Respectively, those two incidents are explainable because of Andromedan Kelvin engine modifications, and William Shatner's terrible decisions as Director of Star Trek V. I've read a good chunk of "Best of Trek" and a lot of the early fan guides. But I was born in 1984, so. Take from that what you will.
Let me just lay it out, all my cards on the table. You need to understand where I'm coming from with all this. The facts are as follows. JJ Abrams and Roberto Orci, empowered with the authoritative voice of the power of canon assigned to them by a corporation that wanted nothing more than to maximize profits for all concerned, have set in stone the contents of a narrative. Now, my heroes are good people. They have explored, adventured, enjoyed triumph and suffered adversity, and in a number of cases, committed great personal sacrifice in the interest of the greater good. They willingly rush into danger, they not only accept but embrace all diversity, they give without asking anything in return. They answer distress calls even from their enemies, because it's the right thing to do, and they know it can get them killed but they do it anyway because that is what they are about. The premise of Star Trek is that if people in the universe choose to be good, and more and more of them join together over time to each do their own thing without hurting each other, then the universe will eventually be good. These people influenced my development, and they helped me survive some very dangerous, tough, and adversarial periods in my life as a young queer person. In a very real sense, they are a significant part of who I am as a person. You can condescendingly tell me it's all fiction, Christopher, and imply that contradictions, corruptions, and misrepresentations of established concepts are therefore unimportant or meaningless in the context of the "real world." But the fact is that all of these things are "real" to me, in a very special way that I care deeply about. I think they probably are to a lot of people, or Star Trek simply would not have become what it is. The Prime timeline is important because everyone and everything I've ever cared about in Star Trek exists in that timeline. Especially the parts that influenced me in the darkest times of my life, when I was young. The real parts of Star Trek had such a profound impact on my life that it is as if I lived through it all myself. It doesn't matter that it's fiction, because it's speculative fiction about how things can be, about how things should be. I really needed it when I was little, and I feel as though I need for it to continue now. You speak about your writing gigs as being "hired to do a job." You talk about restrictions, and licenses, and cashing cheques. And you keep doing it. Somehow, you work within those limitations and restrictions, you keep putting out great stories. You've produced some amazing works that hold deep meaning for me. You clearly know Star Trek inside and out, and you love to tie things together and make everything work. That's why it hurts me when you say things like that you don't care at all how the doors seem to know when to open, for example. I respect you, but I don't like a lot of the words you've said to me in this thread. You don't need to remind me that Star Trek is made-up, I'm a grown adult and I understand the fictional context of the world in which we're basing our discussion, and the secondary context of the real-world licensing issues that stand poised to complicate our continued experience of the shared prose narrative. Maybe you all had great friends, a supportive social structure, a family that loved you, and were able to find schools and jobs that accepted you without a huge amount of effort and fighting and pain and suffering. I didn't. All I had, alone at the end of each day, was Star Trek. People on the Enterprise-D don't abuse and mock Data for being different. They don't ostracize him and force him to live in isolation, team up against him, and collectively punish him for something he can't control. Instead, they learn about and are amazed by his differences. They embrace, praise, and appreciate his unique capabilities and cooperatively create a role for him where he can thrive and contribute to his community. They accept his differences and welcome him as a friend, they forgive him his social failings, and they go out of their way to help him understand what he wants to learn about how the rest of them work. It's a world where a man can wear a skirt while on duty, whatever his personal motivation might be, and none of his peers tear him apart and ruin his life for it. Instead they just respect him equally, because presumably he does his fucking job correctly, and that's the end of it because he's just entitled to and equally deserving of their common decency, and everyone just respects that. I didn't dream about living in Star Trek because they have replicators and transporters and holodecks. I dreamed about living there because I thought, if I did, they might give me a meaningful job to do, and a safe place to live, and they certainly wouldn't bully me to the point of attempting suicide. These people are who I want all people to be. I was promised a future where, eventually, everyone would understand these things about what it supposedly means to be human. I can see myself existing there because it's where I would choose to be if I had a choice. It's a hell of a lot better than this shit world we live in, unless you happen to be a rich cis white man. Now, in exchange for a combined profit of approximately $518.1 million dollars (which is more money than I will ever see), all of everything I have cared about most has just been erased from existence. All of those people I looked up to and relied on, their homes, families, memories, actions, feelings, choices, consequences, the totality of their being, is gone. Every problem they've ever solved, every life they've ever saved, is ultimately meaningless because according to the well defined and repeatedly