Periodically, I return to obsessions I thought I left far in
my past. I have been a fan of Star Trek since soon after the original
series went off the air and into syndication. Born at the end of 1961, I think
I was just barely too young to get caught up in it during the original airings,
which began in September 1966 and ended in June 1969. I would therefore have
been four years old when it debuted and seven when it went off. Moreover, my obsession
with space really began with the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969 –
ironically within weeks of Star Trek being cancelled. Just as I do
remember flashes of earlier manned space missions (most clearly, Christmas Eve
1968, popping firecrackers with my older cousins outside my grandmother’s
house, my uncle commenting that there were astronauts circling the moon right
then – Apollo 8), so do I recall flashes of earlier Star Trek episodes
on TV, but not clearly enough to know what episodes they might have been.
But then, that summer of 1969, right after Apollo 11, still
age seven, I became much more “space-aware.” Star Trek was gone, of
course … Until a year or so later, sometime, I’m not sure exactly when, just
that it was when I was in fourth grade (1970-1971), my father put up a huge rotary television
antenna that gave us the ability to receive more than just the two local
channels available in Monroe, Louisiana. This was, of course, several years
before cable, even several years before the addition, in quick succession, of a
third commercial station – in the UHF band (1974) – and then a public
television station (1976).
Wow! Four channels! With remote control that consisted of
Daddy saying, “Son, get up and change the channel….”
A couple of words about the “huge rotary television antenna” that
I referred to. I don’t know how tall it was, but it was easily twice the height
of our one-story house, standing tall on a pole right next to the back patio,
connected to the TV in the den – and motorized with a little control box that
sat atop the television. It could be turned via a dial on top of that box, which
initiated a humming “kachunk – kachunk – kachunk” sound from outside as
the motor turned the antenna and you watched the snow-filled, staticky screen
of the TV slowly resolve into a (usually still quite fuzzy) picture from
someplace far, far beyond the Monroe area.
Such as Jackson, Mississippi … which was where, one Sunday
afternoon, I discovered Star Trek – specifically, the episode, “The
Galileo Seven.” The objective merits of that episode aside (it’s actually
pretty stupid on several levels), it will always be special to me because it
was, for all intents and purposes, my first Star Trek episode. I
was hooked. I came back week after week. Soon I was recording the episodes on audio
cassette and listening to them, over and over. And I discovered Star Trek
books.
I’m not sure when exactly I got the Whitman hardcover novel, Mission
to Horatius, except that it was pretty soon because I remember taking it to
school and showing classmates in my fourth-grade class. I am pretty sure that
was my first “Star Trek book” – but there would be more, and very quickly,
although again I do not remember exactly when. I do remember where, however. My
father’s aunt lived in Meridian, Mississippi, and we would periodically visit
her there. I have no clear memory of the instant I first saw it, but I
associate with one of those trips my discovery of the first volume of James Blish’s
episode adaptations, specifically Star Trek 4.
I had been a pretty obsessive reader even before that – comic books
as early as 1966 or 1967, as soon as I could read, introduced to them, like
many other kids of my and preceding generations, in the barber shop. Sometime in
third grade I had discovered The Hardy Boys in my school’s library. I remember
my dad trying to get me to read Tom Swift – but that didn’t “take” until
my space-obsession began in the summer of ’69 and I devoured the Tom Swift
Jr. series. I think, however, it was Star Trek that took me out of
kids’ books into “grown-up” books, and in short order I was reading the big
names – Clarke, Asimov, etc.
But Star Trek remained one of my defining obsessions.
So much so that it is what my high school classmates remembered best about me at
our thirty-year high-school reunion in 2009. Hey, at least I wasn’t one of the “dope-heads.”
I devoured the Blish collections. I was excited when Star
Trek returned in the animated series in 1973, and doubly excited when those
episodes too found much-superior prose adaptation by Alan Dean Foster starting
the next year (the Star Trek Log series). Nevertheless, as late as the
mid 1970s, almost all Star Trek prose was just that – adaptations of
televised episodes. The only two exceptions were the aforementioned children’s
novel, Mission to Horatius (which came out in 1968, thus holding the
honor of being the first original Star Trek novel) and James
Blish’s single foray into an original/non-adapted story, Spock Must Die!
