These are the voyages of... what? Really? Who??? Who Cares????

[Idran]

Why would they even have to address it, honestly? They haven't worried about the decline in baseball attendance in the late 80s reversing and the sport not actually dying out, or us not actually having interstellar AI probes or manned missions to Saturn, or the many other already-significant differences in Trek and real life. The Eugenics Wars books were fun, but you didn't see Rings of Time worrying about the massive tech difference between real life and Trek's early 21st century.

Also it's Marvel that does the shifting timeline stuff, Sci; DC just reboots every decade or two so Superman's always only been around a few years and the old stuff never really happened.

 

[Christopher]

Why would they even have to address it, honestly? They haven't worried about the decline in baseball attendance in the late 80s reversing and the sport not actually dying out, or us not actually having interstellar AI probes or manned missions to Saturn, or the many other already-significant differences in Trek and real life.

Or the fact that humpback whales are no longer endangered, fortunately.

But the thing is... Of course you can still enjoy a fictional franchise once it's been left behind by reality, but then it becomes an exercise in nostalgia. And a large part of Star Trek's original appeal was that it was forward-looking, that it inspired people by offering a vision of a better future that they could buy into. It was so inspiring that it led thousands of people to become engineers, scientists, astronauts, doctors, and so forth, and to make real advances in science and technology inspired by ideas from the show. More than that, it was a cutting-edge, envelope-pushing show for its day in terms of visual effects, design, ideas, and content. It showed people something they'd never seen on TV before. It took ideas and sensibilities from prose science fiction and popularized them to mass audiences. But sometime during the TNG era, it became the old reliable establishment rather than the daring innovator. And it's just receded further behind the cutting edge since then.

I just feel that if it's ever going to be an innovative and forward-looking screen franchise again, Trek will need to start fresh, to begin with the ideas that are current in the present in science fiction and in society and build on those. I don't know, maybe there's a way to inject those into it without losing the old continuity, but it would require being a lot more forgiving of internal contradiction than a lot of Trek fans are willing to be. Doctor Who has managed to modernize itself while still purporting to be in continuity with the original series, but only by pretty much ignoring the outdated present and near-future history of the original series and explicitly codifying the idea that history is constantly being rewritten -- meaning that it technically isn't the same timeline anyway, except from the Doctor's own perspective.

 

[Sci]

Also it's Marvel that does the shifting timeline stuff, Sci; DC just reboots every decade or two so Superman's always only been around a few years and the old stuff never really happened.

Yes -- I was alluding to this when I argued that eventually there would need to be a completely new Trek continuity. I never said that DC did a sliding time-scale.

 

[Idran]

Also it's Marvel that does the shifting timeline stuff, Sci; DC just reboots every decade or two so Superman's always only been around a few years and the old stuff never really happened.

Yes -- I was alluding to this when I argued that eventually there would need to be a completely new Trek continuity. I never said that DC did a sliding time-scale.

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood the last comment about Superman. My mistake!

 

[RandyS]

It reached a point in time where I simply could not keep up with all the cross overs. I tried.

So have I.

So don't worry about it. I've long since stopped trying to catch every little crossover, because that's like trying to keep up with every appearance of Iron Man in every comic published by Marvel each month; it's a Sisyphusean task, and it's not necessary to enjoy the books you've got.



Ezri switched to the command track in the very first DS9 Relaunch novel, Avatar (2001). Destiny: Gods of Night (2008) was set in 2381 and it was the first book to feature her in command of the USS Aventine (not Adventure). At the time Gods of Night was set, the DS9 books hadn't gotten past early 2377 yet. So the idea was that Ezri had transferred to the Aventine between the DS9 books and the start of the Destiny trilogy. The story of how she ended up in command of the Aventine was told in the Destiny trilogy.



Because Destiny was the first to feature Ezri on the Aventine, and used her as its DS9 character so as to avoid spoiling what had happened at Deep Space 9 between 2377 and 2381. At the time, it was thought that the DS9 novels would continue from 2377 to the Destiny period.

