What's the worst non-canon decision in the history of Trek?

[Christopher]

Unless I am misremembering, the main guest figure of the second DTI novel (the one focusing on the TOS era) was Admiral Delgado, who is described as having a salt-and-pepper goatee. And being interested in time travel. :-) It was quite the lovely reference.

Oh, yes, I'd forgotten that. From my annotations:

"Antonio Delgado is named in honor of Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley, the two main actors to play the archvillain the Master in Doctor Who. This is not meant to imply that Delgado is especially villainous; it was originally just a placeholder name for my notes and outline, but I never got around to changing it. Nor is he based on either of those actors; my mental model for the character was Hector Elizondo."

 

[David Mack]

Okay, but the point is not about whether people remember them, it's about whether the objective physical existence of those events is undone so that they "never happened." What I'm saying is that physics and logic require that any event that happens happens, and cannot be retroactively unhappened. The most that can occur is that their quantum information is erased after the fact so that people forget them, which creates the illusion that their timelines were retroactively unmade and "never happened" to begin with. I'm not saying nobody in the books remembered them; I'm saying that even if nobody had remembered them, they would still have physically happened and could not have been unmade. The timelines could have been destroyed, yes, but only going forward from the moment of destruction. Visit them at a point in time before the destruction, and they would still be there. It can't be retroactive.

In other words, the fantasy conceit of many stories is that if time travelers from, say, 2100 go back to 1950 and change history, then the original history from 1950 to 2100 completely ceases to exist and never happened at all. But that's a contradiction in terms, because any change (and ceasing to exist is the ultimate change) requires a version before the change and a version after it, and a point in time cannot come after itself. One version of a given period of time cannot "replace" or "overwrite" another, but can only coexist alongside it. So instead, the original events of 1950-2100 are still there in parallel with the new timeline, coexisting for the duration of that 150-year period, but once 2100 is reached, the original timeline vanishes going forward and is forgotten. So it may look to a time-traveling observer as if it were retroactively erased, but in fact it cannot have been.

So I'm saying that if readers are concerned that the events of the trilogy mean that the Novelverse's events never happened, they can take solace in the idea that they still did happen even if the timeline came to an end.

As usual, you missed the point. The point of objection was your statement, presented as if it were objective fact, that:

The authors of Coda chose to disregard this for their own narrative purposes

This is a major misrepresentation of our intentions and our actions. We did not disregard those things, we addressed them in our text. THIS is what I'm objecting to — your impugning of our motives and intentions.

 

[Zarm]

In addition, the novel’s final chapter is meant to convey that echoes of the First Splinter (and many others) live on in every quantum temporal variation of Jean-Luc Picard himself, as he was at the "fulcrum point in time" when the First Splinter was undone.

Ah, is that what that signified? I see that now; I'm afraid the significance of that chapter eluded me when reading it.

Oh, none of it matters because it came to an end? EVERYTHING comes to an end. Our universe's most likely conclusion is an eternity of entropic heat death. Nothing we do will matter in the scope of that.

Well, as I said, that comes down to a matter of philosophy. And I freely admit my own worldview biases me- as someone who believes in an eternal soul and afterlife, I don't believe that everything will truly end- that the things we do will one day come to nothing. If I did believe that there was nothing beyond this life- that one day we and everyone and everything we affect and which carry any memory of us will simply cease to exist- then I would consider this life, everything you do, I do, and everyone else, has ever done to indeed be fundamentally pointless, because the time will come in when there will be no us to have actually experienced it anymore; it will be functionally as if we had never been, and any good (or bad) we did will have similarly ceased to be as all the other 'us'es it ever influenced will similarly have ceased and any experiences good or bad that our actions caused will have ceased with them... and I do find that quite existentially futile and pointless.

Obviously, others, within their own belief system, do not. I mean no criticism of their differing beliefs, only explain where I am coming from.

And that is probably where the issue lies for me. Because I agree with you- afterlife or not, in life, everything does end. I believe that everything we do will carry on a legacy beyond that; others don't. Either way, though, either worldview- whether you find meaning in what we do now regardless of end, or believe meaning exists because whatever we do now has consequences that will outlast the material universe... in either case, in order to have meaning, a person has to make decisions, do things in the now.

Whereas, to my mind, erasing a timeline so that it never came to be means that, in essence, those people (or versions of them, in the case of legacy characters) now never existed. They never made those choices, did those things that mattered (in either worldview), because they simply never existed to do things and make choices to begin with.

And that's the difference, to me, between 'this universe ends' and 'this universe never began.' It's the same- to my view- as the difference between Kirk's death in Star Trek: Generations, and Kirk being prevented from ever having been born in the Of Gods and Men fan-film. Both end Kirk's story, both mean he is not around anymore- but one is fundamentally different from the other (and far less satisfying).


Now, that said, the notion that other traces do still remain- one that escaped me on the original reading- that the splinter timeline wasn't simply entirely unmade so that it never existed to begin with, does change things, a bit; I'll have to sit with that a while and consider.

And, again, no offense was intended in the exposition of these ideas.

But that is why- perceiving that 'unmaking' to be the case- it struck me far differently merely than an 'everything ends' ending.

 

[JD]

Unless I am misremembering, the main guest figure of the second DTI novel (the one focusing on the TOS era) was Admiral Delgado, who is described as having a salt-and-pepper goatee. And being interested in time travel. :-) It was quite the lovely reference.

I'm assuming that's a reference to something?

 

[David cgc]

I'm assuming that's a reference to something?

Roger Delgado (and his trademark beard) was the first actor who played the renegade time-traveler the Master on Doctor Who.

 

[JD]

Oh yeah, I've seen a bunch of his episodes, but I had forgotten that was the actor's name.

 

[Christopher]

As usual, you missed the point. The point of objection was your statement, presented as if it were objective fact, that:

This is a major misrepresentation of our intentions and our actions. We did not disregard those things, we addressed them in our text. THIS is what I'm objecting to — your impugning of our motives and intentions.

Not impugning, since it was your prerogative to take the story in a different direction if it suited your needs. We're all just borrowing the toys, after all. I'm just saying that if the trilogy depicted timelines being erased so that they had never existed at all, as the posters in this thread are stating it did, then that differs from the model I put forth in DTI.