Yeah, it is a visual medium, after all.
So is live theater, but you can still use your imagination to pretend the stage in front of you is a mountaintop or a castle or a battlefield rather than just a bunch of wood boards and painted backdrops. So are comic books and animation, but you can still use your imagination to pretend that the ink-and-paint drawings you're looking at are actually living people in real physical places. It may be visual, but it is still a
medium, a vehicle for artistic expression, and thus it is missing the point to insist it must be taken absolutely literally.
One of the most unpleasant things to emerge in fictional IP in my lifetime has been the obsession with continuity and the significance of trivia. Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoy when writers can tie trivia together in fun and unexpected ways, or can come up with an amazing retcon, and my neurodivergent brain *loves* making timelines of fictional universes and reconciling different stories, but when it gets to the point that you can't enjoy or advance a story because you're too stuck picking nits, there may be a problem.
Amen to all of this. I love playing with continuity, but it's a means to the end of entertainment, not an absolute dogma that overrides everything else. And you can hope for strong continuity while still having enough basic maturity and common sense to understand that absolutely
perfect continuity is never going to be attainable, especially in a huge sprawling franchise created by hundreds of different minds over half a century, and that sometimes you just have to accept the humanity of the creators, the fact that sometimes they will be imperfect or change their minds and rely on your good graces as the audience to suspend disbelief, the same way an audience in live theater learns to forgive the inevitable fumbled lines and missed cues.
That all said, one of the major advantages I think the original lines of Trek originals had, both Bantam and Pocket, was that they started after the show had ended. The writers (presumably) knew the characters and settings and had had plenty of time for them to sink in. Very different than the earliest novels in TNG on where writers may have been writing original stories based on little more than the pilot script and concept art, or the poor DS9 writers writing Cardassian and Bajoran stuff even as those stories were unfolding slowly in the show. One of several reasons I think the overall quality (let alone the interconnectedness) of Trek Lit exploded post-VOY and Nemesis.
I don't think this really holds up, because if anything, those early books had far
looser continuity than the later ones. Yes, they didn't have to worry about new episodes coming along to contradict them, but they didn't always remember the old episodes accurately, because they only had a few reference books and edited-for-syndication reruns to go on. And many authors had never even seen the animated series, or chose to ignore it, so some acknowledged it and others contradicted it.
Not only that, but so much of the Trek universe was still undefined that there was plenty of room for different novelists to fill in the gaps in wildly divergent ways, so that there were notable differences in the portrayal of the universe between Joe Haldeman, David Gerrold, Kathleen Sky, Vonda McIntyre, Diane Duane, Diane Carey, A.C. Crispin, J.M. Dillard, etc. And there was no effort at the time to reconcile different books with one another, not until the occasional author started choosing to reference Duane's Rihannsu or John M. Ford's Klingons or what-have-you.
Personally, I loved that wide-open, wild-and-wooly era, when
Star Trek wasn't some well-defined set of strictures to operate within, but a loose theme that different writers could reinterpret in their own voice and style. It was the very lack of uniformity that made the different interpretations so interesting -- IDIC and all that. It made ST feel populist, something individuals could define as they chose, rather than a doctrine imposed from the top down the way many modern fans seem to expect and want it to be.
