The EIGHTIES (TOS, by definition with maybe a smidge of TNG)

[Allyn Gibson]

I still remember reading The Entropy Effect and thinking 'wow- this lady (McIntyre) is really taking liberties with the characters, the 'verse, and the franchise!

I reread Entropy Effect about three years ago, and I was struck by how much McIntyre made the Star Trek universe feel bigger. Like, there was a sense of how people lived in this universe. It felt very grounded and very human, which is a strange sort of comment for a book about the end of the universe. It felt like a place in ways that Star Trek usually didn't (and still doesn't). Prime Directive, a decade later, has a similar feel.

 

[Jedi Marso]

Not that it's One vs. Another, but I've come to like Spock's World more. Or at least I've come to like Final Reflection less. It ultimately boils down to

Spoiler: Final Reflection Spoiler

Crazy Admiral / White Supremacist (!) Wants a War.

Everything about the book is so wonderful except for that sadly tiresome core. (It hadn't been beaten COMPLETELY to death back then, I suppose.) I would have liked to have seen more of the Shadowy Power Behind the Throne guy.

Also the ages of Spock and McCoy are entirely out of whack, IIRC. The "modern" part of the book takes place ten years after Errand of Mercy and the end of the story is 30 years before that (40 years before the start of the book). Bones is supposedly in diapers during the book and Spock is a boy. There's no timeline I know of that puts Bones in his thirties during season 1 of TOS. There's more wiggle room with Spock but I still think he's too old. Considering that the book features Carter Winston then I can certainly take TAS and Yesteryear into account.

But I'm sure I'll read it again in the coming months. It's still an astonishing book.

Remember that TFR is presented as a book within a book. It's a work of historical fiction, so the age discrepancies are okay- not to be taken literally. (As canon). Many authors of historical fiction shift events around here and there in order to fit their narrative- Bernard Cornwall is a master at it.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

One of the things that I remember about 'The Final Reflection' is that it felt like FTL travel was still relatively new and it took weeks, sometimes months, to travel between star systems; with the Klingon Ambassador Kreen's journey to Earth taking several weeks.
I didn't so much mind the age discrepancy between Spock and McCoy because it allowed us a glimpse of McCoy's grandfather and Carter Winston.

 

[Falconer]

Spoiler: Final Reflection Spoiler

Crazy Admiral / White Supremacist (!) Wants a War.

There are tons of pro-war guys in the Klingon Empire; we see that beginning in Chapter One in Margon’s discussion of how the Empire needs to expand but it’s surrounded on all three sides by the Federation, the Romulans, and the Kinshaya. Chapter One sets up the idea that the pro-war guys are playing a Game against the anti-war guy (Kethas). In Chapter Two, Kethas teaches Vrenn about the Reflective Game—the idea that in war your enemy’s losses are your own. In the end, Krenn thwarts the pro-war guys on both sides (who are conspiring together), because he has learned the lesson well. The one pro-war guy on the Federation side “reflects” the one anti-war guy on the Klingon side (Krenn or Meth). There are lots of layers to it so it’s not easy to boil down the interpretation.

 

[Christopher]

One of the things that I remember about 'The Final Reflection' is that it felt like FTL travel was still relatively new and it took weeks, sometimes months, to travel between star systems; with the Klingon Ambassador Kreen's journey to Earth taking several weeks.

I think that was a reference to "The Cage" and Tyler saying starships were much faster than they'd been 18 years before because "the time barrier" had been broken. Diane Carey's First Frontier also treats fast starships like the Enterprise as a recent innovation. As I recall, TFR's plot was built in part around a reference in the Spaceflight Chronology to ships being limited to warp 4 until there was a breakthrough with the use of dilithium.

 

[Tallguy]

with the Klingon Ambassador Kreen's journey to Earth taking several weeks.

A full year, IIRC.

There are tons of pro-war guys in the Klingon Empire; we see that beginning in Chapter One in Margon’s discussion of how the Empire needs to expand but it’s surrounded on all three sides by the Federation, the Romulans, and the Kinshaya. Chapter One sets up the idea that the pro-war guys are playing a Game against the anti-war guy (Kethas). In Chapter Two, Kethas teaches Vrenn about the Reflective Game—the idea that in war your enemy’s losses are your own. In the end, Krenn thwarts the pro-war guys on both sides (who are conspiring together), because he has learned the lesson well. The one pro-war guy on the Federation side “reflects” the one anti-war guy on the Klingon side (Krenn or Meth). There are lots of layers to it so it’s not easy to boil down the interpretation.

More than fair. Except:

Spoiler: SPOILER

"Krenn thwarts the pro-war guys on both sides" WELL. I mean he does, but he's also given an unstoppable living superweapon to do it. The Klingons stop the Klingon conspirators AND they stop the Federation conspirators. It makes the "good" Feds come across as rather bumbling or at least ineffectual.

Also there isn't a Federation advancement that the Klingons haven't gotten to first.

(I'll stop using spoiler tags for a 40 year old book if no one cares.)

I think there was something in the Spaceflight Chronology about ships being limited to warp 4 until there was a breakthrough with the use of dilithium.

I was amazed when I was going through the SFC a few years ago that several plot points in TFR come directly from the SFC. Including the Babel conference, a notable death, and Carter Winston's involvement.

 

[Jedi Marso]

One of the things that I remember about 'The Final Reflection' is that it felt like FTL travel was still relatively new and it took weeks, sometimes months, to travel between star systems; with the Klingon Ambassador Kreen's journey to Earth taking several weeks.
I didn't so much mind the age discrepancy between Spock and McCoy because it allowed us a glimpse of McCoy's grandfather and Carter Winston.

Yes. The ships in TFR were pre-dilithium. Dilithium power-channeling was a technological breakthrough near the end of the novel that brought about the first generation of starships (on both sides) able to achieve the warp 6-8 speeds commonly seen in TOS.

 

[Jedi Marso]

I was amazed when I was going through the SFC a few years ago that several plot points in TFR come directly from the SFC. Including the Babel conference, a notable death, and Carter Winston's involvement.

I always saw this as a benefit of the relative lack of material available back on those days- it tended to be a LOT more internally consistent. FASA Trek was notable for this as well.

 

[Christopher]

I always saw this as a benefit of the relative lack of material available back on those days- it tended to be a LOT more internally consistent. FASA Trek was notable for this as well.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you're talking about different works of fiction, this is completely untrue; the occasional book chose to reference something outside itself, but it was rare for any novelist to stay consistent with anything beyond their own previous books, until a loose, partial continuity started to build up in the mid- to late '80s. For instance, Pawns and Symbols came out only 18 months after The Final Reflection but depicted Klingon culture in a very different way.

If you're only speaking of reference materials, then I guess so -- having only a few available works in the "canon" of Trek reference works (in the original sense of "canon" as a set of essential texts on a given subject) means that everyone drew on the same sources, e.g. The Making of Star Trek, the Concordance, the Technical Manual, etc. But I don't see how that's different from today, when the authoritative texts are the Okuda reference books and Star Charts, plus Memory Alpha.