If you could make one trek novel canon which would you choose?

[Christopher]

This does raise an interesting question... if the Nicholas Meyer Khan on Ceta Alpha V audio drama ends up happening... would it be canon?

No, because he's not a current producer or showrunner, just an independent creator doing a tie-in. It's the same situation as Vulcan's Glory, say. A tie-in by a series creator is still a tie-in.

"Word of god"?

A nonsense phrase, because there's not just one creator, there's a team, and a story that a single creator tells outside that team won't necessarily be honored by the head of the team. Even the same creator doesn't necessarily limit oneself to a single continuity -- for instance, Rick Sternbach didn't try to incorporate any of his ship designs for the Spaceflight Chronology into TNG, but came up with new designs instead. Different works are different contexts, and a creator can adapt to those contexts.

And Mr. Bennett, this thread isn't reality: this is fantasy!

Yeah, but even so, it's important to define the terms of the question. When the thread starter suggests "making something canon," what does that actually mean? The first step in answering a question is defining its terms. It seems to me that making something canonical means remaking it as an episode or movie. And then it's not going to be the book, it's going to be something reworked and distinct from the book. Like when the Batman: The Animated Series tie-in comic Mad Love was adapted to The New Batman Adventures, it was mostly very faithful to the comic, but it made some changes here and there. Same with the "Holiday Knights" episode that adapted a Christmas special anthology comic (and left out the best story of the bunch). The tie-in books were adapted to the canon, but the canonical episodes were still somewhat distinct from the original books.

More to the point, what is the value of "making something canon?" What is gained by doing it? Canon is not a measure of a story's worth. It's not a reward for being good. It's simply a matter of consistency with other stories. So is the question, "Do you want this story to be acknowledged in other stories?" And if so, what difference does that make to the story itself? I think a story should be judged on its own terms instead of on the basis of things outside itself.

 

[mithril]

honestly? tough choice. though many of my favorites are older works that don't mesh all that well with canon trek. (the Rihannsu series for example)

i'd have to say that if we take the perspective of "this will be adapted into a miniseries or film".. First Frontier. you have Kirk and spock and the TOS enterprise, Dinosaurs, time travel, interesting alternate timelines, dinosaurs..
also having Clan Ru show up would establish that Dinosaurs had been taken off earth by Aliens to preserve their potential as future sentient species. which would help fix some of the problems with the official explanation for the Voth, by getting rid of the idea of some lost continent and prehistoric technological civilization not leaving any palentological evidence.. and instead replacing it with "an alien race wanted to preserve one 'pre-sentient' species by moving it, why not then moving a 2nd?

 

[James Cole]

No, because he's not a current producer or showrunner, just an independent creator doing a tie-in. It's the same situation as Vulcan's Glory, say. A tie-in by a series creator is still a tie-in.

But, what if the Ceti Alpha V project is produced by Paramount/Secret Hideout themselves, not a licensee? That would be a new situation (granted. the closest comparison could be the explicitly non-canon Very Short Treks).

Granted, Star Trek and canon has drifted over the years. Now it's almost at the level of the James Bond franchise, where canon just means official (sorry Never Say Never Again, even with Sean Connery), and not in continuity with each other.

 

[Christopher]

also having Clan Ru show up would establish that Dinosaurs had been taken off earth by Aliens to preserve their potential as future sentient species. which would help fix some of the problems with the official explanation for the Voth, by getting rid of the idea of some lost continent and prehistoric technological civilization not leaving any palentological evidence..

That's actually not so unreasonable, given how little evidence would survive in the fossil record. Scientists call it the Silurian hypothesis after the 1970s Doctor Who serial. More here:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...vilization-have-existed-on-earth-before-ours/

Still, I've always thought as you did, that it made sense for Clan Ru and the Voth to have the same origin.

But, what if the Ceti Alpha V project is produced by Paramount/Secret Hideout themselves, not a licensee? That would be a new situation (granted. the closest comparison could be the explicitly non-canon Very Short Treks).

Looking into it, I think maybe it is. I was assuming it was an audiobook like the Seven/Raffi one, but I was mistaken. It's being developed for Paramount+, and apparently it started as a suggestion from Alex Kurtzman that Meyer developed into a TV miniseries but that ended up being reworked as a "podcast"/radio play. https://trekmovie.com/2023/11/25/ni...-and-why-making-it-an-audio-drama-is-perfect/

During Meyer’s time on Portal 47, there was no discussion regarding how the podcast would fit into Star Trek canon. Trek showrunners have long held that any event that appears in a TV show or movie is considered canon, while stories from novels and comic books are not. It is unclear where officially produced podcasts would fall under that distinction.