Instead, editor Marco Palmieri (who was in charge of the DS9 novels) was laid off in late 2008 as a result of the economic crash, and the subsequent editors of the DS9 book line decided to jump into the post-Destiny era rather than to keep the DS9 books in 2377.

Some fans were upset at the decision to jump time frames. However, author David R. George III is finally getting the chance to flash back and show us what happened between 2377 and 2381 in his upcoming DS9 book Ascension.



I don't think there's a market for it. A few fans on the Internet doesn't mean there's enough interest for Yet Another Planet Of the Week Story Where Data Learns A Valuable Lesson About Humanity.



The continuing story on TNG, DS9, TTN, and VOY are far more interesting than yet another series-era story. I mean, damn, we got 176 episodes each of TNG, DS9, and VOY. There just isn't that much new territory you can cover in those timeframes.

This is not about reasonably thinking a series-era book is gonna be more interesting. This is about you just not liking the direction the post-series books have taken. If it were about the former rather than the latter, you would want more ENT series-era books, too.

I never once said I didn't like the way the post series era books were going, only that I'm tired of all the change. And I also DID in fact say that some new ENTERPRISE novels set within their four year time frame would be welcome, I just feel that what those novels are currently doing is fine, because, in that instance, they're filling in the 90 year gap between the end of ENTERPRISE, and the beginning of TOS. The 24th century novels have become unrecognizable, and are just doing change for change's sake, and that has never been, nor will it ever be a good thing.

 

[Greg Cox]

Why would they even have to address it, honestly? They haven't worried about the decline in baseball attendance in the late 80s reversing and the sport not actually dying out, or us not actually having interstellar AI probes or manned missions to Saturn, or the many other already-significant differences in Trek and real life. The Eugenics Wars books were fun, but you didn't see Rings of Time worrying about the massive tech difference between real life and Trek's early 21st century.

At the time, I remember worrying that the window to write The Rings of Time was shrinking, because I didn't want it to be about John Christopher's grand-son, but I still had to push the Saturn mission ahead a few years to be even quasi-believable, given the current state of America's space program.

But, yeah, ultimately you have to kinda fudge things, like Marvel "forgetting" that Reed and Ben once fought in the Korean war or that Spider-Man used to crack jokes about Nixon . . .

 

[TheUsualSuspect]

I just feel that if it's ever going to be an innovative and forward-looking screen franchise again, Trek will need to start fresh, to begin with the ideas that are current in the present in science fiction and in society and build on those. I don't know, maybe there's a way to inject those into it without losing the old continuity, but it would require being a lot more forgiving of internal contradiction than a lot of Trek fans are willing to be.

For myself, I look at Trek as taking place in an alternate timeline to our own. The fact that in real life there haven't been Eugenics Wars, we seem unlikely to get a manned mission to Saturn in time for John Christopher's son to command it (although that's disappointing), and so forth doesn't particularly bother me. I'm rather hopeful that we'll avoid the catastrophic third world war in real life, actually!

Even if the Trek universe cannot be our own, I still think it can show an optimistic view of the future. I do think it needs to address current events and issues, and if in doing so it needs to overturn some continuity, I'm good with that.

 

[Christopher]

For myself, I look at Trek as taking place in an alternate timeline to our own. The fact that in real life there haven't been Eugenics Wars, we seem unlikely to get a manned mission to Saturn in time for John Christopher's son to command it (although that's disappointing), and so forth doesn't particularly bother me. I'm rather hopeful that we'll avoid the catastrophic third world war in real life, actually!

Even if the Trek universe cannot be our own, I still think it can show an optimistic view of the future. I do think it needs to address current events and issues, and if in doing so it needs to overturn some continuity, I'm good with that.

