What are the least Star Trek-like Star Trek novels?

[SheliakBob]

Diane Carey's "Fireship"--the Janeway Captains' Table book.
God awful to start with, but more importantly it was utterly a non-Trek novel with its protagonist swapped out for a Trek character, who didn't act or think in any way like the onscreen version.
Gods.
I want those hours of my life back!

Though, I do like some of Carey's other Trek fiction. I just think that "Fireship" was a non-Trek project that got "Trekified" for a quick paycheck.

In general, I hate it when writers take concepts that they created for out of Trek works, then retool them for Trek use. Goes against the whole notion of franchise fiction, IMHO.

You've got a whole UNIVERSE to play with! Leave your own toys at home!

 

[Therin of Andor]

it was utterly a non-Trek novel with its protagonist swapped out for a Trek character, who didn't act or think in any way like the onscreen version.

Totally disagree. I thought it captured (and explained) aspects of Janeway perfectly.

 

[Christopher]

In general, I hate it when writers take concepts that they created for out of Trek works, then retool them for Trek use. Goes against the whole notion of franchise fiction, IMHO.

You've got a whole UNIVERSE to play with! Leave your own toys at home!

"Arena" was an adaptation of a short story by Fredric Brown (sort of). "Tin Man" was based on the novel Tin Woodman by Dennis Bailey (a TrekBBS member) and David Bischoff. And I'm sure plenty of other Trek episodes were based on elements of other unsold works their writers had developed. Heck, the character of Data was based on the title character from Roddenberry's failed pilot The Questor Tapes, crossed with Xon from the unmade Star Trek Phase II series.

Ideas are ideas. Writers very often take ideas that were originally developed for one project and adapt them for another. After all, why let a good idea go to waste?

And I don't agree that the "notion of franchise fiction" is to exist segregated from the rest of fiction, as if it were some sort of ghetto. The "notion" is to tell new stories in the familiar universe. And that universe can't be limited strictly to the stuff that's already been seen onscreen. Those new stories have to have new ideas to be worthwhile. And what difference does it make whether a writer conceives those ideas anew for that specific project or repurposes ideas that were conceived for something else? Ultimately they come from the same mind.

 

[BrotherBenny]

In general, I hate it when writers take concepts that they created for out of Trek works, then retool them for Trek use. Goes against the whole notion of franchise fiction, IMHO.

You've got a whole UNIVERSE to play with! Leave your own toys at home!

"Arena" was an adaptation of a short story by Fredric Brown (sort of). "Tin Man" was based on the novel Tin Woodman by Dennis Bailey (a TrekBBS member) and David Bischoff. And I'm sure plenty of other Trek episodes were based on elements of other unsold works their writers had developed. Heck, the character of Data was based on the title character from Roddenberry's failed pilot The Questor Tapes, crossed with Xon from the unmade Star Trek Phase II series.

Ideas are ideas. Writers very often take ideas that were originally developed for one project and adapt them for another. After all, why let a good idea go to waste?

And I don't agree that the "notion of franchise fiction" is to exist segregated from the rest of fiction, as if it were some sort of ghetto. The "notion" is to tell new stories in the familiar universe. And that universe can't be limited strictly to the stuff that's already been seen onscreen. Those new stories have to have new ideas to be worthwhile. And what difference does it make whether a writer conceives those ideas anew for that specific project or repurposes ideas that were conceived for something else? Ultimately they come from the same mind.

QFT.

SheliakBob, read Christopher's books and tell me they're not Trek. He is an excellent worldbuilder and his fiction is among the best in the entire line.

 

[SheliakBob]

"Ex Machina" was generally a fine book. Great Trekness (tm). But...the bird people part totally did not work for me.
It felt like an intrusive element--it didn't feel..."Trek" to me. That's the problem with ideas birthed outside of the franchise universe, they're not conceived within the expectations and parameters of the franchise universe, and all too often they stick out like sore thumbs.

Everyone's mileage varies as to what is or isn't "Trek" to them. (God knows, there are even people who think that J.J. Abomination epitomizes the concepts of Trekness. I don't under stand it, but there ya' go.)

I'm not saying, necessarily, that every time an original birthed outside the franchise concept gets wedged into Trek that it is inevitably a Bad Thing. Odds are there are lots of such elements that I've never noticed because they were blended in so well. Just, most of the time, when I find some element of a Trek novel to feel "not Trek", or when I feel that something is out of place--it turns out to have been an idea that started out as part of a non-Trek original fiction piece.

I am aware of Mr. Bennett's philosophy concerning ideas and fiction and Trek, etc. And, while I find much of his writing to be enjoyable and very well crafted, I do not completely agree.

I feel that franchise fiction should be birthed, developed and presented entirely within the bounds of the franchise.
Mr. Bennett gets paid to exercise his talents and philosophies.
I do not.
Therein lies pretty much the Bottom Line of any discussion we may have.

 

[Christopher]

"Ex Machina" was generally a fine book. Great Trekness (tm). But...the bird people part totally did not work for me.
It felt like an intrusive element--it didn't feel..."Trek" to me. That's the problem with ideas birthed outside of the franchise universe, they're not conceived within the expectations and parameters of the franchise universe, and all too often they stick out like sore thumbs.

Like the Horta? The Horta was created when creature performer Janos Prohaska crawled into Gene L. Coon's office in a monster costume he'd recently worn for an episode of The Outer Limits. Coon was so impressed by the costume that he decided to write a script to showcase it. So the whole episode "The Devil in the Dark" was built around an idea -- the monster costume -- that was "birthed outside the franchise." And the Horta certainly wasn't like the other humanoid aliens that were characteristic of the franchise. Did that make it wrong to include it?

