I think of New Vegas.
Spoilers TOS: Lost to Eternity by Greg Cox Review Thread
- Thread starter Kilana2
- Start date
I really enjoyed this one, the modern-day plot with Melinda was great and the other two time frames balanced it nicely.
A true-crime podcast in a Star Trek setting does not seem like an immediate fit but the concept really piqued my interest and made me want to dive into the book.
I was surprised initially that Gillian wasn’t part of the movie-era narratives but it worked out rather well.
I spent a lot of the modern plot unsure how it could resolve, there were no future characters who could stop by and explain it and having Melinda not find out the truth wouldn’t have felt satisfying, Cox found a great solution.
The villain starting in the past and living through all the other time periods reminded by of Federation by the Reeve-Stevens, which is no bad thing. The reveal that the three narratives revolve around the same villain was very skillfully done.
I listened to the audiobook and was very impressed with how Robert Petkoff correctly pronounced sabotage.
A true-crime podcast in a Star Trek setting does not seem like an immediate fit but the concept really piqued my interest and made me want to dive into the book.
I was surprised initially that Gillian wasn’t part of the movie-era narratives but it worked out rather well.
I spent a lot of the modern plot unsure how it could resolve, there were no future characters who could stop by and explain it and having Melinda not find out the truth wouldn’t have felt satisfying, Cox found a great solution.
The villain starting in the past and living through all the other time periods reminded by of Federation by the Reeve-Stevens, which is no bad thing. The reveal that the three narratives revolve around the same villain was very skillfully done.
I listened to the audiobook and was very impressed with how Robert Petkoff correctly pronounced sabotage.
What? You haven't finished the book? She shows up.
Uh, how else would you pronounce it? Unless maybe you're Bugs Bunny?
I’m only slight older than Melinda and even I know about New Coke. Being an amateur journalist she should know about that.
I dunno. I forget how old she is, but let’s say she’s born in 2000, it might be real easy to believe she has no idea why Coke cans used to say “original formula”. I was born in ‘83, I’m an elder millennial, and it’s not like I had much contact with New Coke. I might have first found out about it because it was a subplot in Gump & Co.
Sah-boh-tage, with a long a sound.
Personally, I prefer the taste of the tennis ball. To either New Coke, original Coke, or Pepsi.
Yeah, I missed New Coke, but was aware of the world early enough to know the jokes in the early ‘90s, and to ask why the cans said “Coca-Cola Classic” (which stopped in 2009, when New Coke had, apparently, faded from public consciousness).
Without getting too deep into theories of how referential animation and children’s comedy was in the ‘90s and how that tapered off, I think it’s plausible for someone born in the extremely late ‘90s or early 2000s to have missed New Coke, depending on their media diet and if they had older siblings (and their sense of humor).
Yeah, that's a bit of a give away so I was being vague
My take away from Melinda not knowing what New Coke was is that she must not have watched Stranger Things. Granted, I don't either, though I do remember seeing in the news a few years ago that with the release of a particular season of Stranger Things which was going to feature New Coke in the season, Coca-Cola actually brought New Coke back for a limited time as a promotional tie-in. In fact, here's the official announcement from Coca-Cola about it.
Since our Earth and her are not absolutely identical, maybe new Coke had a lesser presence?
Speaking of which, her saying that they still haven’t had a manned mission to Mars sounded odd when they had manned missions to Saturn a few years earlier. @Greg Cox himself even wrote one about that.
Last edited:
And it really has almost no antecedent. I want to say it’s almost like a literary artifact.
And GC is undoubtedly grumbling, and wondering why his copy editor didn't notice.
In one of the podcast interviews, Greg mentioned that he got a heads-up about SNW retconning 20th/21st century history to fit better with the real world, and muffled or removed some references to Trek history. He specifically talked about removing overt references to the Eugenics Wars, but I wouldn't be surprised if Shaun Christopher and even PIC's Europa expedition were in the same category.
For anyone who isn't aware...
An episode of SNW ended with the unmasking of a Romulan assassin who'd been sent back in time to murder Khan Noonien Singh and avert the Eugenics Wars in order to disrupt Earth's history and prevent the formation of the Federation. The assassin mentioned that, due to various conflicting time-altering missions by different factions disrupting and repairing history (more or less), she'd been waiting to carry out her mission for decades, since Khan hadn't even been born until the mid-2010s, when she was expecting him to have been an adult warlord twenty years earlier.
Honestly, I don't remember the Saturn mission or the Europa mission coming up at any point. Certainly, it slipped my mind. What can I say? I wrote The Rings of Time more than a decade ago.
In the new book, I was mostly focused on making the 2024 segments feels as contemporary as possible, aside from the fact some mysterious time-travelers came looking for humpback whales back in '86. The idea was not to present some alternate version of 2024, but instead the world right outside our window, true-crime podcasts and all.
(Which, in my defense, is how Trek traditionally handles visits to "the present." It's almost always meant to the "present" of the TV audience.)