Mark
CreativeMountainGames.com
Funny thing, actually, that it was Big Gene Roddenbury that introduced time travel and its ramifications in TOS in a number of episodes making the use of it in ST development canon. To follow ST canon, and because of the time travel episodes including three in TOS, you'd really have to make some decisions about what events that have been mentioned ever even took place. Ask Joan Collins and she probably can't even remember being on the show. What began as a nod to UFO spotters (and a way to reduce costume and set budgets) with the Enterprise coming back, being spotted in orbit and interacting US Air Force personel set in motion the very thing that people seem to decry as untrue to the vision of the guy who added it to the bag of design tricks. By introducing it then, he was making it incumbant ipon developers of future parts of the ST universe to ignore much of what was previously done.
The Romulan Wars, the Klingon conflicts, and World War III, the Eugenics Wars have all been casually tossed in during the run of the shows (and movies) to give some feeling history to a universe that is fiction. Let's als mention the list of scientific discoveries or advancements that are sometimes trotted out to build a foundation of ages (you know, the ones that usually begin with one that is real, one that mentions a person on a Mars colony, then one that mentions an alien race.) Even the fiction that is created in later series such as the whole arc involving Tasha Yar is not only necessary but likely to go away. Part of ST fiction is the possibility that at any single moment all of ST's fiction of history can change, not in spite of it, but because of it. It has to be noted that a true ST canon adherent would require that almost all of it change to be true to the vision.
It is the nature of ST canon to disallow itself, if not in whole then at least to a great degree.
Funny thing that the people who complain about what ST has become, and that it should be more like it was (with not even a hint of repeating itself), don't seem to realize it is not only just what it was, but what it has to be to have been what it was becoming what it is.
If you really love ST and ST canon, you have to be willing to ignore it.
Along a similar vein, here's a review of an interesting book on ST -
http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_2945.html
The Romulan Wars, the Klingon conflicts, and World War III, the Eugenics Wars have all been casually tossed in during the run of the shows (and movies) to give some feeling history to a universe that is fiction. Let's als mention the list of scientific discoveries or advancements that are sometimes trotted out to build a foundation of ages (you know, the ones that usually begin with one that is real, one that mentions a person on a Mars colony, then one that mentions an alien race.) Even the fiction that is created in later series such as the whole arc involving Tasha Yar is not only necessary but likely to go away. Part of ST fiction is the possibility that at any single moment all of ST's fiction of history can change, not in spite of it, but because of it. It has to be noted that a true ST canon adherent would require that almost all of it change to be true to the vision.
It is the nature of ST canon to disallow itself, if not in whole then at least to a great degree.
Funny thing that the people who complain about what ST has become, and that it should be more like it was (with not even a hint of repeating itself), don't seem to realize it is not only just what it was, but what it has to be to have been what it was becoming what it is.
If you really love ST and ST canon, you have to be willing to ignore it.
Along a similar vein, here's a review of an interesting book on ST -
http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_2945.html
