I wish! I'm old enough to (dimly) remember watching STAR TREK during its original run on NBC . . . .
Old school Trek authors here?
- Thread starter EnriqueH
- Start date
I wish! I'm old enough to (dimly) remember watching STAR TREK during its original run on NBC . . . .
I seem to recall Diane Duane coming in here once or twice right around the time that "The Empty Chair" was finally released.
Aww shucks, I got shout-outs. Thanks guys! 
Yup - me: 1 Trek quote book, 2 trivia books, and two short story credits - Constellations and Lives of Dax. Was also a writers' assistant on Deep Space Nine and Andromeda as mentioned with a story credit for an Andromeda ep too.
Though I'm fully in the recent/contemporary crowd as far as I'm concerned even though my quote book came out what - 15 or so years ago? Because I grew up reading the "classic" Trek writers.
Yup - me: 1 Trek quote book, 2 trivia books, and two short story credits - Constellations and Lives of Dax. Was also a writers' assistant on Deep Space Nine and Andromeda as mentioned with a story credit for an Andromeda ep too.
Though I'm fully in the recent/contemporary crowd as far as I'm concerned even though my quote book came out what - 15 or so years ago? Because I grew up reading the "classic" Trek writers.
Aww shucks, I got shout-outs. Thanks guys!
Yup - me: 1 Trek quote book, 2 trivia books, and two short story credits - Constellations and Lives of Dax. Was also a writers' assistant on Deep Space Nine and Andromeda as mentioned with a story credit for an Andromeda ep too.
Though I'm fully in the recent/contemporary crowd as far as I'm concerned even though my quote book came out what - 15 or so years ago? Because I grew up reading the "classic" Trek writers.
Jill, I love Quotable Star Trek. One of my most beloved volumes, actually. If you are ever given the opportunity to do another, I hope you will take it!
If you mean Joe Haldeman, he wrote two, Planet of Judgment and World Without End. It was Jack C. Haldeman II (Joe's older brother) who wrote just one, Perry's Planet.
Thank you so much! Quotable was my absolute labor of love and is very dear to me too! I have always wanted to do an update of it as there really isn't enough for a full Volume II.
It's missing the end of Voyager, all of Enterprise and the two JJ-verse movies, but I think that's it. Happily it still seems to sell a few copies here and there even without the updates! I would still love to do an update, but the folks I worked with at the publisher back in the day have long since moved on so I wouldn't even know who to talk to about suggesting the idea! But I'm so glad you like the book!
Because I'm a fan first, last and always.Aww shucks, I got shout-outs. Thanks guys!
I was trying to remember your moniker here, Jill. I recall you were here for quite some time as js before we realised who you were!
I just got very lucky to have the chance to work on/at what I loved.
Joe Haldeman was a guest at a small literary SF convention in Sydney, Australia, in the late 80s or early 90s and a group of us from the local Trek club attended, hoping to chat to him about his Trek books. Our best opportunity to get Trek goss was after the convention, when a small entourage accompanied him to a pub.
He had plenty to share about his books, and also explained the puzzle he attempted to set up in his preface to the first book, that is explained (in the preface to the second book) as suffering a typo that totally ruined the original puzzle. (I don't recall now, but he was very excited to chat Trek with Trek fans.)
It was Joe himself who indicated that we should go back and reexamine the original Bantam cover of his brother's "Perry's Planet". You can barely see it, but Kirk is actually wearing his white short-sleeved ST:TMP uniform top (and Perscan device) in the art!
Perry's Planet by Therin of Andor, on Flickr
Now that's interesting... is that cover the 1st printing? This is my copy, listed as 3rd printing Sept 84 and clearly TOS era.
The 1984 covers are MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE.
I'm actually trying to buy them all. It's the only time I've EVER bought books for their covers. LOL.
But seriously, there's something about those '84 covers that exude the sense of wonder I felt whenever I watched TOS as a kid.
Galactic Whirlpool, Perry's Planet, Death's Angel and Trek to Madworld all had wondrous covers.
^Except the 1984 re-release cover for The Galactic Whirlpool portrayed Katwen as a blonde Caucasian even though she was clearly described in the book as having very dark skin and black hair. David Gerrold seems to have a problem with cover authors whitewashing his characters -- the viewpoint character in his Dingilliad series is a black teenager who was rendered as white on the covers.
Yep!
Womp, womp, woooomp.
^I thought I remembered that the boys in the Dingilliad series were lightly "coffee-coloured" and that this description didn't pop up till I was halfway through the first novel. (Certainly, I'd assumed the boys were white and I thought DG had deliberately paced his reveal of the skin colour detail. Was it not that most of the world's populace were now said to be "coffee coloured"?)
^Which doesn't excuse the cover artist missing that detail and assuming by default that the hero must be white -- nor does it excuse the reader for assuming that (and I was guilty of the same assumption, I'm sorry to say). Indeed, I suspect the reason Gerrold avoided revealing the hero's ethnicity for so long was to force us to confront our own tendency to treat white as the default -- by writing the character without racial markers for the first half of the book, letting us fill the void with our own preconceptions, and then showing us that we were wrong to assume. It worked for me.
And it sure as hell doesn't excuse continuing to portray the hero as white and blond-haired on the two sequels, by which point they surely would've known better. Presumably Gerrold would've had plenty of time before publication of the first book to tell his editor that the cover artist had gotten the hero's race wrong.
But there's a long, unfortunate history of book covers whitewashing non-Caucasian protagonists or leaving them off of covers altogether, a history that sadly continues to this day, particularly in young-adult publishing. There's a pervasive belief in the industry that putting nonwhite people on book covers will hurt their sales. This is a disturbingly widespread trend and not something to be blown off casually or defended as justifiable.
Although sometimes it's on the readers as much as the publishers. Note all the Hunger Games fans who were shocked when the movies cast a black girl as Rue, even though Rue was explicitly described as brown-skinned the first four or five times she was mentioned in the book. These assumptions can be hard to shake, which is why it's so important not to be complacent about them.
And it sure as hell doesn't excuse continuing to portray the hero as white and blond-haired on the two sequels, by which point they surely would've known better. Presumably Gerrold would've had plenty of time before publication of the first book to tell his editor that the cover artist had gotten the hero's race wrong.
But there's a long, unfortunate history of book covers whitewashing non-Caucasian protagonists or leaving them off of covers altogether, a history that sadly continues to this day, particularly in young-adult publishing. There's a pervasive belief in the industry that putting nonwhite people on book covers will hurt their sales. This is a disturbingly widespread trend and not something to be blown off casually or defended as justifiable.
Although sometimes it's on the readers as much as the publishers. Note all the Hunger Games fans who were shocked when the movies cast a black girl as Rue, even though Rue was explicitly described as brown-skinned the first four or five times she was mentioned in the book. These assumptions can be hard to shake, which is why it's so important not to be complacent about them.
Similar threads
