Yeah, well we've been hip deep in denial round these parts. It's going to take a little time. And some excellent nuTrek novels wouldn't hurt.
Abrams Trek...
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Yeah, well we've been hip deep in denial round these parts. It's going to take a little time. And some excellent nuTrek novels wouldn't hurt.
I mean, the same physic that applied on screen before.
if only they use the term "trans-supernova" or something.. then we can consider it's a new phenomenon.
the schimitar torpedo won't hit enterprise for the first time in Nemesis, if it's not warp-drived.... since it was shoot during warp flight to a ship in warp flight
As I already explained, there are multiple cases in prior Trek productions where the effects of stellar or planetary explosions have propagated faster than light. So it already is consistent with the physics that applied on screen before. Insofar as Trek physics has ever been consistent, which, news flash, it hasn't, because there have been a lot of different people making it up and the majority of them haven't cared less about scientific accuracy but have just made up whatever suited the story at the time.
All that proves is that some torpedoes are warp-capable, not that all of them are. Besides, who cares?? As I've already pointed out, the pre-existing Trek canon has many, many inconsistencies within it that are far greater than this one. So dwelling on one trivial inconsistency that isn't even provably an inconsistency is pointless nitpicking.
A truly amazing summary of everything I ever wanted to point out (about these issues some people have with Star Trek '09), but never quite found a way to put it into words the way you just did.
Not being a writer probably had something to do with it.
Anyway, two thumbs up for this. I think I'll be quoting these posts occasionally.
This is not meant to offend anybody, it's just a general observation that somehow fits into this.
The logic I can't agree with is when mistakes of the past are brought up to justify mistakes in the future. It's like a little kid that did something wrong blaming the other kid with "But he did it, too!"
Yes, it's fiction, it's not important. And with such a logic, it's a good thing, because if it was important, like engineering, or judiciary, we'd all be screwed. Well, cars had malfunctioning breaks and airbags before, why should we be changing that? People commit crimes every day and get away with it, so what's so bad about what I did?
No, I'm not taking Trek so seriously. Trek is fiction. People can do with it whatever they want. But the other examples support my point about an, in my opinion, very flawed reasoning that is actually only an attempt at justifying slouchiness with the material people are working with. Be it engineers screwing up a car, be it writers screwing up a movie script, you name it. It simply is a bad habit, and I wished people, in EVERY area of life and work, would ditch this in favor of doing things right and with effort.
The logic I can't agree with is when mistakes of the past are brought up to justify mistakes in the future. It's like a little kid that did something wrong blaming the other kid with "But he did it, too!"
Yes, it's fiction, it's not important. And with such a logic, it's a good thing, because if it was important, like engineering, or judiciary, we'd all be screwed. Well, cars had malfunctioning breaks and airbags before, why should we be changing that? People commit crimes every day and get away with it, so what's so bad about what I did?
No, I'm not taking Trek so seriously. Trek is fiction. People can do with it whatever they want. But the other examples support my point about an, in my opinion, very flawed reasoning that is actually only an attempt at justifying slouchiness with the material people are working with. Be it engineers screwing up a car, be it writers screwing up a movie script, you name it. It simply is a bad habit, and I wished people, in EVERY area of life and work, would ditch this in favor of doing things right and with effort.
Actually, the American legal system does have a strong basis in Common Law, which is built entirely of case precedent. So that's a bad counterexample.
I wasn't speaking of the American system.
You're a bad counterexample.
But we're not talking about mistakes. We're talking about deliberate creative license. When different people work in the same fictional reality, it's not a mistake for them to portray it in subtly different ways. If twenty students in an art class paint their subject in twenty different ways, that doesn't mean nineteen of them are getting it wrong. It means each creator is interpreting the subject in his or her own distinctive way. Which is the whole point of creativity.
Star Trek is not real. There is no single "correct" version of the universe. It is an imaginary creation, the creation of many different hands. Each of those creators has brought a different interpretation to that universe, and sometimes the same creator has brought more than one different interpretation to it (1980s Roddenberry had a very, very different view of his universe than 1960s Roddenberry did). Yes, they change the technical details, they change the design styles, they change the attitude and tone. But that's their prerogative as creators. It's no different from the way different artists on a given comic book title will each redesign the characters to fit their own styles. The way John Romita Sr. drew Peter Parker is very different from the way Todd Macfarlane or JR Jr. or especially Humberto Ramos draws him. Dick Sprang's Batman is very different from Jim Aparo's or Dick Giordano's or Bruce Timm's or, so help us, Frank Miller's. The changes in the characters' looks aren't mistakes, they're deliberate choices on the part of the creators to bring their own distinctive style and approach to an imaginary creation. And it's the changes that keep the creation fresh over time.
That is a gross misrepresentation of my position. I write fiction for a living! I'm the last person who'd say it's not important! Come on!
What I'm saying is that fiction is mutable. A fictional universe is not something that's locked in a single, rigid form. It's something that exists within the human mind, within many human minds, and that makes it flexible, adaptable, capable of evolving and being reinterpreted. That's one of its strengths: its ability to be more than one thing. That's what lets a great story stay fresh across time and across changing audiences. If a story couldn't change, if it were stuck in one fixed, rigid form, then it would be left behind as the world moved forward. It would become obsolete, irrelevant, forgotten. Great stories reinvent themselves and that is why they survive down through the ages. And that makes them very important.
Roddenberry himself denounced Star Trek V: The Final Frontier as being rubbish and it has essentially been decanonised, as has Voyager's Salamander TransWarp episode, Threshold. These aren't mistakes, just parts of the whole that we'd rather forget. People who first watched ST09 and no other trek prior aren't to obsess over old details in the prime universe, they'll obsess over details in the new universe as it diversifies by Abrams himself doing the films and Pocket doing the books.
