Star Trek: 10 Things You Need To Know About The Lost Era
1. Lost And Found
Star Trek abhors a vacuum and The Lost Era novels have done a brilliant job of filling the void. Before Star Trek: Section 31 has even hit screens, it seems like we might look forward to more. As Adam Vary hinted at in his Variety article:
Should 'Section 31' prove successful, Yeoh says she's game for a sequel. And [Alex] Kurtzman is already eyeing more opportunities for TV movies.
What else would we like to dig up from the Lost Era? In canon, we don't know anything about Section 31 itself during the period, but you can pick any 'incident' on this list and be sure they were up to their black-collared necks in it!
In Star Trek: Voyages of Imagination, The Lost Era editor Marco Palmieri stated that,
If I have any regrets about The Lost Era, it's that there was less thematic variety among the stories than I was hoping for. […] I realized that most of the things that had been established about those years were military in nature—wars, battles, etc. We knew far less about discoveries, first contacts, scientific breakthroughs, etc.
It's certainly true that the period is so rich in possibilities that we've not had the time in this list to mention half of the backstories, continuing stories, inventions, and that one ship that skipped over it all (the Bozeman). When did Starfleet and the Federation go from food synthesisers to replicators? What about the invention of the holodeck proper as we know it from The Next Generation? So many questions, quite a lot of time.
We're not going to get all the answers we seek, but with the promise of seeing Rachel Garrett again, we can say that canon has finally found at least part of the Lost Era, some 20 years after Marco Palmieri and team of writers had pointed it out. In all that, and with all the Lost Era novels have given us for the years 2293 to 2364 and beyond, we might just need to start thinking of a new name!