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Legal situation concerning the new TV series

It's not that it's technologically unlikely in Trek, it's that it comes out of nowhere. It's a deus ex machina used because they wanted to have the drama of Kirk's death scene and the Wrath of Khan reprisal without having the actual consequences of Kirk's death. It wasn't even hinted at until the tribble popped back to life just before they brought Kirk back.
The movie established the "magic blood" in the first act when it is used to cure a dying child. The Tribble only reiterates that. Chekhov's Gun.

And no one's saying the Gorn have to lay eggs, they're just commenting on the fact that some Trek works have said they do and others have said they don't.
The novels are the tail, not the dog.
 
Fair enough, I forgot about the kid at the start. And I'll drop the STID talk since I don't want to drag the thread off-topic with a discussion about opinions on the movies.

The novels are the tail, not the dog.

You're really misreading the tone of the conversation. Outside, like...one poster, it wasn't criticizing, it was commenting on the many differing ways that the Gorn have been presented both on screen and in print.

Plus, we are in the Treklit forum. We're supposed to talk about the novels and comics here.
 
No, that was certainly not the reason. If that had been the case, they would've just asked us to revise the novels, as happened many, many times with novels that came out while TNG/DS9/VGR/ENT were on the air. And there's no reason it would've led to a change in the status of the whole license. The cancellation was a business decision. It wasn't about anything within the books themselves.

I stand corrected; thanks.

I don't get it, though. Maybe as such a habitual TrekLit reader I'm missing something, but if the content isn't an issue, why would it be bad for a license to have tie-in novels? They're clearly comfortable with subsidiary stories in the comics. I can see someone cancelling novels if they assume they won't sell, but deciding they'd be profitable in the first place was up to Margaret/whoever-else-at-Pocket, right? They commissioned them, so they clearly thought they would sell.

Probably I shouldn't give a crap, I just find the whole thing odd.
 
Probably I shouldn't give a crap, I just find the whole thing odd.

Why shouldn't we give a crap? Four perfectly good novels were just cancelled on a whim. Why shouldn't we be upset about that? And why don't we deserve to be told the REASON for this?

More to the point, why shouldn't the authors be upset - that all the work they put in, turned out to be for nothing?
 
Why shouldn't we give a crap? Four perfectly good novels were just cancelled on a whim. Why shouldn't we be upset about that? And why don't we deserve to be told the REASON for this?

More to the point, why shouldn't the authors be upset - that all the work they put in, turned out to be for nothing?
I'm sure the writers were disappointed. Maybe even upset. They got paid so not for nothing I don't think were owed anything.
 
We may not be owed the novels themselves, but we are owed a dose of COMMON SENSE. Meaning, an explanation as to why the novels were cancelled.

And by that I mean, something beyond your standard boilerplate bullshit legalese.
 
We may not be owed the novels themselves, but we are owed a dose of COMMON SENSE. Meaning, an explanation as to why the novels were cancelled.

And by that I mean, something beyond your standard boilerplate bullshit legalese.
No we're not. We're not owed reasons for business decisions. Nor is there an issue of a lack of common sense here. Comes across and Fan Entitlement Syndrome
 
I don't get it, though. Maybe as such a habitual TrekLit reader I'm missing something, but if the content isn't an issue, why would it be bad for a license to have tie-in novels? They're clearly comfortable with subsidiary stories in the comics. I can see someone cancelling novels if they assume they won't sell, but deciding they'd be profitable in the first place was up to Margaret/whoever-else-at-Pocket, right? They commissioned them, so they clearly thought they would sell.

Margaret's in charge of developing and editing the content, not the business side of things.

As I said, the cancellation of the books was a business decision. Sometimes business decisions have side effects, consequences to things that aren't directly connected to them. So the reasons behind those side effects don't always make sense to an outside observer.


I'm sure the writers were disappointed. Maybe even upset. They got paid so not for nothing I don't think were owed anything.

