As I said, that's pretty much the extent of their similarity. The reason they both had such impact is because they were so extraordinarily different from everything else being published in Trek Lit -- including each other.
Please Recommend Books For Continuity Porn or Story Advancement.
- Thread starter BobtheGunslinge
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As I said, that's pretty much the extent of their similarity. The reason they both had such impact is because they were so extraordinarily different from everything else being published in Trek Lit -- including each other.
One of the "best" things? Not for me. I hated that feeling I frequently got from old Trek fic, that some author had finally managed to sell their unpublished sci fi story by trying to cram it into the Star Trek universe.
Yeah. I'm glad you love them, that most people love them, but I think I'm probably going to leave them on the shelf a little longer. I'll still read her So You Want To Be A Wizard series to my kid, but I'm not interested in her "really different" take on Star Trek right now. I'll take season 7 TNG or even, God help me, Voyager over the kind of Trek I read in the void between TOS and TNG. By the same token, I don't plan to read any Enterprise-era or Abramsverse novels. I guess I'm looking for more of a short, sweet reading list than an inclusive one.
So, you're saying I should sell off the Rihannsu books, then?
Man, if you guys think I'm tough on The Final Reflection, it's a good thing we aren't talking about Tolkien.
Well, my first exposure to Diane Duane was "The Wounded Sky", when it was first released, which is absolutely nothing like "The Final Reflection". And when I read "My Enemy, My Ally", it was essentially a standalone novel, with no hint of the Rihannsu saga that would unfold.
And what's wrong with that? I've always felt that Trek should be a gateway drug to the rest of the vast, diverse world of science fiction. After all, while TOS was good by the standards of TV science fiction, it was entry-level stuff by the standards of prose SF. If Trek fiction could introduce you to the diverse styles of different writers -- and maybe lead you to seek out their original work -- then that's a good thing.
Besides, back at that time, when there was no Trek except TOS, TAS, and a smattering of movies, the universe was much less clearly defined. It wasn't even established what decade it took place in. So different fans had lots of different points of view about the nature of the larger universe TOS occupied. So it was good that the novels offered that same kind of diversity. Trek in the TNG era became such a top-down thing, with everyone expected to follow a singular vision of the universe. Before that, it was much more populist, more up to the individual fans to make their own decisions about what ST was. And the diversity of the tie-ins reflected that flexibility of thought.
If you like Young Wizards, you'll probably like Duane's Trek novels. They have very similar ideas and sensibilities -- and there's even a veiled crossover of sorts between Deep Wizardry and Dark Mirror.
Totally! I sought out Larry Niven's "Ringworld" and "Tales of Known Space" because I ran out of new Trek books to read, and I realized there were Kzin stories out there beyond "The Slaver Weapon".
"The Galactic Whirlpool" made me seek out anything by David Gerrold. "The Entropy Effect" led me to Vonda McIntyre's "Dreamsnake", which I found in a second hand shop while on vacation. Peter David's Trek material led me to his iconic "Aquaman" comic mini-series, and "Dreadstar and Company" run, and his wonderful "Sir Apropos of Nothing" novels. I have a towering pile of original non-Trek Ward, Mack, Bennett, Bonanno, Duane, Foster and Kagan SF novels in my collection, which I hope to read onedayrealsoonnow, but at least I contributed to their royalty cheques.
So, you're saying I should sell off the Rihannsu books, then?
Not really. She puts as much effort into her backstory as he does at times, but she presents it in a much more interesting way.
You appear to have a somewhat idiosyncratic taste in Trek lit, which is fine, but your reactions are so off what most of us would expect that it's a little surprising.
And, for the record, I kind'a agree about Tolkien. Hobbit was OK, the LOTR trilogy in book form is a massive slog (the films were better), and you couldn't pay me to read the supplementary books.
That is the exact opposite way I came into Trek. I had read plenty of original science fiction before coming into the tie-in novels. I read A.C. Crispin's Starbridge stuff before her ST or SW works, for example. I'm not looking for a gateway to where I just came from; when I read Star Trek, it's because I want something that feels like Star Trek.
This is also the reason why I disliked seeing the Kzinti in Star Trek. Known Space was already a distinct thing for me, and it didn't at all feel like Star Trek. Plus, the more Niven I read (even back then), the less highly I thought of him as an author.
The Star Trek book I read and reread the most as a child was the Starfleet Technical Manual (followed by the TNGTM and Mr. Scott's Guide when they came out), so I had definite ideas about what Star Trek should be like. I also watched the show a lot, so any novels that didn't capture the feel of a low-budget TV show felt off. ("Enterprise is meeting complex, non-humanoid aliens in a microgravity environment? That doesn't sound right at all.")
I just did not grok that early Trekkie scene, I guess.
Dark Mirror is on my list now. Have to find it, though.
I do the same thing, in that I plan to buy original works by Mack, Bennett, et al.. However, I find that tie-in fiction and stand alone fiction often require different skill sets, so that a great stand alone author might not be able to write good Trek while a great Trek author might struggle to build a unique and interesting world. Often, the tie-in writing depends on the property as well, such as AC Crispin's Star Wars book being awful despite excellent Star Trek work, or James Swallow's 40k stuff being spotty (although Flight of the Eisenstein was powerfully good), even though his Star Trek work seems solid.