demonstrated laws of their universe, it has been over-written. They cease to exist in 2387, and do not continue. Even Enterprise is sullied, spoiled by Abrams's doings. Archer and the crew of the NX-01 were decent, and did the right and moral thing. But none of it matters because despite their goodness, their future can be rendered to shit by the violent, vengeful, greedy selfishness of one man with a black hole and some guns and an unscientific glob of garishly coloured magic that makes planets turn inside out. Or, a greedy selfish man with a legal contract and a keyboard, depending on the particular perspective you choose to take. If good, decent people making the right choices in the 22nd century is pointless because it leads to a broken time-wrecked bullshit future in the 23rd century and beyond, then what purpose is there, what possible good does it serve to try to be decent in the here and now, as a "real" person in the 21st century? Why should I continue to expend the effort to keep being a good and decent person, in the persistent face of adversity and near-constant affront? If the future is hopeless and out of my control, why do I spend my time and energy helping strangers, and treating each new acquaintance optimistically as a potential friend, rather than acting selfishly and expending myself in defensiveness and paranoia at the ultimate expense of others? I do what I do because, deep down, I am a Starfleet officer. A very particular set of people, in very specific situations, taught me what that means, and that's how I learned the difference between right and wrong. JJ Abrams erases hope in exchange for ticket sales. Paramount and Bad Robot have sold out Star Trek. I wasn't on the Narada with Nero. I wasn't on the Jellyfish with Spock. JJ Abrams's reality isn't real to me, because I do not exist there. I don't see how I would fit in with that world, nor do I wish to. Nobody there behaves with any decency. Everything is guns and fighting and danger and violence and death, with a sort of a post-9/11-esque atmosphere of terror and fearmongering, and a totally fucked up militarization of Starfleet. Heteronormative bullshit, and an overwhelming sense of unrealism. These movies don't make me feel good, or hopeful, or happy or comforted. They make me feel dead inside. And nothing makes any fucking sense. Uhura is fucking Spock for no adequately explained nor even barely discernible reason. Hand communicators establish real-time phone calls from light-years distant. Because why not. Khan's genetically-engineered blood brings dead people back to life. Trans-warp beaming: no special hardware required, just some creative math we never thought of before, and we can type it into the console in about ten seconds flat. This is a bunch of ticket-selling bullshit and all of you know it. You either genuinely don't care, or pretend not to care. But it's fucked and I refuse to accept it. Regardless of all the "geeky" technical details and the "obsessive" adherence to established canon, to invoke both of the derogatory judgemental statements that have been levelled against me in this thread so far, I put it to you now that the spirit of Star Trek is dead in these newer films. Where is the exploration? Where is the discovery of self, and the external universe? Where is the grandly majestic, hopeful soundtrack and the burst of bright white light cast when the ship goes into warp? Everything is just fucking wrong. This is where 'canon' has left us. Nero and his crew are dead, the Jellyfish and Narada are destroyed, and it's doubtful Spock Prime will be making an appearance in the next Abrams movie. (Leonard Nimoy, may he rest in peace). Nobody who lives from an objective observer's standpoint inside the universe defined as "Star Trek" who wasn't on one of those two ships will ever know, meet, or be affected by the actions of, the people who made me who I am. It is as though I have been erased from the timeline. Any interest I have in it most certainly has. "Star Trek(TM)" is no longer "the future." All of it has been taken away from me, in favour of a truly repugnant reality full of reprehensible choices, terrible outcomes, indismissable sexism (as it's not filmed in the sixties), unlikable people, and lens flares. It's a broken future and I want no part of it. The books are all that I've had since the end of Enterprise; A series whose theoretical continuity with what came around it was already potentially adulterated by the interference of the Temporal Cold War storyline, and whose saving grace was, ironically, the news of its own cancellation triggering a changing of the guard in the creative staff. The comics are and will remain irrelevant, having always been ridiculous and contradictory in their content, their stories also critically limited by their medium in both scope and length. These days, for real Star Trek, the novels are all that matter. And that's all about to get fucked up by all this nonsense and legal wrangling over who owns what parts of my imagination. The terrible punchline of all this, really, is that what's going on with "Star Trek(TM)" flies in the face of what Star Trek was originally meant to represent. All of this bullshit exists so that men can make more money, and so that JJ Abrams can keep making more movies where people beam across light-years, Kirk gets catgirl threesomes, Carol Marcus needs to be naked in public to order to get into a shuttle or whatever the fuck that was about, and where the distance between stars and planets simply isn't a thing, because reasons. "Cold Fusion" is a device that turns volcanoes into ice... Also, racist depictions of indigenous aliens, and the Enterprise works as a submarine under water because why the fuck would it not, amirite guyz? Basically, as a result of this nonsense since 2009, I am suffering a spiritual crisis. The new Pope is saying a bunch of shit that I just really can't agree with, and I'm consequently worried that I might not get into heaven after all. I have nothing else to say at this time.
