Even in TOS the Andromeda galaxy was shown to be way out of reach, and becoming uninhabitable to boot...
Star Trek: The Entropy Effect (#2) by Vonda McIntyre
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Even in TOS the Andromeda galaxy was shown to be way out of reach, and becoming uninhabitable to boot...
True also. This was years before the whole Richard Arnold saga I think, right? I guess it's more accurate to say TEE is at the tail end of the 5YM.
Is it possible there were some legal issues at the time of "Yesterday's Son?" I remember the foreword to "Mudd's Angels" that the author couldn't include "Mudd's Passion" from the animated series due to some legal issues. Could that have affected "Yesterday's Son" as well?
Also, it's been a long time since I read "Yesterday's Son", is it possible that takes place before "Yesteryear?".
You know, I can't remember that bit. Was it actually the Andromeda Galaxy? Or something else referred to as Andromeda?
Otherwise you are right, short of some wormhole or something it's not really a feasible Star Trek plot device to have an officer that served in the Andromeda Galaxy. That would seem to be a pretty large inconsistency.
It takes place two years after "All Our Yesterdays," which would have to be toward the end of the 5-year mission, so it seems unlikely.
Yes, the Kelvans in "By Any Other Name" were from the Andromeda Galaxy and seeked to colonize our galaxy because theirs was becoming uninhabitable.
No, it was a postulated advance in starship speeds, a new experimental starship class fast enough for intergalactic travel. It didn't become an inconsistency until later productions established that Starfleet was still confined to our galaxy. At the time McIntyre wrote these books, there was nothing to rule out the possibility of a new breakthrough.
Oh yeah, forgot about that.
No, I mean Flynn from TEE--did she really work in the Andromeda Galaxy (though I guess based on the rest of your comment it was the galaxy)
I guess so. It seems a bit far-fetched to me just based on "By Any Other Name" but I guess it's true it's not really a contradiction at that time.
Probably not. Another publisher had the rights to the animated series, and they had already done a novelization of “Mudd’s Passion” (Log Three) in 1975. Mudd’s Angels came out in 1978, and all of the Logs were still in print. By the time Yesterday’s Son came out in 1983, it’s unlikely Ballantine had any leverage to prevent Pocket from referring back to a 10-year-old animated episode.
She didn't "work in the Andromeda Galaxy," like she was in an office job there or something. She was given command of a long-range explorer starship (a "galaxy ship") that traveled to the Andromeda Galaxy.
It's not so different from The Wounded Sky's inversion drive, or ST III's transwarp.
Yes.
Because Alan Dean Foster had already novelized "Mudd's Passion" for Ballantine, published in December 1974. "Mudd's Angels" was published by Bantam in May 1978. So Lawrence just skipped over the events shown in TAS.
From memory, it all still fits. The "Yesteryear" incident was embarrassing to the historians that were scanning while an exploration party was using the portal. They caused the timeline to erase Spock as an adult. I think "Yesterday's Son" (and certainly "Time for Yesterday") mentioned a permanent historians' facility on the Time Planet.
I asked Janet Kagan about the absence of M'Ress in "Uhura's Song". The medical staff was studying UFP records about felinoids and, it seemed to me, having M'Ress already on board would have helped the plot. Janet simply wasn't familiar enough with TAS to try to address it when writing the novel to her deadline, and the Filmation animateds were not on hand, unless they happened to be running on TV. However, Janet did make a reference to Snnanagfashtalli (aka Snarl), the Treklit felinoid crew member introduced by Vonda McIntyre in "The Entropy Effect".
Was it not that Sulu was assigned to Flynn's ship and - had the events not been altered by Kirk's untimely death - we would not have been seeing Sulu or Flynn again?
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Definitely agree, I really like that aspect of McIntyre's books. Somewhere on here I half-jokingly said I would have been keen for a character-study/drama novel about Del and Vance. I have mixed feelings about how intriguing she makes those characters out to be...after their deaths. On the one hand, it's great that she makes them characters who are missed. On the other, she does it so well, it's almost a little morbid, IMO.
One nice little bit of continuity is how Dreadnaught! picks up on and refers to Flynn in command of the Magellan as a posting that Piper almost went to. Even though it never comes to the forefront, its still nice that that setup exists in the background in another novel.
