Spoilers TOS: Lost to Eternity by Greg Cox Review Thread

[daveyjones]

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.

i suppose agree to disagree. i really like trek novels that hew to how the dialog was written in each era of show / movie. to me that provides an extra level of immersion when reading fiction based on existing media properties. when reading a TOS novel feels like watching the show.

still, there's no excuse for The Mission District.

 

[D Man]

Wow, that blurb for the 2024 portion of the book is both the coolest and cleverest idea for a Trek story I've heard of in a long time! I've been out of the TrekLit loop for way too long plus I'm usually not a TOS novel guy...but I think I'll grab this one. I've always enjoyed Greg's work in the past. Looking forward to seeing how all the plots converge.

Well I'm a little late to the party, but I finally had time to pick this up and I loved it!

As I was expecting, the 2024 story was probably my favorite. It's just such a fun idea to see a years-later investigation into the absurdity of a comedy movie's plot through a believable "real" person's eyes. The planet-based adventure in 2268 was terrific too. The TOS Klingons were pitch-perfect, the locals were fun ("O Captain!" ,) the monster battles were cool, it was just generally a good time. I would have loved to see it on screen in an imaginary world where TOS was given Marvel movie budgets for an episode. I also liked how it all converged in the end, but I did miss the fun momentum of the every-third-chapter-A-B-C storytelling when we stopped visiting 2292 as often in the second half of the book. To be fair though, plot-wise that made sense since the story kind of had to resolve in the "future" so the narrative stepped back from that timeline for a bit while the other 2 stories took the lead. Great use of Saavik too.

Overall this was an awesome way to get back into TrekLit after way too much time away. I grew up on TNG with a dash of the 80s movies, so I've never been super attached to TOS. That said, I'm inspired to pick up some of @Greg Cox's other TOS books after this one - when the classic characters are written so authentically I find myself getting into TOS prose way more than the show. Plenty to choose from I know. Thanks for a great read!

 

[Zarm]

I enjoyed this fairly well, particularly the extrapolation of what people would have deduced post-Voyage Home.

However, points deducted because I automatically loathe any character who says "Okay, boomer" in a non-ironic manner, soured me on the final pages. ;-)

 

[Zarm]

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.

I greatly appreciate the amount of thought you put into this!

 

[Zarm]

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.

Bravo on this analysis!