Regarding canon: isn't it ironic?

[jaime]

Weren't Mosaic and Pathways briefly canon to voyager before Jeri Taylor left? (falling therefore along the same lines as the B5 works)

And, I did hear that the much returned to All Good Things future was implicitly designed around being that from the Imzadi novel, though as both versions of that future end up being erased by temporal intervention, or may have been a Q pocket universe, it's somewhat moot.
It does however make a more Trek related point about tie ins and canon.

Spending time in Doctor Who Fandom, I have seen how crazy this can get (universes in bottles, kittens in mittens, multi benny)

 

[Idran]

Weren't Mosaic and Pathways briefly canon to voyager before Jeri Taylor left? (falling therefore along the same lines as the B5 works)

That was common belief, but it was never actually true; Jeri Taylor herself might have used her works to inform her writing the same way any creative person might have developed their own personal set of notes on a work as they created it (akin to Andy Robinson's massive set of notes on Garak), but the writer team was never bound to them, they were free to accept or ignore Taylor's work.

And, I did hear that the much returned to All Good Things future was implicitly designed around being that from the Imzadi novel, though as both versions of that future end up being erased by temporal intervention, or may have been a Q pocket universe, it's somewhat moot.

Imzadi was possibly an inspiration, but AGT wasn't actually specifically meant to be in line with it.

 

[Christopher]

Weren't Mosaic and Pathways briefly canon to voyager before Jeri Taylor left? (falling therefore along the same lines as the B5 works)

Well, sort of like the B5 works in reverse. "Canon" just means "the work of the creators themselves," and when the creators themselves write books (or outline them, in JMS's case), then they're generally canonical (unless the creators don't intend them to be -- I don't think the jokey Ferengi books that Ira Behr wrote were intended as canonical per se). But when the creation is passed from one person to another, as when Taylor left VGR and Brannon Braga became showrunner, then a different creator is in charge and the ideas of what's canonical can change.

Basically, Mosaic was written while Taylor was in charge, and she used elements from it in "Coda." As far as I know, the remainder of the TV series didn't directly contradict it in any way, though I'm sure they wouldn't have hesitated to if they had reason. Taylor presumably intended Pathways to be the official word on the other characters' backstories, but her successors on the show didn't consider it binding and the tie-in authors weren't expected to either. So pretty much every character-bio flashback chapter in Pathways has been contradicted by something in canon or the novelverse, except for the Kes chapter, since once she was gone, the show didn't reveal anything more about her past anyway. (Chakotay's flashbacks were contradicted by Christie Golden's novels and Tales from the Captain's Table story, with regard to which Captain Sulu sponsored him and what his family makeup and history were like. The names of B'Elanna's parents and the planet where she was raised were contradicted by the show; I think Pathways called her mother Prabsa instead of Miral. I think Harry's Academy flashbacks in Pathways don't quite reconcile with the whole Lyndsay Ballard business in the show. And so on. I don't quite remember all the inconsistencies I noted before.)

EDIT: Idran has a point -- the Taylor novels probably weren't intended as canon per se, because they were merely a supplement to the show, secondary to it. Generally, creator-written tie-in books and comics are only "the canon" when the show they're tying into is no longer in production and the books/comics are the only form in which the series is continuing. As long as you have both a show and books at the same time, then the show is the primary work and any books, even those by the creators, are supplements. (Assuming that the books are based on the show and not the other way around. In the case of something like Game of Thrones or The Expanse, obviously, the books are the primary canon and the TV shows are adaptations thereof.)

And, I did hear that the much returned to All Good Things future was implicitly designed around being that from the Imzadi novel, though as both versions of that future end up being erased by temporal intervention, or may have been a Q pocket universe, it's somewhat moot.

