"Essential Legends" of Trek?
- Thread starter Corran Horn
- Start date
I had a thought, what if instead of editing the original books, we got remakes, totally new versions that are consistent with the current canon, and are able to exist alongside the original?
Like a new version of Federation that give us the story of the First Contact version of Cochrane's story.
Like a new version of Federation that give us the story of the First Contact version of Cochrane's story.
Please don't imply that your fellow board members are not sane just because they don't enjoy things the same way you do. You obviously don't have to agree, but you could have made the exact same point without the digs against the other poster's sanity.
I sometimes forget, any interpretation is correct as long as it's Christopher's
By the same token, let's please not get personal. You can rebut the contents of the post all you want, but post, not poster.
I don't see the point. If it's adapting a book into an episode or movie, I can see rewriting it, but if you're going to do a book, just write a new book.
I often say that if canon is history, tie-ins are historical fiction. They're not saying "this happened," they're just conjectures about what might have happened based on the understanding of the continuity as it existed at the time. And "at the time" is an important part of it. A book is a product of its time. That's baked into it and it's part of what gives the book its character. Rewriting the book to efface that history would take away part of what makes it unique.
On somewhat similar lines- taking a cue from the Star Trek (2009) ongoing comic series reimagining TOS episodes, I always thought it would be interesting to do what Harlan Ellison did in graphical novel form- go back to the first drafts, before tons of ideas were cut for budget reasons, and produce either Blish-style adaptations, or comic adaptations, of the TOS episodes as they were originally imagined. (In the process, re-writing Rand into all the scripts intended for her character that got revised when Grace Lee Whitney was fired, for instance).
Just sort of a 'Star Trek Unbound' what-if series, looking at the way TOS might have been if
A. SFX and set design and budgets could match the writers' imaginations, and
B. With the exception of characterization of the main cast, Roddenberry hadn't done as much rewriting.
Just kind of a fun experiment, looking at the Trek as the sci-fi greats imagined it before anyone knew what Trek actually was.
(For example: Court Martial with Samuel Cogley's 'space jalopy' and a jettisoned section of Enterprise crew lodged in an asteroid; Space Seed with the criminal Erikson leading his men to board the Enterprise from the Botany Bay by swinging across on grappling lines like pirates of old; The Alternative Factor with a charismatic Lazarus and an actual romance subplot so that the poor man doesn't have to fall off of Vazquez Rocks 22 times to fill the runtime...)
I, on the other hand, absolutely hate when books are reprinted with a small amount of new content in order to get me to pay again for something I already own. How unfondly I remember buying the limited hardcover edition of Harlan Ellison's City on the Edge of Forever because that was all there was going to be. Most expensive book I'd bought at that point, over C$100. The next year he revised it, added new material, and it came out in paperback for something like $20. At least he didn't do it the other way around.
Yeah, you guys are probably right. I was just trying to think of a way for people who want the old books to be consistent with the canon we've gotten since then, but without actually changing the original books.
There was a time when I tried to mentally edit books to reconcile them with later canon, sometimes even making changes in pencil or marking off sections to ignore. Eventually I realized that that was just unfair to the books as they were written, and that continuity was not so important that it should get in the way of appreciating a story as it was written and intended by its author. Often the things that made a book conflict with screen continuity were key to its distinctive character and feel as a story, and I realized that should be embraced as a feature, not rejected as a flaw. They are, after all, just stories, speculations about what might have been.
The primary value of any story is in the story itself. Its connections to other stories are a secondary consideration. The connections are of no value except to the degree that they support the individual stories. If the desire for connection leads us to devalue a story for what it is in itself, then we've got our priorities the wrong way around.
Tell me about it!
One sees this in comics fandom, too. It always bugs me when some folks talk as though a classic older story is no longer worth reading just because it's slipped out of the current comics continuity. Or, worse yet, when they complain that they "wasted" their time and money on a story that no longer "counts."
To which I always wonder: Has the writing suddenly gone bad? Did the art get worse once it was no longer "canon"? And, perhaps most importantly, did you enjoy the experience of reading that story in the past? Did you perhaps derive plenty of pleasure from reading and rereading that story over the years?
