Books Whose Information Became Canon
- Thread starter Tiberius1701170
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In the Shatnerverse mirror universe, first contact went normally. It diverged from the prime universe when Zefram Cochrane decided to tell the world about the Borg, which led to the militaristic Terran Empire. This was first contradicted by Regeneration, which revealed that Cochrane did tell the world about the Borg but no one believed him. In a Mirror Darkly would later establish that the Terran Empire has existed for centuries.
Care to elaborate?
Admiral Luther Whitetree offered prune juice to Klingon Captain Krenn while visiting the Federation, though he quickly thought better of it, noting that the Medical Corps would object. (TOS novel: "The Final Reflection"). [Memory Beta.]
Right. It doesn't make much sense that everything would be exactly the same before First Contact, yet the humans would arbitrarily, inexplicably meet the Vulcans with violence rather than peaceful greeting. There would need to be some prior reason for them to react so differently. The idea was not to show the moment of divergence, just to show the audience a familiar event and then shock us by changing the outcome. The "Mirror" main titles and Phlox's history discussion made it clear that the MU's darker history stretched back much further.
If anything, the prose version of the MU that comes closest to IaMD is Diane Duane's Dark Mirror, which also posited that the MU had always been a darker reflection of our history, rather than having a specific point of divergence. Both even allude to Shakespeare in discussing the differences, yet they approach his work in opposite directions; Duane's Picard reads a rewritten version of Shakespeare that's crueler than ours (Portia treats "the quality of mercy" with contempt rather than celebration), while Mirror Phlox asserts that Shakespeare's canon is the one thing that's exactly the same in both universes. So it's hard to tell if the resonance is intentional or accidental.
Well he says they’re equally as grim.
So there could be differences just the Terran version isn’t grimmer? Idk
For years, I've always felt that the point of divergence was that "Requiem for a Martian" wasn't a hoax in the MU.
If I'm not mistaken, Tellarites' liking for mud baths wasn't canonised until ENT's "Babel One", but was mentioned in The Ashes of Eden.
My first thought was that that could easily be a coincidence, an obvious riff on their resemblance to pigs. Then I remembered that Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens were on the writing staff in season 4, so I guess they could've carried it forward from their own previous work.
This was my thinking too.
Picard season 1 episode 4, "Absolute Candor", named the legislative building on Romulus as the "Hall of State", which was coined by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz in 1999's Vulcan's Heart.
Picard season 1 episode 9, "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1", referred to the Vulcan lyre as ka'athyra, which was coined by Margaret Wander Bonnano in 1985's Dwellers in the Crucible.
This thread has been charting canonical details of ancillary origin for Picard.
Picard season 1 episode 9, "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1", referred to the Vulcan lyre as ka'athyra, which was coined by Margaret Wander Bonnano in 1985's Dwellers in the Crucible.
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/things-from-the-litverse-that-were-canonized-in-picard.302763/
This thread has been charting canonical details of ancillary origin for Picard.
Romulan names in Picard seemed to have been inspired in part by the Rihannsu novels. Although looking at Michael Chabon's notes on his Romulans there are plenty of differences too.
Thanks everyone for these great answers. I'm glad there was more than I realized.
This query was sparked because of how Star Wars brought Grand Admiral Thrawn in from their Legends continuity into the mainstream one. I couldn't think of such a thing occurring in Star Trek, where a major character or event was brought in like that.
This query was sparked because of how Star Wars brought Grand Admiral Thrawn in from their Legends continuity into the mainstream one. I couldn't think of such a thing occurring in Star Trek, where a major character or event was brought in like that.
Star Wars has canonized quite a few characters, planets, etc. that originated in tie-ins -- Aayla Secura, Quinlan Vos, kyber (Kaiburr) crystals, Mimban, etc. The difference is that, until the modern era of Star Wars TV series, there wasn't remotely as much onscreen material to draw on as Star Trek had. Not only did that give them more incentive and opportunity to borrow ideas from the abundant tie-ins, but the SW franchise has been more dependent on its ancillary merchandise (largely the toys, but also the comics, games, and books) to maintain fan interest in between movies. Also, its tie-ins have mostly presented a single unified version of the universe, while Trek tie-ins have offered a range of contradictory possibilities.
So do you feel that in practice Star Trek, with its hundreds of novels, would have too hard a time pulling something that could be incorporated into an episode or movie? That the media culture for Star Trek is mainly satisfied with what has been done on screen and thus views novel details as easter eggs to sprinkle in every once and a while?
Of course not. I'm saying the opposite of that -- it's not that there's too much tie-in material, it's that there's so much more canonical material to draw on as a source of ideas that there's little incentive draw on supplementary material to fill in the gaps. Whereas Star Wars's screen canon, until recent years, had a huge amount of gaps in what it showed, and a proportionally huge amount of unified tie-in material to draw from.
And it's not about "easy" or "hard." It's never hard to borrow an existing idea. It's just a question of where, proportionally, you can find the most ideas to draw on. It's been mentioned in this thread that TMP incorporated references from the Star Fleet Technical Manual in its voiceovers and graphics. That wasn't out of some deep-seated need to "canonize" that material -- it's just because it was there, because it was convenient to draw on it as a source of background texture at a time when there was really nothing else available that was comparable to it. There wasn't that much canon material at the time, so there was more room for the tie-ins to be noticed as a potential source.
When TNG and the later shows came along, the canon content proliferated so much that the tie-ins receded in relative significance, and thus there was less likelihood that they'd be noticed by the creators. But now we see the new creators researching on Memory Beta and the like and borrowing ideas from that -- perhaps because the shows have been off the air for a while whereas the tie-in material has proliferated in the interim.
Or maybe it's simpler than that. Producers of a show have little time to pay attention to whatever new tie-in stuff is coming out at the time, but they can always draw on the stuff that was already out years before, that's had time to establish itself in people's awareness or in the reference sources.
Who said anything about "media culture?" What's that got to do with anything? The people writing and producing a show are just looking for ideas they can use. If there's something that already exists that they can borrow (and that the studio already owns), then it saves them work. And if the amount of canonical screen material is small relative to the amount of tie-in material, that makes it more likely that they'll look to tie-in material as a source of ideas to borrow.
Which is slightly improbable. The Shakespeare canon is what was preserved, so in an alternate history they might have versions of plays now lost, but politically problematical ones might have been lost, or censored.
Well, Phlox presumably meant that the parts he read were the same. He probably didn't have time to do a comprehensive comparison.
Still, I'm not a fan of either version of the "it was evil all along" view of the MU. I prefer the idea of a comparatively recent divergence, and my interpretation of IaMD (which also works for Dark Mirror) is that the Empire rewrote past history and literary works to make it look like the Empire had always existed and its ideology had always been the only one.
But of course! Yes.
I did.
Since you were confused, let me spin this another way. Star Trek has a rich literary background, with hundred of stories that could be used in some capacity in a movie or television episode. Not all of them should be, of course, but when you have something that is for example a best seller, how come no one is approaching that as a potential idea to use? I get that Star Wars didn't (and still doesn't) have the plethora of TV media to engage with, but at least those show creators know when a popular character like Thrawn or a concept like kyber crystals should be incorporated. Couldn't Trek do the same?
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