Well, yeah, it sucks that the events of Trek aren't real: I seriously regret that tens of millions of people won't be killed in a horrific nuclear war in 35 years or so that almost ends the human race for good, but I'm sure something good will come of losing that. In all seriousness, are you really saying that Trek, and Trek alone, is the only thing that gave you hope for the future? That the only reason you do good is because of a felt kinship with a fictional paramilitary organization with laudable goals, not because it's simply the right thing to do? I honestly don't even know what to say about that. Into Darkness was awful, and the Abramsverse barely holds a candle to the Prime universe in my eyes, but that's just...wow.
Sorry to resort to memes, but this one really sums up my opinion of reboot Star Trek's content. Sorry you don't see what I do, chrinFinity.
Yeah, well there wasn't a lot of light in my life growing up. I'm glad you had it better than I did. FWIW, I understand there are some people who are all about a two thousand year old carpenter with a famous dad and a bunch of parlour tricks, but I personally like my thing better.
The beauty of memes is that they can be offered with no explanation or justification of any kind. Fortunately they carry little dialectical weight.
That meme did have an explanation - it was contained in the rest of the post and the posts preceding. Also, that description doesn't fit all memes. 'Meme' is just the way the content is communicated, not necassarily what the content is. And my Theory of Cultural Communication class has finally proved it had some worth. Only $499.99 left to work off. Considering the meme contains more text and content than most people's posts (including most of my own), I'd also say it contained a little dialectical weight. Not that anything we're talking about fits any definition of 'dialectical' anymore. We are completely OT.
I take it you didn't read what was said in those images then. Star Trek and Into Darkness were the epitome of what Star Trek is and just because a small vocal minority think it is out of canon (so what!) or some other childish arguments over time lines and other circular and ultimately pointless arguments, it's their loss. I'm a fan of both and you know what, I don't feel I should identify more as a fan of the Prime or Nu-Verse, it's all Star Trek.
No, that's not right. First off, why do so many people assume that time travel can only work one way? Laws of physics apply differently given different conditions and circumstances. For instance, the same laws of gravitation apply everywhere, but an object ten meters above the Earth's surface is going to move differently under the influence of those laws than an object in deep interstellar space. Different time-travel scenarios can have different outcomes depending on the initial conditions. The existence of stories where altered timelines are "fixed" does not preclude the simultaneous existence of altered timelines that coexist independently of their originals. As I said above, the filmmakers' intent, which they have confirmed multiple times, was that the Prime and Abrams timelines would coexist permanently. They did not want to set up the cliched time-travel story where an altered timeline is a problem that needs to be eliminated. That's misunderstanding the reasoning behind the creation of the new timeline. They wanted, on the one hand, to go back to the most popular part of the franchise and tell new stories about the TOS crew, yet on the other hand, to be able to tell whatever stories they wanted without being limited by the established futures of the TOS characters and world. The only way to do that was to create an alternative continuity, one that was designed to be completely open-ended and let them tell new stories for as long as they wanted. They could've made it a complete reboot, but they were afraid of alienating fans and thus came up with a convoluted time-travel plot to tie the new continuity together with the old. Which has proven to be a spectacular miscalculation, because many fans have completely misunderstood that intention, expecting just one more iteration of the hackneyed time-travel cliche of an altered history that needs to be "fixed." Where in the hell did you get that? I don't recall anything about it in the movies. If you're referencing something from a comic or novel, those aren't canonical. The "discrepancies" are no greater than the discrepancies that have always existed between different Trek productions from different creators -- TOS, the movies, TNG, etc. They're all stories, not documentaries, and stories told by different people will present their ideas in different ways. So all prior Trek productions have major inconsistencies that fans in the past complained about quite passionately. But over time, we learn to gloss over the inconsistencies and construct the myth for ourselves that it all fit together as a coherent whole. That's a superb summation. A lot of people complain that the Abrams movies are shallower than Prime Trek, but if you look at the first ten movies, almost all of them are shallower than the TV shows. It's just the nature of modern adventure cinema that the storytelling is more superficial and more action-oriented than what you can get on episodic TV. The difference isn't Prime vs. Abrams, it's TV vs. movies. An Abramsverse TV series would have more room to go into character development and ideas and themes, just as the Prime universe movies had less room for those things.