Continuity is an incidental detail. I'm more concerned about ideas. Science fiction as a genre has advanced so far beyond where it was in the '60s, yet the Trek universe is still founded on those older ideas, and that holds it back conceptually. Any more modern ideas like nanotech, the biotech revolution, transhumanism, etc. have to be grafted onto a framework founded on pulp-era tropes, and it's often an awkward fit. For instance, instead of embracing the potential of stories about transhuman augmentation (as it seemed TNG initially attempted to do with Geordi, Picard's artificial heart, etc.), we instead got DS9 retconning a ban on genetic engineering into existence as an excuse for the show's antiquated portrayal of an unmodified future humanity. There are so many creative possibilities that have emerged in the past half-century of science fiction, and a universe that could start fresh without all that past baggage would be more uninhibited in exploring those ideas.

I'd point to Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda as an example of an SF universe that embraced all those modern ideas from the start, with most of the characters being genetically or bionically enhanced as a matter of routine, artificial intelligences and robots and jacking into cyberspace being everyday parts of life, etc. It was the 2000s' answer to what Star Trek was in the '60s, a TV show that built on ideas from the leading edge of SF literature (or at least ideas less than 20 years old) and brought screen SF forward as a result. Although unfortunately that potential was wasted due to the cheap production values and the corporate decisions that drove out the original staff and replaced them with hacks.

 

[TheUsualSuspect]

For myself, I look at Trek as taking place in an alternate timeline to our own. The fact that in real life there haven't been Eugenics Wars, we seem unlikely to get a manned mission to Saturn in time for John Christopher's son to command it (although that's disappointing), and so forth doesn't particularly bother me. I'm rather hopeful that we'll avoid the catastrophic third world war in real life, actually!

Even if the Trek universe cannot be our own, I still think it can show an optimistic view of the future. I do think it needs to address current events and issues, and if in doing so it needs to overturn some continuity, I'm good with that.

Continuity is an incidental detail. I'm more concerned about ideas. Science fiction as a genre has advanced so far beyond where it was in the '60s, yet the Trek universe is still founded on those older ideas, and that holds it back conceptually. Any more modern ideas like nanotech, the biotech revolution, transhumanism, etc. have to be grafted onto a framework founded on pulp-era tropes, and it's often an awkward fit. For instance, instead of embracing the potential of stories about transhuman augmentation (as it seemed TNG initially attempted to do with Geordi, Picard's artificial heart, etc.), we instead got DS9 retconning a ban on genetic engineering into existence as an excuse for the show's antiquated portrayal of an unmodified future humanity. There are so many creative possibilities that have emerged in the past half-century of science fiction, and a universe that could start fresh without all that past baggage would be more uninhibited in exploring those ideas.

I'd point to Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda as an example of an SF universe that embraced all those modern ideas from the start, with most of the characters being genetically or bionically enhanced as a matter of routine, artificial intelligences and robots and jacking into cyberspace being everyday parts of life, etc. It was the 2000s' answer to what Star Trek was in the '60s, a TV show that built on ideas from the leading edge of SF literature (or at least ideas less than 20 years old) and brought screen SF forward as a result. Although unfortunately that potential was wasted due to the cheap production values and the corporate decisions that drove out the original staff and replaced them with hacks.

Okay, your examples help me see what you mean a little more clearly. I guess you're right, the kind of update you're talking about would require ignoring or altering some pretty large pieces of what's been established in Trek continuity.

I'm with you, however, in that it would be great to see a return of up-to-date, cutting-edge Trek, preferably as a new weekly TV series. As you mention, issues of transhumanism would seem to be called for, as well as questions about AI - it seems to me like we'll probably see some form of self-aware AI in real life long before Trek suggested it would happen. Having just watched "The Devil in the Dark" a couple nights ago, I'd also love to see a contemporary Trek exploring encounters with truly alien aliens, not just various humanoids with shared DNA or aliens with highly advanced, ill-defined god-like powers.

