Old school Trek authors here?

[Greg Cox]

Octavia Butler told a story about how the dark-skinned heroine of one of her SF novels ended up with green skin on the cover--apparently as compromise. Her take on it was that the publisher was afraid to put a black woman on the cover, for fear of hurting sales, but couldn't quite bring themselves to put a white woman on the cover instead. So . . "Let's make her green!"

 

[Christopher]

Of course, things are better in some places -- like Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence from Tor, which prominently features its nonwhite protagonists on the covers.

 

[Greg Cox]

Of course, things are better in some places -- like Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence from Tor, which prominently features its nonwhite protagonists on the covers.

And I should probably note that that Octavia Butler story is decades old. I remember her telling it at a reading back in the mid-eighties.

 

[Klaus]

...and of course it doesn't just happen on covers, most recently with Skiffy's Earthsea debacle.

 

[Christopher]

...and of course it doesn't just happen on covers, most recently with Skiffy's Earthsea debacle.

That's mentioned in the article I linked -- the book covers have never gotten the Earthsea characters' ethnicities right either.

 

[Khan 2.0]

it is a great thing to have Trek authors here. I guess this place is the best to talk trek.. I stumbled upon here sort of by accident after just using imdb boards for trek stuff (and other movies of course) and still do

EnriqueH - im curious but did you use to frequent the Superman Cinema board a while ago. your name sounds familiar might've been on that forum (I didn't post there btw, just used it as a superman news site as it was a good place to keep uptodate with news)

 

[EnriqueH]

I did post there for many, many years.

It was a romp. Many years of fun posting, people busting each other's chops, people posting drunk and venturing off on weird tangents, occasionally making controversial statements to get a rise out of people, but we had a lot of fun talking about the Superman movies, Bond movies, Trek and Star Wars movies. It was a good time while it lasted.

But I had a falling out with several people there and the community is all but dead, showing very weak signs of life.

 

[Khan 2.0]

yeah, it was a great place for keeping in the know about super news and of course the reeve movies. I was kind of a longtime visitor to the forum and the actual site, in fact I remember contacting the site owner (Gandalf? Gandy?) back in the 90s to talk about the mythical Donner Cut. but a while back there seemed to be some kind of war that happened in the forums im not sure what exactly caused it but that place is a graveyard

 

[Therin of Andor]

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.

Yes, that was my take on it, too.

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.

Okay. I did check the cover art of Book 1 when responding last time and was reassured that the tones used were ambiguous. I'd forgotten that the characters were whitewashed in the sequel covers.

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.

Totally agree. I'm a teacher-librarian. We confront this every day.

 

[EnriqueH]

yeah, it was a great place for keeping in the know about super news and of course the reeve movies. I was kind of a longtime visitor to the forum and the actual site, in fact I remember contacting the site owner (Gandalf? Gandy?) back in the 90s to talk about the mythical Donner Cut. but a while back there seemed to be some kind of war that happened in the forums im not sure what exactly caused it but that place is a graveyard

Yep, Gandalf, but we called him Gandy.

The Superman Cinema forum has had little internal battles from time to time, but this last one seemed to kill the community pretty good.

The problem, as I see it, is that there's a certain "pack mentality" that takes place when there's a disagreement there, and sometimes these disagreements turn into a witch hunt where a person, no matter what they say or do, are suddenly "targeted" for ridicule, insults and whatever.

This last one had to do with Man of Steel and, as I saw it, people who didn't like the film were ridiculed or pigeonholed as people who ONLY like Christopher Reeve and their dissenting opinions on Man of Steel were automatically brushed off as biased or what have you.

Anyway, you can message me if you want to continue to discussing this as I don't want to get off topic.

 

[KRAD]

I wonder how much Haldeman remembers about writing his Trek book.

Quite a bit.

In 2012, the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago and Dragon Con in Atlanta were the same weekend, and they did several joint panels, where half the panel was in Chicago and the other half in Atlanta, and they were joined via video conferencing, with two audiences.

I was on a media tie-in panel with Peter David, Mike Stackpole, David Gerrold (the four of us in Atlanta), Haldeman, Richard Lee Byers, Matt Forbeck, and Tom Dowd in Chicago.

Joe talked about his Star Trek experience -- the only reason he was even on the panel -- and he said that the first one was a joy to write, tremendous fun, and he had a grand old time; but the second one was a nightmare, an absolute chore, a grind to finish, and he swore he'd never do that sort of thing again.

And he hasn't. But we got two cool novels out of it.....