As for Niven, he seems like the George Lucas of written sci fi. He's great when he collaborates, and his short stories demonstrate what an amazing idea man he can be, but his novels are just.... I do have to admit I am biased, though, since I've met him several times, at least once in a professional capacity, and thus have a good reason not to like him.
I saw the Kzinti in TAS long before I read Known Space, but I tend to agree that it's better to consider the Kzinti as something distinct and separate from Trek. Indeed, I've come to realize that "The Slaver Weapon" isn't even a Star Trek episode at all -- it's a straight-up dramatization of a Known Space story with three Trek cast members playing the leads. Aside from the presence of Spock, Sulu, Uhura, and a Starfleet shuttlecraft, there is nothing about the episode that doesn't fit better in the Known Space universe than the Star Trek universe. Usually, when a pre-existing story is adapted for a show (like when the novel Tin Woodman was reworked into TNG's "Tin Man"), the elements of the story are changed to fit the characters and continuity of the show. But "The Slaver Weapon" did the exact opposite -- it cherrypicked those parts of the Trek universe that could be fit into a very strict adaptation of a Known Space story, actually leaving out two of the three lead characters and the primary setting of the series.
But the thing about ST is, it could be a wide range of different things, and different people found different meanings in it. That versatility is one thing I've always appreciated about it. ST attracted a diverse audience with diverse ideas, and it was only fitting that the tie-ins offered a diverse range of interpretations. With all due respect, you weren't the only person buying the books.
Now, I just don't understand that. The whole value of doing Trek stories in a prose or comics medium is that you can be freed from the restrictions of a television budget and tell stories that would be impossible on the screen. It's a way of expanding and enriching what the universe is capable of, complementing the shows rather than just slavishly, pointlessly copying what they already had to offer.
I've always resisted that notion, since it's too often used as an excuse to dismiss tie-ins as inferior work. I've always tried to approach my tie-ins with the same care, creativity, and sensibilities of my original work, allowing for different degrees of scientific "hardness" and adult content in different universes.
How so? I would expect there to be a lot of 'new fans' who would not want to go back to the older stuff. Prose styles and techniques change over time, and shared universes have a way of evolving, so I would expect there to be a stratification of fans by era.
I have a theory about Tolkien: the less genre fiction a person has read before they read LOTR, the more likely they are to enjoy that series. While I thought the Hobbit was decent, I tried to put down LOTR several times and only finished it because my wife literally forced me to. With force. I found the prose painful, the characters hammy and unrealistsic, the pacing uneven (to say the least), and the plotting to be anachronistic. For example, I read all the elf poems because, as a child of a post-Chekhov's Gun world, I expected them to matter. When I found out I had wasted so much mental energy on them, I asked my wife how she got through it. She skipped the poems, and probably all the long descriptions of trees and crap. Plus, she read it when she was twelve.
I'd probably have just shrugged and forgotten about LOTR if it hadn't been so hugely influential (positively and especially negatively) for the genre.
Having said all that, I would recommend the Silmarillion if you enjoy ergodic literature, like RPG sourcebooks. It's the Tolkien book I enjoy the most, and I find it really plays to his strengths for world-building and simple storytelling.
He's not saying what all Trek books should be, though, he's just saying what he likes in Trek books. Unless you're trying to convince him to change what he likes and what he doesn't?
So, we agree about the Kzinti and The Slaver Weapon. Well, that is how I felt whenever I read a book that had a feeling of telling someone else's story with Star Trek dressing.
I'm not claiming I was the only one buying the books. I was buying original Science Fiction books, which had even more diversity of ideas and audience. As I said, I'm glad you guys all read and enjoyed the old TOS novels. I didn't.
I created this thread to ask for the types of Star Trek books I enjoy reading. Apparently we are also discussing the types of Star Trek stories I do not enjoy reading and why. Maybe that will be helpful for me to narrow down the possibilities in the future.
Well, I did say I was looking for continuity porn and story advancement--i.e. more of the same. And I can more easily picture movei-era or post-TNG adventures having a 'big budget' approach. TOS just doesn't feel right without styrafoam rocks.
And again, I don't come to Trek for a wide range of new ideas--I have plenty of sci fi anthologies for that--but for a Trek experience.
I find it odd that you would say that. Watching the Clock has so much depth and power behind it because it does tie into so many other stories and build upon them in a single, unified framework.
As someone who has read a lot of original genre fiction and a lot of tie-in fiction, I think good tie-in fiction is much harder to pull off and requires a tremendous amount of skill. Capturing the flavor of a specific universe, bringing beloved characters to life, staying true to their histories, all while telling a compelling story? That's hard. Typically, I prefer to read stories that drop the familiar characters in favor of keeping the familiar elements of the background that I love rather than the opposite. Star Trek has been great at doing this.
