And, to be frank, I don't care particularly about the creative expressions of their authors. Those relevant to your experience as a writer, but not to mine as a reader. I don't enjoy works on a metatextual level; for me, it's either Star Trek or not (perhaps this is why I was taken aback by The Entropy Effect being considered a classic Star Trek novel).
If you don't care about creative expression, then why do you enjoy fiction at all? I mean, that's what fiction
is! This isn't a bloody documentary. Every single bit of
Star Trek is the creative expression of one author or another. The whole thing is an amalgam of various different creative expressions, and even the creative expressions that define the unwieldy beast called "canon" are often wildly inconsistent with one another.
Star Trek is not and never will be a singular, monolithic thing. It's just been too many different things already.
I'm interested in what's created, but am unconcerned with it as a form of expression (except either when writing, or when specifically trying to understand a person, in which case the story is less interesting than the expression).
Setting aside its non-filmed tie-ins, Star Trek seems essentially cohesive to me. There are errors here and there, and small pieces that don't add up, but they are small pieces of a generally coherent whole, and not particularly important.
And I'm not talking about anything metatextual. The qualities I'm talking about are integral parts of the texts themselves as they were written. Rewrite them to conform to modern continuity and you change the text into a very different text. It's just not the same story. Enjoying the spirit and flavor of the story as it's written is entirely, profoundly relevant to my experience as a reader. It's as a reader that I enjoy the diversity of these books, and I'd be less satisfied as a reader if they were bowdlerized and homogenized and stripped of the things that make them feel the way they do.
I wouldn't argue that something should be entirely re-written to fit modern dictates (the
Rihannsu novels, for instance, would not fit particularly well with modern Star Trek, but are excellent), but that details not important to the story could be changed slightly to better fit. In
Federation, specifically, a great deal of the content of the novel fits very easily into modern Star Trek's version of mid 21st Century events. There's no reason to assume that Earth was immediately peaceful after the Vulcans arrived - Enterprise even slightly suggests otherwise in one episode. There's not even reason to conclude that Earth suffered only one nuclear exchange during the period surrounding the Third World War. We know that the United States survived, and it appears that Britain did (though the Royal Navy is never specified as the British Royal Navy; technically, it could even be the French
La Royale), but we don't know much else about what happened during those years.
As a reader, I don't consider the diversity of books I read, just as I don't consider that of persons I meet, places I travel - really of anything I encounter. I enjoy each work as what it is, but don't so much consider that as immerse myself in it.
It's interesting that it sounds like you read with a parallel unimmersed train while you read stories - like you consider their context and history within the real world while reading them for story enjoyment. I've noticed a similiar affinity for non-immersive aspects in your writing (which has, unfortunately, often drawn me out of feeling connected to the stories). It's a very different approach to mine, and one that offers a significantly different experience for the reader. I tend to read stories either in real-world mode or immersed mode (occasionally taking a break from the latter when something in a book provokes an interesting thought about the real world); when reading them in immersed mode, I consider stories as though they're actual accounts of events in other places and times.
If anything, you're the one who's defining things in metatextual terms, because you're the one saying that texts should be altered to conform to the contents of entirely different texts.
I refering specifically to your experience as a reader, in which outside information about the book is relevant to your enjoyment of the story. I wouldn't consider this situation at all while reading a novel for enjoyment.
