Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
Well, there were always novels coming out alongside the shows from TNG through ENT; they just weren't as closely integrated with the shows as this seems to be.
Stipulated.
I was a kid back then, and Trek novels were hard to get by in my country. If you got them, they were years old.
Oh, I see now.
A novel from David Mack and a comic co-written by Kirsten Beyer. Awesome!
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Agreed - I got lucky in the eighties and early nineties as my Uncles were die-hard Trekkies and would pass the novel down when they had finished them. It wasn't until Voyager premiered and they became easier to track down and I'd save my pocket money to buy the Voyager tie-ins. Enterprise novels were few and far between anyways, and went back to being a bit more erratic, even in Manchester.
It's like Doctor Who - I watched it in the eighties as a kid, and Sylvester McCoy has long been my favourite. But it wasn't until the Smith debut where I got the excitement in the build up to releases and tie-ins etc. I guess this is pretty much like that.
While the novels aren't canon-most of them take place in the post TNG era so as long as Discovery steers clear of stuff related to that they ought to be safe for the most part.
I just found out about Kirsten Beyer, that is awesome.
All it'll take is for there to be one line in Discovery about Andorians only having two genders and suddenly that's a large chunk of novel continuity that's just been thrown out the window.
Meh. Enterprise treated Andorians as two-gendered, and the novels just shrugged it off. But they also retconned Andor(ia) to be an icier world than it had been portrayed in earlier novels. Then there's the Tholians. The Sundered said they looked like crystal scorpions, more or less. Then "In a Mirror, Darkly" gave them a different design, and later books used that design while still keeping the events and Tholian worldbuilding of The Sundered in continuity otherwise. We've been through this before, having new canonical Trek coming out concurrent with the novelverse, and we've adjusted. We've found ways to reconcile what was onscreen with what was in the books, or we've just quietly overwritten some details of older books while keeping their overall stories and ideas intact. Heck, the Star Wars Extended Universe did the same thing while the prequel trilogy and The Clone Wars were coming out -- either inventing handwaves to reconcile the different versions of the information, or just ignoring the parts that no longer fit canon while keeping the rest intact. A story can still be true in broad strokes even if a few of its details are erroneous.
After all, what does "one line" mean? Who utters the line? How much do they really know about Andorians? Maybe they're just wrong. If it's an Andorian saying it, maybe they're lying, or pretending in order to avoid an uncomfortable subject. There are workarounds for these things.
The fall out from that would be interesting to witness.
Unlikely to ever happen. They don't waste time mentioning things like that in other species (they just assume it), so why would the Andorians be any different?
Besides, the four Andorian genders basically correspond to two male and two female, so that's probably the way DSC will handle it (if at all). The four-gender thing seems more suited to literature anyway - any attempt to actually put it in onscreen dialogue would just seem kind of awkward.
