniel]

No, it doesn't, because a story is not about such superficialities. It's about events and ideas and characters.

Yet if someone watches "The Cage" and wants a novel with that "feel", they're going to be disappointed.

To say details matter not in a story is ridiculous. Details are worldbuilding, which plays a huge part in reader immersion. And what Discovery does is swap out all that worldbuilding for something else. No, doing so is not a crime, but pretending that it makes no difference at all is doublethink.

 

[Christopher]

To say details matter not in a story is ridiculous.

I didn't say they don't matter. I said they matter to the style of how the story is told rather than its substance. A story is an artistic creation, not a literal report of facts. Give two artists the same subject, and they will render it with differences in detail and style. That does not change the fact that they are depicting the same subject.

 

[Kemaiku]

Yet if someone watches "The Cage" and wants a novel with that "feel", they're going to be disappointed.

To say details matter not in a story is ridiculous. Details are worldbuilding, which plays a huge part in reader immersion. And what Discovery does is swap out all that worldbuilding for something else. No, doing so is not a crime, but pretending that it makes no difference at all is doublethink.

I mostly agree with you but...

In "The Cage", they go to red alert and call the captain to the bridge, fearing an imminent collision...from a radio wave. It's so absurb it's ridiculous and should be ignored as hard as possible.

In this episode, they deliberately go to warp to blue shift a long faded transmission back into something that has red shifted from distance decay. And probably to deliberately mock the opening scene of the older episode.

Writing a novel based on The Cage would mean ignoring a lot of scientific progress for the sake of aesthetics.

 

[Damian]

When a chunk gets blown out of the ship, it's the difference between bulkheads sealing the breach and affected areas and a forcefield popping up, keeping the room inhabitable. That has a massive impact on the story they're telling.

I have to admit one of the problems I had with Discovery and trying to think of it as anything other than a reboot is some of that. If there were emergency force fields available why was the Enterprise relying on the more primitive emergency bulkheads?

Another biggie for me was how the Discovery crew were nonchalantly beaming to different areas of the ship like it was nothing. Scotty was pretty specific during the original series that intra ship beaming was incredibly dangerous. Yet the Discovery crew did it without batting an eye....now if it was just not done and nothing was said about it then ok, not a big deal. But you had a very specific line about it and about how dangerous it is to do and Discovery just contradicted that, multiple times in fact. There are a couple of examples of things like that. And a lot of times it just seemed unnecessary to me. I mean, why are they beaming to another section of the ship anyway. In most cases it wasn't an emergency. Couldn't they just WALK to the section they needed to go to. Even in TNG, DS9 and Voyager, much later shows, usually walked to the appropriate section of the ship?

I can get used to design changes over time. But if they are stating this should fit in the continuity then it should fit in the continuity. If you want to reboot the universe then do that. It wouldn't be my personal first choice but it'd make more sense that trying to do pretzel twists trying to explain how it's supposed to fit. When I view Discovery among the rest of the Star Trek universe it doesn't fit in almost every way I can think of. I should be able to point to something and say, oh yeah, now I can see where it makes some sense. But it doesn't and I can't. It screams reboot to me.

 

[Christopher]

In "The Cage", they go to red alert and call the captain to the bridge, fearing an imminent collision...from a radio wave. It's so absurb it's ridiculous and should be ignored as hard as possible.

That's not an accurate characterization of the scene. Rather, they initially thought something was approaching on a collision course, but then discovered it was just a radio signal and therefore harmless. As Pike said, old-style distress signals like that "were keyed to cause interference and attract attention in this way." I take that to mean that the radio signal was designed to disrupt sensors and trigger the ship's alarms (including its collision alarm), sort of like how a strong vibration sets off a car alarm.

In this episode, they deliberately go to warp to blue shift a long faded transmission back into something that has red shifted from distance decay.

Hmm, that's an attempt to use real science, but mostly nonsensical. Something within the galaxy probably wouldn't be moving fast enough away from us to redshift that much, and it wouldn't increase over time, I don't think. And going to warp wouldn't fix it if it were; impulse speed would be more than sufficient.

I have to admit one of the problems I had with Discovery and trying to think of it as anything other than a reboot is some of that. If there were emergency force fields available why was the Enterprise relying on the more primitive emergency bulkheads?

First off, a solid wall is always going to be better than a force-field, because it doesn't cease to exist if the power goes out. Sci-fi likes to use rays and fields to do things that good solid matter does better for the sake of seeming "futuristic," but it's lousy engineering.

More to the point, though, when did we see the Enterprise using emergency bulkheads, except in TWOK? And we saw plenty of force-field use on the ship in TOS, notably in the brig, and in the field Spock rigged to contain Charlie in "Charlie X." Not to mention the deflector shields, of course.

Another biggie for me was how the Discovery crew were nonchalantly beaming to different areas of the ship like it was nothing. Scotty was pretty specific during the original series that intra ship beaming was incredibly dangerous. Yet the Discovery crew did it without batting an eye....now if it was just not done and nothing was said about it then ok, not a big deal.

Yes, that does annoy me. But Trek has always had continuity errors on that scale. TOS contradicted itself on many occasions, and the movies, TNG, and later shows all had further contradictions. I've been seeing this since Enterprise (and it goes back to the original movies and TNG too) -- there are always fans who react to the latest continuity errors as if they were the first of their kind and required shunting the show off into a new universe, even though they're no bigger than the continuity errors we've been getting in Trek since the beginning. Trek has never been a perfectly consistent universe, because a bunch of different people have been making it up as they went.

