I've been a Star Trek fan for40 years now, so don't get me wrong when I say this: They're just books. I'm not going to waste brainpower pining for canonicity.
Regarding canon: isn't it ironic?
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One thing I will say is I think the Star Trek: Novelverse has become almost impenetrable to outsiders. Is there any chance we can get an Essential Chronology ala the Star Wars one listing the basic events of the books and maybe a general history of Star Trek series? I think that would really help people get a better sense of what's going on with things like the Typhon Pact, Borg, and so on.
I've seen an article about the elements of the EU that could still count. And some EU elements have already been acknowledged in TFA material and might get officially reintegrated at some point in the future. It's more practical for the filmmakers and the Story Group to start with a clean slate and be free to define a new version of the continuity that serves their needs, but that doesn't make it impossible for old material to be folded in.
If I were actively collecting SW tie-ins, I'd probably treat them the same way I've always treated Trek tie-ins: Decide for myself which works I felt were still compatible, and keep them in until and unless some new bit of canonical or deuterocanonical information came along to exclude them. To me, it's like science -- I formulate the most consistent model I can based on the data I have, and I use that model as long as it proves viable, but if new evidence contradicts my model, I revise or replace the model accordingly. It's a continuous process of successive approximation, never finished but always improving. I think a lot of fans want a single, immutable definition of canon that they can approach more as an article of faith than a scientific model, but I don't see that working for any active, growing canon.
Actually, it's not really all that "impenetrable to outsiders." I took a sabbatical from Trek novels from 2006 to 2011, and when I did go back to reading them, I had no problem jumping into the current books despite not having read nearly five years worth of novels developing key points in the continuity, like Destiny. Trek novels tend to recap important stuff from previous episodes, movies, or other novels so much that at times it actually makes it unnecessary to have read the previous books. Obviously I exaggerate, but you get the idea.
I tend to agree that this is what will happen with Star Wars, and it even has precedent within the EU itself: back in the Nineties, the official line was that the original Marvel comics weren't canon, but more and more references to it popped up in other EU works until it was eventually incorporated after all.
Once the dust settles on the new films and people have an idea of how much room there is at the margins, I suspect we'll get new versions of characters like Mara Jade, Thrawn, and so forth--much like Earth-2 characters being reinterpreted for Earth-1 stories in the DC Universe.
I don't know if anyone at Lucasfilm is officially planning this, but the "Legends" banner conveniently allows them to create new stories in that EU, if and when someone wants to put them out there alongside stories in the current canon. Star Wars already had the "Infinities" banner beforehand for non-canon works, so this would work very similarly.
As for the rest of the canon debate, I'll just throw out quick versions of my go-to answers:
Comic books are a terrible example to use, as most major comic book properties (DC, Marvel, and even TMNT and The Transformers) already have in-story explanations for alternate versions of characters which make all of them "count."
Google Groups searchability isn't what it used to be, but I've previously posted examples in other threads of Usenet posts from the Eighties talking about Star Trek canon in this way which predate anything Richard Arnold did. It's factually false to keep perpetuating the notion that he affected how fans talk about canonicity.
If anything, that's a case of the tail wagging the dog. Arnold did what he did because fans were already concerned about canon, and Lucasfilm marketed (and continues to market) their tie-ins as canonical for the same reason. There'd be no reason to do either if the perceived value of such weren't already there, and I don't actually know how a content-creator could make fans care about it if they didn't beforehand.
You know, I was wondering about that. I'd had the impression back then that the Marvel stuff was excluded and that the new novels and Dark Horse comics were ignoring it. But more recently I've gathered that elements of the Marvel run were being used. I figured it was just piecemeal, though, cherrypicking characters and species and planets like the films did with EU elements like Coruscant and Aayla Secura.
