Chasing the Third Transfer

The BattleTech Universe, now 25 years old, has long been a particularly complicated and fascinating world in the vast history of science fiction. Breaking from our history in the 1980's, the current timeline reaches some 1130 years forward, and contains wonderful examples of characters, events, plots, and conspiracies to fascinate any reader. Perhaps the most remarkable element of the BattleTech universe is the way in which it is delivered; in a piece-meal, rolling timeline that never gives away everything at once.

Our sources for information on the timeline (at least the 'canon' timeline, something I may get to discussing later) are two-fold: Sourcebooks and Fiction. Sourcebooks are written as in-universe publications. The characters who represent the authors and the intended reader vary, from highly sensitive intelligence reports to news summaries prepared for the general public. Releasing source information this way provides two very valuable advantages: First, there's no need to provide more information than the in-character author would have, and secondly, its possible for the in-character author to be wrong.

From a writer's perspective, this is absolutely win-win. Not everything needs to be fleshed-out, but even if something is irrevocably stated as fact, it is possible that it could later be overturned by some in-universe clarification coming to light. Indeed, this has happened numerous times, although it is sometimes very difficult to tell which subsequent changes were intentionally put in by the writers to mislead the reader into believing something that is not true about the universe, and which are legitimate retcons to the universe based on some future inconsistency that arose. That difficulty, though, I like to think is the point.

The second type of released information is Fiction. This category envelopes all the novels and short works of fiction that have been written about the universe, but are not in-universe documents. These works are, as near as can be, unquestionable gospel. If an event happened in a Fiction work, it happened in-universe, and nothing will subsequently contradict it. Events given in Fiction are therefore sometimes ambiguous, or not as clear as they first appear. Sometimes, later works will cast previous events in a Fiction in a new light, radically changing the interpretation of events and actions described.

I'm writing this Blog now because for me half the fun of the BattleTech universe is trying to stay ahead of the writers; trying to work out what's really going on using the meager clues they give us in the source material, and trying to assemble the whole picture out of as few pieces as possible. Wherever possible, I will try to be rigorous in citing passages and clearly outlining my logic as I draw conclusions. If you catch me in a logical fallacy, be sure to call me on it in a comment (although you don't need to if somebody already has; I don't need to be told too many times!) Often there will not be enough information to make a definitive conclusion on a particular matter, and in those cases I will simply advance what I think is the strongest theory.

I hope you find this Blog as interesting to read as I find it to write. Let's see what we can figure out.