I do not appreciate the PU timeline to be retconned to fit our universe better. Our universe is highly unlikely to be that of the PU.
Spoilers TOS: Lost to Eternity by Greg Cox Review Thread
- Thread starter Kilana2
- Start date
I didn't make it that far into SNW, but I remember their first episode establishing that the US entered into a second civil war during the 2020s. If they wanted to clean up the timeline, they gave themselves very little runway. At least TOS gave their original Eugenics Wars 20+ years of room to breathe.
Although it is nice to see more people accepting that SNW is an alternate timeline...
Wheras PICARD season 2 did a great job of squaring the circle of following pre-established canon with nods to all the "Past Tense" world building, Nomad, and more, while also getting through studio / network notes to be "present day" enough. And, at best the Soong / Khan thing is constructively ambiguous.
It’ll be fun when we get to 2063.
I still think it would've been simpler just to reboot Trek entirely, to start over without the 1960s baggage and create a more modern version of the universe. That basically was Roddenberry's intention with TNG, to keep only the parts of TOS he still thought were viable and leave out the rest, which is why he replaced the Eugenics Wars with the "Post-Atomic Horror." But his successors went in the other direction and tied the new shows directly to the old ones.
When I revisited the first couple of seasons of The Six Million Dollar Man some years back, it was an aching reminder of how optimistic we were about the future of the space program when I was a kid. It had episodes about new Moon missions, a space station, even a Mars mission, I think (though I didn't get that far in my rewatch), and at the time, it didn't seem that far removed from reality, just maybe a little bit ahead of schedule. We really dropped the ball.
Looking around at the state of the country, it's not an unreasonable prediction. Although it maybe feels a bit more improbable now than it did a month ago.
Well, not really, since if the superhumans reached adulthood and came to power in 1992, they would've had to be born around the time the episode was made, or not long after. Since "Space Seed" posited they were "engineered through selective breeding," a process that takes generations, rather than genetic engineering as TWOK retconned it, they would've had to be the result of a program stretching back decades, probably to the late 19th-early 20th century when eugenics movements attempting to breed a "superior race" actually did proliferate in real life. That's probably what Carey Wilber intended, given that his original idea, where the villain was Harold Ericssen instead of Khan, was much more overtly a parallel to the Nazis and their belief in eugenics.
That is not, in fact, the case. It's clear that when it comes to the 23rd century, SNW is determined to conform as closely as possible to the continuity of TOS, right down to contriving an excuse for Pike to be a temporary fleet captain when Kirk meets him, and making sure that Chapel meets Roger Korby on schedule. The intention is that only the history of the 20th-21st century has been revised to conform more closely to ours, eventually converging onto a 23rd-24th century that's essentially identical to the one we know (just without the '60s sexism and set designs).
It's the same time travel theory that Prodigy expounded in "Temporal Mechanics 101": History is like a series of dominoes, and as long as certain key events still happen in sequence, they lead to essentially the same timeline even if they happen in a different way. Which is basically the same idea seen in "Past Tense" and "Trials and Tribble-ations" -- the protagonists changed a few details, but since they arranged for the key events to remain intact, the timeline reconverged onto its original path.
Granted, the Eugenics Wars happening 40-50 years later is hard to buy as a small enough change to reconverge to the same future, but that's the explicit intent.
Hi all,
Some thread drift is natural, and of course it makes sense to compare elements of the books to elements of the shows. But much like the Pliable Truths thread recently, this discussion seems to have lost any connection to the book, and is just discussing the shows. We have other forums for discussing the shows. Let's please try to get the focus of the thread back on the book itself.
Some thread drift is natural, and of course it makes sense to compare elements of the books to elements of the shows. But much like the Pliable Truths thread recently, this discussion seems to have lost any connection to the book, and is just discussing the shows. We have other forums for discussing the shows. Let's please try to get the focus of the thread back on the book itself.
I doubt it. There isn't really a novel continuity anymore to set things up for, and even when there was, Greg Cox's novels were almost always standalone, aside from the loose connection between Assignment Eternity and the Eugenics Wars novels.
I don’t know… talking about how 2024 was handled relates to the book I feel.
Yeah, but I think we were starting to get into the weeds there.
I feel like there's a decent chance of the Osori at least getting referenced again at some point, if not becoming Greg's version of the Grigari from the Reeves-Stevenses novels.
The only thing that confused me was the half human, half Andorian lady. I don’t think the 4 gender thing has been retconned yet in the nuTrek shows. If anything Lower Decks hinted that it might still be a thing by revealing Jennifer’s full name, indicating that she’s a Shen.
Last edited:
As far as I know, nothing has been retconned and there has been no sweeping official mandate on the topic. That was just me not worrying about the four-gender thing, probably because I was mostly in full TOS mode when I wrote that book and wasn't really thinking about the latter-day shows all that much. Mea culpa.
I needed Dr. Hamparian to be visually distinctive for plot reasons, so my brain went straight to blue skin and antennae -- as seen on TOS. And, as I recall, I made her half-human because I didn't want her to look too alien on Atraz.
She needed to stand out from the crowd, but not too much, so half-Andorian filled the bill. And that was pretty much the extent of my reasoning there. Honest.
(I flirted with making her a cyborg, with visible prosthetics, but that's not really a TOS thing, so I went with half-Andorian instead.)
Last edited:
Yeah, but are you referring to the 4 gender set-up as in the older TrekLit? Because there could very well still be 4 genders, just in a different way and one or several of them could mate with a human.
Could have used one of these Orion variants that are blue.
Andorians having four genders has never been canon anyway. Canonically, we only know they get married "in groups of four, unless..."
And even that was entirely unplanned. I swear to God, when I mentioned in "Assignment: Earth" that Seven and Roberta had been instrumental in overthrowing Khan, I'd had no intention of writing that story. That line was meant to be just a cute little Easter Egg. I wasn't deliberately setting anything up.
It was my editor, John Ordover, who read that bit and told me, "Okay, Greg, you have to write that book now."
Really
Last edited:
Perhaps Mr. Cox can answer this. Starting in the 1960's there was a program of selective breeding, not genetic engineering? The genetic engineering that produced Khan now started in the early 2000's?