^Actually Kurtzman & Orci have already been announced as the writers of the next film, along with Damon Lindelof.
Should we get books that are accepted as part of canon?
- Thread starter Jayson
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This is a good point, which deserves stressing. As much as certain fans seem to resist this motion: people make this stuff up as they go along. There is no big book resting in a hidden vault at Paramount that contains a master ten-year plan for the future of STAR TREK, along with complete bios and fact sheets on every ship and character.
Does Scotty have a long-lost brother in this timeline? Who knows? We'll find out if and when some writer decides to give Scotty a brother . . . or a half-Klingon daughter or a sexy ex-wife. Even if somebody sat down today and wrote a complete bible for the "Abramsverse," there's no guarantee that somebody wouldn't have a better idea five years from when STAR TREK XV: THE RETURN OF NERO is in development.
As long as "canonical" novels can be contradicted by later movies and tv shows, this whole debate is academic.
That's a good example. Scotty's "official biography" in The Making of Star Trek, which was about the most authoritative source you could get at the time, said that he was an only child. Then TWOK (at least the extended edition and the novelization) gave him a nephew, meaning he must've had a brother or sister. Indeed, even onscreen, canonical details like that are often overlooked. Early on in the M*A*S*H TV series, Hawkeye had a sister and a living mother, but later on he was an only child whose mother had died when he was young.
True. Look at the Okuda's Chronology, a number of whose assertions were contradicted by later episodes. And I've already mentioned Mosaic and Pathways. A fictional universe is not a rigid, unchanging whole, but a dynamic entity being explored and adjusted as it goes.
Heck, I remember the original bible for Voyager. That was full of stuff that never made it onto screen. Tuvok as an elderly Vulcan who was sort of a mentor/father-figure to B'Elanna? Doc Zimmerman?
Stuff gets invented (and revised) as needed. Why hamstring future writers by codifying it all in advance?
Stuff gets invented (and revised) as needed. Why hamstring future writers by codifying it all in advance?
^And the TNG bible. Data built by unknown aliens, "Bill" Riker prejudiced against Data, Geordi being liaison to the ship's children, Worf not even existing.
Well I figure they could use the novels to explore aspects of the Trekverse that proably won't be touched on in the movies. I supose there might some conflict at some point but I don't see it being a huge issue. I think it's safe to say the movies will be told from the perspective of the Enterprise and it's crew. These are the two things were you would proably have to be more vague in terms of what you want to do with them.
Also it could help also to explore things going before the first movie. For example you can explore what like life was like for Scotty living on the planet and how he made friends with his sidekick. I just don't see the movies doing much i nregards to this. Let's say Scotty and his Sidekick liked to get drunk together and that's how they bonded. In the movie's you could have them getting drunk together for comedy scene or maybe you only get a reference to this,which to casual fans will just be them talking about stuff they use to do on the planet. I mean we have seen stuff from the books transfer over before such as Uhura's name and didn't they mention that they wanted to read more books before planning the new movie? That was a intresting choice of words because you would think they might would say something about seeing more of the episodes.
Someone mentioned about how this has been done in the comics. That's true, so why not do it in novels as well? I know they have said "Countdown" isn't canon and that is kind of wierd to say because there isn't anything in it that interfere's with the movie. It's actually a really good example of how to do something in the books and count it as canon.
Jason
Also it could help also to explore things going before the first movie. For example you can explore what like life was like for Scotty living on the planet and how he made friends with his sidekick. I just don't see the movies doing much i nregards to this. Let's say Scotty and his Sidekick liked to get drunk together and that's how they bonded. In the movie's you could have them getting drunk together for comedy scene or maybe you only get a reference to this,which to casual fans will just be them talking about stuff they use to do on the planet. I mean we have seen stuff from the books transfer over before such as Uhura's name and didn't they mention that they wanted to read more books before planning the new movie? That was a intresting choice of words because you would think they might would say something about seeing more of the episodes.
Someone mentioned about how this has been done in the comics. That's true, so why not do it in novels as well? I know they have said "Countdown" isn't canon and that is kind of wierd to say because there isn't anything in it that interfere's with the movie. It's actually a really good example of how to do something in the books and count it as canon.
Jason
^ My question is: How is doing any of that different from what's already been/being done?