No, that's not true. The details of the two futures are rather different. The only points of commonality are that Riker is an admiral and Deanna is dead in both futures. But in Imzadi, Deanna died during TNG's fourth season (2368), while in "All Good Things..." it was an unspecified time after 2371. And Riker is in a dead-end starbase command in the novel while he commands a modified Enterprise-D in AGT. In Imzadi, Data is captain of the Enterprise-F, while in AGT he's a Cambridge professor. Also, Wesley is captain of the Hood in Imzadi's future, while AGT was written after Wes had gone off to be a Traveler. True, the AGT future is c. 2395 while Imzadi's is c. 2409, and Imzadi doesn't mention anything about Picard, Worf, Beverly, or Geordi that would contradict AGT, so maybe you could fudge most of it if you really wanted to, but the Deanna contradiction is pretty much irreconcilable, and having Wes return to Starfleet would be a real stretch. So while there are a couple of coincidental similarities, it's clear enough that the writers of "All Good Things..." had no intention of evoking the Imzadi future. They'd probably never even read the book, any of the books, since they were too busy making the show.

The thing is, different creators accidentally come up with the same ideas all the time, especially when they're working with the same series and characters. With the same ingredients and initial conditions to work with, parallel evolution is bound to occur from time to time. The number-one reason why TV episode pitches get rejected is "We're already doing a story like that." So if anything, writers have to try hard to avoid coming up with similar ideas, and thus it's most likely for two works to resemble each other when their creators have no idea of each other's plans. But laypeople don't know that, so when they see a similarity between two works, they assume it was intentional.

 

[Idran]

I have heard previously that Imzadi might have been, if nothing else, an inspiration for AGT, Christopher, so it's not completely baseless a thought. Not in a canon sense like Jaime was thinking, but in a "this is kinda neat, let's pay a little homage" sense.

If I remember right, what I'd heard was that Frakes enjoyed Imzadi so much that he started recommending it to everyone on set at TNG, and that's how it got to the writers. And keep in mind, there were two summer hiatuses in between Imzadi and AGT; writing a TV show is intensive work, but it's not 24/7/365, and it's like 2-4 hours to read a paperback.

Edit: After some digging through Google, it looks like what I'd heard about Frakes loving Imzadi was just a rumor. Found a fansite with notes from a convention in 1992: "And speaking of Imzadi, he was asked what he thought of the story, and he could only say that he has read better...he has read worse..."

 

[suarezguy]

I think the Star Wars novels, that they were so consistent with each other and with all the films, are an impressive achievement and I am bummed that they were suddenly just blown out.
I've mellowed out on the Trek novels not being canon (both from reading some bad ones and becoming more realistic about how hard it is for a TV series to be consistent with itself, let alone hundreds of book pages a month) but I do think Canon status does affect how the books are regarded and it is unfortunate that some think it is because they are all low-quality or the book format just isn't fitting or appropriate for ST rather than Paramount making clear that it's because the novels being canon would make writing consistent episodes too difficult.

Sure, consistency in a canon is the ideal, but a canon is still a story being made up as it goes, and storytellers sometimes change their minds. So canon is just as subject to being contradicted as tie-ins are. It's just that, in both cases, it's the original creators (or their successors who are working for the copyright owners) who get to decide what gets acknowledged or contradicted, and the tie-in creators who have to follow their lead.

I don't think the novel writers and editors should be considered less the successors to the original creators than the episode writers/producers (especially the episode writers aside from the pilot writers). While the episodes can generate more viewers and profits, the books are also official, commissioned and published by and profiting the company that owns the concepts.

 

[Christopher]

I think the Star Wars novels, that they were so consistent with each other and with all the films, are an impressive achievement and I am bummed that they were suddenly just blown out.

Except that's a myth. The novels and comics were frequently contradicted by new productions like the prequel movies and The Clone Wars. But the policy was to pretend that all the novels and comics still fit despite the many contradictions, and the tie-in creators went to great lengths to try to retcon or explain away the inconsistencies. Like all other tie-ins, the books were just trying to follow the lead of a canon that had no qualms about ignoring or contradicting them. The only impressive thing is how effective their snow job was at convincing fans that their tie-ins were somehow more "canonical" than anyone else's.

I don't think the novel writers and editors should be considered less the successors to the original creators than the episode writers/producers (especially the episode writers aside from the pilot writers).

