Star Trek suffers from a lack of continuity with their fan fiction novels. There are some really good novels out there for Star Trek like Q-Squared by Peter David and Mirror Universe Part 1: Glass Empires by David Mack, Greg Cox, Mike Sussman, Dayton Ward, and Kevin Dilmore (each co-authoring it). However, none of these novels are considered canon. In fact, the events of a great deal of them are made impossible by new canon that came after them, thus forcing the reader to assume it is an alternate reality where things happened differently if they have seen all the canon already.
Star Wars, meanwhile, has a linear, non-conflicting "semi-canon" storyline known as the Expanded Universe, from which entire games have been based on (Grand Admiral Thrawn makes an appearance in Star Wars: TIE Fighter way back when, before FreeSpace 2). Each author builds upon the stories of the previous in some way. While the impression I get from reading Wookieepedia's timeline of EU events is that the result is a "comic book"-like storyline (partially because comic books are also considered part of the Expanded Universe), the storyline is nonetheless enjoyable. They even were bold enough to kill off a character from the Star Wars films, and they got away with it. To my knowledge that character is still permanently dead in the EU timeline, and has not been resurrected.
I have an idea...
I was going to propose it earlier in a new thread but I've decided to hijack this one (forgive me) now that people are discussing the topic.
Why don't we create our own Expanded Universe type storyline for FreeSpace 2? Starting with some new collaborative campaign that all of HLP works on (just like the collaborative modeling projects recently started), or maybe not (if one person here is excellent enough), we could create a series of campaigns which always link to one another, like a great long roleplay thread in a roleplay forum, each campaign builds upon the one that came before, not necessarily introducing new awesome ships each release, but developing characters and factions and events as if a real FreeSpace GTVA universe is evolving.
We have the power to do this and still have side campaigns that occur completely independently should someone wish to take more artistic liberties (just say it's in an alternate reality and it's fine). As long as the universe is open ended enough, we could have entire wars spanning several campaigns, politics, characters and other events unfolding as if each campaign were merely an episode of an ongoing series. Events could unfold not only one after the other, but concurrently. We would not be able to make major time jumps with campaigns in this timeline. We'd need rules to govern how long in-universe time passes within a campaign, and an emphasis would have to be placed on keeping things to a certain level of believability.
Would it be all for nothing if then, [V] came back out of the blue? I say no. A FreeSpace equivalent of an interconnected Expanded Universe has the potential to become something amazing. Who knows? [V] might honor us with an FS3 in the timeline we make...
