Lit/fanon inventions that became canon

[Enterprise1701]

In 1966's TOS - "The Man Trap", Spock stated to Uhura that "Vulcan has no moon."

In 1973's TAS - "Yesteryear", a large moon-style object is seen from the ground in the sky of Vulcan despite the script including specific instructions not to animate any moon(s) in the Vulcan sky. Episode writer D.C. Fontana would propose the fix that this celestial object was a binary planet rather than a moon like Luna for Earth.

In 1975, the "Landing Party Six" stories in the Warped Space fanzine headed up by George Carleton named this planet "T'Kuht".

In 1984, TOS - The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah was the first licensed novel to take up the name T'Kuht.

In 1988, TOS - Spock's World by Diane Duane adjusted the spelling of the name to "T'Khut".

Finally, in 2023, SNW - "Charades" included a background graphic by Timothy Peel showing T'Khut's position in the 40 Eridani system. (A clearer view came from Peel's since-deleted Twitter account.)

 

[Christopher]

In 1984, TOS - The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah was the first licensed novel to take up the name T'Kuht.

In 1988, TOS - Spock's World by Diane Duane adjusted the spelling of the name to "T'Khut".

And in 1994, Sarek by A.C. Crispin called it T'Rukh, while acknowledging that it had different names at different times of year (which feels to me like an attempt to maneuver around the no-continuity rule at the time).

Also, Duane and others asserted that the human name for it was Charis. I wonder if that originated in fanfic too.

 

[Extrocomp]

Star Trek Prodigy made Phoebe Janeway's name from Moasic canon, Janeway's sister had been referenced in Voyager a few times, but never by name.

Prodigy also canonized Janeway's middle initial from the Caretaker novelization.

 

[Tuskin38]

I wonder why Duane changed the spelling to T'Khut

 

[Extrocomp]

Minor spelling changes happen all the time in Star Trek. Noonien and Noonian, Tarr and Taar, Dimitri and Dmitri, Carl and Karl, Zefram and Zephram, Na'kuhl and Na'khul, etc.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

What a pity so many moderators on this site loathe the notion of thread necro-ing so much.

It's not personal, its in the rules.

And your point is?

And there is a TrekLit-forum-specific exception to that rule, because anybody could be picking up any book (going all the way back to Mission to Horatius) for the first time, at any arbitrary moment.

It seems to me that the best possible disposition of the two threads would be to merge them, cleaning out the irrelevant stuff, and then put the merged thread into the index.

 

[James Swallow]

It's a 'blink and you'll miss it' moment, but in the Short Treks episode "The Brightest Star", there's a shot of a group of Kelpiens playing Kaasad, the memory box game I created for my Discovery novel Fear Itself; it's a small detail from the Kelpien culture backstory I developed with Kirsten Beyer, when we were working on early outlines for the novel.

 

[Christopher]

I wonder why Duane changed the spelling to T'Khut

I always figured she just forgot how it had been spelled. Everyone else seems to forget that it was originally T'Kuht. And the "Kuht" spelling seems more counterintuitive, so it's a natural enough mistake to make.

 

[Detached Nacelle]

No one has yet been brave enough to name the NX-01's chef.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I always figured she just forgot how it had been spelled. Everyone else seems to forget that it was originally T'Kuht. And the "Kuht" spelling seems more counterintuitive, so it's a natural enough mistake to make.

Much simpler: Roman orthography of Earth languages that use a written form other than the Roman alphabet is only an approximation, and often quite fluid. Consider how царь is romanized as czar, tzar, tsar, and probably a few less standardized ones. And the number of different Romanized spellings of the Yiddish/Hebrew משוגע is downright meshuga!

So why should Romanizations of Vulcan be consistent, when there are probably Vulcan phonemes that don't exist in any Earth language, let alone any Earth language for which the Roman alphabet is the standard orthography?

 

[Christopher]

Much simpler: Roman orthography of Earth languages that use a written form other than the Roman alphabet is only an approximation, and often quite fluid. Consider how царь is romanized as czar, tzar, tsar, and probably a few less standardized ones. And the number of different Romanized spellings of the Yiddish/Hebrew משוגע is downright meshuga!

Of course, but the question on the table isn't how it can be rationalized in-universe, it's why Diane Duane changed it in real life. The simplest explanation is that she -- or perhaps her copyeditor -- transposed the letters by mistake, an easy mistake to make.

So why should Romanizations of Vulcan be consistent, when there are probably Vulcan phonemes that don't exist in any Earth language, let alone any Earth language for which the Roman alphabet is the standard orthography?

Generally, though, the placement of an "H" in a word is not random, because it often conveys phonetic meaning. For instance, Westerners often misspell "Gandhi" as "Ghandi," which is not simply a change in spelling but in pronunciation, since the H represents the aspiration of the preceding consonant. So it is unambiguously an error, not simply a harmless variant. It stands to reason that "Khut" would be pronounced distinctly differently than "Kuht," that the former would have an aspirated K and the latter would not.

Although I think the "Kuht" spelling actually makes more sense for a Vulcan name, given the precedent of words like "Kolinahr" and "koon-ut-kal-if-fee."

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Of course, but the question on the table isn't how it can be rationalized in-universe, it's why Diane Duane changed it in real life.

