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Issue 1.7 also includes Jacqueline Bundy's latest STAR TREK IN PRINT column, updating us on all the latest goings-on regarding TREK books. Jason Barney takes a look at the First Five Year Mission of Captain Kirk & Co. in this month's Nexus Feature. You can read a preview of the feature below, but will have to subscribe to the newsletter to get the full article.

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Nexus Feature Preview: Exploring the First Five Year Mission (FYM): A Detailed Look

Written by Jason Barney, edited by Steve Krutzler

Have you ever wondered when in relation to our time STAR TREK takes place? Have you wondered how all of the comics, novels, and episodes fit into an organized timeline? Have you ever wondered how Kirk and Spock could have possibly been involved in so many missions in just a five year time period? A few studious individuals have put in a tremendous amount of work trying to nail down and answer some of these very questions.

All of the speculation about the placement of Kirk's first FYM comes down to one line uttered at the beginning of an episode of STAR TREK: VOYAGER. In the seventh season episode, "Q2," the former Borg drone, 'Icheb', recited to Captain Janeway: "In the year 2270 Kirk completed his historic five year mission." That line cemented the start of the FYM in 2265. The rest is history!

Michael and Denise Okuda paved the way for a lot of chronology buffs when they published their two versions of the STAR TREK CHRONOLOGY. The Okudas did some magnificent work, and the fact that they were actually members of the show’s production crew added an element of legitimacy to the material, even if they advised their Chronology should be taken with a grain of salt. The Okuda chronology covered the wealth of onscreen information, but there have also been many STAR TREK novels, published first by Bantam Books and now by Pocket Books, as well as several incarnations of TREK comics. Fans of these stories did not get the chance to see many of their favorite adventures included in the timeline.

A very important fact that emerged from the work of the Okudas, however, is the general "break-up" of the seasons. According to their chronology, Season One spans parts of nearly three years - 2265, 2266 and 2267. Season Two chronicles the last half of 2267 and the first half of 2268 and so on. The novels and comics are scattered in between the episodes, based on internal references. The Timeliners, a group of fans who have read almost all TREK literature, have managed the amazing task of placing all of the Pocket Books novels in the timeline. This was no small feat, particularly with regard to the earlier novels, as much "dating" information did not surface until long after the original series was complete. Pocket has given its blessing to the material of this group, adding a stamp of approval, of sorts, to all of its published work. Despite all of the internal inconsistencies in the novels, the Timeliner's placement of the Pocket Books stories is extremely accurate and rationalizes internal mistakes only when absolutely necessary.

Taking information from both of these valuable sources and adding relevant comic stories and the Bantam books, a detailed analysis of the first Five Year Mission (FYM) of the Enterprise crew is possible. Totaling up the sum of all the stories that took place during the FYM, we come up with about two-hundred missions from mid-2265 to mid-2270. While at times obvious internal references within certain books have to be ignored for the sake of continuity, it is surprising that most of them actually seem to fit very well into the FYM.

There is not much known about the first months of the FYM. We know that Kirk was one of the youngest to command a starship and that not all of the characters we have come to know and love were on the vessel when it was launched. The book ENTERPRISE by Vonda N. McIntyre (1986), is chronicled as the first mission of Kirk commanding the ship, while a DC Comics story (First run Ann #1, ALL THOSE YEARS AGO) offers another mission that is supposed to have happened during this early time period. Elements of the book STRANGERS FROM THE SKY by Margaret Wander Bonanno (1987), and one other comic story fit in before the first episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before." After the death of 'Gary Mitchell', we have one comic story and the MY BROTHER’S KEEPER eBook trilogy (2001). During some of these stories we see Sulu prior to his eventual posting on the bridge, Dr. McCoy is speculated to have joined the crew, and we get a glimpse of Spock getting used to his new captain. At this point, this is all of the information available from the first 6 months of the FYM.

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