Question on Richard Arnold and his role

[Therin of Andor]

I've never understood this kind of attitude, part of what I love about for tie-ins is that they often can do things you couldn't see on the TV shows.

We forget that licensed tie-ins are bought and read by less than 2% of the viewing audience. I was shocked, throughout 1980, as a newbie Trek fan, how much anger and irritation that novelisations and original tie-ins cause for some diehard fans. Also some fanfic creators and readers are amazingly opposed to licensed fiction.

it was the tie ins that kept Star Trek alive and moving when there were no new shows on the air

Not only. They still represented 2%. A larger group would be comprised of convention attendees, fan club gatherings, fanzines, newsletters, K/S material, fan art, fan craft, plus syndication TV audiences with new fans finding the show every day, etc...

 

[Desert Kris]

We forget that licensed tie-ins are bought and read by less than 2% of the viewing audience. I was shocked, throughout 1980, as a newbie Trek fan, how much anger and irritation that novelisations and original tie-ins cause for some diehard fans. Also some fanfic creators and readers are amazingly opposed to licensed fiction.

That sounds so strange. They're just good fun, nothing more serious than that. Even an average Star Trek novel can have a moment of brilliance where I'm in a character's head, inside a version of the Star Trek universe. Sometimes a book can put us into Star Trek by triggering all of our senses, if we let the book do so, putting us more within the setting than the passive experience of viewing a television episode (not meaning to knock the television episodes by saying that). People got angry? Why get angry and feel threatened by books that just aim to be good fun?

 

[Therin of Andor]

Desert Kris said: People got angry? Why get angry and feel threatened by books that just aim to be good fun?

Because, for hundreds of reasons, they are not "good fun" for them. One of the weirdest experiences in my first year of fandom: fans who gave all manner of cranky reasons for not buying or reading media tie-ins.

* The events never happened. (RA had not yet popularised the term "canon".)

* The novelization has things that didn't happen in the film. (Wow, did that one blow up, when Australia had to wait six extra months for ST III's premiere, and I had been promoting its novelization to our club membership.)

* The likenesses on the covers and in the comics "never look like the actors" or they are wearing the wrong uniforms.

* This book "has the wrong stardate"/"uses the wrong warp speed".

* Spock doesn't sound like Spock.

* It has a Mary Sue in it.

* They are "too safe" (compared to K/S fanfic).

* They are too expensive.

And so on. Totally crazy. Essentially, shorthand for "I have better ways to... spend my money/be a Trek fan".

(Eventually novelizations began to evolve into prose versions of scripts and teleplays, with no additional scenes at all.)

... the passive experience of viewing...

You got it. Some fans want to stay passive.

 

[Csalem]

We forget that licensed tie-ins are bought and read by less than 2% of the viewing audience. I was shocked, throughout 1980, as a newbie Trek fan, how much anger and irritation that novelisations and original tie-ins cause for some diehard fans. Also some fanfic creators and readers are amazingly opposed to licensed fiction.



Not only. They still represented 2%. A larger group would be comprised of convention attendees, fan club gatherings, fanzines, newsletters, K/S material, fan art, fan craft, plus syndication TV audiences with new fans finding the show every day, etc...

And discussion forums. TrekBBS has been going for a long time keeping Trek "alive" but I would love to know what percentage of posters on this board read the books. One of the review threads for a Destiny book here only has 135 votes so this forum may only represent 2% of the 2%.

 

[Damian]

Because, for hundreds of reasons, they are not "good fun" for them. One of the weirdest experiences in my first year of fandom: fans who gave all manner of cranky reasons for not buying or reading media tie-ins.

* The events never happened. (RA had not yet popularised the term "canon".)

* The novelization has things that didn't happen in the film. (Wow, did that one blow up, when Australia had to wait six extra months for ST III's premiere, and I had been promoting its novelization to our club membership.)

* The likenesses on the covers and in the comics "never look like the actors" or they are wearing the wrong uniforms.

* This book "has the wrong stardate"/"uses the wrong warp speed".

* Spock doesn't sound like Spock.

* It has a Mary Sue in it.

* They are "too safe" (compared to K/S fanfic).

* They are too expensive.

And so on. Totally crazy. Essentially, shorthand for "I have better ways to... spend my money/be a Trek fan".

(Eventually novelizations began to evolve into prose versions of scripts and teleplays, with no additional scenes at all.)