It's not a value judgment. It's just a matter of whose universe you're working in. When I write my own original fiction, I'm in charge. When I write a work set in a universe someone else created, then they're in charge. To me, the difference is simple and self-evident. It doesn't diminish me as a writer, because I can still do my own original work and have total control over it. It's simply the difference between working for yourself and working for someone else.

While the episodes can generate more viewers and profits, the books are also official, commissioned and published by and profiting the company that owns the concepts.

And so are the toys and video games and pajamas and lunchboxes. That doesn't make them equal to the thing they're promoting.

 

[Greg Cox]

As Christopher says, it's not a value judgment or artistic choice. It's simple pragmatism. STAR TREK is first and foremost a TV/movie franchise; that's the core. Everything else, from novels to coloring books to action figures, is a licensed product based on the movies/TV shows. One strives to do a good job and make them enjoyable to fans of the original source material, which are the movies and TV shows, and as consistent as possible with the source material, but they are NOT the source material.

For the shows to treat the books as "canon" would be a case of the tail wagging the dog.

 

[JD]

I've mellowed out on the Trek novels not being canon (both from reading some bad ones and becoming more realistic about how hard it is for a TV series to be consistent with itself, let alone hundreds of book pages a month) but I do think Canon status does affect how the books are regarded and it is unfortunate that some think it is because they are all low-quality or the book format just isn't fitting or appropriate for ST rather than Paramount making clear that it's because the novels being canon would make writing consistent episodes too difficult.

I don't think that is the primary reason the books aren't canon. I was under the impression it was mainly just that the TV shows and movies were the primary medium of Star Trek. Star Trek was created to be a TV, and then also a movie series, while the books were created by different people to be an extra bit of Trek on the side. It has more to do with the people making them and who is controlling them, than their relationship to the episodes and movies.

 

[Christopher]

Strictly speaking, the tie-ins aren't canon because canon simply means "the stuff that isn't tie-ins." That was, essentially, the original meaning of the term as applied to fiction -- specifically, it was used to mean the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle as distinguished from those written by others. Yes, there are some circumstances in which tie-ins can become part of the canon, at least provisionally, but that's the exception.

But JD's right -- it basically boils down to the creators' control over their own creation. "Canon" is just a pretentious word for the creators' own ideas and decisions. So stuff created by other people can only be part of the canon if the creators want it to be. But suarezguy is right in a sense as well, because generally it's just not feasible for creators to pay sufficient attention to the tie-ins to allow them to be canonical. That's why they farm out the work of creating tie-ins to other people in the first place.

It's an interesting experiment that the Lucasfilm Story Group or whatever it's called is undertaking now, trying to keep all the canon and tie-ins mutually consistent. But it seems to me they tried to do much the same thing when they started the Expanded Universe decades ago, yet the tie-ins still ended up being contradicted and eventually decanonized altogether. So whether the experiment is more successful this time around remains to be seen.

 

[Idran]

Here's a question: if even the canon doesn't necessarily need to be consistent, and if consistency is only added value rather than a primary goal (both of which I agree with), then what is preventing a hypothetical creator of some hypothetical franchise from just declaring "everything is canon, regardless of if I am involved in the creation or not, and regardless of if it is inconsistent or not"?

 

[Christopher]

Here's a question: if even the canon doesn't necessarily need to be consistent, and if consistency is only added value rather than a primary goal (both of which I agree with)

Well, first off, consistency is certainly a good thing to have as a general rule. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, just that every general guideline has its exceptions. Any ongoing creation is a work in progress, and inevitably you'll come up with some ideas that are better than what you had before, or you'll realize that something was a mistake or a failure, so there needs to be some degree of wiggle room to let you change your mind and fix problems. I mean, personally I care very much about consistency within my own work, but when the time came for me to expand one of my published stories into a spec novel (which I'm currently trying to sell), I realized that some of the scientific assumptions I'd made in the story were in error and that other aspects of the work were flawed, so I decided to just go ahead and rewrite the whole thing and treat the original version as apocryphal. I made that decision reluctantly because I never wanted there to be any inconsistencies in my published work, but I came to realize it was inevitable, that too fanatical an insistence on changing nothing would prevent me from correcting my mistakes. So while I still believe in maintaining as much consistency as I can as a rule, I recognize that rules need exceptions.