 

[TheAlmanac]

I'm with you, however, in that it would be great to see a return of up-to-date, cutting-edge Trek, preferably as a new weekly TV series. As you mention, issues of transhumanism would seem to be called for, as well as questions about AI - it seems to me like we'll probably see some form of self-aware AI in real life long before Trek suggested it would happen. Having just watched "The Devil in the Dark" a couple nights ago, I'd also love to see a contemporary Trek exploring encounters with truly alien aliens, not just various humanoids with shared DNA or aliens with highly advanced, ill-defined god-like powers.

Popular culture seems to be pretty comfortable with sticking to SF tropes that are at least fifty years old, though, well beyond Star Trek--anything based on Marvel or DC, really, not to mention the Star Wars Universe, rests on those same basic assumptions without much interest in "updating" them with developments in SF literature.

Transhumanism seems like an appealing thing to incorporate, but a lot of it is either too esoteric to easily depict visually and/or leads to human augmentations which are functionally indistinguishable onscreen from mutations and superpowers. If viewing audiences are already familiar and onboard with the latter, what is the motivation of a film/series to introduce (and thus have to explain) some other origin for them?

 

[Christopher]

^It's easy to come up with excuses not to try something new. That's what people do most of the time. But sometimes, as with Star Trek, people do come along and defy conventional wisdom by trying something novel and having it succeed. It happens when someone comes along who doesn't care about all the arguments against trying it.

 

[JD]

I'm with you, however, in that it would be great to see a return of up-to-date, cutting-edge Trek, preferably as a new weekly TV series. As you mention, issues of transhumanism would seem to be called for, as well as questions about AI - it seems to me like we'll probably see some form of self-aware AI in real life long before Trek suggested it would happen. Having just watched "The Devil in the Dark" a couple nights ago, I'd also love to see a contemporary Trek exploring encounters with truly alien aliens, not just various humanoids with shared DNA or aliens with highly advanced, ill-defined god-like powers.

Popular culture seems to be pretty comfortable with sticking to SF tropes that are at least fifty years old, though, well beyond Star Trek--anything based on Marvel or DC, really, not to mention the Star Wars Universe, rests on those same basic assumptions without much interest in "updating" them with developments in SF literature.

I don't know if I'd include Star Wars in a discussion of innovative Sci-Fi. It's pretty much always been intended as a call back to old sci-fi and fantasy stories, so it's never really even tried to include any kind of innovative science concepts. Hell, there's barely any science concepts of any sort in SW, it's basically just a fantasy that includes a very thin covering of old sci-fi elements on it.

 

[TheAlmanac]

I'm with you, however, in that it would be great to see a return of up-to-date, cutting-edge Trek, preferably as a new weekly TV series. As you mention, issues of transhumanism would seem to be called for, as well as questions about AI - it seems to me like we'll probably see some form of self-aware AI in real life long before Trek suggested it would happen. Having just watched "The Devil in the Dark" a couple nights ago, I'd also love to see a contemporary Trek exploring encounters with truly alien aliens, not just various humanoids with shared DNA or aliens with highly advanced, ill-defined god-like powers.

Popular culture seems to be pretty comfortable with sticking to SF tropes that are at least fifty years old, though, well beyond Star Trek--anything based on Marvel or DC, really, not to mention the Star Wars Universe, rests on those same basic assumptions without much interest in "updating" them with developments in SF literature.

I don't know if I'd include Star Wars in a discussion of innovative Sci-Fi.

Neither would I--that's why I included it in a list of franchises which have no incentive to innovate because audiences are already responding to older tropes.

It's pretty much always been intended as a call back to old sci-fi and fantasy stories, so it's never really even tried to include any kind of innovative science concepts. Hell, there's barely any science concepts of any sort in SW, it's basically just a fantasy that includes a very thin covering of old sci-fi elements on it.

My point wasn't really about the dividing line between fantasy and science fiction, but about how current successful franchises are built on older genre conventions in general--and (as I said in an earlier post) many of those franchises are literally continuing their older stories (as Star Wars is) because (it seems to me that) that's what fans actually want as opposed to any sort of closure or thorough reinvention.