So it's hard to say at this point. It's new ground. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if it were regarded as a peripheral work like a tie-in.

Although I doubt it's likely to matter either way, since a story set entirely on Ceti Alpha V during Khan's exile doesn't seem likely to contain anything that could be referenced or contradicted later, unless it has flashbacks to the Eugenics Wars or something. (And that would raise the question of whether it would be consistent with the old 1990s timeframe or the temporal-war-rewritten 21st-century timeframe.)

Granted, Star Trek and canon has drifted over the years. Now it's almost at the level of the James Bond franchise, where canon just means official (sorry Never Say Never Again, even with Sean Connery), and not in continuity with each other.

I'd say you have it backwards. Historically, consistency within a series canon has been more a broad-strokes pretense than anything else. Canons pretend to represent a unified reality while freely revising it as needed, since it's all imaginary and thus the creators and audience can just pretend it was that way all along. Perhaps the first thing described as a literary canon was the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, but they have plenty of contradictions, like where Watson's war wound is located and even Watson's first name. And TV series canons in the time of ST:TOS, or even TNG, tended to have very loose, mutable continuity, ignoring long-term consequences and hitting reset buttons and retconning things and playing fast and loose with the chronology (look at M*A*S*H, for example -- an 11-year series about a 3-year war, where the timeline got up to 1953 and was then bumped back to 1951 with the character development and cast changes still intact). It's only in the era of home video and wikis that it's become easier to keep track of a series's granular details and the pressure to maintain tighter continuity has become more influential.

I'd say that modern Trek canon is as consistent as it ever was. It all pretends to be in the same reality even when it changes the details, and that's exactly how series canon has always worked everywhere. It's no worse that TOS's chronology references bouncing around from 200 years to 700 years in the future, or Lt. Leslie dying one week and being alive the next. The pretense of a unified continuity is always going to have imperfections, and more of them will accumulate the larger a franchise gets, but overall, Trek's consistency is greater than that of most canons, and it's remarkable how consistent and unified it's remained over the decades, when most other franchises would've rebooted entirely by now. People get it backward when they take the consistency for granted and dwell on the inconsistencies.

 

[Stevil2001]

Every thread about a fun idea that all its participants know would never come to pass needs multiple multi-paragraph posts that explain in exhaustive detail to all its participants why the fun idea will never come to pass.

 

[KRAD]

The Khan audio drama is being produced by Secret Hideout, so it's not a tie-in, it's part of the slate of productions being created by the people currently in charge of Trek.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Yeah, but even so, it's important to define the terms of the question. When the thread starter suggests "making something canon," what does that actually mean?

I would submit that it would mean something on the order of

If we could have the fabric of reality rewoven (perhaps by Q, perhaps by our old friend from DD's other masterpiece, K's'tl'k) such that some particular work of tie-in prose fiction was instead, say, a 3-7 hour miniseries, or something else that is implicitly canonical, what opus would we want that to be?

And (with apologies to CLB, GC, and the other true masters currently writing TrekLit) my first choice would be Spock's World, and my second choice would be The Wounded Sky (yes, even though "Where No One Has Gone Before" was already a very loose adaptation therof).

Which is why I say (quoting Uhura's line from the very canonical TSFS), "This isn't reality; this is fantasy."

 

[Christopher]

I would submit that it would mean something on the order of

If that's the parameter, I wouldn't want it. "Was instead a miniseries?" As in, not a book at all? Why would anyone who loves a book want it to be erased from existence in favor of something else? That's terrible! Adapting a book, creating an alternative work inspired by it and translated for a different medium, can often be very worthwhile, but only because the original work still exists. The adaptation is meant to live alongside the book, to be in dialogue with it, to promote it and encourage newcomers to read it (like how recently watching Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express inspired me to read the novel and rent the Albert Finney film version). But replace it? What a horrific idea.

After all, a miniseries would have to be different from the book -- there's no way to adapt a prose work precisely into a visual work, since it's a whole other language and it has to be translated. It would be a different creation, not a one-to-one replacement. You'd lose the character of the prose, the internal monologue, the ideas and details expressed in narration, so much of what made it a great book.

