The Future of "Novel-Only" Lines
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It's all the same continuity. It's all the same franchise from the same owners, so the novels are required to stay consistent with all of it at once. Picard's continuity adds to the 2009 film's continuity, expands on it and clarifies it, in exactly the same way that, say, TNG expanded on what TOS established about Kahless and Kor and Zefram Cochrane, or DS9 expanded on what TNG established about Bajorans and Trill and Ferengi, or VGR expanded on what First Contact established about the Borg Queen. It's not an either-or choice; it's all part of the same evolving narrative, new works picking up narrative threads laid by earlier ones.
Novel verse isN’t compatible with Picard. Everything is too depressing there. I would just ignore it.
It’s a shame that show had to end the novel verse just when we got to the event. I was looking forward to a big event. Give Spock a better send off than what what we got in the Countdown comic.
I disagree with Picard’s take on the nova matching the film. They are very different. We never got any indication of it being another star that went nova causing a massive supernova that put many systems in danger, including Romulus, or that Spock saved them with Red Matter. For all intents and purposes Spock is still around in the Picard continuity.
It’s a shame that show had to end the novel verse just when we got to the event. I was looking forward to a big event. Give Spock a better send off than what what we got in the Countdown comic.
I disagree with Picard’s take on the nova matching the film. They are very different. We never got any indication of it being another star that went nova causing a massive supernova that put many systems in danger, including Romulus, or that Spock saved them with Red Matter. For all intents and purposes Spock is still around in the Picard continuity.
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Okay, one more time: Tie-in novels are not fanfic. We cannot do what we want. We are contractors working for CBS. Our job, the specific thing that we are paid and contracted to do as professionals, is to tell stories that are compatible with the Star Trek franchise as created and defined by CBS. That is, always has been, and always will be the purpose of professional, licensed tie-in fiction: to tell stories consistent with the official franchise. We don't have the freedom to ignore or contradict parts of it, any more than a contractor you hire to repaint or rewire your house can just ignore an entire room because they don't like its feng shui or something. You pay them to work with the whole thing, so they work with the whole thing, or else you fire them and hire someone who knows how to do a job with actual professionalism.
I never said they matched. New continuity doesn't have to be consistent with old continuity to expand on it, because this is all made up and thus it can be revised. Old TOS continuity said that James R. Kirk and his part-Vulcanian first officer commanded an Earth starship for UESPA; later continuity refined the nomenclature and introduced the Federation. DS9 Trill expanded on the Trill from "The Host" but contradicted the specifics about them in many ways. "Q Who" introduced a Borg collective totally uninterested in individual people, only overall civilizations and their technology, yet later Borg stories changed that drastically.
Here's the thing: The 2009 movie's version of the supernova was awful. It was absurd and incoherent. Picard's version takes the seed of that very clumsy idea and transforms it into something immensely more plausible and interesting. This is part of how creativity works. First drafts are rarely the best version of anything. Ideas are made worthwhile by reworking and revising them to make them better than they started out. Sometimes the version that gets onto the screen or the page isn't revised nearly enough and comes out badly. And the advantage of series fiction is that you have more opportunities to fix those bad ideas when you revisit them later. And Picard did a really impressive job making sense of the movie's bad idea. They came up with a better explanation than I was ever able to come up with in a decade of trying. It's good that it changes the movie's version, because it changes it into something far, far better.
On a somewhat related note - doesn't the novelverse include elements of "previous relaunches"? i.e. the DS9 relaunch, the (first, pre-Beyer) VOY relaunch, the ENT relaunch..
wouldn't that mean that mean that there would be multiple differences from the TV ("canon") continuity, beyond post-NEMESIS?
wouldn't that mean that mean that there would be multiple differences from the TV ("canon") continuity, beyond post-NEMESIS?
I admit I haven't read many post-Nemesis novels yet, but is there no way to reconcile that? There have been times before that the Borg were thought to be defeated and came back (Hugh getting re-assimilated, Voyager finale, one of the Return of Kirk novels...). Again, once I read the books I may look back at this post with a sad smile at my younger self and his futile quest, but the fact that the lit-verse conveniently only goes up to right before the Romulan supernova makes it really tempting for the completest in me to try to fit them in.
That's often been my strategy...
Yeah, I'm still hoping we one day get a satisfactory explanation of this.
I really don't think so.
We learn in Destiny, that the Borg are an accidental off-shoot of an uber-powerful species know as the Caeliar. At the end of the trilogy, the Caeliar return and absorb the Borg. Most of the drones join the Caeliar, basically ascending to a higher form of existance, although some chose to stay behind, like Seven of Nine. Those that stay behind however, (and there are more than Seven), lose all their Borg implants. All Borg technology vanishes.
