Ship of the Line by Diane Carey
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Tell us how it is, Allyn!
Tell us how it is, Allyn!
Will do. Amazon (which was selling it for something like sixty-five percent off) says I'll have it by the end of the week.
I would only use the [sarcasm][/sarcasm] if I had said that Braga and company had did a fantastic job on "Broken Bow".
Sorry, but Carey took such an unprofessionally written script in "Broken Bow" and turned it into a professionally polished story.
I love her broken bow book, but truthfully that's because I dislike enterprise. It was a pretty unprofessional thing to do.
WHen it comes to trek, it's obvious that Carey only cares about TOS, as that's the only place it seems like she cares about making the characters true to the tv series. Great Starship Race is good and First Frontier is one of my favourite trek novels. Clan Ru was an awesome idea and the different track vulcans meeeting and kirk/spock/mccoy discussing the cosmic string likelihoods are two of my favourite trek book scenes.
WHen it comes to trek, it's obvious that Carey only cares about TOS, as that's the only place it seems like she cares about making the characters true to the tv series. Great Starship Race is good and First Frontier is one of my favourite trek novels. Clan Ru was an awesome idea and the different track vulcans meeeting and kirk/spock/mccoy discussing the cosmic string likelihoods are two of my favourite trek book scenes.
The bits where Picard watches TOS on the holodeck sucked, but otherwise I enjoyed SotL quite a lot.
Can you go into detail about how it's professionally polished? She didn't change the events at all, she just had the characters constantly snark in inner monologue about them.The plot is literally exactly the same and there's nothing fleshed out about anyone to any insightful level, so I'm not really sure what you mean at all. Like, can you present specific excerpts that show off this professional polish? I understand if you like the book, but I don't understand how you can think it's good; the two are not the same thing at all.
It's a reasonably good MSTing, I'll give it that much. But I'd never call Joel Hodgson and the 'bots snarking about Santa Claus vs. the Martians a more polished version of that movie; it's a completely different version is all.
Her snark was unprofessional. And it even came to the attention of Berman and Braga. From the "Broken Bow" DVD commentary...
Of course, Carey was never "reprimanded" as such, but she hasn't written a Trek novel since.
There is a thread on the subject in the archive...
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=208597
I'm pretty sure tomswift was defending her and the novelization in that thread too, if I remember right.
Edit: Yep, that's the thread I was thinking of.
Sorry, but I got into Enterprise first by Carey's novelization of "Broken Bow" and Dean Wesley Smith & Kristin Kathryn Risch's "By The Book", and I really thought that Enterprise would be a good series based on the bar that all three of those authors set. I never saw "Broken Bow" the episode until the DVD was released in 2005 (but I had seen a few episodes from mid-season 2 and mid-season 3 thanks to someone recording them to VHS for me), and unfortunately the quality of the filmed BB episode and the other episodes were so far below the bar Carey, Smith & Rusch had set to question what garbage pile the producers had gone diving into to find and even shoot Enterprise. And even to this day I consider the books to be more true to the universe than the episodes.
I mean, I feel that way about literally every series, that the books in general are a better fit to the universe than the episodes in current TrekLit. But By The Book? I mean, it's an okay book, it's not bad, but Enterprise had plenty of episodes that hit way above it. (Though Cutler's RP system is legitimately awful. Dice for stat generation is so 1980s, and wow what a killer GM. )
And I still really want to know some specifics beyond just "Broken Bow is bad but the novelization is good". Like, I want to know what it is you didn't like about Broken Bow, specific stuff that rubbed you the wrong way. Because I've seen the episode and read the novelization, if you strip out the snark from the novelization, you really do get exactly the same thing. Like, there's maybe two or three scenes in the book that were completely invented for the book, and they're mostly off screen dialogue between characters.
I'm not trying to attack you or anything, I just literally don't see how you could think the episode was garbage and the book wasn't when everything in the episode is also in the book. I am legitimately befuddled right now. Was it the cinematography? The set design? It had to have been something visual rather than narrative, right?
)And I still really want to know some specifics beyond just "Broken Bow is bad but the novelization is good". Like, I want to know what it is you didn't like about Broken Bow, specific stuff that rubbed you the wrong way. Because I've seen the episode and read the novelization, if you strip out the snark from the novelization, you really do get exactly the same thing. Like, there's maybe two or three scenes in the book that were completely invented for the book, and they're mostly off screen dialogue between characters.
I'm not trying to attack you or anything, I just literally don't see how you could think the episode was garbage and the book wasn't when everything in the episode is also in the book. I am legitimately befuddled right now. Was it the cinematography? The set design? It had to have been something visual rather than narrative, right?
