Federation Spaceflight Chronology

An expanded version of Spaceflight Chronology (SC) used to be online at http://www.jh.kobarg.de/ but that site is apparently gone for good. The original book (ISBN 978-0671790899) was by Stan Goldstein, Fred Goldstein, and Rick Sternbach in 1979 and published by Pocket Books. It had a different timeline from the one subsequently established as canon. Licensed Star Trek works tended to use SC in the early '80s, but soon came the period of the TOS movies and TNG, which formed what we now know as canon. Like the Genesis device, new creation destroyed the old "in favor of its new matrix." Well, not quite destroyed, since we still have old copies of SC to compare with the new timeline, so we can observe that events occur about 60 years later in the new timeline, so that Kirk takes command of Enterprise in the year 2265, no longer in 2207 as in SC. We can also observe that the timeline isn't merely shifted, but that much of SC is incompatible with canon. Nevertheless, much of the wealth of detail in SC and works based upon it would fit well in any Star Trek timeline. For a fuller discussion of SC's place in the Star Trek universe, see the Memory Beta article on Spaceflight Chronology.

It's the wonderful wealth of detail that attracted me to SC, so I find the fuller version represented in Federation Spaceflight Chronology simply irresistible as a point of departure for the imagination. Here are the 14 volumes of that unpublished work by Richard E. Mandel, who chose his pseudonym to honor Geoffrey Mandel, one of the early pioneers of Star Trek fandom, who set to work in the 1970s filling gaps in our knowledge of this imagined world.


No comments:

Post a Comment