(1970). (These dates and much of what follows about Star Trek fiction are confirmed
from Wikipedia’s article, “List of Star Trek novels” [LINK].)
Then – here, I do remember the instant I spied it, on a book rack in a local department
store, probably in early-mid 1976 because it’s listed as published in March – Star
Trek: The New Voyages, a collection of short stories published in fan
magazines introduced over all by Gene Roddenberry himself, with individual stories
introduced by various of the original series cast. I have no clear memories of any
of the stories, but I remember being excited by it and enjoying it.
Then came, just a few months later (September 1976, according
to Wikipedia), Spock, Messiah! “A Star Trek First,” the cover proclaims,
and Wikipedia confirms it to have been “the second original novel based on
[the] television series Star Trek intended for adult readers” [LINK]. It was
dreadful! Thank God that poor sales did not kill the prospect of further new Star
Trek novels. The next year, The Price of the Phoenix … was just as
dreadful!, with added homo-erotic layers that were downright creepy. “What Hath
Bantam [Books, the publisher] Wrought?” was the cri-de-coeur from an irate fan reviewer in
Interstat #1, although the review’s subtitle was prescient, “Or They’re
Going to Keep at it Until They Get it Right!” [Wikipedia LINK]. Luckily,
they did, although Bantam did put out far more clunkers than decent Star
Trek novels over the next few years. Of a baker’s dozen (including the
three already mentioned – Spock Must Die!, Spock, Messiah!, and The
Price of the Phoenix – I really only remember Joe Haldeman’s Planet of Judgment
(the fourth) and David Gerrold’s The Galactic Whirlpool (the twelfth) as
being decent reads. (Gerrold had the advantage of “cred” – he wrote the
wonderful original series episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” and had earlier
chronicled that process in a memoir of the same name before writing a
book-length retrospective of the show, The World of Star Trek [both
published in 1973]; Haldeman had “cred,” too, of course, as an established
science-fiction writer although I had not and have not read anything by him
except his Star Trek work.) Don’t even get me started on Kathleen Sky’s Vulcan!
and Death’s Angel (fifth and thirteenth, respectively). Awful.
It really wouldn’t be “gotten right” until a new publisher had
entered the fray. I do not know the behind-the-scenes machinations, but I’m
guessing that sometime in the mid-1970s Bantam was licensed to publish a dozen Star
Trek novels (which with the previously-published Spock Must Die! makes
up their thirteen; Bantam had, of course, also published the James Blish original
series adaptations; the animated series adaptations, Foster’s Star Trek Log
series, were published by Ballantine Books, again, for reasons I do not know –
nor do I really care. The mysteries of licensing and trademark usage mystify
me, but suffice it to say that with the appearance of Star Trek: The Motion
Picture in 1979, Simon & Schuster under their Pocket Books imprint gained
the publishing rights to Star Trek books. Even though the novelization of
the motion picture (by Gene Roddenberry himself – although I suspect it was
ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster) arrived close on the heels of the movie
itself in December of that same year, I guess they had to wait until Bantam had
run out their license, because once that was done with the appearance of Death’s
Angel (shudder) (April 1981) there came only two months later The
Entropy Effect (June 1981), and Star Trek novels started coming at
an accelerating pace after that. A lot of the early ones from Pocket were
objectively pretty bad – frankly, from what I’ve seen surveying the broad landscape
of Star Trek novels over the next forty years via Amazon.com and various
review sites, a lot of them overall are objectively pretty bad – but there
were enough decent ones and some downright really good ones (in my judgment,
all that really matters to me) to create a whole section of most bookstores
even today. The Entropy Effect was, in my opinion, one of the really
good ones; Diane Duane’s early ones – The Wounded Sky (December 1983),
her Rihannsu cycle (especially the first two, My Enemy, My Ally,
July 1984, and The Romulan Way, August 1987), as well as Spock’s World,
the first original-to-hardcover Star Trek novel, I believe (September
1988) remain dear in my memory. (I think Gene Roddenberry’s wounded pride and
harsh words when she was inadvertently referred to in his presence as the “creator
of the Romulans” burst her bubble because her later forays into Star Trek
fiction are not of the same caliber. She did not create the Romulans, of course
– but she did give them life as the Rihannsu [their own name for themselves rather
than the obvious name from Earth mythology that Roddenberry, et al., gave them],
and for my money’s worth, the Rihannsu are canon. – Of course, I also consider
the Animated Series as canon as well as Star Trek Continues [LINK]
(respectively, Years Four and Five of
Kirk’s Five-Year Mission, as far as I’m concerned).
