Are novels canon
- Thread starter Krog
- Start date
There's no debate. Star Trek novels and comics are NOT canon. Never have been. Are not now.
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/thread
No. No Star Trek novels or comics have ever been canonical and none of them are ever likely to be.
They are not. But, being owned by the same copyright holders people can draw upon them if they wish to and navigate whatever writes have to be done.
But, they are not regarded as canon.
Any canon is still just a bunch of imaginary stories. Canons often draw ideas from other, non-canonical continuities -- for instance, the Superman comics adopted Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, and kryptonite from the 1940s radio series even though they were in incompatible continuities. And modern Star Wars often borrows planets, species, and characters from the old Extended Universe even though it contradicts the overall continuity they belonged to. It's all make-believe, and different versions of a story often borrow ideas from each other but do their own things with them.
"Canon" is a word whose meaning is far less important than fan mythology would have it. It's just a nickname for the complete body of works from the original creators or owners of a series, as distinct from imitative works from outside creators such as tie-in literature or fan fiction. As a rule, the only time canonical tie-ins are practical is when the original creators are directly involved with them, as with the Buffy and Firefly comics overseen by Joss Whedon or the Avatar: The Last Airbender comics plotted by the show's creators. It's generally impractical to have canonical tie-ins to a series currently in production, since the creators are too busy with the series itself to oversee the books closely. That's why the only canonical Buffy comics are the ones released after the series ended, and why the attempt to publish canonical Babylon 5 novels during the series failed, with only two of the books being counted as canonical after the fact.
Yes, Star Wars has its Story Group that's supposedly responsible for keeping the tie-ins canonical, but that's exceptional because Disney/Lucasfilm has a huge bureaucracy able to manage all that. And despite the Story Group's existence, new screen canon has already contradicted several supposedly "canonical" tie-in stories. Even onscreen canon is sometimes contradicted by new storytelling, e.g. Leia remembering her birth mother. Because canon isn't "reality," just a set of stories, and all stories can be rewritten.
And that's why you can't really have canonical tie-ins to an ongoing franchise -- because the core material will always set its own course, and there's no way for supplemental or peripheral materials to ensure consistency with it. Today, there's just so much new Trek being produced that it would be prohibitive even to try it.
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That is the illusion. The illusion suck's us in, makes us start believing the lies then we try to add it to a discussion and {{{POW}}} right in the kisser.
Yeah, a beta canon, separate from the real canon.
Ummm, Uhura, Sulu and a bunch of Discovery characters' first names came straight from the novels. Control from Discovery season 2 is a very loose adaptation of the big bad from the novel Section 31: Control. Jankom Pog's Tellarite cursing in Prodigy is again, straight from the novels.
But the novels aren't canon. Not entirely sure TOS is these days - how can it play in the same world as SNW? As others have said, it's all a bunch of imaginary stories, built up over 55 years.
Lastly, don't confuse canon with quality. Some of the novels are freaking amazing. Others are crap and a lot are inbetween - just like the TV episodes.
Sure it's canon. How it intersects with other shows is up to the viewer. I treat TOS as an in universe dramatization of Kirk's logs. Life is simple.
Every Trek TV series is part of the canon, by definition, but canon is not continuity. Large canons contradict themselves all the time -- e.g. Marvel Comics treating all its stories back to the beginning as part of the same continuity, but constantly retconning stories originally set in the 1960s or 1970s to be closer to the present. Or M*A*S*H running for 11 years while depicting the 3-year Korean War, and bumping the date references back from 1953 to 1951 when they realized they weren't going to be cancelled anytime soon and needed the wiggle room. A canon is just a set of stories that pretend to be a consistent whole even when they rewrite themselves. After all, any ongoing creative enterprise is a process of revision and improvement, changing as it goes. In a novel or movie, you only see the final version, but in an ongoing series, you see it being rethought and revised in progress.
Gene Roddenberry's own view was apparently that TOS was a dramatization of Kirk's logs rather than a literal depiction. He saw ST:TMP and TNG as opportunities to improve on it and fix its mistakes and shortcomings, and he approached them as more accurate depictions of things that TOS portrayed inaccurately, e.g. the Klingons' appearance or the advancement of the technology. We just have to assume that the underlying world is consistent even though the 1960s interpretation of it and the 2020s interpretation of it are naturally different from one another in their details.
Very easily.
