Did they ever release The God Thing?

[Greg Cox]

Even before this stuff was all done digitally, I'm sure it was common for cover designers to mock up multiple different potential text treatments and placements to show to their bosses for approval.

Oh, god, yes. Covers are endlessly tinkered with due to input from the author, the agent, the editor, the publisher, the sales department, the sales reps, the big accounts, etc. And the more high-profile the project, the more cooks are going to be involved. I've seen books that have gone through the umpteen mock-ups before everybody settled on the final cover. Heck, at one point, my first Eugenics Wars novel was tentatively titled KHAN and I used to have a mockup of the cover featuring that title.

And I remember another book, not-Trek, in which the title came first, then the publisher found a big-name author to front the book, then they found a ghost-writer to actually write it, then another ghost-writer to rewrite what the first ghost-writer did, and so on, and, in the meantime, the sales reps already were out taking orders for the book based on the cover art and Big Name Author's name alone. In other words, the title and the cover existed even while the publisher was still struggling to get a book by that title written by somebody!

Punchline: the book in question was named the "worst book of the year" by ESQUIRE magazine AND hit the New York Times Bestseller List.

 

[Christopher]

^Maybe that's why so many books have covers that don't reflect their actual contents.

 

[Greg Cox]

^Maybe that's why so many books have covers that don't reflect their actual contents.

Well, speaking as an editor, one wants to end up with a cover that both catches the eye and conveys what kind of book it is, but sometimes this is easier said than done, especially if you need the cover for solicitation purposes long before the manuscript is delivered.

And sometimes wires just get crossed.

True story: I screwed up once by forgetting to inform the art department that the third book in a certain trilogy took place twenty years after the previous book, which meant that the hero on the cover looked the same as he had on the first two books instead of significantly older. Oops!

Alas, it wasn't worth spending the time or the money to fix something that wasn't going to affect sales one bit, so I just had to let it go.

 

[tomswift2002]

Yeah, but with this book, considering that by 1992-1993 when Michael Jan Friedman was announced, it was being based on a rejected film script from 20 years prior, and there had already been a couple of starts and stops on the project over those 20 years, where is the business sense in making more than 1 mock-up cover on a book that might not even come out. Making 2 mock ups seems like “carriage before the horse” situation in this case, which doesn’t make a lot of business sense.

 

[Dayton Ward]

Pocket's attempt was the first "serious" go at publishing it. Everything prior was more of a grassroots effort. It stands to reason Pocket would bring more resources/marketing/etc. to bear. Plus, cover mockups are pretty cheap, in the grand scheme of things. I've had as many as four different versions of covers for certain books before one was decided upon.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Has Friedman ever spoken of how far he got?

Yes. There's this on Steve Roby's old webpage:

Michael Jan Friedman, April 7, 2003

Friedman, whose expanded rewrite of The God Thing was supposed to be published by Pocket in the early 1990s, won't say too much about it these days. He was willing to answer, on the record, a couple of questions about how he was chosen to do the job and how long he worked on it, though.

Dave Stern was the editor, and I was approved by Paramount because, supposedly, Gene liked my work on the franchise better than he did the work of the other Trek novelists. I can tell you that my books sailed through the approval stage pretty quickly, so maybe there's some truth to that.

How much work? Probably two solid weeks, spread out over a few months. I produced an outline and a sample chapter, then went into revisions on the outline.

So it appears that whatever happened to scuttle this version of the book happened early enough in the process that there isn't a full-length, completed version by Friedman lost in limbo.

I have a collector friend who bought Friedman's dust jacket from the unpublished book -- they were printed then pulped, but Friedman got one -- who gave me a couple more details, but nothing of any significance. So, basically, he fleshed out an outline and wrote a sample chapter, and then the project died.

 

[Greg Cox]

Producing cover art, copy, ISBN numbers, etc. is not an enormous expense or undertaking, even if the book doesn't exist yet. Heck, I once offered $15,000 for the novelization rights to an upcoming movie based on the preliminary poster art, and there wasn't even a script yet. (The movie never happened and the deal fell through.)

And I can think of at least one Tor book that went through a couple of completely different titles and cover treatments before finally seeing print. The original plan was to sell it as a fantasy novel, but then we switched gears and decided to market it as a mainstream literary novel instead, which meant a whole new approach when it came to the title, cover art, copy, and even quotes.