Suffice it to say, that through the 1980s I read a lot of
those Star Trek novels, both good and bad, both Original Series and,
after 1987, The Next Generation. I probably read most of them that
appeared during that decade. Then, in 1990, I returned to graduate school and
my pleasure reading was sharply curtailed. My reading of Star Trek
novels declined and ultimately petered out, with occasional exceptions.
Something would catch my eye and I would pick up the occasional novel – or miniseries
of novels, such as the four-part Dominion War series (November-December
1998, two each from The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine). In
more recent years, the “autobiographies” of James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard
found their way onto my bookshelf. But, frankly, not much else. It was a very
occasional indulgence, with sometimes years passing between various instances
of sticking my toe into the increasingly deep waters – as of late 2019,
according to the aforementioned Wikipedia article, there were “approximately 850
novels, short story anthologies, novelizations, and omnibus editions” in existence,
if not all in print.
Eight. Hundred. And. Fifty.
To be sure, although my reading of Star Trek had faded
away to almost nothing, I watched it pretty religiously, for the most part –
through the 1990s as Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) faded
into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), to be succeeded by Star
Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), and finally by Enterprise/Star Trek:
Enterprise (2001-2005). I did find my interest waning, however, during Voyager,
and pretty much sat out the third season of Enterprise. The movies
similarly seemed to give less and less bang for the buck, even the seeming
revitalization of the first really standalone Next Generation film, First
Contact (1996) quickly fizzling out to an almost unwatchable finale just
two movies later with Nemesis (2002) (which, incidentally, made me
realize again how inferior the “canon” Romulans of series and film are to Duane’s
Rihannsu). I barely got excited at all about Voyager, and elements of Enterprise
just made me mad, although the too-little, too-late fourth season actually redeemed
it somewhat – it had to be liberating to know they were on their way out and
could just do whatever the hell they wanted. Neither series, however, inspired
me to pick up the first novel set in their milieux – I just didn’t care for the
characters enough. Although the first two of the “Abramsverse” movies
(2009-2016) were fairly decent, the third was just boring. Discovering Star
Trek Continues (#betterthanAbrams) in 2015 had stoked the fires a little and
opened me to reading a trilogy of novels set in the Original Series period, Legacies,
when they came out the next year, billed as a “50th-Anniversary
Celebration.” But any excitement that would have come with the announcement of
a new Star Trek series, Discovery, round about or shortly after
that time was immediately snuffed out with word that it would only be available
by subscribing to a new CBS streaming service. And watching the first episode
teased via broadcast on the regular CBS network the night before CBS All Access
went online made me even madder than certain elements of Enterprise had
a decade and a half before. They literally got nothing right. What the hell
were those “Klingons”? Instantaneous holographic communications over light-years?
The general look of post-Next Generation supposedly being the style and
technology ten years before Kirk and Company? I knew about the Picard
series, but, unwilling to subscribe to a streaming service for one or two series,
I basically ignored it.
Then, earlier this year. After a “month-to-six-weeks” project
that I began last summer to take elements of my travel blog and create a book
turned into a six-month project (August through January) – I did
finish the book and get it published [LINK],
but for the six months I’d poured into it I had read virtually nothing for
pleasure. I needed something light and relatively mindless. And I remembered a
few months ago, on my wife’s birthday in August, when my son was up, we went to
Alexandria to a restaurant then spent a couple of hours just browsing in Books-a-Million.
I had found myself poring over the fairly substantial Star Trek section –
full of books I’d never even heard of – and saw a couple that intrigued me. I had
snapped pictures of the covers, figuring I’d probably never get to them, but I
remembered them now and decided to give one a shot.