Hello, chrinFinity: Look, I can sympathize with not a few of your issues with the silliness in AbramsTrek (for my money the venerable K-DID's meme there is a laundry list of story elements that's blind to context and execution) but reading that makes me kind of almost worried for you. The basic fact is that TV shows and movies are always about making money and you can never count on the people making them to make what you want. It's madness to identify with them to the point where a swerve in the creative road puts you in "spiritual crisis." Oh, and about that: This rather comes out of nowhere. What does this mean and what does it have to do with anything, exactly?
It also seems contradictory to this statement with its disparaging tone... Why would one worry about getting into heaven while mocking Christianity?
Especially as it's followed by a dismissal of Christian lore as myth. Not that I'm judging atheists or Christians or whatever, because I really don't care either way. I am just a little confused how somone can at once worry about the Pope and Christian heaven, but not believe in Christ. That's seems contradictory to me, especially as both views are at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Again, this is not about the religion itself or a posters personal beliefs per se. More like trying to clarify WTF is actually being said. EDIT: Damn Sevrin, ninja'd me.
Okay, time out Chrinfinity - it's against the rules to post so many posts in a row. I accept that you need to respond to several different people, but a lot of those single quote responses could have been combined using either multi-quote or the edit post function. The general rule is no more than three at a time, I allow a certain amount of leeway when discussions are complicated, but your collection of responses could have been combined. To everyone: Also, we have now gone completely into a discussion on what is wrong / right with the movies. This thread is for discussing how the novels will handle the story. Please get back onto that topic and move your film criticism into the wonderful film discussion forums we have here. ta ever so - enjoy your weekend folks
Apologies if this has been covered before, but I was wondering how the authors for the Trek novels found out about the restrictions they have to work under. Do they just present a pitch which is then rejected, or do they receive some sort of announcement or guidelines? For eg. When it came out the Abrams novels weren't going to be published, were the authors notified as to why? Or did they find out like the rest of us?
I'm not sure why you are taking my post quite so seriously. It was a tongue in cheek attempt to give ChrinFinity an "out" for the Prime universe to continue existing. And it honestly works far, far better in the context of canon than most ST time travel stories. Heck, no one even devolved into a spider, so by Trek standards. my science was harder than a rock on Viagra. I guess I should have gone with plan B: the entire Abramsverse ends when Old Riker says, "Holodeck, end program and erase. See what would have happened if you hadn't help Spock save the Hobus Star, Me. Barclay?" Personally, I am fine with 09 being a separate timeline. STID I just file in the same mental bin as Enterprise and TFF.
That's because it took me 20 minutes to find the post where I remembered seeing "carpenter". If it had taken 25 minutes, you would have been first, and I would have done all that work for nothing.
The editors and the CBS licensing people know the rules, and if a proposal we submit has any issues with regard to continuity or permission, they will inform us what needs to be changed. All I was told at the time was that they wouldn't be published; I wasn't told why. Contractually, their only obligation was to pay me for my work; once that was done, it was their property to do with as they pleased, including not publishing it. So I wasn't entitled to an explanation.