The books have always been a platform for exploring plot points, characters, etc. which are unlikely to be addressed on film. There's nothing currently precluding a writer from pitching a novel to do the very things you mention, just as there was nothing preventing Pocket from pitching a series of books which addressed all the nagging questions raised by Star Trek: Nemesis, or what happened between the TOS movies or TNG, or the "secret history" of the Eugenics Wars, or the aftermath of "These Are the Voyages..." and so on. If the licensing office gives the green light, then we're off to the races. It's the licensing office which also will (as much as they're able) ensure that anything a writer pitches or produces doesn't tread on any ground which might be covered by a future film/TV episode.
As for whether any of that will be accepted as "canon" or even noticed by the producers of the films or any future television series, the answer to that is as it's always been: It's possible, however unlikely, and it's a decision which won't be made by anyone here, or who's affiliated with Pocket Books. That's just the truth of the tie-in business, regardless of the property.
The books have always been a platform for exploring plot points, characters, etc. which are unlikely to be addressed on film. There's nothing currently precluding a writer from pitching a novel to do the very things you mention, just as there was nothing preventing Pocket from pitching a series of books which addressed all the nagging questions raised by Star Trek: Nemesis, or what happened between the TOS movies or TNG, or the "secret history" of the Eugenics Wars, or the aftermath of "These Are the Voyages..." and so on. If the licensing office gives the green light, then we're off to the races. It's the licensing office which also will (as much as they're able) ensure that anything a writer pitches or produces doesn't tread on any ground which might be covered by a future film/TV episode.
As for whether any of that will be accepted as "canon" or even noticed by the producers of the films or any future television series, the answer to that is as it's always been: It's possible, however unlikely, and it's a decision which won't be made by anyone here, or who's affiliated with Pocket Books. That's just the truth of the tie-in business, regardless of the property.
You seem to have the stance that this won't/can't/shouldn't happen without the contribution of the screenwriters?
For a whole novel?
In any case, every ST novel ever written adds little scenes like that. Backstories that cleverly shoehorn old canonical factoids together are common.
If you listen to the new ST IV commentary, you'll hear that the writers did plenty of research into both the episodes and the TOS movies. And TAS.
Sure, they had favourite novels, too, but they cherrypicked. For example, "First Frontier" gave them some angles on George and Winona Kirk, but they chose to ignore Robert April, who's a major presence in that novel.
There WILL be novels set in the new timeline. Comics work on a different timeframe from proposal to finished product. Novels take much longer.
You still don't get it. You cannot tout a comic read by 1% of your audience as being essential reading for anyone writing future movies or novels. And since there won't be any TNG, DS9 or VOY movies coming along in the near future, there won't be anything canonical that needs to pay attention to the 24th century characters and events set out by that comic mini-series.
But if the comic is declared canon, then any future TNG film set in a post-"Countdown" era must use B-4 as Captain Data, Ambassador Picard, retired LaForge and returned-to-the-Empire Worf. Future filmmakers might not like those choices, and are thus free to ignore them. So the comic is not, and cannot be, canonical. In any case, the "Countdown" trade paperback may be out of print by the time ST XII comes out; the four single issues certainly already are.
Maybe Pocket's authors don't want those futures for those characters either, and yet a "canonical" comic will force them to comply with those choices. Indeed, several of the writers (and fans) have been quite vocal that B-4 evolving into Data is a nonsense, and they were saying that way back before "A Time..." was out.
Actually there are at least two points that seem to conflict with the movie. One is that in the movie, Spock implies that he never met Nero before their battle at the supernova, conflicting with the Countdown story in which they were friends beforehand. Another, at least according to a commentator on TrekMovie.com, is that the Narada's weapons seemed more powerful in Countdown than in the movie, tearing through 24th-century Klingon ships effortlessly while in the film it took more time for them to inflict cumulative damage on 23rd-century Starfleet ships. Neither is a blatant contradiction, but they represent differences in interpretation, at least. Countdown was written after the film was completed and was not scripted by the filmmakers themselves.
And that's why it's not canon. You're making the perennial mistake of assuming that canon equals continuity. That's not correct. The canon is the core body of work, from the original creators or in the original medium. Anything else is outside the canon, regardless of its consistency with the canon. Countdown is from different creators and in a different medium, so it's extracanonical.
That was Gene Roddenberry. Before his 1989 memo, nobody in fandom really talked about canon. Nobody tried to draw lines between what was canon and what wasn't. There was the show and the movies, and there were various different works of fiction based on them, and people enjoyed them all. But GR started getting annoyed that other writers were interpreting his creation in different ways, and that some of those interpretations were being treated as equal to his creation. So he put out that memo that codified the notion of canon as something that was intrinsically important to Star Trek and as something that was defined on the basis of what it excluded.