So, round about the end of January I found one of those books
on Kindle – From History’s Shadow (2013) by Dayton Ward. The cover shows
silhouettes of two “men-in-black” as well as a flying saucer – and the story is
set both in the 23rd century of the Original Series and in the 20th-century
… of Project Blue Book. Yes, starting with the 1947 Roswell Incident (the “real
story” of which, I had forgotten, was told in a Deep Space Nine episode,
“Little Green Men”) and bringing in Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln from the
Original Series episode “Assignment Earth” as well as a continuing story
arc/subplot from Enterprise, the Temporal Cold War – this novel had it
all! I thoroughly enjoyed it, and as usual wanted more. Not only did I find
another Gary Seven/Roberta Lincoln Star Trek Original Series novel, Assignment
Eternity (1998), by Greg Cox – and toyed with going directly from that to
his Eugenics Wars trilogy about the Rise, Fall, and Exile of Khan
Noonien Singh (2001-2005) – but, over a most-of-a-week period “batching it” (? –
living as a bachelor as my wife visited with her sisters) in late February, I
decided to give that “Temporal Cold War” arc on Enterprise another view.
I had not actually watched all of those episodes during the original run
because, as I said, elements of the series made me mad and I even sat out the
third season entirely – which is when the arc culminated. I did a little
research, determined what episodes made up that arc, watched the premier
episode (“Broken Bow”) to refamiliarize myself with the characters, and started
watching.
And I found myself enjoying it overall way more than I
remembered. Sure, it still doesn’t really work as a “prequel” to the Original
Series, but taken on its own terms it’s not too bad. By the end of the Temporal
Cold War and its associated episodes I was interested enough to go ahead and
watch pretty much the entirety of the fourth season, which as I said I had
actually enjoyed the first go around basically fifteen years before.
As I remembered, however, the very last episode (“These Are
the Voyages”) was rather odd. Jumping forward about six years – except it was not
really “live” at all, it was instead told as a holodeck recreation aboard the Next
Generation Enterprise D over two hundred years later, with certain
story elements that just did not make a whole lot of sense. I discovered
through some online reading that others felt the same way – and had ended up
rectifying the situation via a “post-Enterprise” series of novels
telling the real story and subsequent events, including the legendary
Romulan War a century in the past for Kirk and company but which was in the
near future for Archer and company and would by all rights have been
part of the Enterprise story had the series not come to its inglorious
end after only four seasons rather than the more typical seven – followed by
the founding and early years of the United Federation of Planets. (I also have
heard there were plans to bring in the Kzinti had the series not continued, but
thus far the novels have not gone there….)
Kindle, here I come again! I read in quick succession: Last
Full Measure (2006), telling how “Tripp” Tucker really did not die in 2161
as depicted in “These Are the Voyages,” but rather had faked his own death in
2155 – just after the penultimate episode, “Terra Prime” – and become a secret
agent of the black ops organization Section 31 working behind Romulan lines as
his former crewmates continued their mission amidst escalating tensions among
the members of the fledgling Coalition of Planets, as told in two subsequent
novels … The Good That Men Do (2007) and Kobayashi Maru (2008) (all
three by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin).
Tensions erupted into full-scale conflict as the loose
Coalition of Planets failed in two further books (Beneath the Raptor’s Wing,
2009; and To Brave the Storm, 2011; both by Martin alone) telling the
story – at long last – of the Romulan War which proved the need for a truly
United Federation of Planets, the formation and early years of which are told in
five more books by Christopher L. Bennett (A Choice of Futures, 2013; Tower
of Babel, 2014; … and three more).
I made it that far, through A Choice of Futures, reading
through pretty much the month of March, maybe a little further. Of course,
March 2020 is when the whole world seemed to stop amidst the “Wuhan Flu,”
Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic – and pretty much a nationwide lockdown, stay-at-home
orders, quarantines (of the healthy more so than the sick), etc. Virtue signaling
like hell, a lot of big media companies offered extended free trials of their
services (easy publicity, plus I’m sure there’s going to be a percentage of
people who “forget” or are unable, for whatever reason – and they do not make
it easy, let me tell you –, to cancel before actually being charged to continue
with the service). Among them was CBS All Access, the aforementioned streaming
service, the only place to watch Star Trek: Discovery and Picard.
For free, I decided to give them a try, signing up right at the end of March.