How then was that time wasted? Why is a story you once enjoyed now "pointless" just because it's not "officially" part of the current comic book "universe"?
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I actually enjoy reading stories that aren't consistent with current canon, I find it interesting to see how they approached concepts differently, like Dark Mirror's different take on the post-Mirror, Mirror MU, or Strangers from the Sky's different approach to Earth's first contact with extraterrestrials.
Let's take Sherlock Holmes for a moment. Writers after Doyle have invented a number of family members that aren't in the Canon. There's the much older brother Sherringford (from William S. Baring- Gould), a much younger sister Enola (from Nancy Springer), a completely different younger sister Violet (from Andy Lane), plus his son Raffles (from John Kendrick Bangs), and his daughter Lucy (from Charles Vesey and Anne Elliott). None of these go together, or were ever intended to go together, yet I like imagining that they can and do fit together in various combinations. Just for myself, and only for fun. Enola and Raffles together would be hilarious.
Very unlikely.
Let's take Sherlock Holmes for a moment. Writers after Doyle have invented a number of family members that aren't in the Canon. There's the much older brother Sherringford (from William S. Baring- Gould), a much younger sister Enola (from Nancy Springer), a completely different younger sister Violet (from Andy Lane), plus his son Raffles (from John Kendrick Bangs), and his daughter Lucy (from Charles Vesey and Anne Elliott). None of these go together, or were ever intended to go together, yet I like imagining that they can and do fit together in various combinations. Just for myself, and only for fun. Enola and Raffles together would be hilarious.
Don't forget Gene Wilder's Sigerson Holmes from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes's Smarter Brother, the first non-canonical Holmes sibling I was introduced to. And the recent TV series Sherlock & Daughter with David Thewlis and Blu Hunt.
Elementary gave us John Noble as Sherlock's father Morland Holmes. I don't think I've ever seen Holmes's father play such a major role in any other incarnation, paralleling how Enola Holmes makes his mother a major character. Barry Levinson's Young Sherlock Holmes hinted briefly at a traumatic backstory where Sherlock exposed some transgression by his father (implicitly an affair) and was blamed for causing his mother pain.
Honestly, novels like Final Frontier, Strangers From the Sky or Federation (among others) are such engaging stories that I really don't care while reading them that they don't match the continuity as established in the franchise's canonical material since those novels were first published.
I see them as a chance to revisit how Trek looked at an earlier time. Nostalgia for me, an insight into the series's history for someone younger.
And if a writer makes a concerted an extraordinary effort to keep the stories sharing a common milieu consistent with each other, that certainly makes for a much richer whole (I do it almost obsessively with the mostly-unpublished works in my "Organ Princess" milieu), but (as I've pointed out myself) Baum was constantly breaking continuity in Oz, Doyle was constantly breaking continuity in the Holmes Canon, and ADF had Thranx body-surfing (and even playing "living surfboard" with a Human friend) in one early HC novel, but having an instinctive terror of open water in later HC novels.
I only get upset over continuity breaches in cases where the breach is stupid, unnecessary, and/or insulting to the audience.
I only get upset over continuity breaches in cases where the breach is stupid, unnecessary, and/or insulting to the audience.
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Point of order: A single person cannot make a concerted effort, since they're not acting in concert with anyone else. I tend to make that mistake myself sometimes, before I catch myself.
I think people who take an all-or-nothing approach to continuity are being too unforgiving of human imperfection. Even if you try your best to stay consistent, there will inevitably be errors, forgettings, or times where it just serves the story better to change things. Series continuity tends to be impressionistic, holding together in broad strokes but not necessarily in granular detail.
And a "Point of Order" is a highly privileged incidental motion calling attention to a breach of parliamentary procedure. Not of syntax or semantics.
At any rate, post rephrased.
Meanwhile, The Seven Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer revealed (or implied) that Sherlock's mother had an affair with his math tutor, one James Moriarty, who was not, in fact, the evil mastermind of Holmes' cocaine-fueled paranoia.
Or so I recall. It's been decades since I read that novel.