That's a very good point. The Legends banner isn't a way of saying "These stories don't count, just ignore them." It's just a way of saying "We have two continuities now, and we're making it clear which stories belong in which one so you can more easily keep them straight." Lots of fictional universes have rebooted their continuities, or added to the canon continuities in ways that required rebooting the tie-ins (e.g. Star Trek when TNG came along), but they've rarely been so considerate as to actually put clear labels on the old stuff to differentiate it.
On Wookieepedia, I've found that many of their articles now have two subheadings that you can switch between with one click, "Canon" and "Legends." All the information from the old EU is still there on the site, just in its own distinct "folder" alongside the one for the new stuff. That doesn't seem to me like an attempt to say "Only one of these matters," but rather like an attempt to serve them both equally.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind if Memory Beta did something like that for the Trek tie-ins, to distinguish incompatible takes on a character or story element from different continuities (e.g. Star Trek Online's take on the Iconians as opposed to the novels' version), instead of just jumbling info from contradictory sources together into one article.
Yeah, the "multiverse" idea. Also used by the Ben 10 franchise on Cartoon Network; episodes of the later shows have retroactively established the two live-action TV movies as being set in an alternate timeline, and its crossover with Generator Rex was justified in the same way. It's also implicitly used in Doctor Who tie-ins to justify the various incompatible continuities of books, comics, audios, etc. (not to mention the continuity errors in the show itself).
Lots of Japanese franchises have multiple continuities, but I'm not sure they really bother to explain the relationship between them. There are seven different Japanese Godzilla continuities so far, with the upcoming movie probably representing an eighth, though every single one of them includes the original 1954 movie or some version thereof. But they're not branching alternate timelines, because many of them disagree about the nature of the original film's events or Godzilla's origins before it. They're just separate fictional realities that have a "fixed point" in common but vary everything else around it, which is fascinating. Then there's the Digimon franchise, which starts over with a new reality every 1-2 seasons, albeit with new versions of many pre-existing Digimon characters. The third season of the series was not only a separate universe from the first two, but it was a universe in which the previous Digimon continuity existed as a work of fiction! I loved how metatextual that was. (Although DC and Marvel have done similar things for a long time, like the Barry Allen Flash being established as a fan of the comic books about the Jay Garrick Flash -- and later discovering they were based on a real parallel world. Marvel actually has Marvel comics being published in-universe, based on the real adventures of the heroes, though presumably the in-universe versions leave out some things like secret identities.)
Surely people argued over continuity, but I don't recall the word "canon" itself being the irrational idee fixe it's become today. And I think it was more understood that continuity and inclusiveness were matters for the fans to debate among themselves, as opposed to the belief Arnold and Lucasfilm helped promote that canon was some kind of official declaration handed down by the studio. It's not that the ideas didn't exist before Arnold and Lucasfilm, but that they popularized certain ideas and assumptions more widely than before.
For instance, there were always debates over whether the animated series should "count," but before '89, the assumption was that it was a matter of individual opinion and preference whether or not it should count, whereas these days it's assumed to be a matter of official policy, something imposed from above rather than decided by the individual. That's the change Arnold and Roddenberry (and Lucasfilm) brought to the debate.
It can go both ways. Something can start among a small portion of the population, get embraced and catered to by those in authority, and thereby be built up into a much more influential thing than it was before. For instance, look at political movements where something that starts out as a small extremist fringe notion gets embraced and promoted by political or social leaders until it becomes the mainstream view -- whether it's a reform like gay marriage or a reactionary thing like racial or religious supremacism. So there's no contradiction between the notion of an idea originating among the public and the idea of an authority figure promoting its spread among the public.
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I'm okay with the novels being a separate thing from the Online game from the TV and movie series.
Maybe because it's my familiarity with comics.
Maybe because it's my familiarity with comics.
Or to quote Grant Morrison: HYPERTIME!
Now there's a solution for you. Every individual work has its own set of individual continuity with no total shared universe. You've got book A, book B for which A happened, book C which is independent, book D for which A and C happened but not B, so on, so forth.