 

[David Mack]

The Khan audio drama is being produced by Secret Hideout, so it's not a tie-in, it's part of the slate of productions being created by the people currently in charge of Trek.

I don't think that's enough to say it’s canon, however. (Not that you did.) For a very long time, the position of CBS Studios (and Paramount before them) was that only "live-action, filmed episodes and movies of Star Trek" (emphasis mine) were canon. So an audio drama podcast occupies a kind of gray area.

 

[Christopher]

For a very long time, the position of CBS Studios (and Paramount before them) was that only "live-action, filmed episodes and movies of Star Trek" (emphasis mine) were canon.

But surely they've retracted the "live-action" part now that we have Lower Decks and Prodigy. For that matter, I assume the modern shows are shot on digital video rather than film, although I suppose people these days use the word "filming" more generically than that.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Change it to "live-action and hand-drawn/computer-drawn/generated episodes and movies".

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Like when the Batman: The Animated Series tie-in comic Mad Love was adapted to The New Batman Adventures, it was mostly very faithful to the comic, but it made some changes here and there. Same with the "Holiday Knights" episode that adapted a Christmas special anthology comic (and left out the best story of the bunch).

And as Bruce Timm told me when I interviewed him for BACK ISSUE #99, the reason they left out the Mr. Freeze story "White Christmas" (outside of the time considerations) was precisely because it had been contradicted by later canon established in the DTV movie Batman and Mr. Freeze: SubZero. As far as the previous Mr. Freeze episodes "Heart of Ice" and "Deep Freeze" were concerned, Victor Fries' wife Nora was dead, but SubZero established that she was still alive and even had her recover from her terminal illness. Consequently, "White Christmas" could no longer happen in the same way it did the comic.

On the original question, my choice would definitely be Mike W. Barr and David Ross' "All Those Years Ago..." from DC's Star Trek Annual #1. It's still my headcanon version of Kirk's first mission as Captain of the Enterprise.

 

[Jedi Marso]

The Final Reflection

Federation would be a close (almost tied) second place, in lieu of Generations.

 

[Victoria]

If something were going to be canon for me, I'd like it not to clash with, nor lessen, existing canon. I want it to add to the canon. I think books like The Final Reflection and A Stitch In Time do that.

Now, having looked through my collection of novels, there are a lot I enjoy. Most of those fit "between" what we see on screen. There are others that clash with screen canon but I still enjoy them: others are so referential as to be positively...dull.

The novels that I feel would best serve the STverse by being canon would be the 4 Kelvinverse Academy novels. They do provide a great deal of background to the rather small amount of screen canon and are enjoyable in themselves. As the question asks for "one", I'll go for "The Assassination Game" just because I like it the most of the four.

 

[Steve Roby]

What book would I like to see as canon? Doesn't matter to me. Fans spend too much time worrying, thinking, and fighting about canon. A good work of Star Trek tie-in fiction doesn't suddenly suck if some aspect is overwritten by a movie or TV series.

 

[mithril]

That's actually not so unreasonable, given how little evidence would survive in the fossil record. Scientists call it the Silurian hypothesis after the 1970s Doctor Who serial. More here:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...vilization-have-existed-on-earth-before-ours/

Still, I've always thought as you did, that it made sense for Clan Ru and the Voth to have the same origin.

i'm aware of the Silurian hypothesis. and while our fossil record is fairly fragmentary, and probably wouldn't be much help in finding artifacts from a pre-industrial society, there are a lot of things that would have cropped up if a prehistoric society made it to an industrial age, much less the sort of advanced industrial age you'd need to develop spaceflight and FTL. (especially in trek.) chemical traces in sedimentary rocks as a result of pollutants. stuff like microplastics. evidence of coal, oil, and gas bed that had existed then vanished. and so on. IRL we're still sorting out what to look for (with a lot of it coming from SETI and related programs looking for signs of life elsewhere in the galaxy) but in trek those sorts of things are stuff we've seen then scanning for fairly often. and the whole "lost continent" thing fails due to scale, a single (fairly small, if the continental plate in question vanished) continent wouldn't have the sort of resources to sustain a civilization on its own. not at an industrial level allowing for development of advanced technologies. so it seems unlikely that in trek such a prehistoric civilization's footprints went completely unnoticed. (honestly, i always cringe when i hear that explanation given in the episode.. someone in the writing staff read too much Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. )

i do like that in First Frontier, the aliens that moved Clan Ru off earth weren't ever identified. given the preservers were established in TOS, i'm sure it was very tempting for the writer to identify the saviors as them.