Once he passed away, his memo ceased to be binding at all; it was just one person's opinion, and his successors weren't constrained by it. But nobody told fandom that, because nobody in Hollywood actually thinks much about canon (any more than a fish thinks about water). So for nearly two decades, fandom has been enslaved to an idea of canon as some strict, exclusionistic dogma handed down from on high, an idea that's totally mythical.
I'm sorry, but didn't somebody in a recent canon thread (either here or on TrekMovie) already link to a Usenet search covering the years before 1989, showing that people in Trek fandom online were already talking plenty about canon?
Even without such a search, all you have to do is look at something like The Best of Trek to realise that this characterisation of fandom at the time is off the mark.
These sorts of discussions about fictional canon go at least as far back as the earliest Sherlockians (who popularised the Biblical terminology to describe it), if not further.
^Maybe you're right. I was unaware of the term "canon" back then, but I wasn't heavily involved in fandom.
But from what I recall of the Best of Trek volumes, I don't think there were any articles proposing that material that wasn't onscreen should be ignored or treated as inferior. On the contrary, I remember plenty of articles that treated stuff from the books, both novels and "nonfiction" stuff like the Goldsteins' Spaceflight Chronology, as an equally worthy source to any onscreen material. And many articles featured fans engaging in their own speculations about how to fill in the gaps in ST continuity, and it was treated as a fun exercise, rather than vilified as something that didn't count because it didn't have the shibboleth "canon" appended to it.
But from what I recall of the Best of Trek volumes, I don't think there were any articles proposing that material that wasn't onscreen should be ignored or treated as inferior. On the contrary, I remember plenty of articles that treated stuff from the books, both novels and "nonfiction" stuff like the Goldsteins' Spaceflight Chronology, as an equally worthy source to any onscreen material. And many articles featured fans engaging in their own speculations about how to fill in the gaps in ST continuity, and it was treated as a fun exercise, rather than vilified as something that didn't count because it didn't have the shibboleth "canon" appended to it.
I don't know how complete Google's usenet archive is, but there are a few Star Trek canon references before 1990. Not very many at all, though.
^Surely the concept of canon was around then; as TheAlmanac points out, the term in this usage has been around since the days of Sherlock Holmes. But back then, I don't think "canon" had acquired the fetishistic quality it has for many today.
Richard Arnold was formally employed by Paramount as ST Archivist after ST IV had lots of money rolling into the studio. During his convention appearances, and in his column for "ST Communicator", he was probably the one who used to "c" word to clarify Gene Roddenberry's mode of thinking for handling the tie-ins. Fan annoyance with RA probably has something to do with the annoyance with canon.
Certainly, there were several convention appearances by Gene that got GR riled up. Fans asking him why Franz Joseph-designed ships weren't used to make the movies more warlike, fans asking GR what he thought about "Star Fleet Battles", fans praising Diane Duane's "Rihannsu" novels (and a particular convention flier that arrived at the Star Trek Office promoting Diane as "the creator of..."), etc.
When GR was unable to attend conventions, RA would attempt to answer in the same vein, and the "c" word would get used more and more.
But, of course, that actual "What is canon?" memo was written for the ST licensees, not the fans. It was not intended to tell fans which bits of ST were somehow better than other bits. It was so that the licensees could make sure they never departed too far from the parent shows/movies.
The thread where I originally saw such a link (which I'm increasingly sure was at TrekMovie--can anyone else more successfully track it down?) pointed out that Google actually gives you more results if you restrict your search to a specific year.
When I enter "trek canon" and restrict it to 1985, for example, I get 65 900 results.
Here's one of them:Some things never change.
^Okay, now you're just depressing me.
From a movies-and-TV perspective, the Trek 1.0 universe is about as locked down as it can possibly be. Any book that's consistent with the 1.0 universe as of the events of the latest Trek movie is in little danger of being contradicted by a future movie or TV series.
Heck, even if the 2.0 universe references a pre-2233 event which flies in the face of our assumptions about the history of the 1.0 universe, one could always rationalize that, just as Nero's ship and Spock's ship were sent back to different years, a piece of not-previously-mentioned debris could have been sent back even earlier in time, when it wreaked all sorts of temporal havoc.
Heck, even if the 2.0 universe references a pre-2233 event which flies in the face of our assumptions about the history of the 1.0 universe, one could always rationalize that, just as Nero's ship and Spock's ship were sent back to different years, a piece of not-previously-mentioned debris could have been sent back even earlier in time, when it wreaked all sorts of temporal havoc.
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