Isn't it a bit too early for nuTrek literature? I mean, with 4 novels for 2010, and possibly another 4 to 8 novels before the next movie is released, won't you risk that most of the stories and character developments will be rendered pointless by the next movie, and/or risk to take a good story idea away from the next movie? How do you know what you can write and what you can't?
What you're describing is the way tie-ins have always worked, and it's never stopped them from being published before. The first TOS tie-in comics were out within a year of the show's premiere and were wildly inconsistent with the show. The first tie-in novels to TNG, DS9, VGR, and ENT came out within a year of their premieres, sometimes sooner, and were often written before the shows were even filmed, based solely on writers' bibles and scripts. If anything, these Abramsverse novels are coming out comparatively late in the game.
And yes, contradiction is always a risk. Many, many Trek novels and comics published over the past 40 years have been contradicted by later episodes and films. Sometimes they've been contradicted by episodes that aired before they even came out. That's just a hazard of the genre.
But then, it's a hazard of science fiction in general, except there the stories are contradicted by real scientific discoveries or historical events -- again, sometimes before the stories are even published. It's the nature of any speculative literature -- in this case, speculating about the experiences the movie's characters might have after the movie -- that it runs the risk of being invalidated by later developments. But that doesn't keep us from writing it, and it shouldn't. The goal isn't to be "right." The goal is to tell entertaining, thought-provoking stories.
All we can do is try to minimize the risk of contradiction by telling self-contained stories that don't change the characters or the status quo or lock down too much about the broader universe. In other words, to do it the way tie-ins to ongoing series have always been done. And if we get contradicted anyway, well, we'll be in good company, because plenty of terrific works of Trek fiction have been contradicted by later productions. If the story's genuinely good and enjoyable, then it should still be enjoyable whether it's consistent with the next movie or not.
Besides, the movie's in an alternate timeline anyway, right? So who's to say that timeline couldn't split into further alternate timelines?
Or will the scriptwriters consider the books and don't contradict them, in order to keep them interesting for people who are supposed to get interested in the tie-in literature by watching the movies?
Absolutely not. Less than two percent of the moviegoing audience will ever read the books, so it wouldn't be worth it for the filmmakers to limit themselves like that. Besides, it would be the tail wagging the dog. It's their series. They're the ones in charge of
Star Trek now, and
Star Trek is a film and television franchise. The books are merely derivative works following their lead, a very minor sidebar of the franchise. It's not our place to set the filmmakers' agenda for them. We're just borrowing their toys, handling them delicately, and putting them back in the box when we're done playing with them.