The canon is simply the body of work, in this case televised and cinematic.
How well it all fits together is another matter entirely.
If we go by the introductory section of Roddenberry's own TMP novelization, Roddenberry thought that even any visual depictions of the events surrounding V'Ger (i.e. the movie itself) should not be considered as accurate as his "definitive" prose account of the real story.
Kor
How well it all fits together is another matter entirely.
If we go by the introductory section of Roddenberry's own TMP novelization, Roddenberry thought that even any visual depictions of the events surrounding V'Ger (i.e. the movie itself) should not be considered as accurate as his "definitive" prose account of the real story.
Kor
How so? The only gray area in regards to canonicity of comics was when Roberto Orci once claimed the Kelvin timeline comics were canon. However, this can be disregarded, since this statement was made in an interview in which Orci was goaded and manipulated into calling the comics canon, just so the interviewer could have a soundbite of Orci saying "comics are canon" to use to generate clickbait articles. Besides, Orci recanted the statement within a day anyway.
Otherwise there is no indication that the "comics seem to be canon" as you put it, and I am not aware of how any Trek comic has "contributed to the creation of canon."
If we go by the introductory section of Roddenberry's own TMP novelization, Roddenberry thought that even any visual depictions of the events surrounding V'Ger (i.e. the movie itself) should not be considered as accurate as his "definitive" prose account of the real story.
Maybe not so much thought it as used it as his narrative conceit. Though it's true enough that the novelization is the one version where he'd be free to express his purest idea of the story (I don't want to say "vision" since talking about "Gene's vision" is pretentious and overdone), without the compromises necessary in a filmed production.
But of course, by the time Roddenberry made TNG, he'd probably changed his mind about some of the ideas in the TMP novel, which is why we never saw any of those ideas like sensceiver brain implants and love instructors carried forward into TNG. So by then, he would've considered the novelization less "accurate" than TNG.
I would argue that canon has become synonymous with continuity, even if that's not the original meaning. Especially among us nerds.
The point is that it's unrealistic to expect any long-running canon to have an ironclad continuity, because any creative work is going to be subject to revision as it goes. The creators may try to be as consistent as they can, but it's inevitable that some inconsistencies will pop up over time, whether by accident (e.g. the MCU Spider-Man movie that incorrectly put The Avengers 8 years earlier) or by design as creators change their minds or disagree with their predecessors (e.g. the apparent decision of the MCU to de-canonize the TV series that were intended at the time to be part of the canon). It doesn't matter if fans believe or expect a canon to be perfectly consistent, because the viewers' beliefs do not dictate what the creators actually do. A belief that conflicts with actual reality is simply wrong.
Look at it this way -- if a dozen artists paint the same subject, they'll depict it in a dozen different ways. The differences in the individual artists' interpretations do not mean that they're depicting different things. It means they're depicting the same thing, filtered through different decisions of what to emphasize and what to embellish. Some fans obsess over superficial things like set and costume design and think that's what canon is, but that's just interpretation. The canon is the overall body of stories painting a picture of a larger universe. Not every detail of that picture is going to be continuous or consistent, but what matters is the overall image being portrayed. It's all one universe as long as the storytellers treat it as all one universe, even if they refine or rethink the details of how it's depicted.
No.
How can they be? NuTrek has already contradicted so much that was established in the novels.
Isn't it enough that they are their own continuity? While I don't like the novelverse, I also don't think that, for fans of it, the books being their own continuity/continuities should detract from their enjoyment of it.
I can understand that some people might prefer it to NuTrek (I myself liked the Romulan Republic from STO a lot better than what PIC did witht he post-Hobus Romulans) but liking it better than NuTrek won't magically make it replace said NuTrek in "canon" or "continuity".
(yes there are references to elements of the novelverse, but that doesn't suddenly make it canon either)
How can they be? NuTrek has already contradicted so much that was established in the novels.
Isn't it enough that they are their own continuity? While I don't like the novelverse, I also don't think that, for fans of it, the books being their own continuity/continuities should detract from their enjoyment of it.
I can understand that some people might prefer it to NuTrek (I myself liked the Romulan Republic from STO a lot better than what PIC did witht he post-Hobus Romulans) but liking it better than NuTrek won't magically make it replace said NuTrek in "canon" or "continuity".
(yes there are references to elements of the novelverse, but that doesn't suddenly make it canon either)
