But the shows really weren't that different, there were a lot of episodes where certain characters didn't appear, and a lot of the story arcs progressed sporadically over the course of several years. Hell, Worf's whole Klingon Empire/Family Honor story arc went through two different series and about 9 years if we start with Sins of the Father and finish with What You Leave Behind.
This argument doesn't really work, books operate on a very different system, so you really can't judge them based on weekly, multi-season TV series. Hell, it's taken 20 years just to get five books in the Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones book series.
The writer is now also a writer for Star Trek: Destiny, so it's going to be even longer between books now, the next book has already been delayed.
Very much agree.
Books do indeed work on a different system. But these are Star Trek books, so the system is different again. Not least as half the world and half the characters are already made for you. You just have to tell a story with them, and add the bits you need that don't already exist. You can argue no one wants a paint by numbers Trek story, except some of the books coming out are that, and this thread clearly illustrates that sometimes, yes, yes we do want that. We want five guys staring at a big screen, (the Cross gender variant of guys here) wondering at the mystery, getting stuck in, getting stuck, getting out and home for replicated tea. We want the people we like, the ones that come with the banner on the front of the cover as promised, and we want them to do stuff.
Game Of Thrones (it's much shorter to type than its proper grand and pointless title.) is not a good example, firstly because it's pretty awful (opinion) but mostly cos it's one dude writing it and making it all up. Trek has half a dozen authors or more and could easily find more. Granted most of them have other jobs too. Where the two are similar is that GRR Martin is neve happy working with what he has and keeps putting more stuff in till the whole lot seems to spiral a bit out of control. He also likes to kill his toys when he gets bored with them, but only after making sure the reader is probably bored of them too (unless he's just messing with readers favourites...but then he's not a fan of the reader/writer promise that's sort of implicit in this sort of work.)
Your argument about that specific strand of words story is true...but only for that strand. Very rarely was stuff left outright dangling, usually a new status quo was reached. (Worf is discommended, Worf has his family name back, oh he's lost it again, martok has adopted him etc.) later, a different story is told and his status quo is changed again. That's narrative. At no point did he wander off mid episode to do something, or put events in motion, and then you wait years for that to be followed up on with absolutely nothing in the interim. The books scheduling on the other hand means this is happening all the time. (Dax in the stockade, vic in his odd holostory which is being doled out at the rate of one paragraph a year across three titles. Data is back...but may as well not be because that story is totally unresolved and doesn't fulfill that writer/reader promise because cake is being eaten in a quantum state there, Bashir is stuck in some kind of odd loop and is totally stuck, Sisko has been almost but not quite leaving on a mission, but is mostly walking down corridors and looking at padds....for four years.) They are also suffering from Beverly Crusher syndrome (lines and scenes that should really be given to her character are given to the producers favourite guest star...like Tenmei helping Bashir escape...when his best bloody friend in the world gets one line from engineering. In a book that also guest stars Katherine Pulaski. Sigh.) Even the literature only characters are suffering from that now...as you mentioned, Elias Vaughan was on life support for a about a billion years before finally being put out of his misery with a ghost moment. It's really really noticeable in the Ds9 books. You can blow up the enterprise, and give the crew a new one, because it's the same crew. You can incrementally change the crew by about half, and it just about works, because it's mostly the same lead characters (about half) and the same ship. Ds9 is a different station, and only about ten percent of the series crew (at an absolute stretch...really it's just quark) is still actually on the station. The rest are cameos or shoehorns. (Rules of accusation is the best Ds9 book in years...but hoops were jumped through to let Odo do what he does.)
It's a mess. And what is realistic in the real world (hey man, people move on all the time and do new things) isn't realistic in Trek (because crews stay together for ten, twenty, thirty years or more, unless a totally catastrophic event kills some and drives wedges between others....before getting reset by time travel.)
The next big event needs to be a quasi reset in exactl the way the great 'return to exploration' at the end of The Fall wasn't. You need to get those characters back where they are meant to be, even if they have changed in some way or their positions aren't quite the same. Because when a book has the title of a given series on the front, you expect to rea about those characters....and you can see the writers straining to follow up on each other's work (ro and quark, ro and doctor lost in time chap, then have to flip flop in the next book a bit because no one got the memo...including quark. Bev crusher guest starring as a locus for Bashir, but no one quite sure why, but hey, we get to have her face to face with Pulaski who is there because....reasons. Who then get to live through a season one Ds9 story.) and keep it all coherent while juggling balls they didn't know existed.
The prophets need to smack some reset in so it can stop being such a mess and ironically get some linear time going again over there.
Man.
I rant sometimes.
Top decision making there geniuses.