Although some franchises care more about internal consistency than others. Star Trek generally tends to try to maintain a consistent reality (though there are a lot of glitches along the way), but Doctor Who, for instance, has always been pretty free to reinvent the rules and history of the universe as it goes along, all the way back to the beginning. (In the first season in 1963, one of the best stories, "The Aztecs," revolved around the fact that it was impossible to change even a single line of history, and yet a year later in "The Time Meddler," the Doctor and his companions had to prevent the title character from changing the outcome of the Battle of Hastings.) And Hercules/Xena was always quite carefree about its continuity, basically acknowledging outright that it was a work of fiction and playing fast and loose with just about everything in it.

Then there's the broad-strokes approach of something like Marvel Comics, where everything is presumed to be in continuity going all the way back to the early '60s, yet with the timescale compressed to a perpetual "within the past 10-15 years" so that the presumed time frame of those old stories is always moving forward and the period details that were included in the original stories are just dismissed or ignored. (For instance, Tony Stark is now presumed to have been injured in Afghanistan rather than Vietnam, and Flash Thompson's Vietnamese girlfriend Sha Shan that he met during the war has been pretty much forgotten, even though the whole thing is still supposedly canonical.) So while the stories are still presumed to have happened, the details of how and when they happened are rewritten all the time. And the impossibility of cramming so many decades' worth of adventures into a few years' span is pretty much ignored.

, then what is preventing a hypothetical creator of some hypothetical franchise from just declaring "everything is canon, regardless of if I am involved in the creation or not, and regardless of if it is inconsistent or not"?

Some would say that actually is Doctor Who's approach. While the comics, novels, and audios aren't generally acknowledged by the shows, they have a lot of creators in common and the shows do sometimes draw on ideas from the tie-ins. And there's never been any formal policy either including or excluding them, even though there are a lot of contradictions among them. And in recent years, the show itself has embraced the idea that time can be and routinely is rewritten (so much for "The Aztecs"), so there's room for the idea that every Doctor Who story is "true" in some variant version of history.

 

[Idran]

Oh, that's right, yeah. Now that you bring up Doctor Who, I think there actually was a quote from either Moffat or RTD basically to the respect that "everything's canon".

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

It is somewhat easier to keep the deuterocanon and the apocrypha consistent with the canon when you have a closed canon (e.g., Oz became a closed canon when Baum died and his last completed novel, Glinda of Oz, was published posthumously; Holmes became a closed canon when Conan Doyle died.

SW was believed to be a closed canon, because Lucas said he wasn't doing another movie. Closed, that is, until Disney revived the idea of a third (and possibly fourth) trilogy.

In ST, no canon should ever be considered closed. I don't just mean the Abramsverse isn't closed; it's entirely possible that we might see more TV and/or movies set in the Prime continuity, maybe in the Pike era, or the April era, or the Harriman or Garrett eras. Or we could see what happens to the Abramsverse in those eras.

(And even Biblical canon, the original meaning of the word "canon," is loaded with inconsistencies.)

 

[Greg Cox]

Here's a question: if even the canon doesn't necessarily need to be consistent, and if consistency is only added value rather than a primary goal (both of which I agree with), then what is preventing a hypothetical creator of some hypothetical franchise from just declaring "everything is canon, regardless of if I am involved in the creation or not, and regardless of if it is inconsistent or not"?

Because it's not about the label, but the practicalities of producing the stuff, particularly if the Hypothetical Series is still a going concern and the Hypothetical Creator is still on the scene.

Picture this scenario: The Powers That Be are meeting to plan out their next big $200 million dollar movie. Everyone loves the new screen treatment, the HC, the stars, the studio, etc. But there's a problem.

"Um, this new script completely contradicts an old HS comic book issue story that came out a few years ago. And we said the comic book was 'canon,' remember?"

