Re: Blurb for Shadow of the Machine now up
Be interesting to see if this meshes with Christopher's Ex Machina, continuity-wise. Doesn't that story pick up around two weeks or so following the movie? If so, there might not be any real problems, as far as the two-week window goes.
Two months, actually.
I don't know where you got two months. In fact, ExM picks up exactly ten days after the end of TMP, and there's no return home in it. After all, the movie ended with Kirk ordering the ship "Out there.. thataway." The
Enterprise travels to Starbase 22 and gets its final bits of work done there, and Kirk spends the time in intensive study of the ship's new systems. There's no room in the novel for any 2-week leave. So unless the blurb is inaccurate, it sounds like this novella is going to be an alternative interpretation of post-TMP events.
I wonder how many alternate takes on the events just after TMP there are. Marvel's "The Haunting of Thallus" in 1980 takes place after a successful shakedown cruise, and there's no telling how long that cruise took; and there's no specific reference to the film's events. So I don't think it would count as immediately post-V'Ger. Similarly, the newspaper comic opens with a routine mission that (if you ignore the erroneous inclusion of Ilia in the first few strips) could easily take place months or years after the movie.
So there's the
Debt of Honor version, which has Kirk ordering the ship to backtrack V'Ger's course. There's the
Untold Voyages version, which actually opens with the final scene of TMP and continues directly from there as a Klingon commander attempts to capture the newly upgraded
Enterprise. There's the
Ex Machina version, as discussed. There's this new one in
Shadow of the Machine. And there's the
Crucible version, which says that the ship went on a month-long shakedown and completed a couple of missions in the interim.
Crucible is inconsistent with the main novel continuity to which ExM belongs, but it could theoretically be reconcilable with one or more of the other versions. So that's 4 or 5 distinct versions of the events immediately post-TMP. Which is fewer than the number of versions of the end of the 5-year mission; there are at least 7 of those by this point. (
The Lost Years, DC's "The Final Voyage" and "A Bright Particular Star," ExM/
Forgotten History,
Crucible, IDW's
Mission's End, and "Empty" in
Strange New Worlds 10.)