Yes, that's true. Yet Starfleet is often testing new FTL drive systems. And the Kelvans were refugees. There's still stuff to explore, while the Andromeda Galaxy remains habitable. And I imagine the Kelvans would be keen to work with Starfleet to develop technologies that make the journey between Galaxies shorter. They augmented the Enterprise to travel faster, IIRC. So I imagine research and development between Starfleet and the Kelvans would be mutually beneficial, and of scientific and humanitarian interest. The Magellanic Cloud's scouting mission might be a prelude to assisting a Kelvan evacuation.
It read to me as an example of Starfleet's technological advancement after the 5YM. It's not as if it is a major thread, but the idea that Starfleet is testing some really ambitious FTL drive systems is there in the 80's novels; in the previously mentioned The Wounded Sky. Battlestations! keeps the development of Transwarp in mind, too.
There was no knowing what future Star Trek would have, after the original crew were gone. I imagine showing technology having advanced exponentially can be read as suggesting how hopeful the future is for the Star Trek fictional setting.
I think Sulu was temporarily reassigned to the Captain Hunter's ship, the Aerfen, in TEE...? Mandela Flynn eventually leaves the security chief posting on the Enterprise to become captain of the Magellanic Clouds. That could have been an interesting development for Sulu's career between the end of the 5YM and TMP, but Sulu seemed to have a real bee in his bonnet for the Aerfen under Hunter's command, IIRC.
Very interesting background information about the accessibility of the animated series for authors of the 80's novels. Thank you for sharing that behind-the-scenes perspective!
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No, as Desert Kris said, that was Captain Hunter and Aerfen in The Entropy Effect. The "galaxy ships" were established later in McIntyre's TWOK and TSFS novelizations, set further along in the timeline, and then referenced in Dreadnought!, written later but set earlier.
Yeah, that's what I meant
I was just curious. But it sounds like it's more of a case where either the writers at the time just weren't as familiar with the animated series. Obviously there was no Memory-Alpha back then, and no videos of the animated series at that time so if they weren't on TV there probably was no easy way to review them.
And maybe the writers/editors back then just didn't consider the animated series as 'official' Star Trek for lack of a better word (I hesitate the use the word 'canon' because was that even really that big a thing back then). I mean, this was before the whole Arnold thing, but maybe some writers just didn't feel the need to consider the animated series episodes back then for whatever reason.
Yes, even before Arnold and the '89 memo, a lot of people dismissed TAS because it was animated, or just because they weren't familiar with it. I remember a letter column from an early issue of DC's first TOS comic where editor Bob Greenberger said that he preferred to count the animated series while the comic's writer Mike Barr preferred to disregard it. Bjo Trimble's Concordance covered TAS (because it came out while TAS was on and she had access to a lot of production art) while the original 1981 edition of Allan Asherman's Compendium ignored it (despite being touted on the cover as "The Most Thoroughly Researched and Complete Star Trek Reference Work Ever Published!"). There was no "policy" on the matter, just individual preference.
I'm lucky enough to have the 'revised' Compendium that has the animated series. That helped when I recently did a rewatch of that series because like the TV series, I like to watch that in production order as opposed to airing order and my DVD collection is in order of airdate. I used the Compendium to keep me on track for both series
It sounds like back in the 1980's it was much more up to the individual writer's preference on some things. Nowadays it sounds like there's more parameters I guess you'd call it and canon is a bigger deal. Which I guess makes sense since there's so many more shows now to keep track of. Back then there was just a TV series, one movie and if you counted it an animated series.
I do like that the animated series is now part of the equation. There were some good, and some even really good episodes and it's nice that they are part of the mix. I liked that your novel included a significant place for "Yesteryear"-easily one of the best episodes of TAS.
I've gotten the impression that even though most of the animated series is downplayed or dismissed or avoided because of possible legal issues, "Yesteryear" was something of an exception...? Yesterday's Son may be incompatible with it, but The Vulcan Academy Murders, Mindshadow, and Demons seemed inclusive of "Yesteryear".
What you say was sort of true later on, in the TNG era. The '89 memo claimed to "decanonize" TAS, but that was a fiction because Arnold only had power over the tie-ins, and TNG itself was unaffected by it and went ahead and alluded to "Yesteryear" in "Unification." So when the Chronology came out, it handwaved that by saying "We tend to disregard TAS except for 'Yesteryear' because it was mentioned in TNG."
However, that has nothing to do with the books you're talking about. Until that benighted '89 memo, there was no such thing as "canon policy." Nobody until Richard Arnold was enough of a control freak to think it was necessary to legislate what was "real" in an imaginary franchise. For that matter, there was no systematic continuity to the '80s novels; a number of them alluded to or borrowed elements from each other, but plenty more did their own thing, and even the ones that had loose continuity links often contradicted each other. So whether a given writer chose to reference TAS or not was entirely, 100% up to them, based on their own personal preference or whether they were familiar with the series.