You really think they're going to scrap the new script and go back to the drawing board just because of some old comic book issue? Or even rewrite the script to accommodate the bit in the comic book, which 99% of movie-going audience has never read or heard of? Just because it was approved by the Licensing Department a few years earlier?

Of course not. That would be ridiculous. In real life, in fact, this issue would probably never even come up, or would be greeted with incredulous looks. "Seriously?"

So what would be the point of declaring everything "canon" if it doesn't have to be consistent?

 

[Christopher]

So what would be the point of declaring everything "canon" if it doesn't have to be consistent?

Yeah. People have gotten too preoccupied with the label itself as if it's something that needs to be used or applied or defined before anything else can be done, or as if nothing really counts until this magic incantation is invoked and turns it into a real live boy. But that's ascribing far too much power and importance to the word. It's nothing more than a convenient description. It's a shorthand label for referring to the core work in the franchise. It's not something the creators or owners themselves are required to define explicitly, it's just a term that people discussing or analyzing a body of work can apply to it after the fact. And insofar as it does function as a useful term of analysis, it is far from being the overarching or exclusive matter of interest in evaluating a literary or cinematic work.

 

[suarezguy]

I think the Star Wars novels, that they were so consistent with each other and with all the films, are an impressive achievement and I am bummed that they were suddenly just blown out.

Except that's a myth. The novels and comics were frequently contradicted by new productions like the prequel movies and The Clone Wars. But the policy was to pretend that all the novels and comics still fit despite the many contradictions, and the tie-in creators went to great lengths to try to retcon or explain away the inconsistencies. Like all other tie-ins, the books were just trying to follow the lead of a canon that had no qualms about ignoring or contradicting them.

That Lucas had the ability to contradict them but generally didn't and that the writers generally were able to retcon and explain the inconsistencies makes it all the more impressive. Retcons and plain continuity errors also appear in canon material so in practice the highest (and therefore only?) level of canon in SW isn't the films and TCW but the latest-released film or TV material.

I don't think the novel writers and editors should be considered less the successors to the original creators than the episode writers/producers (especially the episode writers aside from the pilot writers).

It's not a value judgment. It's just a matter of whose universe you're working in. When I write my own original fiction, I'm in charge. When I write a work set in a universe someone else created, then they're in charge. To me, the difference is simple and self-evident. It doesn't diminish me as a writer, because I can still do my own original work and have total control over it. It's simply the difference between working for yourself and working for someone else.

But Piller and Taylor didn't create the TNG characters, Moore the DS9 characters, Coto the Enterprise characters and they were working for Paramount, were writing new adventures for other people's characters (albeit in the main format).

While the episodes can generate more viewers and profits, the books are also official, commissioned and published by and profiting the company that owns the concepts.

And so are the toys and video games and pajamas and lunchboxes. That doesn't make them equal to the thing they're promoting.

A lunchbox and toy don't have a story and so wouldn't affect the main product (other than a minor detail like a Paris action figure having lighter hair than the real character) and do seem to be just promotion and thus not worth affecting the main product.
Making a story that is consistent with the main product but tells its own plot (I think it's also a big achievement how many books Pocket published that had good stories despite them having to basically return to the status quo by the end) seems a lot different from just promoting the main product. Selling the new story but saying it didn't really occur within the (of course) fictional universe seems to be saying, unless it's just a pragmatic issue, that it's necessarily less good than the live action material.

Picture this scenario: The Powers That Be are meeting to plan out their next big $200 million dollar movie. Everyone loves the new screen treatment, the HC, the stars, the studio, etc. But there's a problem.

"Um, this new script completely contradicts an old HS comic book issue story that came out a few years ago. And we said the comic book was 'canon,' remember?"

You really think they're going to scrap the new script and go back to the drawing board just because of some old comic book issue? Or even rewrite the script to accommodate the bit in the comic book, which 99% of movie-going audience has never read or heard of? Just because it was approved by the Licensing Department a few years earlier?