My assessment? 1) The first season of Discovery is the
stupidest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Here’s what I wrote in my journal on
30 March: “I watched the first few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, the CBS
All-Access series that started a couple of years ago that I have not seen
because I’m not paying for it. I decided to get a trial 30-day subscription so
we could watch Picard (Anne says she wants to). Hopefully Picard will be better
than Discovery, which is ludicrously horrible, absolutely moronically stupid as
a so-called “prequel” to the Original Series. I’m not even sure I’m going to
continue watching it.” I did continue to watch it, of course – the very
next day I wrote, “watched another dumb episode of STD (I kind of like that
abbreviation, because the series is about that repulsive to me).” From 02
April, “Afternoon, watched a couple more episodes of Discovery. That after
having ridiculed and dissed it to Chris G_____ [one of my colleagues] via
email.” To quote that email, “I availed myself of a free trial of CBS
All Access because when I told Anne there is the new Star Trek: Picard series,
she said "Jean-Luc!!" and wants to see it ... but we haven't
even started it. I'm about halfway through the first season of Star Trek:
Discovery, however ... Do. Not. Bother. I know you're not a Star Trek fan
anyway, or maybe that means you might like this because it ain't Star Trek!
But probably not, because it is so ludicrously stupid I'm wondering why I'm
even bothering, although word is that the second season is much better,
introducing the Enterprise under Captain Pike, with his first officer
Number One, and a very young Ensign Spock. But right now Discovery is
tough slogging. The Klingons are totally different, the technology is generic
far-more-advanced than even the latest post Next Generation series
(although Discovery is supposed to be set in the 2250s a decade before
the 2260s of the original series (Next Generation was the 2370s). And its
based on some kind of living network of "spores" that permeate the
universe and that a new experimental "spore drive" (no, yesterday was
April Fools Day -- I am dead serious) can latch onto for instantaneous travel
anywhere in the known universe.... (Hey, the spores sound kind of like
midichlorians ... 😱!!!!) Sorry.
I've been holding that in and it suddenly exploded.” Chris chortled,
“That is hilarious! Spore drive. That sounds like a placeholder
explanation ... that never got replaced,” to which I responded, “No,
they put a lot of thought into that....”
I did press on, however, and it seemed to get a little better
as the season progressed, although it was fighting against a pretty stout
headwind of really bad premises. Then, the end of season one came – and in
sailed the Enterprise – which is where season two began (a year later
and more on CBS All Access, but literally moments later for me). It was so
much better than the first. They downplayed the stupider parts of the first
season -- redesigning the Klingons to align more closely with later (earlier?)
series, using the "spore drive" more sparingly and writing in an
explanation for why it's ultimately never heard of again ... actually they end
up doing the same thing for the Discovery and its crew by the
end of the season! Of course, it remained sickeningly over-the-top as far as
"progressive" social engineering goes – rampant feminism and
homosexuality, things which can be portrayed in an integral manner but here were
handled basically as virtual signaling run amuck. But all of that I found
secondary to the overwhelmingly positive presence of Captain Christopher Pike, who
is here possibly the best captain since Picard, in my opinion, maybe since Kirk
himself – Anson Mount nails it! I am not quite so taken with Rebecca
Romijn as Number One, but Ethan Peck (grand- or great-grandson of Gregory Peck)
does almost as good a job as a young Spock. They really really really need
to make a “Pike of the Enterprise” series.
I hope they do it. Of course, it probably would be just as “woke” as Discovery.
(As an aside, Picard was quite good, I found. Set
about twenty years after the last appearance of the Next Generations characters,
by the end of the season they assembled a rag-tag crew of misfits reminiscent
of Firefly that could be enjoyable going forward. I think the
real limitation is going to be Patrick Stewart's age -- he's about to turn eighty;
how many more seasons can he have left in him?)
Having watched season two of Discovery, I wanted
some "real" 23rd-century Original Series stuff ... so I rewatched Star
Trek Continues (#betterthanAbrams) -- but I also discovered a
wonderful little sub-series of Star Trek prose novels, entitled Vanguard.
It is set during Kirk and company's Five Year Mission, giving kind of a
story-behind-the-story focused more on political intrigue and an overarching
mystery in a political hotspot region of the galaxy that ties together
disparate elements that were tangential to the Original Series. It is full of
connections weaving in and out of the Original Series. I’m about halfway
through the series right now (not counting four novels in a follow-up series collectively
entitled Seekers), and relations between the Federation and the Klingons
are quickly headed toward the "Four Day War" depicted in the episode
that introduced the Klingons in the first place.
