What is it's a 1980s novel but the antennae move?
Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
And what about the Discovery Andorians, who look more like TOS Andorians (with some added facial spikiness), but whose antennae also move?
Well of course it's gonna be passing mentions and not featured stuff. We're the fandom that notices when Voyager's phasers fire the wrong colour beams.
Star Trek fans.
Says the most detail-oriented Trek author ever. The guy who made sure his Stargazer battle matched an illegible on-screen graphic is telling me something far more obvious like the entire look of Star Trek doesn't matter?
Why not both??
Would/Should an author describe only one uniform If there was a TNG season 6-7/DS9 season 1-2 crossover??
It's because I have such attention to detail that I'm aware of the sheer impossibility of reconciling every last inconsistency. I don't write the way I do because I believe the readers are under some obligation to take everything literally; I write the way I do because it's my method as a science- and history-trained writer to do the most thorough research I can in the process of creating my work. I've always gotten my ideas by learning things about my subject and extrapolating from them, whether it's real science or a fictional continuity. It's not some moralistic issue of how Star Trek "should" be interpreted; it's just the way I work. To an extent, it's a matter of convenience -- it saves me work coming up with my own details if someone else has already created the details for me.
Not only that, but I've always known that my particular interpretation of the Trek universe differs from that of other novelists. I write Star Trek as hard science fiction because that's what I do. I'm making it CLB-style SF as much as I can within the Trek milieu. Other writers' approaches to the universe -- especially onscreen -- are filtered through their own styles and sensibilities, so some interpret it in a less hard-science, more fantastic way, or they interpret a particular character or species in a way that doesn't perfectly mesh with mine, or whatever. How a story is told depends on who's telling it, so there will always be subtle variances between different writers' works, and the facade of uniform continuity will always be imperfect.
By the same token, any long-running franchise makes changes in its continuity over time, and if something I wrote in the past conflicts with new canon, I have to go with the new. In Ex Machina, I made assumptions about Vulcans and Klingons that were made problematical by later Enterprise episodes. I was able to fix the Vulcan inconsistency in Uncertain Logic, but the bit about the Klingons (and the Federation not knowing the reason for their different appearances) just doesn't work any longer and needs to be ignored. There have been other, more drastic retcons involving other authors' works; for instance, The Sundered is still in Novelverse continuity, but its description of Tholian appearance has been completely overwritten, and the early DS9 novels' descriptions of Andor have had to be retconned to fit ENT's portrayal of Andoria. These things happen.
That seems like the best way to handle it to me, if they have to pick a uniform then it would be best to just pick whichever one was seen closest to where the book takes place. There's a gap between The Cage and Disco, so the uniforms could easily have changed during that gap.
Because one is a concurrent uniform which coexists in-universe and the other is an out-of-universe swap.
It sounds like you're answering my original question - that new overwrites old and the retconned new-look Enterprise NCC-1701 will thusly be the incarnation of the ship?
While I guess can imagine a time-travel novelverse adventure where, say, the USS Aventine warps back in time and meets Pike's Enterprise and it be the version seen in Discovery with holocomms and touchscreens and whatnot, I can't imagine a TOS novel that's based on anything other than the original series' version of the ship and crew, where the buttons are jelly beans and they talk to people on the big screen at the front of the bridge.
That being said, we already had Children of Kings, which was published as a TOS novel but mashed up elements of TOS, ST'09 and ENT
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They’ve done that in DSC as well. They haven’t solely used the holo comms.
No, because I have no way of knowing if there's any such policy, and I doubt there will be, because this issue of uniform colors is hardly important enough to be a matter of formal doctrine. You're demanding absolutes from something that's a creation of many people's imaginations, including your own. There is always going to be room for interpretation. One writer may try to come up with some meticulous retcon for a continuity error, while another might just ignore it altogether, and both would probably be okay. Pocket and CBS have rarely micromanaged our treatment of incidental details to the degree you're imagining. Why should they? The creators of the franchise itself feel free to change the details at will, because it's all just make-believe, so there's no reason they'd be any stricter in enforcing how tie-in authors approach equivalent details.
Honestly, I doubt this issue you're so obsessed with will even come up. There are three years between "The Cage" and season 2 of Discovery. Trek fans have been rationalizing uniform changes as the result of the passage of time for 39 years now, so I don't get why you suddenly think it's such a hugely impossible conundrum.
