And therein lies the problem.
As for George & Winona: They appeared in plenty of novels prior to ST09, so I assume that writers are still free to mention them. If not, then the FL's are even more hopeless than I thought.
The destruction of Romulus in the novelverse
- Thread starter Voth commando1
- Start date
And therein lies the problem.
As for George & Winona: They appeared in plenty of novels prior to ST09, so I assume that writers are still free to mention them. If not, then the FL's are even more hopeless than I thought.
We're not currently not allowed to reference anything from the JJVerse films. Period.
"Canon" doesn't enter into the equation. The Pocket license doesn't say "adhere to canon." It says "you can do This, but you can't do That, and when you do This, you follow the guidelines we set."
The definition of "This" and "That" can change, depending on the desires of the license owner, but until it does, we stick with what's been laid out. Right now, "This" excludes anything from the newer films.
"Canon" doesn't enter into the equation. The Pocket license doesn't say "adhere to canon." It says "you can do This, but you can't do That, and when you do This, you follow the guidelines we set."
The definition of "This" and "That" can change, depending on the desires of the license owner, but until it does, we stick with what's been laid out. Right now, "This" excludes anything from the newer films.
So can you just go on with Romulus still existing?
I'm sympathetic to the view that if Pocket can't reference the Bad Robot films then they shouldn't feel beholden to them in their creative and editorial decisions. If Pocket wanted to publish a big Romulan event set in 2388 -- say, the Empire becomes a Federation member and Spock is there to witness the treaty signing -- should they let something that is officially off-limits to them stand in their way? It's an arguable position.
You can even make the argument that the novelverse, as currently constituted, has already taken the position that Romulus wasn't destroyed in 2387; the framing device of The Good That Men Do makes no reference to the near-extinction of the Romulans. Yes, TGTMD was published before 2009, so it couldn't be written with the knowledge of a film that wasn't even written yet. But in retrospect, if you look at that book now, the absence of any discussion by Jake and Nog, in a conversation that expressly involves the Romulans, about a destroyed Romulus draws attention to itself. It is the dog that barked in the nighttime.
All of that said, I am also sympathetic to the view that Pocket has to account for a significant galactopolitical event that they can't even hint at for the simple reason that the audience knows about it. Even though fans here, on this board, would understand that legalities are what they are and (might?) accept Pocket decided to forge ahead with what they can reference, there would be many more fans who pick up a book about the Romulan Empire in 2388 and be confused, perhaps even angry, because the book isn't consistent with the movies.
If you get the impression that I'm agnostic as to what Pocket should do, you're absosmurfly right. I don't have a horse in this race, I don't have no strong opinions on it, it's not my creative decision to make, and as people have pointed out (notably The Wormhole) it's not a decision that Pocket will even need to address for a number of years due to the current narrative pace of the novels. It is an issue that will be kicked down the road like an old can. Worrying about it now isn't even worth the bother.
Which is of course logically impossible. You can't account for an event that you can't hint at!
No. We can't contradict any parts of the canon, even the parts we can't reference. They still exist -- we just can't mention them. The tie-ins are not an alternate reality to the canon. They're conjectural stories meant to take place within the screen canon, and that means they stay consistent with it, even if there are parts of it they don't get to talk about directly. Like when Malibu got the DS9 comics license instead of DC. That meant DC couldn't publish its own DS9 comics. It didn't mean DC could pretend DS9 didn't exist.
Besides, maybe someday the license will change and we will get to openly acknowledge this stuff. If we'd just spent years contradicting it, that would put us in a hell of a pickle.
I don't think it is. Star Trek doesn't belong to us. We're just guests in someone else's house. If they don't want to let us into their private study, then we just don't go in.
I always approach it by asking, how would I want to do things if I let other people write stories in a universe I created, like the Only Superhuman universe or the Hub universe? I'm protective of my continuity, so I'd want to make sure their stories would be consistent with how I see the universe. And there might be some part of that continuity that I would prefer they didn't cover because I had my own plans for it -- in which case I'd still want their stories to stay consistent with it, just by avoiding it altogether. I'd expect my ownership and creative control over my own universe to be respected, and so when I'm a guest in someone else's universe, I accept going in that they're entitled to the same deference. It's their creation, not mine. Getting to borrow it and tell stories about it is a privilege, not an entitlement. And if that privilege comes with limits, if there are lines they don't want me to cross, then that's entirely their prerogative.
There are plenty of references in TNG and after to Kirk's Enterprise being the first starship of that name, but that doesn't mean TNG is in a different timeline from ENT. Not to mention all the other details of the novelverse that have been contradicted by later canon and glossed over by later books -- like the scorpion-bodied Tholians of The Sundered or the non-glaciated Andor of Paradigm or William Thelonius Riker in Peter David's books or Chekov's musing in Ex Machina about how the nature of the different races of Klingons was still unexplained. Those contradictions don't entitle us to ignore the canon we're borrowing from -- on the contrary, we're obligated to stick with canon even when it requires retconning our own prior works, because that's how tie-ins have always worked.