Here are the books, in order, by series:
Star Trek: Vanguard:
- Harbinger (David Mack, 2005)
- · Summon the Thunder (Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore,
2006)
- · Reap the Whirlwind (David Mack, 2007)
- · Open Secrets (Dayton Ward, 2009)
- · Precipice (David Mack, 2009)
- · What Judgments Come (Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore,
2011)
- · Storming Heaven (David Mack, 2012)
Short Stories and Novellas
- Starfleet Corps of Engineers: What’s Past, Book Four: Distant Early Warning (Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, 2006)
- The Black Flag (James Swallow, 2009) (Set in the “Mirror Universe” and so at best ancillary to the series
- Declassified (2011) - short stories:
- “Almost Tomorrow” (David Mack)
- “Hard News” (Kevin Dilmore)
- “The Ruins of Noble Men” (Marco Palmieri)
- “The Stars Look Down” (David Mack)
- In Tempest’s Wake (Dayton
Ward, 2012)
Star Trek: Seekers:
- ·
Second Nature (David
Mack, 2014)
- ·
Point of Divergence (Dayton
Ward & Kevin Dilmore, 2014)
- ·
Long Shot (David
Mack, 2015)
- ·
All That’s Left (Dayton
Ward & Kevin Dilmore, 2015)
(It was actually seeing the cover for one of these on Kindle that attracted me to Vanguard and Seekers. The covers echo the original covers for the Bantam episode adaptations by James Blish. Good memories!)
One thing I’ve done in order to align things as I’m reading,
especially given the various short stories and novellas that are interspersed
among the main novels, is extract a timeline from the comprehensive timeline at
the huge reference site Memory Beta [LINK], which
integrates all the “official” and licensed – but “non-canonical” – Star Trek
fiction (mainly novels and comics) as opposed to Memory Alpha [LINK], which limits
itself to canonical mainstream information from the series and movies. This
is only the Vanguard / Seekers stuff, with pertinent references to The
Original Series. I think it is mostly spoiler free, and share it here:
2263
• Vanguard:
Harbinger, Prologue.
2265
• “Almost
Tomorrow” (David Mack) = Stardate [SD] 1257.5
• “Distant Early
Warning” (Starfleet Corps of Engineers: What’s Past, Book Four)
• “Where No Man
Has Gone Before” = SD 1312.4-1313.8
• Vanguard:
Harbinger chapters 1-20
December
• Vanguard:
Summon the Thunder
2266
• Star Trek:
The Original Series, Season One begins
February
• Vanguard:
Reap the Whirlwind = SD 1528.4 (6 weeks after end of Summon the Thunder)
• “Hard News” (Vanguard:
Declassified)
March
• Vanguard:
Open Secrets chapters 1-19 = SD 1573.9 (3 weeks after the end of Reap
the Whirlwind)
• “Balance of
Terror” (Star Trek: The Original Series) = SD 1709.2
• Vanguard:
Open Secrets chapters 20-27 (one week after “Balance of Terror”)
April
• Vanguard:
Open Secrets chapters 29-30 (four weeks after Admiral Nogura takes command
of Starbase 47)
May-December
• Vanguard:
Open Secrets chapters 31-45
2267
January
• Vanguard:
Open Secrets chapters 46-49 || Vanguard: Precipice chapter 1 (03
January)
February
• “Court
Martial” (Star Trek: The Original Series) = SD 2947.3
• Vanguard:
Precipice chapters 2-13 (13-26 February)
• “Arena” (Star
Trek: The Original Series) = SD 3045.6
• Vanguard:
Open Secrets chapters 50-60 (soon after “Court Martial” and “Arena”)
March
• Vanguard:
Precipice chapters 14-15 (22-23 March)
• “Errand of
Mercy” (Star Trek: The Original Series) = SD 3198.4-3201.7 || Vanguard:
Open Secrets Prologue and Epilogue (simultaneously with conclusion of
“Errand of Mercy”)
May
• Vanguard:
Precipice Interlude: Chapter 16, chapters 17-18 (26-30 May)
June
• Vanguard:
Precipice chapters 19-23 (02-05 June)
July
• Vanguard:
Precipice chapters 24-29 (14-31 July)
August
• Vanguard:
Precipice chapters 30-33 (01-03 August)
• Vanguard:
Precipice chapters 34-36 (19-24 August)
September
• Vanguard:
Precipice chapters 37-52 (9-14 September)
November
• Vanguard:
Precipice chapter 53 (19 November)
December
• “A Private
Little War” (Star Trek: The Original Series) = SD 4211.4 (14 December)
