What Books Are "Canon"?

Not a bad assumption in many cases, but, in this instance, it does seem that Roddenberry actually wrote the novelization.

 

...my phrasing was inexact lol, I meant I assumed there was a rumor, not a ghostwriter. I always figured he'd actually written it, the style is a little different than the other Trek fiction of the era.

 

I must admit I feel the same way- now that the 'Prime' timeline has been effectively sealed off from future adventures (acknowledging that we are misusing the word canon) I feel safe in assuming that whatever is depicted in the novels is, indeed, what happened next. My wife doesn't read the novels but often muses openly about the show so she might say something like: "I wish they'd followed up on the Picard and Beverly thing." and I say something like: "Well later they get married and have a baby." like that's a thing that happened.

 

Which brings us back to the literary milieu in which the term "canon" was first applied to works of modern fiction: Sherlock Holmes frequently criticizes Dr. Watson for his overly romanticized depictions of events he would rather have documented with clinical detachment, as exercises in logic. Only to admit, in one of the "first person-Holmes" stories in Casebook, that there is some value in romanticizing his exploits.

 

It's perhaps worth noting that the original TARZAN OF THE APES novel also implied that we were reading a fictionalized account of the actual events. As I recall, Burroughs originally describes Tarzan's soon-to-be-deceased father as a certain young Englishman "whom we shall call Lord Greystoke."

Granted, from then on, there was never another reference to Greystoke not being Tarzan's "real" family name.

 

Which should underline the folly of treating canon as an indicator of absolute, immutable truth within a fictional universe. The original fictional canon, the Holmes canon, was explicitly an imprecise dramatization. It's such a handy way of resolving inconsistencies and odd details that it puzzles me that so many fans want to take every last detail literally.

It was pretty standard in the era for fiction to be presented as if it were a true story being told to the author by one of the participants, or otherwise relayed by them. Pretty much all of Burroughs's books do it, as do the works of Wells and Verne and quite a few others. I particularly like how Stoker's Dracula does it: The process of creating the manuscript is itself a plot point within the manuscript, because it's a key part of how the characters gather and organize the information that leads them to identify Dracula as a vampire and track him down. (Not to mention that the book is largely an infomercial for that amazing new device, the typewriter.)

Then, of course, there's Gulliver's Travels, which took this to such an extreme that it was originally meant to be published as a nonfiction book under Gulliver's name, until the true identity of its author was spoiled shortly before publication.

 

But Holmes repeatedly makes references to the existence of the previous adventures in literature form and how exaggerated they are- with the exception of the TMP novelization, are there any clues inside Trek itself (not imposed from without) that we might not be seeing a literal interpretation? How many times do characters ever 'look back' at something they've done previously, as though it was a recorded event? Off the top of my head:

• Kirk and Sarek review footage of Spock's death that is clearly just footage from Wrath of Khan.
• The Federation council review footage of the destruction of the Enterprise that is clearly footage from Search for Spock.
• Picard reviews footage of Geordi talking to Hugh Borg.

I suppose one of the most meta examples is the final episode of 'Enterprise', where it could be argued that the whole series is a holodeck recreation for Riker's amusement, and so not necessarily a literal recreation. This would explain why Enterprise was so often OTT with it's immature exploitation/titallation scenes- Riker may have been paying special attention to those aspects of the adventure.

 

Not to mention the 800-kiloton gorilla in the room, ST V... how many don't consider that one to be canon? It was responsible for my only moment of canon-related anger while ever watching Trek, the existence of Sybok. I remember reading the memos about Spock being an only child from The Making of Star Trek -- just so people couldn't pull cheap stunts like an unknown half-brother.


...and the ENT finale is the opposite - we only saw a recreation of those events, not the "real" thing.

 

Philip Jose Farmer actually wrote a book, Tarzan Alive! in which he posited that Tarzan was in fact a real person, and that Burroughs deliberately "fictionalized" his novels in order to hide Tarzan's true identity. Farmer even wrote a chapter describing his own meeting with the "real" Tarzan! The book suggests that a number of other fictional characters, including Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage, are similarly based upon real people, all of whom are related to one another.

Nothing to do with either canon or Star Trek, but I'm also a big fan of Burroughs and Farmer, so hey!

 

Nobody's saying it has to be fictionalized in-universe. The point is simply that the original usage of "canon" did not define it to mean something that had to be embraced as absolute, immutable gospel in even the most trivial details.

Sybok is my favorite part of ST V. He was an interesting character, well-played, and his confrontation with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in the lounge is by far the best sequence in the film.

 

...I think he's an interesting character, but making him Spock's half-brother was my objection.

 

Whereas I think Sybok being Spock's half-brother makes a lot of sense. I never liked how Sarek pushed Spock to be Vulcan, it seemed incredibly unbecoming of the man who choose a human wife. But if you factor in a full-blooded older son who was exiled for rejecting the ways of Surak, everything changes. It's Sybok's exile and the fear of losing Spock (and possibly Amanda) similarly which motivated him to push Spock so hard to be Vulcan.

 

That's an interesting (and plausible) interpretation.

All quibbles notwithstanding, the "canonical" status of ST V has never really been in dispute. It's still cited in all the reference lists and chronologies, packaged with the others, referred to in the novels, etc. It's as "official" as any of the other movies; it's just not one of the good ones.

 

ST V served a purpose.
It got people to shut up about how supposedly bad ST:TMP was, and (once the Director's Cut thereof became available) realize just how good it was.

I still remember something Shatner said about ST V at a convention (Creation, at the Disneyland Hotel, as I recall) while it was still in post:

 

That is so interesting! I've never thought of that.

In fact, this whole discussion is very interesting.

one book that may be worth considering under the OP's categories, at least with regards to the author's personal involvement in the story, could be A Stitch in Time (as well as its follow-up story)?

 

Not just lip movements, but the fact that we only hear one voice from a person speaking through a translator. How does that work? Do people just whisper their words and trust that the translator will pick them up? Does a translator somehow fire targeted sound beams at people's ears that cancel out the actual voice and substitute the real words? It really doesn't make any sense as shown.

Oh yeah, and then there's the translation coming in real time. How does the translator know immediately what to say? Some languages use a different word order in their sentences; a subject that comes at the beginning of a sentence in English could be at the end of the sentence in Japanese, say. So to get a clear, grammatically correct translation into the target language, you'd need to know the whole sentence before you translated it. By all rights, there should be some lag time.

In my Hub stories in Analog, I established that the translators in that universe are implanted between the brain and the larynx, so that you actually say the words in the target language you've selected, even if you don't know that language.

 

That's a really cool idea.

 

I guess I was more interested in the thought experiment of how Trek sometimes looks back at itself rather than trying to say that people were saying Trek actually fictionalized itself in-universe.