Spoilers Picard Autobiography by David Goodman - Discussion and Review Thread

Spoiler

What i find interesting but also strange is that according to this book the relations between the Federation and the Klingons are that bad for such a long time in the 24th Century. That and the mention of the 2247 vintage of Chateau Picard might be because of the book was written with the author possessing Information about Discovery and using that when he wrote the book. Wasn't a bottle of Chateau Picard 2247 owned by Captain Georgiou?

 

Oh, it's absolutely ableist and that's part of the reason why I though Path worked so well. The idea being that Geordi and the other individuals had allowed themselves to fall prey to the idea it was possible to "resurrect" their friend but paying no attention to the idea B4 was an entirely valid being in his own right. In-universe it's because it was because of some talent ideas about Data and B4 being machines but out of universe because the audience doesn't consider B4 useful or a valid person in his own right. While his sacrifice has some problematic elements, I also think it's the fact B4 shows himself capable of all the self-sacrifice and nobility Data was. In short, the story critiques abelism in a way which I think gives it oomph.

Obviously, you're right, the problem there is that it seems so often it's the character with a disability who dies for the healthy person.

 

It was actually a 2249 vintage Captain Georgiou had, according to Memory Alpha. 2247 was likely chosen in the book because of Trek's longstanding fixation with the number 47:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/47

 

Where are Greyhorse, "Pug" Joseph, Simenon, and the Asmund Twins?

I see that Goodman is still up to his old tricks of directly contradicting the Novelverse, this time with the entire Stargazer series.

 

There's no reason to expect him to be consistent with the novelverse. Continuity between different publishers' tie-ins has always been the exception, not the rule. And coffee-table hardcovers like this are aimed at a different market of readers than MMPBs, people who might not be familiar with the novelverse and would find references to it confusing.

 

What kind of evidence would distinguish between looking for things in the Novelverse to go out of your way to contradict and writing a story that overlaps with the Novelverse and not looking at the Novelverse at all when you write it, leading naturally to contradictions due to differing interpretations or elaborations

 

Hmm. I don't think I've ever heard anybody describe the Goodman books (or any other "autobiographies" of fictional characters who, being nothing but ink on paper [and silver-based emulsions on either cellulose triacetate or Estar, and bits in mass storage] aren't actually capable of writing autobiographies, or anything else for that matter) as "coffee table" books. To me, a Star Trek "coffee table book" would be something like Ships of the Line or Star Trek Costumes. It seems to me that the Goodman books are aimed at people who have the Starfleet Technical Manual, as well as both the self-published and Ballantine editions of the Medical Reference. (Guilty as charged, on both counts, but I don't have Federation: the First 150 Years.)

Remarkably, I'm actually less annoyed (and that's the word I'd use) at this contradiction of ten whole novels than I was at Goodman's prior opus contradicting 4 pages of A Flag Full of Stars. Although it also contradicted some or all of Diane Carey's Captain April stuff as well.

 

Well, whatever category label you use, they're a different category than paperback fiction, so they'll have a lot of buyers who don't know anything about the novelverse. So it makes sense that they draw only on screen canon and take it from there.

Look, don't even think of it as "contradiction." All Trek tie-ins are just speculations about things that might have happened offscreen. There's nothing wrong with different people offering different speculations. It can be fun to have more than one version of a given event, to see the different ways it might have happened.

 

Seriously? This is Goodman's third Trek novel, the other two didn't follow novel continuity, why would this one?

Why should it? The book isn't even published by Pocket Books. Do you get this worked up when IDW's Prime Universe comics contradict Pocket's continuity? Did it bother you that the Shatnerverse novels did their own thing, even after the novels began building up their own continuity?

 

Can a fictional memoir be called a novel?

 

The only things I take from the novels are names and starships, perhaps planet locations.

 

<William Daniels as John Adams>Why not? It's a book-length work of prose fiction. If there is any other requirement, I've never heard of it.</William Daniels as John Adams>

 

Narrative fiction. I'm not sure if a memoir can strictly speaking be necessarily called narrative, since it's not recounting a story but rather the full course of a person's life.

You can have a recounting of a person's life that follows a narrative line, novels have been written on that basis before. But such a recounting doesn't necessarily do so since lives (especially those of fictional characters from episodic works) don't necessarily follow a narrative line; they're more like a series of vignettes with a common theme, which is also how I'd describe the Kirk autobiography for example. You need to work at it to make a person's life story follow a narrative.

Needs to have a running plotline, as weak as it might be, to be a novel. Dayton Ward's travel guides are book-length, prose, and fictional too, after all, and they aren't novels. If anything, being narrative is more important to the definition of a novel than being prose; House of Leaves certainly isn't strictly prose, for the first example to spring to mind, it does a ton of playing with structure and form. But I'd still call it a novel.

 

There are novels in the form of first-person memoirs, of course (Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, Marie Brennan's Natural History of Dragons/Lady Trent series, just about anything by Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc.), but they're still structured as narratives with dialogue and so forth. There's probably not a clear dividing line between a fictional memoir that's in the form of a novel and one that isn't, but I get the impression that the Goodman biographies tend toward the latter end of the spectrum.

 

Thanks for reading the book! To answer the second question first, I had limited info about Discovery and didn't know about the wine, so that's just fortunate coincidence. To the first question, "Yesterday's Enterprise" postulated that if the Enterprise C hadn't sacrificed itself at Narendra III, the Federation and the Klingons would've plunged into a long war. that told me that before Narendra III, the Klingons and the Federation were headed toward war.

 

Really appreciate the comment - I would point out that I don't say that the Vedala are extinct, I say the painting is from a dead civilization, like a painting from the Roman Empire. But your point is valid since it wasn't clear.

 

It was actually chosen for the book because it's mentioned in the episode "Family".

 

Yeah, I understand that's definitely a problem for readers of the Star Trek novels. The way I approach these books is watching filmed canon and trying to make a full life story from the pieces we get, so that you could read this book with only a knowledge of what you'd seen on tv and film. But if you're a fan of the Star Trek novelverse I totally get why you'd be pissed that I don't follow that continuity.

 

Yeah, I don't do it to directly contradict the novelverse, I haven't read a lot of those books.

 

Thanks for your review! I think I made an attempt to show that Picard was writing towards the end of his life and commenting on how different he was as a young man - but if you didn't have that experience reading it then I won't defend it.