History Literature / Federation

[[quoteright:250:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Star_Trek_Federation_cover_9588.jpg]]
'''''Star Trek: Federation''''' is a 1994 ''Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse'' novel by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens.

''Federation'' tracks three different timelines. In the 2060s, a [[ANaziByAnyOtherName fascist movement]] called Optimum is sweeping across Earth, and a physicist named Zefram Cochrane is caught in the crossfire between Optimum's [[TheDragon dragon]] Colonel Adrik Thorsen and LaResistance.

{{Meanwhile|InTheFuture}} in 2267, [[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries Captain James T. Kirk]] of the USS ''Enterprise'' (NCC-1701) receives a distress signal from Zefram Cochrane, whom he met earlier that year ([[http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Metamorphosis_(episode) TOS: "Metamorphosis"]]).

[[MeanwhileInTheFuture 99 years later]] in 2366, [[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration Captain Jean-Luc Picard]] of the USS ''Enterprise'' ([=NCC-1701D=]) acquires an apparently Borg artifact from a rogue Romulan ship, containing a computer entity that rapidly takes over the ''Enterprise''.

As the two crews struggle to fulfill their missions, destiny draws them closer together until past and future merge -- and the fate of each of the two legendary starships rest in the hands of the other vessel...[[note]]source: book blurb[[/note]]

If you're looking for the trope, see TheFederation.