You got it. Some fans want to stay passive.

Just a note for accuracy's sake, the quote you were responding to in this post was from @Desert Kris . Not sure how it was attributed to me but just wanted to clarify.

 

[plynch]

As a first gen fan, a 70s kid who still has his Trek poster books, Tech Manual, photonovels, etc. . . .

Oddly I never read Trek novels.

I don't really read fiction much, though.

I got a Destiny as a stocking stuffer, so bought the rest. I've read a couple of Greg's and Christopher's just because I now "know" them. Pretty enjoyable by the way. I think I am just not a fiction reader, though I had an English major. (Still do. They don't expire, do they?

 

[Damian]

And discussion forums. TrekBBS has been going for a long time keeping Trek "alive" but I would love to know what percentage of posters on this board read the books. One of the review threads for a Destiny book here only has 135 votes so this forum may only represent 2% of the 2%.

Well, to be honest, I'm not sure how you determine the percentage of fans that read the novels to begin with. I do agree we are just a sliver of the total fandom but not sure what the percentage really is.

I wouldn't go by the polls here though. I know I've been a Trekkie since 1986, yet I only just found TrekBBS in 2017. So how many Trekkies actually come on TrekBBS? I suspect this is just a fraction of the total sampling of fans.

 

[KRAD]

Well, to be honest, I'm not sure how you determine the percentage of fans that read the novels to begin with.

Trek novels sell in five to six figures, but the six-figure numbers are on the low end. Trek TV shows reach an audience of seven figures. It's simple math.

 

[Damian]

Trek novels sell in five to six figures, but the six-figure numbers are on the low end. Trek TV shows reach an audience of seven figures. It's simple math.

About what I expected I guess. I imagine for many franchises the tie-ins usually are just a small part of the total fandom.

Still, however small, the tie-ins (including comics and games for that matter) kept Star Trek moving when there was almost nothing else.

I frequently see in entertainment franchises if something isn't moving it's dead. The tie ins kept a small part of the franchise alive for 4 years until Star Trek (2009) was released, and then the intervening years between movies until it got going on TV again.

Much of the credit goes to the movies of course, but the tie-ins did their small part as well.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I'd like to see them bring Elias Vaughn into the TV shows.

It hadn't occurred to me, but Elias Vaughn in Picard could be interesting. I don't know what you'd do with him, but maybe that's the character Ian McKellen could play. Though I'd rather see him as a rival vintner in France who's perpetually hostile to ol' Jean-Luc, and then we discover that McKellen thinks of Jean-Luc as his best friend.

 

[GeorgeKirk]

Arnold had a Q&A in Star Trek Magazine, where he'd answer questions people had about the Star Trek universe, and he could be a real jackhole. I remember one time he wrote, emphatically, that (from memory), "There is no such character as Elias Vaughn!" when someone wrote in asking about the DS9 novels.

See, stuff like this is why I can't stand the guy. He could have just said that the novels aren't considered part of the "main" Star Trek universe of the TV shows and movies but instead he had to be a raging dickhole about it.

He was always self-importantly denigrating people who wrote for the licensed properties but not the shows (Peter David, Margaret Wander Bonanno, etc.) by insisting they weren't "Star Trek writers". But what was he? Just some guy whose only talent was memorizing a bunch of trivia about a TV show! Hell, Gene Roddenberry would only hire you as assistant if you'd work for free or if you were a woman who'd submit to his sexual advances! Neither of those are something to be proud of. And yet Arnold always acted like his job as Gene's unpaid or underpaid manservant made him better than people with actual marketable skills!

One of his favorite stories to tell is about the time Eddie Murphy (or more likely, one of his people) called the Star Trek offices to ask for the name of the episode where Kirk has sex with a green woman and Arnold got to tell them there is no such episode. In his mind this was obviously a big "win" for him. But at the end of that phone call, Eddie Murphy was still a fabulously wealthy international superstar and Richard Arnold was still the underpaid assistant for a fading TV producer whose professional peak was 2 decades behind him.

Truthfully, I kind of feel bad for the guy. Lots of Hollywood assistants have used that job as a stepping stone to better things. But Richard Arnold never developed any other skill besides knowing a lot of Star Trek trivia, and now the Internet has made that completely irrelevant. I wonder how he pays his bills. Yeah, I hate pretty much everything he's ever done (except for passing Ron Moore's spec script along to the producers) but I hope he has what he needs to live.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Whom Gods Destroy. Although probably not. She was, after all, torn between a desire to screw Kirk, and a desire to stab him.