Every writer has written a bunch of things that never saw print. That's how we learn to be writers in the first place. (They say the first million words are practice.) My Abramsverse novel was hardly the first novel I've written that never got published; I'd say it's maybe the fifth, if I count that series of unsold stories that I hoped to collect as a fix-up novel. But it's the only one I got paid for, so I came out ahead there. Plus, the cool thing about unpublished stories is that you can cannibalize bits of them for later works.
 
It's not that it's technologically unlikely in Trek, it's that it comes out of nowhere. It's a deus ex machina used because they wanted to have the drama of Kirk's death scene and the Wrath of Khan reprisal without having the actual consequences of Kirk's death. It wasn't even hinted at until the tribble popped back to life just before they brought Kirk back. It's not being dismissed because it's impossible, it's being dismissed because it's narratively lazy.
Agreed. If you kill off a character in one movie and bring him back in another, it can be surprising and dramatic. If you kill off a character in a movie and then resurrect him all of 10 minutes later, it just comes off as pointless and insulting.
 
I don't know the actual contractual details, but my impression is that, while the series are licensed separately for other companies like comics publishers, Pocket's deal has always been pretty much all-inclusive by default, and the Abrams thing is the exception.

IDW Comics and the makers of Star Trek Online have licenses to do Abramsverse tie-ins. Pocket, for whatever reason, does not currently have such a license

So, since no one else seems to currently hold a license for Abramsverse tie-in novels, Pocket could technically pursue acquiring one, if they thought it was a financially sound thing to do?

It is strange that they decided not to allow novels set in the Abramsverse continuity but were fine with comic books set in that world. I wonder what the distinction they're drawing is.

:lol: :lol: I see what you did there...
 
Agreed. If you kill off a character in one movie and bring him back in another, it can be surprising and dramatic. If you kill off a character in a movie and then resurrect him all of 10 minutes later, it just comes off as pointless and insulting.
Depends on how its handled.
 
So, since no one else seems to currently hold a license for Abramsverse tie-in novels, Pocket could technically pursue acquiring one, if they thought it was a financially sound thing to do?

I don't think they're offering the license; it's not a question of "not enough money", they just don't want to license out novels at all.

:lol: :lol: I see what you did there...

...I have to admit, I don't. What are you seeing from JonnyQuest that I'm missing? :p
 
I don't think they're offering the license; it's not a question of "not enough money", they just don't want to license out novels at all.

Oh, OK, so Pocket *can't* technically pursue acquiring one, because there isn't one "available"? I was reading the other posts as "Pocket thought their license covered everything, but then found out it didn't cover the Abramsverse". So I thought maybe an Abramsverse license was "available" separately.

...I have to admit, I don't. What are you seeing from JonnyQuest that I'm missing? :p

Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but I thought it was a clever play on words... "fine with comic books" / "distinction they're drawing". It just seemed too deliberately phrased, so I thought it was intentional wordplay.

It made me laugh, anyway. But in fairness, my mind is a weird place.
 
Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but I thought it was a clever play on words... "fine with comic books" / "distinction they're drawing". It just seemed too deliberately phrased, so I thought it was intentional wordplay.

It made me laugh, anyway. But in fairness, my mind is a weird place.
You're reading too much into it.
 
As I said, the cancellation of the books was a business decision. Sometimes business decisions have side effects, consequences to things that aren't directly connected to them. So the reasons behind those side effects don't always make sense to an outside observer.

That's probably the clearest answer we're going to get, and fair enough. Thanks for sharing as much as you did.
 
Everyone gets really confused when all the current TNG-Era books shift to characters nobody has heard of and there are no references to previous books.

That's because they didn't read the TNG books where all the changes took place. You cannot keep recapping in every TNG book in case someone picks one up at random.
 
That's because they didn't read the TNG books where all the changes took place. You cannot keep recapping in every TNG book in case someone picks one up at random.

Go back and read that in context because you have completely misunderstood what is being discussed - it's absolutely nothing to do with the TNG books actually being published at present.
 
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