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!!''Star Trek: Federation'' contains examples of the following tropes:
* BigBad: Colonel Adrik Thorsen is technically TheDragon to the unnamed Optimum leaders, but he serves as the effective BigBad of the 2060s story [[spoiler:and the actual BigBad of the other two timelines]].
* ClarkesThirdLaw: Referenced by Zefram Cochrane when [[spoiler:he's brought aboard the ''Enterprise''-D]]. The ''Ent''-Nil's systems were familiar enough that he could at least take a guess at how they worked, [[spoiler:but the ''Ent''-D is so far advanced from his home level of technology that it's indistinguishable from magic]].
* CallBack: Many of the 21st century characters and concepts are {{Call Back}}s to ''Star Trek's'' established history of the future. The Optimum Movement is led by Colonel Green from "The Savage Curtain" and uses the symbols seen in the "post-atomic courtroom" from "Encounter At Farpoint". Cochrane's friends include Flint the Immortal from "Requiem for Methuselah" and John Burke, the astronomer mentioned in "The Trouble With Tribbles". The storyline also features the technology of the Preservers, previously seen in the original series episode "The Paradise Syndrome".
* CallForward:
** The Ferengi ship is called ''The 62nd Rule''. Since it's still season 3 of ''TNG'', no-one on the ''Enterprise'' has any idea what that means. (In case you're curious, the 62nd Rule of Acquisition is "The riskier the road, the greater the profit", quite an appropriate motto for a starship.)
** Cochrane draws a diagram to try and explain warp drive to Thorsen, showing the speed of light as a star, the energy required under Einsteinian relativity to reach lightspeed being a parabolic curve to infinity over the top, and the energy required by warp drive to be a smaller curve beneath it. When he finishes drawing the diagram, the result looks like the Starfleet arrowhead symbol, suggesting this is where it comes from.
* {{Crossover}}: Between ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' and ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''.
* CyberneticsEatYourSoul / GreyGoo: [[spoiler:Thorsen was implanted with Grigari nanomachines to repair the wounds inflicted by Cochrane and LaResistance at Battersea Stadium. He becomes obsessed with revenge against Cochrane as the nanites gradually replace his body when the immune system rejects them. By the TOS timeline he's more machine than man. By TNG, he's become little more than a computer entity.]]
* DistantFinale: The book ends centuries in the future, as the Federation has united the entire galaxy and a ship equipped with "sidewarp" drive has travelled beyond it, finding another Preserver beacon out in deep space and opening a new era.
--> ''In the language of the time, the ship's name is'' Enterprise.
* EyeScream: Thorsen gets John Burke's laser cane shone into his eye, permanently damaging it. Later, [[spoiler:as a Grigari cyborg, he is shown extracting his own eye and replacing it with machinery]].
* FictionalUnitedNations: The New United Nations in the 21st century storyline apparently replaced the original. Some NUN peacekeepers have the misfortune to become {{Red Shirt}}s at the hands of Thorsen's {{Black Shirt}}s in the prologue, and the entire organization is destroyed by the Optimum during their rise to power.
* FloatingHeadSyndrome: The dust jacket for the original hardcover[[note]]our page picture is from the paperback[[/note]] had Kirk and Picard from the shoulders up and not much else.
* InsaneAdmiral: Admiral Kabreigny. She becomes almost as obsessed with Cochrane and the theoretical warp bomb as Thorsen did, and Spock has to pinch her to get her out of Kirk's hair so he can save the ''Enterprise''. When she wakes up offscreen, she apparently realizes what she was doing and doesn't press charges.
* {{Jossed}}: Much of the 2060s storyline was Jossed by ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact''. In ''Federation'', Zefram Cochrane makes his Vulcan-summoning warp flight ''before'' WorldWarIII, not after, and it's launched from Saturn's moon Titan instead of Earth using an unmanned probe. By the time he returns to the inner planets, the Optimum movement is gaining power. With the help of his friend Micah Brack, Cochrane makes the plans for the warp drive available for free to enable people to escape Earth and the Optimum. The Cochrane of ''First Contact'' was OnlyInItForTheMoney.
* MeanwhileInTheFuture: The story jumps between three different time periods, eventually tying them all together.
* ANaziByAnyOtherName: The Optimum are basically Nazis, though they claim they're not making the mistakes of past fascist movements (the Nazis, Khan Noonien Singh, etc.).
* {{Precursors}}: In the TNG storyline, [[spoiler:Thorsen masquerades as]] the mysterious cube created by the Preservers.
* OffscreenMomentOfAwesome: The Romulans claim that a Borg artefact they're giving the ''Enterprise'' was retrieved when a Romulan freighter collided with a Borg cube and managed to break a piece away by pure mechanical force. [[spoiler:Subverted, as it turns out the artefact is a fake]].
* RammingAlwaysWorks:
** Par for the course with ''Franchise/StarTrek'', but the TNG storyline features a pretty spectacular instance when Picard rams a Romulan ''D'deridex''-class warbird under difficult-to-duplicate conditions. Picard even phrases the order as "Ramming speed!" and angles the ''Enterprise'' so the saucer acts like an axe blade to cut the warbird's "head" off. The ''Enterprise'' comes off damaged but serviceable thanks to her structural integrity field, while the warbird, having been hit by a massive object traveling at a substantial fraction of ''c'', is [[LudicrousGibs reduced to pieces no larger than a computer chip]]. Worf is so impressed he loses his English for a few moments.\\
\\
There are several reasons this ''shouldn't'' have worked. [[spoiler:If the ''Enterprise's'' warp core hadn't been forced into an emergency shutdown, if all available power hadn't been diverted into the SIF, if they weren't covered by a boundary-layer cloaking effect from yet another Warbird, if everybody hadn't been at relative rest, if the target Warbird hadn't had their shields set for combat conditions rather than simple navigation (which would have at least diverted an ''Enterprise''-D-size rock)... you get the idea. It was a one-in-a-BIG-NUMBER occurrence -- which is lampshaded as "not being in the manual".]] Riker says he's not sure whether Starfleet Command will commend or court-martial Picard; Picard says he'll settle for a refit. The narrator soon remarks that it would be easier to list the parts of the ''Enterprise'' that ''weren't'' damaged.
** The TOS storyline produces an accidental collision between the ''Enterprise'' and a Klingon D-7 battle cruiser. [[spoiler:Both ships' sensors were impaired by their proximity to a black hole, and both had the same idea to hide from the other ship inside a particularly strong distortion (the Klingons intended to ambush the ''Enterprise'', while the ''Enterprise'' was trying to evade them). The ''Enterprise'' suffers severe damage including a cracked dilithium crystal, but the Klingon ship is destroyed.]]
** The Romulans also say the Borg artefact was the result of it being separated from a Borg cube by a ramming attack.
* SaveThisPersonSaveTheWorld: Cochrane becomes a walking MacGuffin in the TOS and TNG timelines.
* SpaceBattle: A couple of nice ones.
* SufficientlyAdvancedAlien: Reflected on by Picard when studying a Preserver artefact with unusual mathematical symbols on it. His crew manage to identify the very first set of symbols as another way of depicting the energy curve required for warp drive. He wonders what all the later ones, describing things humanity has not discovered yet, could mean...
* TeleportersAndTransporters: Cochrane gets transported and is initially depressed, because he thinks it's the kind of teleporters that were being speculated about in his own time (where you effectively make a copy of the person somewhere else and then destroy the original). He has to have it explained to him that transporters convert you to energy, shift the energy then convert it back to matter, so you're still the same person you were to start with.
* TimePolice: Dedicated TimePolice don't appear, but when [[spoiler:the original ''Enterprise'' meets the ''Enterprise''-D]], Kirk immediately orders the viewscreen to be pixellated to avoid contaminating the timestream with knowledge of the future.
* TroubleFromThePast: [[spoiler:Adrik Thorsen]] in the TOS and TNG timelines.
* UnrealisticBlackHole: The Kabreigny Object (as it's called in the TNG timeline) is something called a ''subspace'' black hole, consisting of ''three'' singularities orbiting each other faster than the speed of light. Anything that crosses its event horizon from any time period exists in ''all'' time periods for as long as it remains inside, [[spoiler:allowing the TOS and TNG ''Enterprises'' to meet]]. Lampshaded in that Spock tells Kirk, "I cannot pretend to understand how such a thing could possibly exist."
* WeWillNotUseStageMakeupInTheFuture: At the start of the TOS storyline Kirk is recovering from an assassination attempt by an Orion Syndicate hitman surgically altered to look like an Andorian.
* WorldWarIII: Starts mere weeks after Zefram Cochrane escapes from Earth near the end of the 2060s storyline. Nobody really knows who started it, but when the smoke cleared 37 million people were dead.
-->spoiler:The inevitable cry went out: This must not happen again.\\
And this time, on the colony worlds, that cry was finally heard.\\
Something changed in humanity with that last war, because for the first time it was clear even to the masses that no human conflict, even one that could consume a world, could ever be allowed to overshadow or assume more importance than the human race itself.
** Only trouble is, [[spoiler:Adrik Thorsen is a relic of that prior age, and never learns]].
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** The Ferengi ship is called ''The 62nd Rule''. Since it's still season 3 of ''TNG'', no-one on the ''Enterprise'' has any idea what that means.