Maybe I'm too much of a purist but that thousands of people read SW books in which Luke was married and Chewbacca dead (statuses maintained for at least 19 books and 10 years) and that it was the company policy for 20 years that the books do count should motivate the filmmakers to try to make their films consistent, either keep the changed statuses or set the films before the changes they dislike.

 

[Tim Thomason]

Maybe I'm too much of a purist but that thousands of people read SW books in which Luke was married and Chewbacca dead (statuses maintained for at least 19 books and 10 years) and that it was the company policy for 20 years that the books do count should motivate the filmmakers to try to make their films consistent, either keep the changed statuses or set the films before the changes they dislike.

What I think should've been done, instead of all this hand-wringing and story groups and whatnot, was to just let Kasdan and Abrams make their movie however they want (presumably paying attention to the official movies) and let the old guys in charge of the licensing figure it out.

If I recall correctly, when Boba Fett was reintroduced as a Jango clone 14 years ago, that went against a few books and stories about Boba Fett's history. Those were wiped from the Star Wars canon.

The Force Awakens, instead of wiping out all of the licensed material, should have just had the affect of wiping out most of the post-ROTJ material but nothing really before the Original Trilogy and maybe not even those comics they made set 150 years later.

That all said, toys sometimes do have stories, or at least mini-biographies, printed on the back of the packaging.

 

[Greg Cox]

You know, the death of Chewbacca is a good example of what I was talking about. Should they have excised Chewbacca from the new move just because he was killed off in the novels years ago? And if they had excised him, and tossed in a line or two about how he was dead, what about the millions (not thousands, millions) of moviegoers who would be confused--or annoyed to discover that his death took place off-stage in some book they've never heard of?

And as for "setting the movies before the changes they dislike," that's the whole issue right there. Why should the movies--which are the Main Deal--have to work around the (often very cool) tie-in material? That's completely backwards to the way things really work. Something as important as the setting of the new movies is not going to be determined by the books or comics.

Tie-ins take their lead from from Movies/TV shows, not the other way around.

(Says the guy who has written two mutually exclusive prequels to UNDERWORLD, and multiple versions of Batman and Superman . . . .)

 

[Tim Thomason]

Comic book universes have it so easy, maybe because they've been written by thousands of authors across 80+ years across thousands of media. Almost all on a "sliding timescale" that means you have to squint at earlier issues that don't make sense as the present day.

It's kind of a shame that Star Wars, and Star Trek, and Underworld, and whatever else can't be treated like a comic book multiverse, with an "Earth-2266", "Earth-JJA", "Earth-Mirror1" and so on.

----

Or maybe they should've replaced Chewbacca with a grown-up Lumpy from The Holiday Special.

 

[David cgc]

The Force Awakens, instead of wiping out all of the licensed material, should have just had the affect of wiping out most of the post-ROTJ material but nothing really before the Original Trilogy and maybe not even those comics they made set 150 years later.

That all said, toys sometimes do have stories, or at least mini-biographies, printed on the back of the packaging.

That could still end up being the de facto standard. The new canon is still allowed to reference material from the Legends EU.* Both replacement and reintroduction of EU material has already happened, but down the line, with such a wealth of material, I'd be very surprised if much of it wasn't reintroduced by creators with a soft-spot for one piece of older material or another (or writers doing technical books who don't want the next edition of "The Essential Guide to Ships/Planets/Weapons" and so on to be a pamphlet compared to the doorstoppers that were the EU-inclusive versions. Look at poor Wookiepedia, where the "Legends" entries are masterpieces of wiki-ness, and the "Canon" entries are mostly barely more than stubs). As you say, toys and video game backstories have already started using Legends to fill out now-lacking background detail.

*Incidentally, how ballsy is it to reprint a bunch of books right after saying they don't count, with THIS DOESN'T COUNT printed right on the cover? A lot of franchises would just pretend the old stuff never existed, not say "Now that there's a new movie coming out, read a totally different story of what might've happened after the OT. And also read the actual story of what happened after the OT, coming summer, 2015, in inexplicable present-tense."