My original plan for Discovery (back when it was scheduled for January) was to read up to about 2255 and then watch Discovery so that it fits chronologically in my (re)-watch/read. Yeah, that didn't work out exactly as planned
I've been coasting in and around 2269 in the Lit-Verse and I was going to wait for most of DSC to be out before I binged it. For whatever reason I just couldn't get excited to read the DSC novel just yet. Probably because I have no investment in the characters until I get into the show...
Finished Days of Infamy by Newt Gingrich/William R Fortschen early and am currently giving Island in the Sea of Time by S M Stirling a go.
Reading "A Friendly Game of Murder" by J.J. Murphy. The third "Algonquin Round Table" murder mystery. This one guest-stars Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a starlet found dead in a bathtub full of champagne.
I finished Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Gamma: Original Sin by David R. George III. I then read a few comics collections, Outbreak from Aliens Omnibus Volume 1, The Flash: Season Zero & Star Trek: Captain's Log. I'm now reading "Talent Night" by Jeffrey Lang, from the Star Trek: Voyager: Distant Shores anthology.
I'm re- reading Star Trek Enterprise Logs again. The stories are really good.I wish Diane Duane would write more TOS trek stories..
Wow. That book feels like so long ago. As I recall, I researched my Captain April story by renting "The Counter-Clock Incident" from a video store . . . on VHS. Nice to know people are still reading it.
Greg I really liked your Captain April story in Enterprise logs. It was really good. I just finished reading the book this morning.
Thanks! I think of that story as my Diane Carey pastiche, since I very much took my cues from her treatment of April and his crew in her novels. (As I recall, Diane was originally supposed to write the April story for that book, but decided to do one of the earlier historical stories instead.)
April's tenure as captain is a period that doesn't have a lot of books. It was great to see him get some attention in Legacies. I like that the authors these days try to incorporate elements and/or characters of previous books into their stories, even books that were written years ago like Diane Carey's Final Frontier and the before mentioned works by Diane Duane. Bennett's The Buried Age comes to mind too, incorporating characters of Friedman's earlier Stargazer books. It's appreciated when authors do their homework and try as much as is possible to fit their stories with the overall universe, even looking back at stories written years ago.
I wasn't the first to do so. Pretty much every prior Trek Lit or comics tale about the Stargazer had used the characters Mike Friedman introduced in TNG: Reunion. It's interesting... There are some things that different tie-in authors establish differently, but there are others that just become the unquestioned default used by virtually everyone, like Vonda McIntyre's Saavik origin from the TWOK novelization, or Friedman's Stargazer crew. Not out of any formal policy or anything, but just because everyone ends up choosing to use it.
Out of curiosity, who pitches story ideas anyway these days? Does the author pitch an idea, the publisher, the editors. Take Stargazer for instance. Would an author pitch an idea for a Stargazer book? Or does the editor/publisher say, hey, we'd like someone to do a Stargazer book? Right now I'm reading Diane Carey's Fire Ship book from The Captain's Table, and it notes the concept was by the editor, John Ordover, and one of the writers, Dean Wesley Smith. (New Frontier and New Earth come to mind as well as examples). Is that common? Or is it usually one or the other?
Sometimes the editors come to us and say "Come up with a pitch for a novel in this series/about this event." Sometimes we come up with our own ideas and pitch them to the editor.
Yep. It's a collaborative process that can go both ways. Sometimes an editor is looking for something specific ("We need a story about the Pakleds for the SEVEN DEADLY SINS anthology"; sometimes it's as vague as "We need a TOS novel for next summer. Got any ideas?"
Very interesting. Makes sense. I've always been amazed with writers. Sometimes it's easy to forget how much work has to go into writing a novel. I mean, I can get as far as thinking I'd love to see a novel about a mission of such and such a ship between these particular years. But that's it. You guys have to try to think of an original story, and with all the various series, movies, and even other stories, that's probably difficult. But then it's not just the overall story but writing about dialogue, trying to express the emotions of characters in print, writing about the settings of the scenes, some of which are brand new, and create characters and aliens and try to describe how they appear without it sounding like an autopsy. I've never seen characters like Dina Elfiki or Chen, or many of the other new characters, but they've become important characters in TNG now. Like a fan of a TV series, I care about what happens to them in the story. I was sad at the passing of Choudhury, another character we never actually saw but because of the stories about her, she was easy to envision as a character. The same would go for any fiction book really. And you guys do this for a living, sometimes writing more than 1 book in a years time. Simply amazing. I guess in a lot of ways it's like a piece of art.
That is actually not entirely true, she was depicted on the German cover of TNG: Losing the Peace. Spoiler: Images Her death was shocking, though. I found her death to be particularly tragic, considering that she was among the most developed TNG relaunch characters.
I meant on screen on any of the shows. I was referring to characters in general that weren't created for the shows and how the authors have to find a way to bring them to life.
I mean, in general authors of any books have to do that. After all many novels are never seen on screen. But in Star Trek's case, they have to create new characters alongside characters we have seen on screen. And then try to portray them as having the same importance on the ship as established characters. Chen, for instance, is sort of a protégé, or project of Captain Picards, so we have to be able to envision her with Picard. Or when Admiral Akaar dresses down Captain Picard for his involvement in the Tezwa affair. He is an imposing presence in the novels, but is not a character we've ever seen (well, unless you picture the baby in Friday's child, but that's not how I see Akkar ).