• Vanguard:
Precipice chapters 54-60 (28-29 December = two weeks after “A Private
Little War”)
2268
January
• “The Ruins of
Noble Men” (Vanguard: Declassified) (just days after Vanguard: Precipice
ends)
February
• “The Stars
Look Down” (Vanguard: Declassified) (two months after Vanguard:
Precipice)
April
• “Spectre of
the Gun” (Star Trek: The Original Series) = SD 4385.3
• Vanguard:
What Judgments Come chapters 1-39 (more than a year after February 2267,
soon after “Spectre of the Gun.” Ends three weeks before “The Tholian Web” -- Star
Trek: The Original Series)
• “The Tholian
Web” = SD 5693.2
• Vanguard:
In Tempest’s Wake = SD 5694.7 (|| ending of “The Tholian Web”)
November-December
• Vanguard:
Storming Heaven (late 2268, immediately before “Let That Be Your Last
Battlefield” -- Star Trek: The Original Series)
• Vanguard:
In Tempest’s Wake chapter 5 = SD 5729.8 (|| Vanguard: Storming Heaven
chapter 15)
• “Let That Be
Your Last Battlefield” = SD 5730.2
December
• Vanguard:
Storming Heaven chapters 16-35.
• Vanguard:
In Tempest’s Wake chapters 7, 9-10 = SD 5821.3 (|| Vanguard: Storming
Heaven chapters 32-35, The Battle of Starbase 47)
2269
January
• Vanguard:
In Tempest’s Wake chapters 1-2, 4, 6, 8, 11 = SD 5829.6 (Five days after
the Battle of Starbase 47)
June
• “Turnabout
Intruder” = SD 5928.5 (end of Star Trek: The Original Series Season
Three)
August
• Seekers:
Second Nature (two months after “Turnabout Intruder”, six to eight months
after Vanguard: Storming Heaven)
• Seekers:
Point of Divergence (immediately after Second Nature)
November
• Seekers:
Long Shot (five months after “Turnabout Intruder”)
• Seekers:
All That’s Left (five months after “Turnabout Intruder”)
2270
April
• Vanguard:
What Judgments Come Prologue and Epilogue
• Vanguard:
Storming Heaven Prologue and Epilogue
November
• The USS
Enterprise returns to Earth at the end of Kirk’s Five-Year Mission
2271
June
• Kirk is
promoted to Admiral.
August
• Vanguard:
In Tempest’s Wake chapter 12 = SD 7098.5 (two months after Kirk’s promotion
to the Admiralty)
The series as a whole was overseen by David Mack, who wrote
the “bible” for it. That is posted at his web site, along with annotations for
some of the books detailing connections with The Original Series, other prose
novels, etc. He also provides his “dream cast” of actors to portray the various
new characters (not as a distinct document but rather part of others) (I had
already mentally cast a different actor for Commodore Reyes, but his works as
well – and most are brilliant once they are pointed out). There are also
schematics of Vanguard Station and the USS Sagittarius. Those can (at
least currently) be found at: http://davidmack.pro/writing/storming-heaven/the-finale/
.
(Given one of my criticisms of the current CBS All Access
series, the self-aware “wokeness” both of them exhibit, I feel it incumbent to
acknowledge that there is a prominent homosexual relationship critical to the
plot of at least the early books that I am through at this point. It is handled
very differently, in a way that is critical to the characters and integral to the
story, and not as ham-handed what I called above “virtue-signaling.” There is a
right way and a wrong way to do it. Vanguard does it right; Discovery
does not. In my opinion.)
If you want a very different but entirely consistent story set
in the heyday of classic Star Trek, the era of Kirk and Spock and the
NCC-1701 (no bloody -A, -B, -C, -D, or -E!) USS Enterprise, exploring
a different part of the galaxy, Federation politics, relations between the
Klingons, Tholians, and Romulans, through the eyes of very different characters
(some canonical but mostly not – although they all are, at this point, pretty
much “canonical” for me), you really need to pick these books up. You
will thank me for the suggestion.
Thanks for reading … and Live Long and Prosper!
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