Unfortunately, tie-in fiction has a bad reputation because certain companies keep pumping it out, wave after wave, whether or not the quality is there. (Star Wars and DnD are especially guilty of this. By the same token, Baen has a bad reputation as a publisher because they'll print just about any book that features power armored SS supermen shaming those leftist cowards in the UN fifth column, even the ones that somehow don't live up to their potential. Maybe they should try cutting back to one a month?)
But that's because I did the exact same thing with Star Trek continuity that I do with physics, astronomy, history, and anything else in my original writing: I researched the subject and built the story around the information I assembled. I don't see any functional difference between researching the rules and history of the real universe and researching the rules and history of a fictional universe. I exercise the same muscles in either case. I can't help it. It's just my natural impulse to dig into the details and figure out how things work.
Indeed, I wouldn't have been able to create that "single, unified framework" in WTC if not for the research I did into real theoretical physics about time travel and many-worlds quantum theory. I write hard science fiction -- that's what I do. Even if I'm hired to write in the Trek or Marvel universe or whatever, I'll try to make it as hard-SF as possible, to make it as much of a Christopher L. Bennett-style story as possible.
The fact that you approach your original work and your tie-in work the same way doesn't really disprove Bob's point. I think most writers of both probably do-- and that's why some good writers of original fiction make bad tie-in writers, and some good tie-in writers make bad original fiction, because they approach it all in the same way, but they have different needs.
Well, all I can say is that WTC did not feel like a stand-alone story fitted into the Star Trek universe, but rather a story organic from the background. I would very much like it if you wrote a stand alone time travel story with the same attention to the mechanics of time travel, but set in your own original universe. That is an approach I have rarely seen taken with time travel stories.
I do not believe many other writers take quite the same approach as you do, although it could just be an impression. From what I have read, many take on tie in fiction with already-established characters and backgrounds by focusing more on the tone, humor or banter, and immediate action than they do with original universes that require development and exposition. Typically, stand alone sci fi will tend to have a more direct connection between the 'rules' of the background and the plot, which tends to make the stories much more epic and grand, or else feel much smaller and more limited in potential, compared to tie-in fiction.
Considering how many books can be ruined by "Han Solo would never say that" vs how few original sci fi books are ruined by having terrible, terrible characters and dialog, I stand by my assertion that good tie-in fiction takes different skills than what makes for a good hard sci fi novel. You just may have gotten lucky by having a complete and overlapping set of said skills to pay the bills.
Also, "hard science fiction" is poorly defined. Everyone has their own idea of just how hard is hard.
But my point was to demonstrate that original and tie-in SF don't have to be dissimilar. As with most categories, there's an overlap in the Venn diagram. They can be very different, but they don't have to be, because neither one is a single monolithic kind of thing.
Because it was conceived from the start as a Trek novel, like most of my books. However, Titan: Over a Torrent Sea was largely a reworking of an unsold original spec novel of mine, and three of the alien characters I created for Titan's crew in Orion's Hounds were characters I'd previously created for an original project that fell by the wayside as my plans for my universe changed. Most writers recycle unused elements from one project to another.
Which is basically my point. Trek Lit isn't one singular style. We don't have quite the same freedom to interpret the universe that our predecessors back in the '70s and '80s had, because the canonical universe has become so much more thoroughly defined and explored, but we're still free to write with our own distinctive styles and sensibilities. Nobody would ever mistake a CLB novel for a David Mack novel or an Una McCormack novel. There's no "house style" -- we have as much freedom to be ourselves as the canon allows. So the difference between us and the '80s writers isn't in the approach to the writing, just in the amount of canonical material we're constrained by. The gaps that we can fill in with our individual creativity are narrower.
And "typical" isn't the whole story. People read too much into averages and norms. The average position of a car on a circular track is the exact center of the circle -- a point it never actually occupies. Averages are a fiction we invent to simplify things that actually have a lot of variation. You want to really understand something, look at the whole bell curve, not just the middle.
I think it's just a matter of research. Tie-in writing requires researching characters and stories well enough to write about them convincingly. Hard science fiction requires researching scientific phenomena well enough to write about them convincingly. Historical fiction requires researching historical events and eras and cultures well enough... and so on. It's all about doing the legwork. I don't want to claim my skills are more extensive than anyone else's. Maybe it's just a matter of what fields a writer is more invested in exploring or has more of an affinity for.
It's nothing more or less than the same problem GR struggled with during TOS' original run: writers who could write good [x], but not necessarily good science fiction, let alone good Trek.
I think we are misunderstanding each other. I'm happy about the variety of prose styles and plotting styles and pacing styles in Trek Lit. However, I prefer far less variety in the style of interpretation that an author brings to an established universe. I prefer tie-in fiction with less "freedom to interpret" and more established canon. I do not come to Trek for a wide variation of interpretations, but rather for more of a singular vision (well, at least TNG and DS9 levels of coherency). Frankly, if I want to read some really out-there and different science fiction ideas, I don't go to Trek. I go to Trek when I want Trek. Trek can have some out there and different stuff, but for me to love it, it needs to be Trek first and foremost.
Trek isn't my gateway to science fiction. It's more like a doorway to a TV show and a world that I love.
I will defer to your experience when it comes to writing. As a reader, I look for very different things in tie-in fiction than in original fiction.
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