Besides, I just skimmed over those Jake-Nog scenes, and they were only discussing the Romulans in the context of 22nd-century events and the discrepancies between the official accounts and the newly declassified data. There'd be no reason to mention the destruction of Romulus in that context, any more than there would be a reason to bring up the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a discussion of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
So how are you planning on getting past the year 2387 without referencing it? I mean y'all have quite a catch-22. It seems to me you have a problem that can be resolved a few ways-one you reboot the novelverse angering fans that followed it but keeping a reboot loop to 2386. 2 you can carry on past 2387 but only by dancing around the issue hindering plotlines and angering more fans, 3-you can give up and just stop writing tie ins or hope a licensing agreement is reached.
Y'all really are in quite the pickle.
I can't see them stopping the books altogether just because of this, so as just a fan I'm thinking 1 or 2 are the most likely. I'd prefer 1 personally, I'd hate to see all of the other stuff going on not related to Romulus end just because they can't deal with the destruction of Romulus. The Trek universe is huge, and there are plenty of other things they can deal with that aren't related to Romulus or the Romulans..
Do John Van Citters at CBS or any of the licensing people at Bad Robot have either Facebook or Twitter accounts where they communicate with fans? I would love to hear from the people who are making the decisions about this whole situation.
It really is frustrating that there is such a big corner of the Trek universe the novels aren't allowed to touch. I would still love to see a novel series about the Kelvin, and after Beyond, now I want a Franklin novel.
Do John Van Citters at CBS or any of the licensing people at Bad Robot have either Facebook or Twitter accounts where they communicate with fans? I would love to hear from the people who are making the decisions about this whole situation.
It really is frustrating that there is such a big corner of the Trek universe the novels aren't allowed to touch. I would still love to see a novel series about the Kelvin, and after Beyond, now I want a Franklin novel.
I'm not. I've been concentrating on the 22nd and 23rd centuries for the past few years now, and my only 24th-century stuff has been the DTI e-books, which are only up to early 2385. So I have no involvement in any planning pertaining to the 2387 situation.
Not really. The DS9 post-finale novels spent maybe 5-6 years getting through 2376 alone. And it's really only the TNG, DS9, and Titan characters whose narratives are up to 2386 already.
As has been mentioned whenever this topic has come up......this hasn't escaped anyone's attention.
As has been mentioned whenever this topic has come up......this hasn't escaped anyone's attention.
And I'm sure it will become a non-issue at some undefined point in the near future.
We'll have to agree to disagree as to whether or not there's a legitimate argument that Pocket can ignore the events of 2387 documented in a film that Pocket doesn't have the rights to. I'm not saying that I agree with that argument -- to reiterate, I am agnostic on the issue -- just that it's there and I see validity to it.
I guess there could be some huge galaxy-spanning temporal event occur in 2387, with vague suggestions that some local events may have been altered but never fully explain it. Not exactly ideal, but it frees them up to do whatever they want (ironically, using a similar mechanism to the movies they're forbidden from referencing)
Surely we can blame Barry Allen. Everyone tells him not to muck with the timestream, and what does he do? He means well, he just wanted to see him mom... and then everything goes to heck.
My favorite part of this whole thing is that, since books can be commissioned years in advance, and that the details of CBS/S&S licensing agreements and renewals aren't exactly headline-making entertainment news, this will have been resolved for a long time before we actually find out about it with the announcement of Countdown to Prose or whatever.
Dayton's Travel Guides aren't written as part of the Novelverse. They're completely separate books that reference a variety of things across the spectrum of canon and tie-in works, even tie-in lines that are contradictory with one another. He doesn't mean for them to be part of any one specific tie-in continuity.
And there may even be contradictory info, just because I like making people twitch.
So are the novels ever gonna get to the 25th century?
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And I think it's a completely invalid argument based on nothing more than wishful thinking. Again, this is basically the same as when DC didn't have the license to DS9 or when Marvel didn't have the license to anything beyond TMP. Not being able to mention something is not even remotely the same thing as being able to contradict it. Being prohibited from using an idea from canon is being placed under a tighter restriction than normal. Being able to ignore or contradict an idea from canon would mean being freed from the most basic restriction of all. They're mutual opposites, so the former does not imply the latter.
Working under restrictions is just part of being a tie-in writer. Regardless of what the restrictions are or whether they seem reasonable to an outsider, our job is to respect them and follow them, because that's what we're hired to do. That's why the old application process for unsolicited new writers (I don't know if it's still around) had such severe restrictions on what characters and concepts you could use and what you could do with them -- because it was a test of applicants' ability to follow instructions and guidelines. If you want complete freedom to tell any stories you wish, then you write original fiction. Being a tie-in writer means being a paid contractor and working within other people's guidelines. You only have as much leeway as they're willing to give you. This has always been the case, whether it was Marvel not being able to do TOS sequels or Richard Arnold forbidding continuing characters and storylines or Surak's Soul having to be rewritten to be consistent with "The Seventh" or any number of other examples. This latest limitation is just more of the same.
I suppose they could, eventually, but I'm not sure why we need to be rushing toward it.
