The Yesterday Books

[Smiley]

Yesterday's Son had some good ideas, but it had a disjointed feeling to it. It was almost like a good fanfic author was publishing a chapter of a continuing story every month on a website. The scenes with Spock and Zar were the highlight for me.

Time for Yesterday was a little better, but it had the same feeling of jumping from threat to threat. For example, the Originators were a cool idea, but they needed to be explored in more than just one chapter.

This one might have been better if I had read more of the 38 stories before it. I'm pretty sure Winona Kirk's death happened in a previous book, but I have no idea which one. I did like how TfY built on events from the series and TMP and foreshadowed the next three movies.

Ratings:

Yesterday's Son: 6 out of 10
Time for Yesterday: 7 out of 10

I've heard good things about these books in the past. What do you think of them?

 

[Turtletrekker]

I love them both, giving YS 8/10 and TFY 9/10.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

This one might have been better if I had read more of the 38 stories before it.

I seem to recall that Crispin borrowed characters from other books, but I don't think you actually needed to know any of them.

I'm pretty sure Winona Kirk's death happened in a previous book,

Nope.

I did like how TfY built on events from the series and TMP and foreshadowed the next three movies.

At the time, I liked that, too. It was like a lead-in to Star Trek II.

Unfortunately, it's hard to accept the book today; it destroys half the Federation, and the supernovas all over the place would sterilize most of the Federation from the hard radiation wavefronts within about a century. (Earth would be sterilized about four years after the book, for instance.)

 

[Smiley]

Since Winona's death wasn't covered in an earlier book, I would have liked to have had more details. It got brought up so often as an allusion that I was sure it was in another popular book that Crispin didn't want to give full spoilers on.

 

[Claudia]

The Yesterday books are two of my favourite ST-books of all time. First of all, I have always liked episode tie-ins, and secondly, the world-weariness of Zar, Spock's opening up to emotions etc. of TfY just appealed to me a great deal. IMO, Crispin is one of the very few authors who can write Vulcans in a believable way. It's really sad that the once thought of follow-up trilogy never got to see the light of day.

 

[captcalhoun]

i read the second one. was okay. thought it odd that the planets in the AC system are named after Superman characters...

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

Allyn Gibson said:
Unfortunately, it's hard to accept the book today; it destroys half the Federation, and the supernovas all over the place would sterilize most of the Federation from the hard radiation wavefronts within about a century. (Earth would be sterilized about four years after the book, for instance.)

Have you read the Genesis Wave nonsense?

 

[JD]

But at least the Genesis Wave was aknowledged as a big deal in later books.

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

The Yesterday books were published during the era of inter-book non-continuity. It's amazing that the story was allowed to be sequelised! The Genesis books were written when inter-novel continuity became the status quo rather than the exception to the rule.

My appreciation of a book isn't dependent on other books. I love the Yesterday books as great character pieces. I can't stand the Genesis Wave books as they are just so much twaddle. (IMO before anyone complains.)

I don't care if Alpha Centauri II ceased to exist in Time For Yesterday, and turned up again 15 novels down the line. It's not a big deal. The story is what matters.

 

[KRAD]

The Yesterday books were published during the era of inter-book non-continuity. It's amazing that the story was allowed to be sequelised!

This is not true, actually. While there wasn't a huge amount of internovel continuity at the time, it did exist, with some secondary characters being carried over from book to book, and many authors using John M. Ford's interpretation of the Klingons and Diane Duane's interpretation of the Romulans. And in the time between the publication of Yesterday's Son and Time for Yesterday, you also had Battlestations!, a sequel to Dreadnought!; The IDIC Epidemic, a sequel to The Vulcan Academy Murders; The Romulan Way, a sequel to My Enemy, My Ally; and Strangers from the Sky, which may not have been a direct sequel to Dwellers in the Crucible, but used some of the same characters.

So, in fact, that sort of thing was going on quite regularly in the 1980s. It was in the 1990s that the licensor cracked down on such things.

 

[Christopher]

^^Right -- and there were also Mindshadow and Demons, the first two installments in J. M. Dillard's series of novels that featured an ongoing cast of security officers with continuing character arcs, with Bloodthirst and The Lost Years to follow.

In fact, Time for Yesterday is pretty much the pinnacle of the first era of internovel continuity in the Pocket Trek line. It contains allusions to the works of at least a half-dozen other Trek novelists (her acknowledgments credit Diane Duane, Brad Ferguson, John M. Ford, Jean Lorrah, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Howard Weinstein as authors whose works she referenced in the book). Although the loose continuity and cross-referencing among novels had been going on for years -- at least since the first references to Duane's Romulans and Ford's Klingons began showing up in other books -- Time for Yesterday is pretty much the most extensive and inclusive exercise in cross-referencing that existed in that early, pre-Richard Arnold era.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Not to mentioned shared original characters (pre-1989 memo), such as Mahase the Eseriot relief communications officer, Naraht the horta and Security Chief Ingrit Thompson.