Yeah, see, I don't quite understand your argument here. I mean, I'm no lover of ENT myself, but I'd really like to know why you think Carey's novelization of Broken Bow was better than the episode itself. Because from what I understand, the novelization is the exact same story as the episode. The details are the same, each characters' dialogue is the same. The events are the same. In fact, the only difference is that now the characters have inner monologues about how stupid they think everything is. Now if you personally think that Broken Bow was stupid, that's fine. But obviously the characters in the show did not, because that inner monologue does not match their actions in the episode. So Carey basically put words in their mouths that never existed originally, and were the exact opposite of their actions. To me, that's incredibly unprofessional and downright silly. It actually makes Carey look like an idiot that she couldn't do a simple transcribing job without adding her own personal biases into it. No wonder she never wrote a Trek book again after that.
Maybe the actors' performances weren't as great as TomSwift imagined them when he was reading the novelization. 
To his perspective, the filmed pilot was like an adaptation of the novelization and we all know what that feels like, when an adaptation can match the story beat-for-beat yet it still seems off or "not as good" as your original experience reading the story.
I felt this way about the movie Watchmen. I loved the comic series and the movie was almost slavish in its adherence to the source material, but I still left the theater with a general meh feeling.
In this case, Watchmen was always more about the innovative techniques and format (sequential illustrated narrative) of the comic series than the substance of its base story anyway, but I can still empathize with someone that prefers their initial experience with a story over a secondary experience with that identical story, told in a new way.
To his perspective, the filmed pilot was like an adaptation of the novelization and we all know what that feels like, when an adaptation can match the story beat-for-beat yet it still seems off or "not as good" as your original experience reading the story.
I felt this way about the movie Watchmen. I loved the comic series and the movie was almost slavish in its adherence to the source material, but I still left the theater with a general meh feeling.
In this case, Watchmen was always more about the innovative techniques and format (sequential illustrated narrative) of the comic series than the substance of its base story anyway, but I can still empathize with someone that prefers their initial experience with a story over a secondary experience with that identical story, told in a new way.
To me, the Watchmen movie was simply the best comic book adaption I've ever seen. They even swapped out an ending that would only work in comics for one that worked perfectly in a film.
As a huge fan of the source material when it came out, I loved it. Pity Alan didn't.
Broken Bow ? Not a great episode with a pretty bad novelisation.
What I don't understand is why Carey agreed to write the novelization for the pilot if she felt this way about the new series. Maybe she was already on the way out as far writing Star Trek was concerned and this was some sort of lifeline? Of course, that doesn't explain why she'd try to undermine the story by using the characters as a vessel for smart-ass commentary--as she had to have known doing such a thing would likely mean she'd never get to write Trek again.
--Sran
It was the most literal adaptation I've seen, but I didn't consider it the best. Its visuals were too slick and stylized and processed. I felt that Watchmen called for more of a grounded, verite approach to the cinematography. I felt that Snyder was so fixated on recreating the surface look of the work that he didn't really capture its underlying tone and substance.
I did think the changed ending was a good idea, though.
She obviously never thought much of the Enterprise series as a whole, as the novel isn't even listed on her website. I'm tempted to send her an email and ask her why she mailed it in writing that book--though she probably won't respond.
--Sran
She was fast at the keyboard and the money was probably decent. One of the novelizations she wrote in six days. I can tell you from personal experience that writing a novel-length manuscript in ten days turns the brain to mush. Six days? Holee crap.
No, she had plans for more Challenger novels and discussed them at the time. She certainly intended to go on writing Star Trek novels after Broken Bow.
She may not have known that. Or thought it was likely.
In my view, there was a failure all the way around. Her editor (I'm presuming it was Ordover) said this was okay. Paramount Licensing said this was okay. Yes, Carey wrote the snide commentary on the characters and their universe, but there were multiple points where someone with a red pen could have wiped that commentary out.
I don't know why Carey wrote what she wrote in the novelization. I can't even hazard a guess, unless it was to fill word count.
That last sentence is my issue with Watchmen exactly. I called it "soulless" when it came out.
Agreed. It made more sense than Alan Moore's ending. It was more relevant to the characters and their world.
I personally would have liked to see where Challenger went next, and I always thought it was unfortunate it didn't continue.
Is this actually confirmed as the reason she hasn't written any Trek lately, or is it just fan speculation? Would one of the show runners even have the ability to prevent a licensee from working with a specific author?
Yeah, who would have thought that Braga would have read the novelization? (Or did he even do that, or just heard about it secondhand?)
Completely agree. If her work was edited at all, then obviously the editor had no problem with it, and as you mentioned, neither did the group that handles licensing. Please note that I have not read the novelization; is it possible Braga's comments were an overreaction?
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