Does the ST XI novelization go into any more detail as to what Spock Prime's role will be in the rebuilding of Vulcan society? All he said in the film was that he'd helped find a suitable site for a colony for the survivors of Vulcan. Does the novel say what he himself will do there? Will he assume leadership of the colony? Has he told anyone else (Sarek, for example) who he is?
No. No. No. and No. I bought the novelization hoping it would have more, anything, than the movie. but, no, it doesn't. I suspect the Abrams camp. There is an interview with Alan Dean Foster in the Star Trek magazine that I want to read to see how this novelization came about.
^No reason to "suspect" anyone. Foster was hired to write the novelization extremely late in the game. He had literally only weeks to write it. He didn't have time to expand on it too much. Actually he does fill in a lot; there's much more detailed discussion of events in the book than there is in the film. But he didn't have time to expand on everything.
One point in the interview that surprised me: when I asked Alan how long he had to write the book, he said "four weeks" but that that was normal for this sort of project... The impression I definitely got was that this didn't really differ from his Transformers or Terminator books in terms of time. The only difference - which actually probably *helped* the book - was that, very unusually, there was an actual finished film for him to watch before he started work on the novelisation. Normally there's not even a rough cut. Paul