That reminds me of a question I wanted to ask. Is anyone at Bad Robot approving the Abramsverse outlines so they don't conflict or is it just Paula Block at CBS?
That reminds me of a question I wanted to ask. Is anyone at Bad Robot approving the Abramsverse outlines so they don't conflict or is it just Paula Block at CBS?
What prevents you, in your time, when you're in charge, to finally make a correct, fully thought through version of the universe (as a tie-in writer, you barely can, I see that, but as a writer/director of one of the movies...)?
Whenever a writer didn't care... for example when the Enterprise only needs 3 minutes to Vulcan, and people tell them that it doesn't make sense... they don't come up with a speed and distance chart that finally sets the silly thing in stone... no, instead they blame everything that came before for not being consistent, and do nothing about it. That's the point that upsets me (about every fiction, not only Trek), because it's lazy.
Isn't that analogy more suitable for comic books? 1960s Batman, Burton's Batman, Nolan's Batman?
Star Trek is, until now, more like a single project where those 20 art students are working on. And once in a while, once of those students choses to ignore what the others did before (but he doesn't paint on a new canvas, he paints over the old picture), or, when he made a bad choice (or when he simply didn't care), he blames his predecessors for not caring either.
Creativity is the art of problem solving. I personally regard ditching continuity of an established universe just so you can create your story more easily to be the most lackluster way of being creative. Same goes for not establishing a finally solid piece of continuity when you have the chance (i.e. a warp speed chart, a map of the galaxy, etc...). Now that would be creative. It would bring realism and life to that universe. There have been many retcons. The latest are the stardates and the time travel thing (oh, by the way: do the stardates now change for Star Trek novels, according to the new retconned Orci-standard that they use Earth years instead?). But most of the time those retcons make not anymore sense than what was there before. I already bitched about the time travel thing. It totally doesn't fit into the universe. It was done so that the story could be told more easily. And the excuse is that time travel hasn't been consistent. See above why that upsets me.
"Ships move at the speed of plot" is one of those excuses I really can't stand. If you write a story set in New York, will your hero get from Queens to Staten Island in 2 minutes, just because the plot requires it? If so, then the plot is flawed, because it ignores the setting! And if your fictional setting is so totally random, then you haven't been creative!
I really could go on and on about this... but I'm dead tired. I hope you get my point. And I hope it didn't come off as offending anywhere.
Yes. It happens all the time in all sorts of fiction.
If it well written nobody will notice or care if the geography isn't quite right. The bottom line is if the work is entertaining or not.
And "Random" = "Not creative" makes absolutely no sense at all.
No.
Paula left CBS Television Licensing quite some time ago. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say who's vetting the books now; he might value his privacy too much to be "outed."
Will Maximus Decimus Meridius get from Germania to Spain in a few days, riding a horse, wounded and bleeding, just because plot requires it?
"Gladiator" won Best Picture, I remind you!
I think a couple of Trek writers have mentioned him in their acknowledgments. Unless there's another someone else.
There's no such thing as a "correct" version of something like this, that's been through many different hands over the decades and will be through many more in decades to come. There's just the current interpretation. If I were running the show, I'd do my best to tell stories that were consistent within themselves and respectful of what had come before, but above all entertaining and not sacrificing the needs of the story for a wrongheaded and misplaced obsession with "correctness." But whoever came after me and did the next incarnation would bring their own voice and their own ideas to it, and I'd be a hypocrite to say that they didn't have as much right to put their own stamp on it as I did.
Your assumption here is factually wrong. It did not take three minutes to Vulcan. It was edited to seem like a continuous, brief journey, but consider: one moment, we see McCoy in his red cadet jumpsuit injecting Kirk with a fast-acting sedative, then we cut to Pike and Chekov on the bridge, then we see Kirk waking up in sickbay with McCoy now in a standard blue uniform. If you actually pay attention, it's clear that a significant amount of time elapses between what appear to be consecutive moments. This was not lazy or thoughtless. The filmmakers deliberately constructed the scene to work this way: they wanted it to have a fast, apparently seamless pacing to it for effect, but they were careful to insert the details that would allow observant viewers to recognize that a significant interval had passed. Obviously they did care.
It's fundamental to all art.
No, it's various different projects that we choose to pretend constitute a single project. The vision of the Trek universe portrayed in TMP was radically different from that portrayed in TOS, and the vision portrayed in TWOK was even more radically different (Meyer brought a very militaristic and retro sensibility that was never part of Trek before). It's just that fandom has had decades to get used to these multiple, divergent interpretations and rationalize them as pieces of a coherent whole, so people tend to overlook just how major the differences in interpretation and content are. Memory lies, because memory is an attempt to amalgamate assorted bits of information into a cohesive model of our past. And so the Star Trek in our memories always seems more cohesive than it actually was, and that makes the newer stuff seem like a break to the imagined unity of what came before.
The new movie was actually very respectful of past continuity -- a hell of a lot more than TWOK was (that movie was full of retcons and inconsistencies), or than early TNG was (that series strove to detach itself from its predecessors and ignore past continuity as much as possible). The differences you're bitching about are trivial details, matters of style, deliberate creative choices. It's unfair and obnoxious to accuse people of being lazy or negligent just because you don't agree with their creative choices. You have no bloody idea how much hard work goes into something like this. It's easy to criticize something when you have no comprehension of how it's actually done.
Paula left CBS Television Licensing quite some time ago. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say who's vetting the books now; he might value his privacy too much to be "outed."
He has a page on Memory Alpha, so I'd guess not...
It'd be interesting to see some Trek novels based on TAS.
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