It was actually a bit awkward with regards to the latter, in that we had solicited quotes from various big-name fantasy authors, who were gracious enough to provide them for us, only to have to turn around and say, "Gee, thanks so much for that quote, but I'm afraid we can't use it after all since we're not selling this book as a fantasy novel anymore and quoting a bunch of fantasy authors on the cover would send the wrong message."

 

[EnriqueH]

Interesting. Thank you.

 

[EnriqueH]

Just occurred to me it would’ve perfect in The God Thing to have had McCoy yell, “Why is any object we don’t understand always called a THING?!”

 

[Greg Cox]

Meanwhile, on the subject of cover art not accurately reflecting the contents of a book, it should be noted that sometimes one resorts to stock art instead of commissioning something specific to that title. Back in the day, I used to buy "generic" SF and fantasy art (star-fields, spaceships, dragons, etc.) from overseas to use on short-story collections and anthologies because it was faster and cheaper than commissioning a new piece of art. The reasoning being that your average American book buyer wouldn't recognize some recycled art from a Danish sci-fi zine or whatever.

I also used to keep a couple of generic CONAN paintings in inventory just in case we had to slam a new CONAN title into the schedule at the last minute.

 

[Kor]

Without having read the last four pages of this thread... I would guess that even within Trek fandom, this is just too obscure of a topic to be a potentially profitable book.

Btw, I only mention Alan Dean Foster because he seems to have a TON of experience writing in other worlds. (If I remember correctly, he wrote the novelizations for TMP and Star Wars A New Hope).

Roddenberry wrote his own novelization for TMP. And boy, does it show.

Kor

 

[David cgc]

Meanwhile, on the subject of cover art not accurately reflecting the contents of a book, it should be noted that sometimes one resorts to stock art instead of commissioning something specific to that title. Back in the day, I used to buy "generic" SF and fantasy art (star-fields, spaceships, dragons, etc.) from overseas to use on short-story collections and anthologies because it was faster and cheaper than commissioning a new piece of art. The reasoning being that your average American book buyer wouldn't recognize some recycled art from a Danish sci-fi zine or whatever.

Once I saw a cover that included a Babylon 5 fan-model I recognized. I touched base with the artist (Fabio Passaro, who has more recently done a lot of the 3D models and/or renders for the Eaglemoss ship-of-the-month club), and found out that, yes, the cover artist had just yoinked it off of Google image search and, better, it was an officially commissioned piece from the licensed Babylon 5 space-combat tabletop game. I don't know if anything ever came of it (the paperback used the same art, so probably not much), though on further investigation, I saw the book was a sequel, and the cover art for the first book in the duology was a much more blatant rip, with a spaceship on the cover made of the Battlestar Galactica (TOS, this was a couple years before the remake) with the engine section chopped off and half of a low-res flying saucer put into its place.

Though, speaking of Babylon 5, a 3D artist I don't know, who (legitimately) sells stock images, has a spaceship model in several images that's clearly inspired by the Starfury fighter, if you're in the know (the structure has been radically changed to be all curvy and organic, but there are too many little details quoted for it to just be a coincidentally x-shaped ship). I think I've seen that one on a book cover somewhere.

 

[Mysterion]

I remember this old late-60's paperback which used what looks like an AMT USS Enterprise model with a girder stuffed between the nacelles. Very cheesy looking. Gotta wonder how many Trek fans ended up buying this thinking it was a Star Trek novel.
See it here: http://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2013/04/toys-on-covers-uss-enterprise-on-galaxy.html

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Without having read the last four pages of this thread... I would guess that even within Trek fandom, this is just too obscure of a topic to be a potentially profitable book.

I'm going to push back on that gently. With the right marketing campaign -- "Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry's Final Word on His Creation!" -- at the right time (the 30th anniversary?), a novelization of The God-Thing would have had the potential to reach outside of the regular Star Trek novel reader of the time. Even the controversial elements in the book, such as its revelation about what Jesus was, would have been a selling point because it would have added some notoriety to the book. The fact that the basic story would have been twenty years old and was pillaged for parts for Star Trek: The Motion Picture really wouldn't have been a negative when marketed correctly.

Twenty-five years on, the moment for The God-Thing has probably passed. While I'd be interested in a book that contained outlines, scripts, and draft chapters from the unfinished attempts -- in short, the scholarly presentation, a la Christopher J.R. Tolkien's The History of Middle-earth -- that book doesn't have a market to justify the expense.

 

[Saul]

Where's ye old Trek BBS member 'THE GOD THING' when you need him? He used to go into great detail on this stuff.