 

[Kemaiku]

Another biggie for me was how the Discovery crew were nonchalantly beaming to different areas of the ship like it was nothing.

Lorca had that ability built into Discovery. You know, the evil madman from the Mirror Universe. And used it sparingly to slip about inside his chamber of horrors lower levels of the ship.

For all we know the TNG line about it consuming twice as much power is at least what's going on, and he had the computer programmed to not only not alert people, but scrub details of the massive power spikes it causes.

 

[Tuskin38]

Another biggie for me was how the Discovery crew were nonchalantly beaming to different areas of the ship

It happened, what, twice?

When they scan something, it's the difference between a paper print-out from Spock's console

I don't want Star Trek to ignore technological advancement since the 1960s.

ENT didn't have paper print outs, and the pad Sisko hands Kirk in DS9 had a (fake) screen, not a sheet of paper.

 

[Damian]

More to the point, though, when did we see the Enterprise using emergency bulkheads, except in TWOK?

In "Day of the Dove" it's noted most of the crew is trapped behind emergency bulkheads. I seem to remember them mentioned on some other occasions in dialogue as well. Though they were never actually seen, just referred to. And yes, the Enterprise has used force fields in the brig for instance. It was just never noted they used force fields in emergencies.

Yes, that does annoy me. But Trek has always had continuity errors on that scale.

Yes, it's true Star Trek has never been seamless, and never will be. This was just a glaring inconsistency to me for 2 reasons, one is they did this intraship breaming numerous times on Discovery, and the other reason being that there was a very specific line of dialogue that basically said we don't do this because it's dangerous and someone could beam inside a bulkhead. And it's very much avoidable because there is other ways to get around it, mainly by walking to the destination. Sometimes discontinuities occur because they want to advance a story. But there seems to be no reason in this case other than 'it looked cool.' I see no story reason to ignore that line of dialogue from the original series basically.

I guess it comes down to for me if there is some storyline reason something is contradicted from previous canon, I can maybe see that. But when it's done just because it looks neat on TV, that irritates me. Does that matter to show runners, probably not in the least, but, I'll still opine about it nonetheless.

 

[Damian]

For all we know the TNG line about it consuming twice as much power is at least what's going on, and he had the computer programmed to not only not alert people, but scrub details of the massive power spikes it causes.

I was thinking more of Scotty's line in one of the episodes of the original series where he says it's dangerous to do intraship beaming because someone can end up inside a bulkhead. And that was from inside the transporter room.

 

[Kemaiku]

I was thinking more of Scotty's line in one of the episodes of the original series where he says it's dangerous to do intraship beaming because someone can end up inside a bulkhead. And that was from inside the transporter room.

I assume that's still true. Lorca is just determined to get home, and went to the risk of killing an entire starship crew, forcing Starfleet to build Discovery and power the spore drive, he was never in his right mind.

I mean, he kept an 8 foot killer monster in his bedroom.

 

[Christopher]

In "Day of the Dove" it's noted most of the crew is trapped behind emergency bulkheads. I seem to remember them mentioned on some other occasions in dialogue as well. Though they were never actually seen, just referred to. And yes, the Enterprise has used force fields in the brig for instance. It was just never noted they used force fields in emergencies.

It was never noted that they didn't either.

Yes, it's true Star Trek has never been seamless, and never will be. This was just a glaring inconsistency to me for 2 reasons...

I agree that it's a glaring inconsistency. But Trek has had many glaring inconsistencies before, and we've learned to rationalize them or just ignore them. Yelling "alternate universe!" at every continuity error is an overreaction.

I mean, I'm able to accept TAS as part of the same continuity as the live-action shows despite the fact that it uses force-field belts in place of the spacesuits every other production uses. That's the same kind of inconsistency you're talking about with the bulkheads. It's a pretty massive contradiction if you think about it -- but the solution is just not to think about it.

In a sense, every new incarnation of Star Trek is a "reboot" -- a new interpretation of the universe, a new way of telling the stories. That's just how creativity works -- different people approaching the same subject will treat it differently. So every Trek series is a distinct take on the reality. But they all pretend to be the same reality. Just as the Marvel Comics stories being told in 2019 pretend to be in the same reality as the stories told in 1963 even though the characters have aged no more than a decade in-story since then. Or the way the original Planet of the Apes movies pretended to tell a single consistent story even though none of the first four were made with sequels in mind and so every sequel had to rewrite and contradict some element of the previous movies to make a sequel possible. A story doesn't have to actually be perfectly consistent in order to pretend to be consistent.

 

[F. King Daniel]

It's the page-one rewrite of Spock's backstory that separates DSC from TOS and the rest for me. Change it so Spock was raised with a human sister and every time Spock struggles to understand a human or their actions is rendered bizarre. I have no issue with them creating a Spock who had a human sister - it's the insistence that it's the very same incarnation of the character Nimnoy played that I dislike. It's like if WB insisted David Mazous' Bruce Wayne was the same one as Michael Keaton's throughout Gotham's run, or that Tom Welling's Clark Kent was the same version as Christopher Reeve, and pretending his friendship with Lex Luthor fits perfectly within Superman: The Movie's world.

I'm pretty sure Discovery was intended as a reboot, but that market research or whatever showed that a percentage of ultra-die-hard fans will buy anything with "prime universe" slapped on it. So they do pretty much whatever they want and call it "prime". Give it 25 years and someone will release a tell-all book and we'll find out for sure.