* CallBack: Many of the 21st century characters and concepts are {{Call Back}}s to ''Star Trek's'' established history of the future. The Optimum Movement is lead by Colonel Green from "The Savage Curtain" and uses the symbols seen in the "post-atomic courtroom" from "Encounter At Farpoint". Cochrane's friends include Flint the Immortal from "Requiem for Methuselah" and John Burke, the astronomer mentioned in "The Trouble With Tribbles". The storyline also features the technology of the Preservers, previously seen in the original series episode "The Paradise Syndrome".
* CallForward: The Ferengi ship is called ''The 62nd Rule''. Since it's still season 3 of ''TNG'', no-one on the ''Enterprise'' has any idea what that means.

* TimePolice: Dedicated TimePolice don't appear, but when the original ''Enterprise'' meets the ''Enterprise''-D, Kirk immediately orders the viewscreen to be pixellated to avoid contaminating the timestream with knowledge of the future.

** Only trouble is, [[spoiler:Adrik Thorsen is a relic of that prior age, and never learns]].

* CallBack: Many of the 21st century characters and concepts are {{Call Back}}s to ''Star Trek's'' established history of the future. The Optimum Movement is lead by Colonel Green from "The Savage Curtain" and uses the symbols seen in the "post-atomic courtroom" from "Encounter At Farpoint". Cochrane's friends include Flint the Immortal from "Requiem for Methuselah" and John Burke, the astronomer mentioned in "The Trouble With Tribbles".