Speaking of unpublished material. Even an outline would be fascinating. Think of all the unpublished scripts and other material out there. I always think it a great shame that most of it, beyond private collections, will be lost to history. I'd pay top dollar to have a collection of unmade scripts of movies or other stuff.

 

[Mysterion]

Think of all the unpublished scripts and other material out there.

I've long thought that an anthology of prose adaptations of the unproduced Phase II scripts from the 70's would be a fun/interesting look into an alternate Trek path.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Where's ye old Trek BBS member 'THE GOD THING' when you need him? He used to go into great detail on this stuff.

Long gone, I'm afraid.

Speaking of unpublished material. Even an outline would be fascinating.

I don't think the actual plot was all that different from TMP, outside of the religious connections.

I'd pay top dollar to have a collection of unmade scripts of movies or other stuff.

I'd imagine that the rights would be a minefield. AFAIK, the studio would retain the rights to the previously-established characters & such, but the writers would have the rights to their plots and stories if their scripts were never produced. (Pro Writers, please correct me on this if I'm wrong. The studio wouldn't buy the rights to an unmade ST script in perpetuity, would they?)

 

[Kor]

Where's ye old Trek BBS member 'THE GOD THING' when you need him? He used to go into great detail on this stuff.

In the end, his favorable views of the nazis outweighed anything he may have brought to the table regarding TMP's production history. But that's neither here nor there...

Speaking of unpublished material. Even an outline would be fascinating. Think of all the unpublished scripts and other material out there. I always think it a great shame that most of it, beyond private collections, will be lost to history. I'd pay top dollar to have a collection of unmade scripts of movies or other stuff.

Long gone, I'm afraid.
... I'd imagine that the rights would be a minefield. AFAIK, the studio would retain the rights to the previously-established characters & such, but the writers would have the rights to their plots and stories if their scripts were never produced. (Pro Writers, please correct me on this if I'm wrong. The studio wouldn't buy the rights to an unmade ST script in perpetuity, would they?)

I'm not a pro-writer... but for comparison, Harlan Ellison published his earlier teleplay for "City on the Edge of Forever" through White Wolf Publishing, independent of Paramount or Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, or whoever. The copyright page does acknowledge that "Star Trek is a registered trademark of Paramount Pictures," while the teleplay itself is (c) 1975 by Harlan Ellison. A full-cast audio drama was also published by Skyboat Media just a few years ago, with Ellison himself reading his introductory essay.

I would imagine that a writer would not want to sign away any rights for a script that doesn't end up getting produced. They might want to be able to pitch it again later for a better price, or change it to a non-Trek story, or something?

Kor

 

[Christopher]

I would imagine that a writer would not want to sign away any rights for a script that doesn't end up getting produced. They might want to be able to pitch it again later for a better price, or change it to a non-Trek story, or something?

Except that just about any script would be written on commission, not on spec. You'd pitch an idea to the producers, they'd accept it (usually after rejecting dozens of other ideas you pitched) and hire you to write an outline, and if you got lucky they'd then hire you to write the teleplay instead of assigning it to a member of their staff. So you'd be writing work-for-hire and wouldn't own any rights to the material. I think it was different back in the days of TOS, which is why Ellison could do that.

You could submit spec scripts to TNG, DS9, and VGR as part of their open submission process, though. Those would basically be demos to get your foot in the door, rarely getting actually bought and produced. In that case, sure, you could reuse the basic concept for something original. I reworked my DS9 spec script into a VGR pitch, though it was no more successful than any of my other pitches.

 

[EnriqueH]

Eh.

They got all kinds of books out there.

I'm going to push back on that gently. With the right marketing campaign -- "Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry's Final Word on His Creation!" -- at the right time (the 30th anniversary?), a novelization of The God-Thing would have had the potential to reach outside of the regular Star Trek novel reader of the time. Even the controversial elements in the book, such as its revelation about what Jesus was, would have been a selling point because it would have added some notoriety to the book. The fact that the basic story would have been twenty years old and was pillaged for parts for Star Trek: The Motion Picture really wouldn't have been a negative when marketed correctly.

Twenty-five years on, the moment for The God-Thing has probably passed. While I'd be interested in a book that contained outlines, scripts, and draft chapters from the unfinished attempts -- in short, the scholarly presentation, a la Christopher J.R. Tolkien's The History of Middle-earth -- that book doesn't have a market to justify the expense.

Good response