• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers TOS: Lost to Eternity by Greg Cox Review Thread

Rate Lost To Eternity

  • Outstanding

    Votes: 17 50.0%
  • Above Average

    Votes: 13 38.2%
  • Average

    Votes: 4 11.8%
  • Below Average

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Poor

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    34
The implication was that kidney pill was indeed based on the pioneering work of Dr. Hamparian, developed sometime between TOS and the movie era, after the events of the TOS storyline in my book.

Since McCoy didn't seem to have pills like that on TOS, but did by the time the whale movie came along.
 
Imagine the number of times that would have come in handy.

Could it have grown Spock a new brain, for instance? :vulcan: Or does it only heal existing damaged tissue?
 
Medicine in TOS definitely had its limits. See Spock limping in "The Cage," Sarek needing heart surgery in "Journey to Babel," Pike's infirmity in "The Menagerie," Thomas Leighton's facial scars in "Conscience of the King."

I figured Hampararian's work was a game-changer between the TV show and the movie . . . or so I rather strongly hinted in the book.
 
Getting old is not for the timid. And it doesn't do nice things to the little grey cells. I can still almost cite chapter and verse of Spock's World, Uhura's Song, and Ishmael (among others), but I can barely remember Hamparian from a book I read less than six months ago (and rated as "Outstanding"), by one of my favorites among the people currently writing ST novels. Maybe it's time (even after less than a year) for it to join the three I've just cited (and the Bantam novels, and more than half of GC's and CLB's ST novels) among the ST novels I've read more than once.

Then again, I recently re-read MJF's X-Men crossover novel, which I'd only read once, and it turned out that I'd completely forgotten everything that couldn't be inferred by looking at the cover, and it's not the first time I'd picked up a ST novel, and "read it again for the first time."
 
Trust me, I can barely remember the plots of some of my older books, Trek and otherwise.

Which can be awkward when somebody who just read one of my old books asks me:

"So how exactly did Garmak escape from the undersea laboratory?"

"Refresh my memory. Who is Garmak again?" :)
 
Whereas I can remember more details of Assignment: Eternity than I can of the present opus, probably because I've read it several times over the years.

And I forgot that the abandoned original draft of my novel-in-progress had a necessary antecedent for a short story in the same milieu. And so I had to go back and put some of the antecedent into the novel (which I managed to do without disturbing the pagination!), and some of it into flashbacks in the short story itself (which was better anyway).
 
Finished my re-read this morning. And sure enough, the reference to Hamparian inventing the "magic kidney pill" is right there, treated as if it were just a throwaway bit.
 
just picked up lost to eternity and i really enjoyed it! always liked greg's books, especially the eugenics wars ones. some small observations...
  • there are indeed some mistakes. melinda is called gillian at one point. an alien is mis-pronouned. klingon weapon called a romulan one. also some basic typos (repeated words, wrong declarative, subcommander is both capitalized and not, etc). but you see these all the time in mass market paperbacks. hopefully they will be corrected in future additions.
  • melinda and dennis live in san francisco, but they don't talk like it. i lived in the city for several years. for the benefit of a national and even global audience, gillian says "that's in the mission district" of mercy hospital in ST IV. but. no one in the city ever, ever, ever says that. it's just "the mission" like you would say "the castro" or "the haight." our two podcasters would know this, in dialog or as narrator. simply say to the reader, "a neighborhood know as The Mission" and then the characters can say "the mission" later and everyone knows what they mean. IIRC, "the lower haight" is even mentioned in the text. same thing.
  • melinda and dennis live in san francisco, but they don't act like it. the two took a rental car to oakland to interview that dude on his backyard deck. then they stopped for a bite at a "roadside diner" on the way back. first, rental car? to oakland? you'd hop on BART to the east bay and then grab an uber or lyft if you were headed further afield, into the hills or something. second, roadside diner? that implies a highway, probably along a rural stretch. there is nothing roadside on the freeways between oakland and the city. just freeways. no diner. i could see if they stopped for a bite somewhere in oakland. but roadside diner is absolutely the wrong connotation. they'd just be downtown.
  • different characters repeat the same pet phrases. "i'd be lying if i..." comes to mind. this was a distraction.
  • TOS and movie characters both use present-day wordplay. both eras are mostly very immersively written. the action feels right. spock, in particular, feels very right in both. saavik acts and talks like robin curtis. but the use of 21st century contemporary slang doesn't work well. it's like when they drop F-bombs on discovery or picard. if anything, the TOS characters should use 1960s phrasing, and the movie era late 80s / early 90s speak. no one in the 1960s, certainly not on television, would say "good call" when they agree with a course of action. and that's the world the TOS characters live in.
extremely, extremely small bones to pick, i know! but i did really enjoy the book, and look forward to greg's next one coming late this year.
 
TOS and movie characters both use present-day wordplay. both eras are mostly very immersively written. the action feels right. spock, in particular, feels very right in both. saavik acts and talks like robin curtis. but the use of 21st century contemporary slang doesn't work well. it's like when they drop F-bombs on discovery or picard. if anything, the TOS characters should use 1960s phrasing, and the movie era late 80s / early 90s speak. no one in the 1960s, certainly not on television, would say "good call" when they agree with a course of action. and that's the world the TOS characters live in.

Star Trek is not historical fiction. It's an attempt to approximate the future in a way that's accessible to its contemporary audience. That meant that in the '60s, it was written with the vocabulary used by '60s writers and viewers, but now it's the 2020s and it would be pointless to present a 2020s audience with 23rd-century characters who sound like they're from the 1960s.

Gene Roddenberry himself saw ST as a dramatic recreation of the "actual" events in Kirk's logs, and he was the first to say that any change in a new version (like giving the Klingons ridges in TMP) was just a refinement in how the events were dramatized for the audience, rather than an actual in-universe change. He believed that later versions of ST should be updated for their contemporary audience's taste and understanding, because he was trying to evoke the future, not the past.

Incidentally, I can find no reason to believe that "good call" is a term of recent vintage. The term originally comes from sports, referring to the call made by a referee or umpire, and an Ngram search shows its use in writing peaking in the 1920s with a lesser peak in the late 1950s, though declining by the later '60s. Older documents seem to use the phrase in a different sense, but I found one document from 1970 that used the phrase to convey approval of someone's decision.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top