Author Habits That Annoy You
- Thread starter Captain Dax
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Oh, as a American and a comic book fan the only two things that come to mind when I see DC are Whashington and the comics company. I've never seen Diane Carey referred to that way, so it never occurred to me that was who he was talking.
The reference to a soapbox also made me think of Stan's Soapbox from Stan Lee's time at Marvel, so I thought maybe this Piper person did something similar at DC.
The reference to a soapbox also made me think of Stan's Soapbox from Stan Lee's time at Marvel, so I thought maybe this Piper person did something similar at DC.
Diane Carey is a writer, who did a number of ST novels, some years ago. Two of them, Dreadnought and its sequel, Battlestations, center on a group of proto-lower-deckers, led by Piper (from a very small colony where they don't bother with last names), who (at first glance) looks like a Mary-Sue, hacking "Kobayashi Maru" on the fly with her communicator, but her Mary-Sueness is very quickly subverted when she manages to screw up more often than she does the seemingly impossible. She also wrote some "Captain April" novels, giving George Samuel Kirk, Sr. the nickname "Geordie" (note the final "e"), and giving him a sidekick, Lt. Francis Drake Reed. The only real flaw I see in her writing was a tendency to put her own hard-Libertarian rhetoric into the mouths of her characters (including a Vulcan[!]); her career as a ST novelist was cut short when she wrote a very poorly received novelization of ENT: "Broken Bow."
I remember hearing of and being curious about Carey's work but never having read it. Not sure I would have cared for the Libertarianism, and a frequent screw-up can be almost as annoying as a Mary Sue. Do you have any info as to why her "Broken Bow" novelization may have been poorly received? Did she pull a reverse Vonda McIntyre (apologies if misspelled!) and inject stuff into it that weakened rather than strengthened the story?
There’s a classic thread on it. Carey had been editorializing about things she didn’t like in the episodes within her novelizations for a while, but Broken Bow crossed the line.
Brannon Braga: Not a Diane Carey Fan?
So, I’ve been working my way through the extensive and enlightening bonus features on the new Enterprise Season One blu rays, and I thought this passage from the “In Conversation” featurette with Brannon Braga and Rick Berman was particularly amusing. BRANNON BRAGA: Do you remember the...
www.trekbbs.com
C'mon, it's Dreadnought! and Battlestations!. It's just not the same without the exclamation marks.
Think of how much better the novels would have been if they had called them Dreadnought!! and Battlestations!! though.
I believe that was the one where she inserted a bunch of snarky asides about how the story didn't make any sense.
That being said, a lot of her previous work was pretty good, so you might still be interested in checking it out. Before Broken Bow, she kept getting invited back, so her books were presumably well-received overall.
Oh, sure. She had a certain point of view, but someone can still be a good writer even if you disagree with their worldview. Libertarian views are surprisingly common among science fiction writers, e.g. Poul Anderson, whose writing style I love despite his politics.
The (other) most distinctive thing about Diane Carey's writing was her deep love of sailing and nautical themes, which came from real-life experience on sailing crews as well as her interest in naval history. Some people feel the nautical themes got intrusive and overdone in some of her books, but they're part of what made her work distinctive and interesting, and I thought it fit in pretty well, given that the Horatio Hornblower novels were one of Roddenberry's main inspirations for ST.
And say what you will about the Piper novels -- they were the first attempt in professional Trek Lit to center a story on book-original characters, more than a decade before New Frontier, and the first Trek novels written in the first person. Carey's early books often had bold, distinctive concepts that stood out from the pack, like Final Frontier, the first novel about George Kirk and an origin story for the Enterprise, or First Frontier, a time-travel novel about dinosaurs co-written with a paleontologist (fittingly named James Kirkland).
She chose to be completely unprofessional and self-sabotage her Trek novel writing career because she thought she could get away with it. She was wrong.
Something that bothers me about about Carey's "take thats" in the novelizations was that, more often than not, she had to invent something or misinterpret something in order to snark on it. She's inventing a worse script in her head to make fun of.
Like in "Endgame," when future-Barclay introduces future-Janeway to the Academy students as "the woman who literally wrote the book on the Borg," Carey has Janeway think, "What? I never wrote a book. Doesn't this idiot know what 'literally' means?" Who says future-Janeway didn't write a book? Carey, apparently, so she can make an unobjectionable line into a stupid one.
Same with "Broken Bow." Phlox asks Archer if he's tried any of the Chinese restaurants around Starfleet HQ, Archer responds he's lived in the area all his life, and Carey interprets it as him implying that you can't get Chinese food in San Francisco to allow Phlox to feel more culturally aware than him. Or the line about Vulcan children's toys being more advanced than the NX-01's sensors. I don't see what's so obviously ridiculous about that, human children today play with cell-phones that have more advanced cameras, gyroscopes, thermometers, radios, and LIDAR arrays than spaceships from fifty years ago.
