I really loved “Uhura’s Song.” Excellent world building.
A Little Bit of Love For Diane Carey
- Thread starter Cake Is Eternal
- Start date
On the whole, I don't think TAS is any campier than TOS. Giant Spock clones are no sillier than giant Apollo. The Terratins shrinking the crew is no sillier than Flint shrinking the entire Enterprise. Lucien and Megas-tu are no weirder than Sylvia and Korob. Backward-aging Arretians are somewhat sillier than accelerated Scalosians, but not by much.
Exactly, which makes it feel connected to TOS, which I understand some of the writers intended to be Season 4, instead of something separate.
I probably shouldn't admit this, but I'm not terribly well-versed in TAS either, which leads to similar moments. "Why didn't you reference X?"
"Um, who is X?"
But, yeah, I started writing TREK novels in the era when we weren't supposed cite TAS so I never got around to watching it -- and still tend to forget about it.
"Who is X?" must be the bane of a Star Trek writer's existence.
*reads thread title*
*checks thread content*
Whew, I thought this would be another memorial thread for a newly-deceased person.
*checks thread content*
Whew, I thought this would be another memorial thread for a newly-deceased person.
Nostalgia: There was a time when TAS was not always easily viewed. I still remember spending an entire weekend pounding the pavement in NYC trying to find a VHS copy of "The Counter-Clock Incident" so I could write a Robert April story for a Trek anthology. Finally tracked one down in this mom-and-pop video store in the East Village, but it was NOT easy to find.
This would have been around 1999.
Yu
Yup that’s the Star Trek era I grew up in and started writing in too. I only knew the Alan Dean Foster novelization of “Counterclock Incident” until about a year ago. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to have a completely different ending.
There is also an interview with her from the late Eighties in Starlog where she explicitly talks about how those novels were a self-insertion narrative for her, her husband, and their friends.
It's a little mystifying on both fronts. I mean, a gig is a gig, but Carey is so clearly just a TOS fan (with a workable take on it, as Allyn said, recognisable if distinct from how others like Duane or McIntyre interpreted the series at the time) that one wonders why she'd keep writing for the later series when she wasn't interested in diligent research and her only "enjoyment" came from undermining those characters in the text itself.
The editorial approach is even more confusing, though--surely, there were other writers available who were familiar with this milieu and could also meet a tight deadline?
Best I can think of is at the time Diane Carey did seem to be the go-to author for novelizations of episodes. Indeed, between the period of Descent (her first novelization) and Broken Bow (her last) there were fifteen novelizations published, eleven of them written by her.
Indeed. We had some correspondence about Dr. Stavos Keniclius, of the Eugenics Wars, when you were writing your Khan trilogy.
(Kevin Lauderdale did end up using him in the short story "The Rules of War" [anthology, "Strange New Worlds IX"].)
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Yeah, I didn't see them until I got my own computer in 2000. I'd read the first 6 logs of Alan Dean Foster books when I was younger.
"The Great Starship Race" is one of my favorite Trek books. It's just fun.
I'm a big fan of "Final Frontier". It was one of the first Trek books I ever read. (imagine how confusing that was)
I'm a big fan of "Final Frontier". It was one of the first Trek books I ever read. (imagine how confusing that was)
That's just it, though: No professional in her situation should ever think that 'a gig is a gig.' In my career as an audiobook narrator, I've read plenty of utterly crap books. But my personal feelings about the book would never come out in my narration. As a matter of fact, I would strive to make that book sound like the greatest audio ever recorded, despite whatever the subject matter was or how badly the book was written. Because it's not my job to critique the book, it's my job to narrate it.
Yeah, I think it was a bad move on her part. It's pretty telling she hasn't written any Star Trek novels since then. I suppose it's possible she didn't want to write any more Star Trek novels, but still, why burn your bridges.
I would just think, in any franchise, that it'd be a bad move to bad mouth the source material in a novel you are writing for that show. As a fan, we all have the luxury of opining, and even some of our writers have done that here and elsewhere, but never in a story they are writing for that show.
She had plans for more Star Trek novels. She talked in an interview about what she wanted to do with Nick Keller and the crew of the Challenger post-Gateways.
I always wished we could have seen more Challenger novels. I enjoyed the post-New Earth book she did for the Gateways series. Keller reminded me just a bit like Captain Calhoun on New Frontier.
I honestly don't know how things work in Star Trek publishing, but if I didn't like the story I was going to have to write for I would either ask to be replaced, or if that wasn't possible then I'd just try to make the best of it. Sometimes, with novelizations, you can use the narrative to explain away certain things. Ok, so you think this plot point is ridiculous. Is there some way you can clean it up in the novel so it sounds better. But you don't say it's a ridiculous plot point in the book.
I mean, worse case scenario it can even follow you to other franchises. If you wanted to write for some other franchise and they heard about it they might not be inclined to take you on.
I have always assumed that Vanguard reached what seemed like its intended conclusion. I have no idea if Mack, Ward, Dilmore, and Palmieri had plans to keep going before the recession hit; at the time, it seemed to me like there were plenty of other stories to tell with those characters/in that world, but it also made a certain sense that What Judgments Come and Storming Heaven (plus In Tempest's Wake, I suppose) just launched into the endgame after Declassified.
In retrospect, it's amazing that Vanguard got an ending at all. It seems like most of the book-only lines - Stargazer, certainly, but Challenger seemed like it was being positioned to launch something new - just died unceremonious deaths.
@Allyn Gibson - do you happen to remember what Carey intended to do with the character, pre-bridge-burning?
We (Dave, Kevin, and myself) discussed where things would go after Precipice and decided the time was right to start thinking about wrapping things up. Vanguard had always been envisioned as a "limited series" with a defined ending, even though Dave had planned for the possibility of letting things run a bit in order to tell stories which didn't serve (primarily) to drive the main narrative. However, we were all caught up in the main storylines and didn't really want to deviate from those. We also figured we had the chance to end it all on our terms rather than because our editors told us it was time to do it or - worse - the series was cancelled due to low sales or some other reason out of our control. So, as a united front, we pitched The Ending together.
And they said no.
Not only did they say no, but even licensing actually balked at the idea. That's how well received Vanguard was on that end of things at the time. They wanted to know why we'd give up a good thing. To their credit, both our editors and licensing gave us a chance to make our case, and then respected and supported our decision, with one caveat: We provide at least one more book to add to the 2011 roster, so the finale could be better positioned, etc. That gave birth to the Declassified idea.
As for side stories and such featuring Vanguard characters...the idea survived after a fashion, as we eventually pitched the Seekers series.
I can find links to Carey's interview (which was at David Henderson's old Psi Phi board), but archive.org doesn't have that page archived.
IIRC, Starfleet was going to assign another starship to take up station at Belle Terre, to replace the ship that was destroyed in Challenger (which Scotty salvaged to build the Challenger), Keller was going to receive orders to return to Federation space (a court-martial for his actions in Challenger, maybe?), he'd resign and essentially "go native" as a privateer for Belle Terre, and there would be a tension there between him and the Starfleet presence. The book(s) would have explored that tension and what life outside of Starfleet would be like.
I have no idea how far she got with it, if it was just a concept she was talking about with John Ordover or if she'd actually written a proposal that was sitting with Paramount Licensing when Berman and Braga said they didn't want her working on Star Trek projects any more. The concept is workable, but I wonder if Licensing might have had trouble with Carey painting Starfleet as antagonists as this seems to.
Not so much in Stargazer's case. The 6 books we got are basically a complete "season" with an arc that's resolved in the final volume. I think it was planned out as just those 6 books, with the option for continuing them afterward. It's just that the option wasn't exercised.