Again, I think you're imagining a far greater level of descriptive detail in TOS novels than there usually is. There are probably very few of them that say a single word about the appearance of the console buttons. Again, why should they? Tie-ins are written for people who are already familiar with the show, who know what things look like.
Besides, there have already been TOS-era novels that gave the ship technology it didn't have on the show, because they weren't under budget restrictions and were written in a later era where more advanced tech had been imagined. There were plenty of hologram projectors on the Enterprise in Diane Duane's TOS novels, for example. Corona gave the ship AI technology and medical regeneration tanks more advanced than anything in the TOS era. Bantam's Planet of Judgment featured all sorts of landing-party gear that we never saw on the show, like security body armor. The show was not holy writ, it was just the best approximation they could manage with limited budget and resources. Creators of prose were thus free to fill in gaps that the show couldn't afford to. Now we're at a point where the shows themselves are able to do that too.
Arguably, the changes wrought in Disovery go far deeper than the shade of uniform. I realise we're supposed to pretend nothing's changed and go with the flow, but a quick peek into the Disco forum will show not everyone's happy with such drastic changes.
I guess we won't find out for sure until any such hypothetical novel is published. I'm curious what the cover will look like (going back to Children of Kings, they had a TOS Enterprise with a Kelvin universe warp effect)
True.
This is true, but Trek has evolved so far from those days (and they were all intended as sequels/continuations, furthering and evolving Trek from it's TV series roots), we're getting into the territory of whether such a novel would feel sufficiently like a TOS episode or not.
Perhaps part of the problem comes up because Discovery is so close to the time of the original series. What I mean is the other series took place far enough away that you can dismiss inconsistencies as the passage of time.
Even Enterprise. It was over 100 years before the original series, so even though it was a prequel, the show runners could take some "liberties" with things like production design and uniforms. Though I would argue I thought the Enterprise designers did a pretty good job trying to make the NX-01 less advanced then the NCC-1701 while making it look more advanced than today.
But Discovery is so close to the original series timeline and the showrunners say it's the same timeline (and not a parallel timeline like the Abramsverse movies) that I think some people expect it to resemble the original series (maybe not exactly the same but close enough that you'd recognize it as being from the same period). There are fans that just expect it to fit neatly in. I'll admit, I have some difficulty myself with some of that--I don't expect 100% consistency, but Discovery is very far from looking anything like the original series. Now if the stories are good and engaging, I can learn to look past some of that, but it's something I sort of have to work on.
That's one of the reasons I thought from the beginning that they would have been better off placing the show further in the future, say 100 or more years after Nemesis. You'd still have the history (I mean, you couldn't pretend there was no Dominion War for instance) but they'd largely be free to do what they wanted otherwise and design it as they saw fit without having to worry about these sorts of things.
Or just said the show is it's own separate take on Trek a la Gotham or Smallville or whatever.
Not everyone was happy with the drastic changes in TMP and TWOK. Or with the drastic changes in TNG, etc. This happens with every new Trek production. It's naive to think this time is any different. Heck, Pocket had to abandon its entire continuity when TNG came out. If we have to fudge the descriptions of uniforms here and there, that's no big deal in comparison.
Why is that the goal? That makes no sense to me. The whole reason for expanding a franchise into different media is precisely because it gives you the opportunity to do it differently, to take advantage of the opportunities of a new medium that the original medium doesn't have. Fans who want novels to feel exactly like TV episodes are missing the whole point of doing novels. It's not to slavishly copy the show, it's to expand beyond it, to add something new and different to it.
For me, growing up with the early Bantam and Pocket novels, a large part of their charm was that they didn't just slavishly copy the show. The authors brought their own voices, interpretations, and ideas to the stories and made them more than just duplications of the show. The show was rerunning incessantly on TV all the time anyway. It didn't need to be duplicated. It needed to be complemented. Diane Duane's novels, The Final Reflection, The Entropy Effect, Uhura's Song -- those past greats don't feel a thing like TOS episodes. They feel like epic movies expanding far beyond what TV episodes could ever have been capable of. Their difference from the feel of TOS episodes is what made them great. When Richard Arnold came along and forced the novels to limit themselves to the kind of stuff the shows already did, it made them lifeless and unmemorable by comparison. Purism is toxic to creativity.
That was never convincing to me as a handwave for TMP's changes. There's no way every single item of technology, clothing, and graphic design would've been simultaneously replaced with something different in just 3 years or so. It's always been a flimsy handwave for what was really just a wholesale reinvention of the look of the universe -- the exact same kind of reinvention that DSC has done. And, hey, DSC is currently 3 years after "The Cage," so why can't the exact same handwave apply?