* EyeScream: Thorsen gets a laser cane shone into his eye that permanently damages it. Later, [[spoiler:as a Grigari cyborg, he is shown extracting his own eye and replacing it with machinery]].

** The TOS storyline produces an accidental collision between the ''Enterprise'' and a Klingon D-7 Bird of Prey. [[spoiler:Both ships' sensors were impaired by their proximity to a black hole, and both had the same idea to hide from the other ship inside a particularly strong distortion (the Klingons intended to ambush the ''Enterprise'', while the ''Enterprise'' was trying to evade them). The ''Enterprise'' suffers severe damage including a cracked dilithium crystal, but the Klingon ship is destroyed.]]

* CyberneticsEatYourSoul / GreyGoo: [[spoiler:Thorsen was implanted with nanomachines to repair the wounds inflicted by Cochrane and LaResistance at Battersea Stadium. He becomes obsessed with revenge against Cochrane as the nanites gradually replace his body when the immune system rejects them. By the TOS timeline he's more machine than man. By TNG, he's become little more than a computer entity.]]

* CallBack: Many of the 21st century characters and concepts are {{Call Back}}s to ''Star Trek''''s established history of the future; the Optimim Movement is lead by Colonel Green from "The Savage Curtain" and uses the symbols seen in the "post-atomic courtroom" from "Encounter At Farpoint". Cochrane's friends include Flint the Immortal from "Requium for Methuselah" and John Burke, the astronomer mentioned in "The Trouble With Tribbles".

* RammingAlwaysWorks: Par for the course with ''Franchise/StarTrek'', but the TNG storyline features a pretty spectacular instance when Picard rams a Romulan ''D'deridex''-class warbird under difficult-to-duplicate conditions. Picard even phrases the order as "Ramming speed!" and angles the ''Enterprise'' so the saucer acts like an axe blade to cut the warbird's "head" off. The ''Enterprise'' comes off damaged but serviceable thanks to her structural integrity field, while the warbird, having been hit by a massive object traveling at a substantial fraction of ''c'', is [[LudicrousGibs reduced to pieces no larger than a computer chip]]. Worf is so impressed he loses his English for a few moments.\\

There are several reasons this ''shouldn't'' have worked. [[spoiler:If the ''Enterprise's'' warp core hadn't been forced into an emergency shutdown, if all available power hadn't been diverted into the SIF, if they weren't covered by a boundary-layer cloaking effect from yet another Warbird, if everybody hadn't been at relative rest, if the target Warbird hadn't had their shields set for combat conditions rather than simple navigation (which would have at least diverted an ''Enterprise''-D-size rock)... you get the idea. It was a one-in-a-BIG-NUMBER occurrence — which is lampshaded as "not being in the manual".]] Riker says he's not sure whether Starfleet Command will commend or court-martial Picard; Picard says he'll settle for a refit. The narrator soon remarks that it would be easier to list the parts of the ''Enterprise'' that ''weren't'' damaged.

* SaveThisPersonSaveTheWorld: Cochrane becomes a walking MacGuffin in the TOS and TNG timelines.* TroubleFromThePast: [[spoiler:Adrik Thorsen]] in the TOS and TNG timelines.

* {{Jossed}}: Much of the 2060s storyline was Jossed by ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact''. In ''Federation'', Zefram Cochrane makes his Vulcan-summoning warp flight ''before'' WorldWarIII, not after, and it's launched from Saturn's moon Titan instead of Earth using an unmanned probe. By the time he returns to the inner planets, the Optimum movement is gaining power. With the help of his friend Micah Brack, Cochrane makes the plans for the warp drive available for free to enable people to escape Earth and the Optimum. Cochrane's motivation in ''First Contact'' amounted to MoneyDearBoy.