Consider that at the time, Internet email didn't exist. Internet BBSs didn't exist; BBSs were isolated systems accessed by dial-up. It took a room-filling mainframe to equal the processing power of today's smartphones, and what would become the Internet was basically still ARPANET and NSFNet. Hard drives cost about as much as automobiles. When authors needed to communicate in a hurry, they called each other up on landline phones. It's hardly inconceivable that DD caught how T'Kuht was pronounced, over the phone, but not how it was spelled. And copy editors didn't have the resources they have today, to instantly look up spelling precedents on made-up words.

 

[Christopher]

Heck, sometimes mistakes get made even with the best of resources, and even within an author's own work. My stupidest mistake that saw print was probably in my Analog story "Home is Where the Hub Is," the second story in my Hub series. One of the alien species featured in the stories was called the Zeghryk, but in the second story, I mistakenly called them Verzhik, which was a species name I'd used in passing in Star Trek: Mere Anarchy: The Darkness Drops Again. In all my drafts and copyedits and galley reading, I never caught the mistake, and it went to print with the wrong species name. (I fixed it in the collected edition, though.) Transposing a U and an H is trivial compared to that.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Heck, sometimes mistakes get made even with the best of resources, and even within an author's own work. My stupidest mistake that saw print was probably in my Analog story "Home is Where the Hub Is," the second story in my Hub series. One of the alien species featured in the stories was called the Zeghryk, but in the second story, I mistakenly called them Verzhik, which was a species name I'd used in passing in Star Trek: Mere Anarchy: The Darkness Drops Again. In all my drafts and copyedits and galley reading, I never caught the mistake, and it went to print with the wrong species name. (I fixed it in the collected edition, though.) Transposing a U and an H is trivial compared to that.

You could have built an entire story about their different dialects instead.

 

[Christopher]

You could have built an entire story about their different dialects instead.

I would have handwaved it as the species having more than one name, but the name "Verzhik" was from a story I wrote under contract for Paramount/CBS, so I don't own it.

Then again, Diane Duane included Sulamids, a species from her Star Trek novels, in her later Young Wizards novels, explicitly under that name. So maybe I could've done it without legal issues. But I figured it was better not to take the chance.

 

[Enterprise1701]

1967's TOS - "The Squire of Gothos" introduced Trelane of an unspecified species.

1987's TNG - "Encounter at Farpoint" introduced Q of the Q.

1994's TNG - Q-Squared by Peter David identified Trelane as a Q.

2025's SNW - "Wedding Bell Blues" also used this idea, implying Trelane to be the son of Q himself.

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[Greg Cox]

Consider that at the time, Internet email didn't exist. Internet BBSs didn't exist; BBSs were isolated systems accessed by dial-up. It took a room-filling mainframe to equal the processing power of today's smartphones, and what would become the Internet was basically still ARPANET and NSFNet. Hard drives cost about as much as automobiles. When authors needed to communicate in a hurry, they called each other up on landline phones. It's hardly inconceivable that DD caught how T'Kuht was pronounced, over the phone, but not how it was spelled. And copy editors didn't have the resources they have today, to instantly look up spelling precedents on made-up words.

You beat me to the bunch. It's easy to forget in these days of Google and Memory Alpha and what-not that looking this stuff required a lot more effort back in the day. Heck, even rewatching an old episode or tracking down a copy of an old paperback could be challenging . . . .

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Heck, even rewatching an old episode or tracking down a copy of an old paperback could be challenging

Tracking down a copy of "prior art" containing a precedent for how some person, place, or thing isn't a problem for me; I have nearly every ST book published, and every episode I've been able to get my hands on, and the only time I ever dispose of a copy of a book, tape, or DVD is if I've replaced it with a better copy of the same opus. And I know where most of it is*. Knowing what "prior art" I'm looking for, that can be problematical.

_____
* Some weeks ago, I thought I'd either lost or given away my CD of organist Sally Jo Rüedi playing works of her own on an experimental Metzler organ on which one division has a pitch-bend function. So I bought another copy. Then a stack of CDs that I'd lost track of finally turned up, and there it was. And so now I have a spare copy of the CD, still factory-sealed. And yes, you read that right: pitch-bend on real pipes (by varying the wind pressure).

 

[Greg Cox]

At this point, I have an extensive library of Trek reference books and magazines, as well as back-up copies of every TOS episode and movie, but I can't claim to have every Trek novel or episode ever produced.

Thankfully, in these days of Amazon and streaming, I can fairly easily access whatever older Trek I may need to reread or rewatch for reference purposes. (Had occasion to rewatch a Short Trek just a few weeks ago.)

But it wasn't alway that easy. I still remember pounding the pavement in search of a VHS copy of "Assignment: Earth" or "The Counter-Clock Incident." (The latter was a real challenge.)

 

[tenmei]

First and full names of characters. Hikaru Sulu, Nyota Uhura and Una (and although Una in modern novels and SNW was named for @Una McCormack , there is also an ancient fanzine called The Weight by Leslie Fish from the 70's giving her that name in a tiny aside. The name of Vulcan's moon has it's roots in ancient fanfic, and was on a screen display in SNW.

As I understand it, Shelby didnt have a canon first name until Picard, which used the first name established by PAD for New Frontier