Yeah, but in TMP they went to great links to explain on screen that this was a "completely new Enterprise", that everything had been upgraded, which is why it took almost 3 years to complete.
I know it seems outlandish, but it easier to accept I guess because they made it a point to say everything had in fact been upgraded. The difference was they didn't present the refit Enterprise in TMP and say, nope, this is the Enterprise from TOS. They explicitly stated this was a refit Enterprise--it's meant to look and be taken differently.
Uniforms I never had much issue with because it seems Starfleet was constantly updating uniforms. I think TWOK uniforms were the only ones that had any staying power, being used with minor alterations all the way up to Picard's time in the Academy.
But that's not how technological progress happens in the real world. If you buy a brand-new car, it's still going to have a recognizable steering wheel, mirrors, tires, lights, seat levers, cupholders, etc. Open up the hood and many of the engine parts will probably be the same as the ones in your older car, even if they're put together in a different way.
And it's not just the ship either. It's every piece of handheld equipment. It's the uniforms and insignias. It's other Starfleet facilities like Epsilon 9. Not only that, it's the appearance and wardrobe of the aliens. What are the odds that, not only did Starfleet decide to do a wholesale redesign and replacement of everything in the entire fleet simultaneously, but so did the Klingons? It's a flimsy handwave that falls apart if you really think about it.
I don't think anyone seriously expected the TOS look to be replicated. Especially given this show is essentially in the same time period as The Cage, there's no way a TV show filmed in 2017 was going to make its sets look like they were made of plywood in 1964. Updating the look was kind of expected. What was not expected was the level of updates and addition of things like advanced holographic communicators which actually allow the holograms of the people to walk around.
It probably should've been. The goal of creating a new show is to draw in new viewers, to reintroduce Star Trek to a larger audience beyond the core fanbase. So its designers had to think in the context of what other sci-fi franchises are doing these days, what viewers familiar with those franchises but new to Trek would expect and would see as futuristic. And hologram communication is pretty much a standard gimmick in modern SFTV and film. Flat wall screens just don't seem sci-fi enough for modern audiences.
But actually walking around a room and interacting with it as though they actually were there? That is pretty advanced. Even holographic communications in the new Star Wars movies aren't that advanced.
Oh, there are plenty of sci-fi franchises that have exactly that. Hell, 24th-century Trek had that, although its "holograms" were opaque and solid-looking. Ditto Red Dwarf. Ditto Quantum Leap. Ditto Asgard and Ancient holograms on Stargate. Ditto the recent Altered Carbon on Netflix, although its "holograms" seemed to be more like constructs assembled from nanotech "dust." For that matter, I've seen hologram scenes pretty much exactly like that in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Rebels if not the movies, scenes where the people on holocomm were moving around in the environment alongside the people physically in the room. (Extrapolating from the prequels' scenes where some holograms were "seated" in the Jedi Council alongside live attendees.) And plenty of other shows and films do translucent midair holograms as well as opaque, real-looking ones. RoboCop: The Series had Diana, a disembodied human brain running the city's computer and able to assemble a free-moving holographic image of herself in any location. Andromeda had its hologram version of the Andromeda AI. The Flash has its holographic Council of Wells and Council of Harrisons. Really, this is a ubiquitous sci-fi trope these days; I'm surprised you'd think otherwise.
In fact, it's been a common trope for decades. I recently saw the Japanese series Denji Sentai Megaranger from 1997 (the basis for Power Rangers in Space), and they did a few instances of a cleverly low-tech in-camera "hologram" effect by projecting an image onto a clear screen or beam-splitter in front of the camera, so it looked like a translucent hologram was in the room.
(And it's not just sci-fi either. Last year I went to a science museum in Detroit that used a similar beam-splitter effect to project "hologram" presenters -- actually flat projections from above reflected off a transparent screen at a 45-degree angle -- in a way that created the illusion that they were moving through a real physical environment behind the screen, sitting on its furniture and so forth, as long as you didn't move too far to either side.)
Besides, once again, this is a new show for new viewers. Whatever past thing it may be based on, any new show will try to give audiences new things, to push the FX technology in new directions. Professional creators are in this business to experiment and innovate. They always have been. The makers of the original Star Trek pushed the envelope and broke new ground in FX techniques and SFTV storytelling. How is it reasonable to expect the creators of modern Star Trek not to do the same?