Not from a "what counts", external, reader perspective. But as a perception of time and causality in-universe; as in this is all happening in the same reality and this weird "continuity graph" is describing the actual nature of the fictional existence of the setting. (See also Elder Scrolls and CHIM)
I legitimately love Hypertime and similar perspectives on time in a fictional setting. It's literally "everything happened, but not all of it".
True story: Back in the day, I was at a convention talking up Tor's new line of FARSCAPE novels which I had put a lot of time and effort into developing. I was proud and excited about the books, but, sure enough, practically the first question from the audience was:
"But are they canon?"
(I think that's the moment when I began to dislike the very word "canon.")
And it's gotten even sillier over the years. Believe it or not, I still get emails wanting to to know if the 4400 novels are "canon" or not , even though that's entirely academic given that neither TV series nor the books have been a going concern for years now. "Canon' only matters when it comes to future stories rendering older stories apocryphal. But if there are going to be no future TV episodes, how does it matter?
It's madness, I tell you. Madness.
"But are they canon?"
(I think that's the moment when I began to dislike the very word "canon.")
And it's gotten even sillier over the years. Believe it or not, I still get emails wanting to to know if the 4400 novels are "canon" or not , even though that's entirely academic given that neither TV series nor the books have been a going concern for years now. "Canon' only matters when it comes to future stories rendering older stories apocryphal. But if there are going to be no future TV episodes, how does it matter?
It's madness, I tell you. Madness.
^They probably assume canon status means it's a lot more consistent with how the characters were portrayed in the show and/or with the show's creators' visions of what happened before or after the show (the latter being of some interest in itself, especially if they really like the creator's scripts and ideas, and also indicating it's a lot less likely to be contradicted if there is a revival).
The SW canon always seemed like a farce to me, since George Lucas said the concept was based on how Star Trek treated it's tie-ins!
"I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions."
Source: Canonwars
But the only way it's really going to be guaranteed to be consistent with the creators' vision is if the creators themselves either write it or plot and edit it. Which, as I've been saying, is what "canon" really means in the first place when you strip away all the myths and overcomplications. Other people can do their best to emulate the characters and universe, but different creators are always going to have different takes on a world, whether it's a creator vs. a tie-in author or one showrunner vs. the next showrunner.
And even not necessarily then. It isn't like Morrison, Byrne, Waid, Johns, etc. all had/have the same vision for the DC universe, for example, and nothing anyone ever created could be consistent with the visions of everyone involved.
Granted, you could tell that what some of these the readers wanted to hear was that the last few books, published after the series was cancelled, actually reflected what the creators had in mind for future seasons, based on actual scripts or notes or whatever. As opposed to, say, Dave Mack and I just using our imaginations to guess where the show might have gone had it continued.. (Which is the way it really worked.)
But let's be honest here. If and when anybody revives THE 4400, they're going to pick up where the TV show left off, not the tie-in books.
And you know that's a 'for the fun of it' project Charles!
You've got me, I'm an Undine.
One area where ST:O triumphs over the novelverse is what they did with Species 8472.
Of course, that's another reason for the Chronology as Memory Beta doesn't really differentiate those two so it's hard to know who is alive, where, and with what.
I dunno. I think the people who'd say it was inpenetrable are unlikely to pick up the books in the first place.
One of my first Trek reading experiences was "The Fate of the Phoenix" in 1980. I knew Trek via random episodes of TAS, six episodes of TOS, plus ST:TMP. I had neither read "The Price of the Phoenix" nor seen "The Enterprise Incident". Somehow I surged ahead, Marshak & Culbreath's unusual take on Trek notwithstanding. I spent many years picking up aspects of trivia and backstory. If you love a series, you make the effort to learn about what you may have missed.
I trust the current authors to provide all the bits I need to be in the moment with a book. I'm waaaaay behind on recent 24th century novel adventures, but when I do read one at random, I am quickly up to speed. For that novel at least.
And yet here I am, trying to figure out what the state of the galaxy is, who is where, what has happened to who, and which person is on first.
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