I guess you could use statistics to excuse the existance of The Artifact, that the Caeliar missed a cube, but even then, the fact that no one makes reference to the fact that the Borg are gone, and all the ex-Borg (including Seven) still having their Borg implants is really hard to reconcile, unless you just ignore the specifics of the end of Destiny,
I guess you could use statistics to excuse the existance of The Artifact, that the Caeliar missed a cube, but even then, the fact that no one makes reference to the fact that the Borg are gone, and all the ex-Borg (including Seven) still having their Borg implants is really hard to reconcile, unless you just ignore the specifics of the end of Destiny,
Isn’t there a piece of dialogue where Picard says the Borg are still out there.
Of course, I could be remembering that wrong.
I'm not sure what you mean. It's all one continuity. "Relaunches" are not separate series; it's just a nickname for books that continue a series's narrative beyond its onscreen finale. (Indeed, it's a misused nickname, since strictly speaking you can't keep calling something a "launch" after it's already been launched. The term was originally just meant for the promotional campaign surrounding the new beginning -- the literal re-launching -- of the DS9 novel series.)
Naturally, any part of the novel continuity is subject to contradiction by new screen canon. However, so far, the new continuity established by Picard is only inconsistent with the novels from Destiny onward, and probably with the TNG novel narrative from Death in Winter onward (because Picard and Crusher never got together). Nothing prior to Nemesis has been contradicted yet -- naturally enough, since of course all the books had to be consistent with established onscreen continuity up through Nemesis, which new screen canon can be expected to stay mostly consistent with as well. But it's always possible that PIC or Lower Decks or season 3 of Discovery or whatever could reveal something about the fate of DS9's or Voyager's crew that contradicts the novels' conjectures, or something about the Romulan War or the early days of the Federation that invalidates the post-series ENT novels. That's always the gamble taken by tie-in fiction.
I never said they were fanfics. Don’t know where you got that from.
I wouldn’t say the nova in Picard was more interesting. If anything they made it sound more dull. I liked the more radical idea given in the movie. All it needed was some More explanation and it could have worked.
I wouldn’t say the nova in Picard was more interesting. If anything they made it sound more dull. I liked the more radical idea given in the movie. All it needed was some More explanation and it could have worked.
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You were assuming we had the option to ignore certain parts of canon. Only fanfic writers have that freedom, because they're working only for their own entertainment. Professional tie-in writers are doing a job defined for us by our employer, which in this case is CBS. We therefore do not have the liberty to ignore parts of CBS's canon.
It was utterly nonsensical from a scientific standpoint and incoherently presented. Picard's version is not.
Come on now. You of all people could make sense of it.
David Mack Said there was a plan when it comes to the novels. Hopefully it’s just a split. You have the prime novel verse series and the new timeline set up by Picard.
Or they go the comic book route and have some big event that meshes the two continuities together.
Come on now. You of all people could make sense of it.
Yes, that's exactly why it's so great! I spent years trying to come up with a way to make sense of the movie's absurd supernova and never came up with anything that satisfied me. Picard came up with a far more sensible and elegant explanation than anything I was able to think up, and that's why I admire it.
It’s fun to try to figure out what might have been. What’s makes it even cooler is the fact that most of the authors are on here.
my only grip is we don’t get to see the full fallout from the section 31 revelations. I was really looking forward to seeing what would become of Sisko and Garak
my only grip is we don’t get to see the full fallout from the section 31 revelations. I was really looking forward to seeing what would become of Sisko and Garak
I was hoping to see more of the trial with Nechayev and the other top brass.
A final DS9 novel with this would be great .
Most definitely.
I understand all the reasons why it's unlikely we see anything other than TOS, Picard, and Discovery novels for a bit, but given that we're more awash in televised Trek than at any point in decades, it feels wrong for there to be so few books hitting the shelves.
Yeah, I know that two-books-per-month wasn't always great for quality control. But if we're really about to have six different series in rotation on CBSAA and Nickelodeon...that seems to indicate enough interest in Trek to drive demand for the lit.
The new shows have their charms, but none of them have captured my interest like the first five series. I honestly prefer the novels to the new shows at this point (and that's not meant to be a knock on the shows), and would just like more to read.
What I meant was, that the post-Dominion War, pre-NEM period (2376-2378/9) novel continuity (hat we call the DS9 Relaunch etc., influence the post-NEM novels to a great extent - occurrences around Bajor/DS9, the adventures of the VOY crew in post-finale novels (the Christie Golden ones), adjacent series and characters like SCE/CoE, IKS Gorkon crew etc - all coming into play in the post-NEM period.
So basically, if the Novelverse timeline circa 2380-2386 contains developments from previous years (2376-2378/9) and at the same time cannot be reconciled with the onscreen timeline, I was wondering if we would see contradictions with other parts of Trek (DS9, VOY) down the line..
It's the way of the modern world. As it is, at eight novels a year, Star Trek is still publishing more tie-in novels than most other franchises. Star Wars usually only does six, and it's arguably more popular than Star Trek.
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