Deprecation, in the sense I'm applying here, comes from the software field: a published Application Program Interface, or a published data format, is formally deprecated when public notice is given that it is no longer supported, has been replaced with something else...
Yes, but that's why it's completely the wrong word to use here -- the SFC scheme was
never "supported" or "replaced," because it was never the official, accepted Trek chronology to begin with. It was just one of multiple coexisting conjectural timelines in tie-ins and fan works. For instance, 1980's
Star Trek Maps, published by Bantam less than a year after the SFC came out, puts the events of TOS in 2261-3. A couple of mid-1980s* fan blueprint publications I have, David John Nielsen's
U.S.S. Enterprise Heavy Cruiser Evolution Blueprints and Todd Guenther &
aridas sofia's
Ships of the Star Fleet Volume One, put ST:TMP in 2267 and TSFS in 2287, as strange as that is. (How can they be 20 years apart when TWOK was only 15 years after "Space Seed?")
*[Memory Alpha says the first
Ships of the Star Fleet was released in 1988, but my copy has a 1987 copyright date, and I remember there was a delay of a year or two between when I ordered it and when it was finally released.]
So there was no single accepted Trek timeline before "The Neutral Zone" locked down TNG's date as 2364. Before that, the only unambiguous fact was that TOS was
sometime in the 23rd century. Some fans and writers preferred to put TOS at the start of the century to try to reconcile with "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "Space Seed," while various others favored putting TOS sometime in the 2260s, give or take a few years. The writers of "The Neutral Zone" evidently favored the latter fan theory, and so that's the version that won out in the end. (And as I said, I doubt the impetus for that came from Roddenberry, since the 1988 writers' strike required that script to be filmed from the first draft with no rewriting by the producers. If Roddenberry had rewritten it, he probably would've excised the date reference altogether, because he never wanted to pin the date down that precisely.)
And I have a distinct recollection that even though at least one novel (JMF's The Final Reflection) made extensive references to the SFC
Yes, and it was the individual choice of Ford and other authors to use the SFC as material for their books, not some kind of official doctrine. They used it because it was there, because it was a source of ideas and worldbuilding.
somebody closely connected with Roddenberry (and I don't think it was Richard Arnold; I'm pretty sure it was before his time) gave explicit orders that it was to be completely and utterly ignored by novelists.
Unlikely, given that Diane Carey's
Final Frontier from 1988 used the SFC dating scheme.
The feeling I got is that it went beyond Arnold's orders for novelists to ignore each other's work, and beyond Doohan's extreme personal disdain for Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise (which I personally overheard while standing in an autograph line in Pasadena), and is more like how Lucasfilm (and George Lucas himself) treated The Star Wars Holiday Special.
I've never heard anything like that, but even if it's true, so what? The fact that Roddenberry disliked a speculation in a novel doesn't mean that it was ever anything more than a speculation. Roddenberry disliked Diane Duane's Rihannsu, but not because they were ever an "official" interpretation, just because he was envious of other people's conjectures getting more attention than his own creations.