 

[Greg Cox]

About what I expected I guess. I imagine for many franchises the tie-ins usually are just a small part of the total fandom..

Oh, yeah, two-percent of the viewing audience is pretty standard for tie-in novels in general, not just STAR TREK. Based on ratings vs. sales figures.

John Ordover once correctly guessed how Tor's FARSCAPE books were selling just by looking at the viewing numbers for TV show. Sure enough, it was approximately 2% of the TV audience.

 

[David cgc]

I do wonder if Star Trek's transition to streaming has had any effect on that proportion. Maybe moreso a few years ago, when CBSAA had just started and it sounded like a significant amount of the people signing up were specifically seeking out Star Trek: Discovery rather than having access to CBSAA anyway (the way they would to a regular TV station) and checking out Star Trek casually. From what I've seen, the sub numbers have gone up and proportion of Trek viewers compared to subscriptions have gone down, so things might be returning to a less Trek-fan-focused audience breakdown.

 

[Greg Cox]

I think I am just not a fiction reader, though I had an English major. (Still do. They don't expire, do they?

I was a chem major who ended up writing fiction for a living. Go figure.

Had I but known, I would have taken a lot more English courses in college.

 

[Christopher]

I was a chem major who ended up writing fiction for a living. Go figure.

Had I but known, I would have taken a lot more English courses in college.

I think it was Ray Bradbury who said that if you want to be a writer, the last thing you should do is take writing classes. Either you have the talent or you don't, and the best training is actually doing it. So it's more important to study other aspects of life so you can use that knowledge in your writing. (Although he surely said it more poetically.)

 

[DS9forever]

Was it Arnold who said something like "Elias Vaughn isn't real!"

EDIT: Sorry, I see Allyn Gibson has mentioned this already.

To quote Behr and Wolfe in Legends of the Ferengi: "We hate to break this to you, but Quark is a fictional character. ... While we're at it, Picard wasn't real either. And we have serious doubts about the Easter Bunny".

 

[Greg Cox]

I think it was Ray Bradbury who said that if you want to be a writer, the last thing you should do is take writing classes. Either you have the talent or you don't, and the best training is actually doing it. So it's more important to study other aspects of life so you can use that knowledge in your writing. (Although he surely said it more poetically.)

I'm not sure I agree with that. There's certainly value in studying other subjects as well, as well as acquiring varied life experiences, but I benefited from various writing classes over the years. As far back as college, I took a good course on "Writing Commercial Fiction" from an English professor who wrote murder mysteries on the side, and I later attended the Clarion West SFF Writing Workshop, where my instructors included such Trek luminaries as Vonda McIntyre, Norman Spinrad, and, most significantly, David Hartwell, who launched Pocket's STAR TREK book line in the first place.

I like to think of myself as a second-generation Trek writer since I was taught by Vonda, Norman, and David.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

If Vonda McIntyre, whose first ST opus was a post-TMP novel, was a "first-generation Trek writer," then Norman Spinrad, having written "The Doomsday Machine," would have to be "zero-generation." At any rate, your credentials are as impressive as your writing.

There is some truth to Bradbury's assertion (even the best writing teachers are blind to the fact that there is no such thing as "fiction without a genre," since contemporary realism is a genre in and of itself). But then again, the best sort of writing classes are classes in which you are "actually doing it," and getting far more feedback from your classmates than from the instructor.

 

[Greg Cox]

If Vonda McIntyre, whose first ST opus was a post-TMP novel, was a "first-generation Trek writer," then Norman Spinrad, having written "The Doomsday Machine," would have to be "zero-generation." At any rate, your credentials are as impressive as your writing.

There is some truth to Bradbury's assertion (even the best writing teachers are blind to the fact that there is no such thing as "fiction without a genre," since contemporary realism is a genre in and of itself). But then again, the best sort of writing classes are classes in which you are "actually doing it," and getting far more feedback from your classmates than from the instructor.

And perhaps when your instructors are actually professional writers and editors in their own right.

As noted, the only creative-writing course I took in college was from a professor, the late R.D. Brown, who wrote detective novels on the side. He wasn't a sci-fi guy, but he didn't disdain "genre" or "commercial" fiction since he wrote it, too. He encouraged me to write SF and fantasy if that's what I wanted to do.