Like in "Endgame," when future-Barclay introduces future-Janeway to the Academy students as "the woman who literally wrote the book on the Borg," Carey has Janeway think, "What? I never wrote a book. Doesn't this idiot know what 'literally' means?" Who says future-Janeway didn't write a book? Carey, apparently, so she can make an unobjectionable line into a stupid one.
Same with "Broken Bow." Phlox asks Archer if he's tried any of the Chinese restaurants around Starfleet HQ, Archer responds he's lived in the area all his life, and Carey interprets it as him implying that you can't get Chinese food in San Francisco to allow Phlox to feel more culturally aware than him. Or the line about Vulcan children's toys being more advanced than the NX-01's sensors. I don't see what's so obviously ridiculous about that, human children today play with cell-phones that have more advanced cameras, gyroscopes, thermometers, radios, and LIDAR arrays than spaceships from fifty years ago.
Don't mince words; what do you really think?
Indeed. As recently as 55 years ago, if you walked into a toy store, looking for a robot, you'd get a wind-up figure of a tin-can mechanical man. As recently as 45 years ago, you'd get a vehicle steered by either interchangeable plastic cams, or by a cam formed in place by inserting pins into a disk. 35 years ago, you'd get some kind of a crude waldo. Now, you'd get a kit that would allow you to build an actual functioning robot.
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So not only was she intentionally being snarky, she wasn't even intelligent enough to understand figures of speech.
Well, what I really think is that being a Star Trek novel author gave her a huge head over time, not to mention that she basically had free reign to add her own nonsense about sailing, which had little to do with whatever sci-fi story she was being paid to write. By the time of Broken Bow, her antics had gotten so bad that she was basically telling her bosses 'fuck you' right there on the page. But Pocket Books wasn't privy to what she was doing until Braga pointed it out, and that was the end of Diane Carey.
This is an obviously nonsensical thing to say about a successful prose author.
As I mentioned, a lot of us enjoyed the nautical angle in her work, and it made a very good fit for Star Trek, which was always rooted in naval tradition, Hornblower homages, and the like.
This is also obviously nonsensical, since everything that tie-in authors write has to be approved by their editors and by the studio licensing department before it can be published.
Then explain to me the logic of what she was doing.
That's great that you enjoyed it. I though it had nothing to do with the story she was supposed to be telling, and was just self-indulgent crap on her part.
Then explain how Broken Bow got approved.
Moving the goalposts. Just because someone's decisions are hard to understand doesn't entitle you to insult their intelligence. Calling someone stupid is a generic insult that rarely serves a purpose beyond petty name-calling. It's quite possible for highly intelligent people to make decisions that we emphatically disagree with or have trouble understanding.
Which is why it's a mistake to confuse personal preference for objective quality.
Argument from silence fallacy. The burden of proof is on you, not me. I mean, how do you propose it would even be possible for an author to single-handedly typeset, print, and distribute a finished novel, complete with the publisher's logo and legal copyright, without the knowledge and participation of said publisher?
Please answer the question I asked.
I'm not confused. As I said, you're welcome to like something I don't and vice versa, provided that we state the reasons why we liked or didn't like it.
Uh, no. You made the assertion that manuscripts had to be approved by the editors. Are you implying that the editors were fine with Carey's constant snarky jabs at Berman & Braga's story? Are you implying that they paid her to add tons of personal commentary to the story?
The editors obviously didn't mind or they wouldn't have approved it. She did get paid to write what was in the book so yes.
I found Carey's "Final Frontier" a fantastic book, which really captured the recurring characters, while making George Kirk and Captain April (who were little more than names by then) interesting characters of their own. Also enjoyed a lot the two Piper novels; "Dreadnought!" having possibly the most exciting ship battle I've read in these novels so far.
I didn't know Carey had such problems with the editors later. Though I don't see how what she did was worse than Fontana including a line in "Vulcan's Heart" to discredit the existence of Sybok. Whether she liked it or not, Sybok is Spock's half-brother now, and there's nothing in canon to invalidate that.
I didn't know Carey had such problems with the editors later. Though I don't see how what she did was worse than Fontana including a line in "Vulcan's Heart" to discredit the existence of Sybok. Whether she liked it or not, Sybok is Spock's half-brother now, and there's nothing in canon to invalidate that.
Or, just maybe, they didn't actually notice what she was doing. Because once it was pointed out to them, Carey never wrote another Trek novel again. So obviously, they did mind.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they were paying her to write a novelization, not paying her to viciously critique the episode she was hired to transcribe.
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