If the speculation that Pocket Books does not have a license to do anything related to the reboot films is correct, and that this is the factor stopping them from going past the 24th century events depicted in Star Trek XI, I wonder if they might consider purchasing a very narrow license just giving them the ability to reference the 24th century events depicted in the movie only.
As I said, I don't think that a lack of license precludes even
mentioning the events, just directly depicting them. Although this is all conjectural.
CBS is being petty if they are really tossing a roadblock like that in Pocket Books' way.
Whoa, that's a big "if" to base such an accusation on. I can't stress enough -- whatever theories anyone in the general public has about the reasons for the lack of Abramsverse novels,
they're pure guesswork. And nobody deserves to be accused of anything based on guesswork.
I should point that CBS
owns Pocket Books. The relationship there is anything but antagonistic. CBS's licensing department has never been anything but supportive and generous toward Pocket, at least in the 2000s. So you're really off-base here.
As I said, it's been six years. I've got to think the fans are starting to notice. And they can really only slow down the pace of the 24th century novels so much before the relaunch stuff starts to get really, really boring until it grinds inevitably to the events of the movie that they can't show.
As it happens, the
Deep Space Nine relaunch took eight years in real time to get through a single in-story year. People didn't find that boring. If anything, the post-NEM books have been racing forward surprisingly fast, jumping over huge swaths of time to get from 2379 to 2386 as quickly as they have. If things are slowing down now, that's a return to a more normal narrative pace.
In-universe, he technically doesn't; but in real-world terms, if he weren't, there would've been no point in including him in the film at all. The whole reason for the convoluted time-travel narrative was to establish the new continuity as a direct offshoot of the old one, in order to give it legitimacy in the eyes of fans who didn't want a complete reboot (although they greatly underestimated how resistant many of those fans would be).
Never really got that. Firstly, the whole point of the reboot is that it wasn't
for the fans
Of course it was. Nobody makes a movie for only one audience. The desire is to get as many people into the theater as possible, so you want the movie to have a broad appeal. In the case of rebooting or remaking an existing series, the ideal is to find a balance between being accessible/inviting to a new audience and being satisfying/nostalgic for the old audience. After all, alienating the old audience won't help your word of mouth. (This is why the
Battlestar Galactica reboot, which largely discarded or deconstructed just about everything from the original series, still threw in a bunch of nostalgic Easter eggs for the fans of the original, like using its theme as the Colonial anthem or featuring classic Cylon Centurion and Raider designs in flashbacks. You want to get
both the old and new audiences.)
and secondly, the people who are obsessed enough to care would surely be more upset by something that potentially erases the prime universe than a simple reboot.
You're thinking in extremes and ignoring the middle ground. Not everyone who has an emotional stake in classic Trek is "obsessed." The people who are obsessive about it were past winning over to begin with. But the extremists never represent the only point of view, or even the majority one; they just make the most noise and drown out everyone else so that it seems like they're the only game in town.
And anyone who thinks the new continuity could "erase" the old one isn't thinking clearly. It's not like the creators of fiction are bound by the in-story laws of temporal physics. They
invent those laws to serve their storytelling needs. And nobody is going to say that the old Trek continuity has been "erased." There is nobody who wants that, so nobody would ever do it. That's just silly paranoia from fans who've forgotten that
Star Trek is about letting yourself be governed by optimism rather than fear.
The other thing to keep in mind is that at least two members of Abrams's "Supreme Court" -- Roberto Orci and Damon Lindelof, iirc -- are devoted Trek fans themselves, while the others are more outsiders or casual fans. So they wanted to balance their own personal preferences as much as the potential preferences of the audience. They wanted to connect to the classic universe because they
love the classic universe and wanted to be a part of it, even while giving themselves a blank-slate continuity so that they'd be free to tell new stories. They were trying to get the best of both worlds.
Come to think of it, what exactly does "original Spock" even mean? There was a Spock somewhere on Romulus during the events of Nemesis. From that point on, Everett tells us that the universal wave function will evolve into countless weakly-interacting components, each with their own 'version' of Spock. 2009 Spock and post-Nemesis literature Spock could belong to different quantum realities, and they, along with a zillion other Spocks we've never seen, would all be equally justified in saying they're the "original Spock" if "original Spock" just means "the Spock that was around in the last visual incarnation of ST prior to 2009".
Which is basically sophistry, because you could say the same about any moment in the history of the franchise -- that, say, the Spock in "The Cage" diverged into millions of alternative versions by the time Kirk took command of the
Enterprise. But that doesn't matter. Just as each of us only experiences one continuous reality in life, so the creators of a work of fiction intend their characters to be the same continuous ones from week to week, even if their universe does include alternate timelines.
The filmmakers' decision was not about quantum theory; that was just the excuse. The
reason for their decision was emotional. They loved Leonard Nimoy as Spock, they knew the fans loved Leonard Nimoy as Spock, and so they made the entirely wise choice to use him as the bridge between the old and the new, the one who passed the torch and gave it legitimacy. Forget the in-story time-travel conceits and look at it in real-world terms, the terms of how you win over an audience to something new. The new movies included Nimoy for the same reason "Encounter at Farpoint" had a McCoy cameo,
Generations had Kirk, "Emissary" had Picard, "Caretaker" had Quark, and "Broken Bow" had James Cromwell appearing as Zefram Cochrane. It really shouldn't be hard to understand why they did it. It's about audience affinity -- and the filmmakers' affinity -- for an actor and a role.
