L. A. Graf hasn't wrote one since 2002, you gonna speculate about that too?
Author Habits That Annoy You
- Thread starter Captain Dax
- Start date
I dunno; did L.A. Graf write something in one of their novels that pissed Pocket Books off?
Maybe they "Got Rich and Famous" enough. Or maybe they decided that writing ST novels under an acronymic collective pseudonym ("Let's All Get Rich And Famous") wasn't going to get them rich and famous anytime soon, and gave up. As I recall, their stuff was good, but fairly unremarkable, at least compared to "the giants" of TrekLit.
There seems to have been a fairly stark generational turnover in Trek authors in the early 2000s. There were cases where the reasons seem fairly obvious, like Carey being called out by the producers of the actual show, and John Van Citters told a story on the old "Engage" podcast that I'm 90% sure was about him vetoing something in John Vornholt's A Time To... entry, but it could've just been changing times and a false pattern emerging out of new authors being hired and older ones moving on within a few years.
I think it's mainly due to the changes in editors around the turn of the century, with John Ordover replacing Kevin Ryan as the main Trek novel editor in 1996 and leaving in 2003, Margaret Clark joining in 1995, and Marco Palmieri joining in '99. Different editors often draw on different stables of writers, so when an editor gets replaced, there's often a change in which writers get called on.
eh...I found "Ice Trap" generally unsatisfactory
Well, I did say "good, but unremarkable." And maybe I should have added ". . . and unmemorable." Because right now, I can't recall one detail of even one of their novels. And I had to look them up on Memory Beta, just to be reminded that they were Karen Rose Cercone and Julia Ecklar, with Melissa Crandall for one book.
I confess to a bit of trepidation when John Ordover moved on, since it was John who had recruited me and who had been my only Trek editor up until then.
Thankfully, Margaret and Marco kept me on and I soon was working regularly with both of them, right up to the present, more or less. (I worked on a big western project for Marco not too long ago, and was working with Margaret on a new Trek book before we lost her earlier this month.)
I recall having similar conversations with Dayton after John left in 2003. Neither of us were sure whether Marco or Margaret would want to keep us involved in the Trek books. Fortunately for us, they both liked our work and kept on hiring us. In recent years I had pitched some project ideas to Marco when he was at Realm, and until her recent turn for the worse, I had expected Margaret to be the one to read and offer notes on my new SNW novel Ring of Fire.
I know who Diane Carey is, I've just never seen her called DC before.
Yeah, I always assumed that line meant that she had written a book about the Borg between Yoyager returning home and that seem. I really can't think of any reason she couldn't have.
That does seem a bit odd since we really don't know anything about 2150s San Francisco or 22nd Century Vulcan toys.
That would be my assumption, that they just didn't notice them. The books obviously had to have been looked over by the editors, but I can't imagine they would have let that stuff through if they noticed it.
The potential misuse of 'literally', if the presumption is that Janeway didn't actually write a book about the Borg, still doesn't seem like something worth emphasizing in a novelization unless it's somehow going to be a plot point. Having Janeway think Barclay's an 'idiot' seems really disproportionate.
Unless, of course, she's suffering from coffee withdrawal. 
In BoBW Pt. 2, when Riker tells Guinan that Picard ‘wrote the book on this ship,’ to which she replies, ‘Then you have to throw that book away,’ did Diane Carey actually think that Picard wrote a literal book about the Enterprise-D, to which Riker must now find it and throw it in the trash can?
Sometimes, things just go over people’s heads, and they’re not as smart as they think they are.
I'm sure that's not what she thought.
It's possible Janeway did write a book about the Borg at some point prior to "Endgame"; we have no way to know either way. If Barclay misused the word 'literally' then that was a bit careless of him (and the writers), but given all he did for Voyager (via Pathfinder), to even think he's an 'idiot' really paints Janeway in a bad light.
One might wonder what Carey would have Janeway think of Harry Kim.
I'm not trying to put anything in her mouth here, but her dislike of TNG, which was where Barclay originated, is well documented, and it makes me wonder if she simply didn't like the character, that maybe she would have seen him as someone who should have been put off the ship, and didn't like him becoming a recurring character. Pure speculation on my part.
Yeah, Diane Carey in general is... not one of my favorites. Even when she was writing in her comfort area of TOS, there were things that have really rubbed me wrong. The Great Starship Race stands out for me on that side of things, where she had a major character who was NOT the book's villain being pro-confederacy without ever renouncing those views. Also there was a moment that had Kirk order a junior officer off the bridge for acknowledging that they were afraid, which just downright did not sound like Kirk AT. ALL. to me.
But I also get really uncomfortable with her writing a lot of the female characters - I don't think Uhura or Chapel ever have anything of significance to do in her TOS novels, and then in the novelization she wrote for Descent, she's uncomfortably close to undermining the whole Crusher in command plotline, that there's this sense of her trying to shove Crusher out of the center seat, when Jeri Taylor had done that specifically to test the waters of a woman in the center seat of Voyager, and even would go on to have Crusher established as liking command in later episodes of season seven.
And, I mean, don't start me on Ship of the Line, and the dismissal of Troi and the way that the fact that a character with deep trauma that SHOULD have taken him off active duty, but, no, we're not gonna have the therapist on the bridge... (Among the many issues I could go in to on Ship of the Line...)
I also really didn't like the way that her Equinox novelization kept referring to Seven in the narrative text as "the girl." It felt really infantilizing, since she was the only character being referred to like that. And then there's Fire Ship, which... I disagree with one of her fundamental ideas of the book, that Janeway is disconnected from the dirt and grease aspect of ship work, and that she didn't have that familiarity, when Janeway was commonly seen getting down in the proverbial dirt with her crew, that we saw her being involved in the work. So it just didn't feel like it was a story that really fit for Janeway.
Then there was like the one bit of original material she had for the DS9 finale novelization, where she had Kira loopy for the sake of the scene for no apparent reason and just... It didn't feel like a scene that needed to be there, almost like it was just there for the sake of having Kira being less than capable, and it's a bit that has bothered me since I got the novelization, when I was like ten, not even aware of her outside of her writing. Last time I was reading through my collection, I was also really unhappy about how she'd pretty much ripped out Kira's story in Rocks and Shoals, having everything involving Vedek Yassim happen off screen, when that was one of the most compelling parts of that arc to me, the exploration of the banality of evil and how inured you get to it being surrounded by it - has become a lot more timely. I get that in attempting to get the books out timely, some corners get cut, but that key Kira storyline got cut out while she added a whole storyline of Sisko playing chessmaster and deciding that, if he was going to be Ross's right hand, it was actually a grand plan of his, which also undermined his story in Behind The Lines, where he wasn't captaining the Defiant, and how that was actually the point of the plot line on screen...
Her view of Star Trek feels very "boys club," where the ones who are doing the important things in the narrative are the men.
Wow.
The Kira part jumps out at me in particular, because that episode does a great job of conveying Kira's thought processes purely with visuals, but with Carey turning it into prose she had an opportunity to let the readers into Kira's head...indeed, she'd have to, since the visual element would now be moot...and it sounds as though she just squandered that opportunity.
This is some of the most astute criticism of Diane Carey's Trek writing that I've ever read. Well done.
For what it's worth, I don't think she thought that either. But she certainly took bad dialogue out of context just to make another jab at a character she didn't like.
It dawns on me that I neglected to mention Ed Schlesinger, who inherited both To Reign in Hell and my Underworld series from John Ordover, and whom I went on to work with on numerous projects, including Star Trek, Ghost Rider, The Fantastic Four, etc.
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