though one hurdle facing an adaption of said book.. is that Troodon no longer exists as a valid genus. turns out that what had been identified as the Troodontids were in fact groups of unrelated theropods too fragmentary for easy identification. as our taxonomic skills improved, the family got pruned smaller and smaller as remains got more correctly identified,and now even the original taxa has been properly identified. so if adapting it today they'd probably need to make clan Ru one of the Dromaeosaurids. (in the process, they'd gain feathers.)

 

[Christopher]

i do like that in First Frontier, the aliens that moved Clan Ru off earth weren't ever identified. given the preservers were established in TOS, i'm sure it was very tempting for the writer to identify the saviors as them.

I'll never understand why people want to assume the Preservers existed millions or billions of years ago, when the one confirmed instance of their activity could not possibly have been earlier than the 16th or 17th century, since Native American populations weren't endangered until then. They're a modern entity, not an ancient one. Presumably any ancient group that did comparable things would be unrelated to the later one.

I'm still surprised that I'm the only person I'm aware of who ever considered that the Vians from "The Empath" might be the Preservers, given that they have essentially the same goals, to rescue endangered populations by relocating them to other planets.

 

[mithril]

i tend to assume that there are "the preservers" and "The Preservers".. the first being a general category of 'unknown species that chose to preserve a species or cultural group from destruction by relocating it", the later being a definitive article referring to whatever species or culture relocated The Native Americans to the planet Amerind, and built the asteroid deflecting Obelisk.

one fan theory i rather like (and which STO actually introduced me to) that would allow The Preservers to operate on huge timescales is the idea that the ancestral humanoids are them. it does kinda fit (they seeded the galaxy with life 4.5 billion years before with intent to fill it with sentient peoples.. them preserving some of those would make sense if they were still around.) STO has them using stassis systems to sleep the eons away, personally i'd go with the idea that they ascended into energy beings of some sort, and hang around watching over stuff. (sorta like more benevolent versions of B5's Vorlons)

 

[Christopher]

one fan theory i rather like (and which STO actually introduced me to) that would allow The Preservers to operate on huge timescales is the idea that the ancestral humanoids are them.

That's problematical on multiple levels. One, the Progenitors did the seeding in the first place because they were on the way out and wanted something of themselves to remain after they went extinct or ascended or whatever. (I'd suspect they evolved into the Q, but we know Q was already dating Lady Q a billion years before the Progenitors did their thing.) Two, how does it make sense for any single species or society to remain unchanging and do the same thing for billions of years on end? It's implausible enough that they'd do it for thousands. Billions is ridiculous. Three, the Preservers seen in "The Paradise Syndrome" are immensely more primitive than the Progenitors. The Progenitors were able to engineer DNA to "create life from lifelessness" and promote the evolution of future humanoids after billions of years; the Preservers basically just had spaceships and a tractor beam. Four, the two groups had different methodologies entirely; the Progenitors created life where it didn't exist, the Preservers merely did what's right there in their name, preserving existing life. (Although, granted, you could argue that that's covered under point 2. But if their methods and goals are so completely different, why do people want to connect them in the first place? Just because they're both explanations for humanoid aliens? That's a metatextual connection, not one that makes any sense textually.)

That's why I favor your suggestion in your first paragraph -- that Preservers aren't a single group, just a catchall term for various groups that did the same thing at different times (as I suggested in DTI: The Collectors, IIRC). Also, I resist the idea that they're "a species," since how does it make sense for an entire species or civilization to devote itself to only one activity? If anything, the Preservers are probably a charitable organization, like Greenpeace or Habitats for Humanity. At most, they're a specialized branch of a government, like the EPA or the Department of the Interior. But they could very well be a multispecies NGO with multiple members, and maybe over time, some participating societies/species drop out due to societal shifts and others take over the responsibility.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

the Preservers basically just had spaceships and a tractor beam

We don't know that. We never see them, and we never learn the limits of their capabilities. We know what technology they left in place to guard the planet—which includes the memory beam in the obelisk—but there's no incentive for them to leave behind any technology not essential to guarding the planet and preventing asteroid impacts, though we know from Spock's translation that they also signed their work.