Ah, the 'pre-canon' days, when the world of Star Trek novels was freer
.I wonder, do you ever wish you had the chance to write a Star Trek novels back in those days? Or is it better to have more parameters? I could sort of see advantages to both I guess. Having more freedom does open things up a lot. But I can see where maybe having more parameters can keep you more focused.
But I guess one of Arnold's legacies is "canon". The novels at least seemed to be kept to a stricter standard these days when it comes to on screen canon than it once did. Though, I guess too that's because there are way more shows now then there was back in the 1980s so it's probably more important for tie ins to be concerned with canon.
And now we Trekkies have endless arguments about canon and continuity (though personally I am concerned with continuity--ironic how much Trekkies worry about canon when the only ones that really need be concerned with it are you guys--the tie in writers....but then I find a lot of times fans really mean continuity, not canon per se).
Sorry, I was meandering a bit there.
You're operating under a huge misconception here. Arnold did not invent the concept of licensed tie-ins keeping consistent with screen continuity -- he weaponized it. His approach was excessively rigid and micromanaged, an aberration in its strictness, leading to things that normally just aren't done in publishing, like taking a book away from its original author to have it rewritten. The approach post-Arnold is not that different from the approach pre-Arnold -- the licensors expect us to stay consistent with screen content and work with us to achieve that in a way that respects our creative freedom. Arnold was highly defensive of "Gene's vision" and saw tie-in authors as threats to its integrity that needed to be kept in check. His successors like Paula Block and John Van Citters see us as creative partners and trust us to do our jobs with their support and advice. I have hardly ever felt that I lacked creative freedom as a Trek novelist; on the contrary, I've often been surprised by how much license I've been granted. I'm sure I would've hated working in the Arnold era, but that era was brief and ended years before I became a Trek author.
The real impact of Arnold's popularization of the "canon" concept has been on fandom's perception of what canon means, not on how we writers actually do our jobs. From a behind-the-scenes standpoint, the main difference between then and now is not that the licensors are stricter, just that there's so much more of the universe defined and codified now. Back when it was only TOS and a couple of movies, the universe was still full of unknowns and there was a lot of flexibility in how it was interpreted. Also, it's much, much easier to consult the episodes and movies, so we're not so reliant on imperfect memory and edited reruns, and thus our accuracy has improved. Back then, TAS simply wasn't available for every writer to use as a reference; these days it's much easier to get hold of. This isn't about dogmatic officials dictating the Rules to us, it's just about the practicalities of gathering reference material for an artistic creation.
Jeri Taylor also namedropped the Phylosians (of "The Infinite Vulcan") in her novelization of "Unification", the first TAS reference since M'Ress was dropped from Issue #1 of DC Comics' post-ST V comic. Keep in mind that Susan Sackett's and Richard Arnold's positions in the "Star Trek Office" ended abruptly with Roddenberry's passing, and the two-part TNG episode was dedicated to GR's memory.
It tended to get a pass because of DC Fontana being its writer, I think.
My understanding is that the winding down of Filmation (meaning some ownerships were temporarily in flux), coinciding with FASA's inclusion of TAS in the TNG RPG materials (which managed to ignore memos and skip past RA's approval process on the final draft), led to "that memo" requiring tie-in licensees to pretend that TAS no longer existed. But the memo essentially only applied from early 1989 till September 1991 (ie Roddenberry's death).
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Thanks for the elaboration. I guess in a way I was giving Arnold too much credit.
It's always good to hear some of the background into how books are written. And it's nice to hear you guys are given a lot of creative freedom. And yeah, I imagine nowadays it's a lot easier to stay consistent with canon because there's tons of ways to get that information.
I've been guilty in the past myself of using the word canon incorrectly. I have a fetish with continuity, but I've learned here especially that's an entirely different thing. Some fans worry to much about canon. It's kind of amusing in a way. Why should fans worry about canon? For me it would make zero sense, esp. since over the years I've come to consider the novel stories part of the Star Trek continuity I follow--and they are clearly not canon. I'm not even a big fan of the term 'head canon'. But in most cases I think what fans mean is 'head continuity'. But I guess 'head canon' has less syllables
To each their own I guess. I simply refer to it as, well, the continuity I follow.Similar threads
