The fact that Paramount/CBS Studio Licensing has never policed fictional continuity among licensees has been a great annoyance to me over the years. However unrealistic it might be for the editorial staff of Pocket Books or continuation authors to be familiar with both filmed Star Trek and licensed tie-ins, as a consumer of Star Trek product, I believe that all the pieces should fit together.
Even the old "pieces" that have been blatantly contradicted by later canon? For that matter, there are some assertions in some of the early books and comics that are rather silly, some stories that weren't that good, etc. Being beholden to every bit of it would undermine the credibility of the current fiction.
And I'm disturbed by the idea that tie-in continuity should be "policed." As if we're committing some kind of crime if we exercise creative freedom. It's good to have the
option of continuity among different creative works, but if we were forbidden the choice of taking alternate paths, it would be too restrictive. Sometimes, as with
Crucible, it's better for a story if it doesn't have to be consistent with earlier works. And there can be value in telling different possible versions of the same event in Trek history. There's more than one version of Kirk's first mission on the
Enterprise, more than one version of his last, more than one version his Academy days, etc. And they're all pretty good stories, and it would be a shame if most of them had been forbidden to exist.
Authors really shouldn't be in a position to pick and choose pieces of the Star Trek licensee universe that appeal to their particular tastes. There really shouldn't be any question of what is canon and what is apocrypha.
There is no such question.
All print tie-ins are apocrypha. Only onscreen material is canonical. So the question of whether one piece of apocrypha acknowledges another piece of apocrypha has nothing to do with canon.
And for the record, most Trek authors, when given the freedom to choose, have chosen to be consistent with earlier works, to acknowledge the creations of their fellow authors, at least within the same medium and publishing program. That's how the internovel and novel-comic continuity of the late '80s and early '90s came about, and it's how the current novel continuity came about: because the various writers and editors involved
wanted to pay homage to one another's work, and so the continuity among tie-ins spontaneously and voluntarily increased over time. The only time we've been "policed" was when Richard Arnold forbade any continuity among the books and comics. So it's rather backward, and frankly rather condescending, to suggest that we need to be forced to acknowledge each other's creations.
If something is marked with the Star Trek brand it should fit with everything else that came before it, that includes toys, books, comics, RPGs, and computer and video games, and future authors should be tasked with maintaining continuity with it.
You're several decades too late for that to be a remotely realistic expectation. "Everything that came before" in Trek licensing doesn't even remotely fit together. How can the Power Records comics with the blonde Uhura and black Sulu possibly fit with the rest of Trek? How can
Spock Must Die's finale with the Klingons being frozen in time for all eternity possibly fit with the Klingons' continued presence in all subsequent fiction? There's no conceivable way we could keep our works consistent with
everything that's come before. So there's no choice but to pick and choose. And how do you decide what's "real" and what isn't? What seems irreconcilable to one reader or writer may seem reasonable to another. There's no objective standard for defining a "canon" of the non-canonical. That's just the way
Star Trek tie-ins have always been. If you want a franchise whose tie-ins are absolutely self-consistent, you need to look elsewhere.