And do you really think that of all the hundreds of writers who contributed scripts and stories to ST over the decades, not one of them ever took an idea they'd conceived for something outside of Trek and incorporated it into the show's universe? That's just not how writing works. We don't segregate ideas like that. We keep them around and we use them when an opportunity comes along, regardless of their origins.

I'm not saying, necessarily, that every time an original birthed outside the franchise concept gets wedged into Trek that it is inevitably a Bad Thing. Odds are there are lots of such elements that I've never noticed because they were blended in so well.

Indeed. You complain about the Shesshran in Ex Machina, but you didn't comment on my worldbuilding for the Fabrini/Lorini, which was based only slightly on the minimal information we got in the episode and far more heavily on my historical studies and on an alien religion and mythology I made up from whole cloth. Nor did you object to my depiction of the source of Yonada's gravity and the threat it posed when Yonada came under attack, even though that was taken directly from an unsold original story of mine, part of the same universe that I originally created the Shesshran for. So maybe the origin of the idea isn't really your problem.

I feel that franchise fiction should be birthed, developed and presented entirely within the bounds of the franchise.

You're asking the impossible. That's just not how ideas work. Every work of art is influenced by factors outside itself. If it weren't, it would quickly become stagnant, incestuous, and irrelevant.

 

[SheliakBob]

You keep going back to TOS and episodes, which really is another subject. I'm only saying that when a writer retasks a fictional idea that has been developed outside of a franchise and uses it for licensed work, the result is all too often intrusive and identifiably different in feel than materials that are crafted with the internal presumptions and parameters of the franchise in mind from the beginning.

 

[Lt. Brannigan]

Every work of art is influenced by factors outside itself. If it weren't, it would quickly become stagnant, incestuous, and irrelevant.

Yes, that is very true. and I agree with this statement 100%. If it wasn't influenced by outside factors, then we would see a never ending loop of the exact same variations on a theme. And then it would ridiculously repetitive.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I'm only saying that when a writer retasks a fictional idea that has been developed outside of a franchise and uses it for licensed work, the result is all too often intrusive and identifiably different in feel than materials that are crafted with the internal presumptions and parameters of the franchise in mind from the beginning.

And I'm fascinated that you think you can tell the difference. Star Trek authors don't decide, "I shall create a new 'Star Trek' alien/civilization/planet today" or "I created an alien race today and will use them in a different universe because it's not a 'Star Trek' alien".

The criticism of canonical 24th century Star Trek aliens was that many shared too-similar forehead appliance makeups. Every so often we get a Species 8472 or a Horta. The licensed tie-in authors aren't limited by budget - only imagination - so when it comes to alien races in a "Star Trek" novel how can anyone tell if it's a true ST alien or not, or its original purpose?

 

[Thrawn]

But the case could be made that those episodes fell short of what TOS aspired to. Roddenberry's goal was to move beyond the camp and cartooniness of most SFTV of the era and do a genre show that was just as much a believable adult drama as any cop show or doctor show or Western of the era. If it occasionally failed to achieve that and fell back on some of the sillier tropes of the era, that's attributable to budget limitations or the influence of the era's tropes or what-have-you rather than a deliberate embrace of outlandish silliness. So it could be argued that being consistently outlandish on purpose is not truly "Trek-like."

Well, ok, but the case could also easily be made with exactly the same argument that Roddenberry was going for optimistic, and so the Dominion War / moral ambiguity stuff going on in DS9 was antithetical; as dark as the occasional TOS outlier, but clearly (to mirror your construction) being consistently dark & ambiguous is not truly "Trek-like."

Except DS9 was awesome. And so is New Frontier.

What's the phrase; "I am large, I contain multitudes"? Star Trek is large, it contains multitudes. Anything you can define as "Trek-like" somewhere can be explicitly countered with at least one adventure from some series somewhere. That's what I like about it; it's a canvas, a universe of connections and possibilities to be exploited in a million different creative ways.

For me, sometimes the outliers are the most interesting. I actually enjoyed the Rebels trilogy a lot; it was sort of DS9 reimagined as a Saturday morning cartoon, and I thought it was fun to come at it from that kind of perspective. Or Carey's DS9 as Greek Myth in Station Rage, or whatever the hell dark magic Thorne was channeling to write Sword Of Damocles. Or, for that matter, your tremendous infusions of rigorously hard sci-fi worldbuilding (just look at the Amazon reviews of really any of your books for plenty of people that find that extremely offputting.)

I say the weirder the better. Go large, take chances. Make me think.

 

[Christopher]

You keep going back to TOS and episodes, which really is another subject.

No it isn't. It's a direct refutation of your false premise that ideas from "outside the franchise" don't belong. It illustrates that "the franchise" as we know it has always been influenced by outside ideas. This conception you have of "the franchise" as something completely self-generated with no outside "contamination" is a fantasy. It has no meaning.

I'm only saying that when a writer retasks a fictional idea that has been developed outside of a franchise and uses it for licensed work, the result is all too often intrusive and identifiably different in feel than materials that are crafted with the internal presumptions and parameters of the franchise in mind from the beginning.

And by making that assumption, you're just revealing that you don't understand how the creative process works. As I said, every writer takes ideas that originated for one context and adapts them to another. For all you know, many ideas that you assume were generated "in-franchise" actually originated for something different but were adapted effectively enough that they felt like a perfect fit. That's part of what writers do all the time, because as I said, we reuse and repurpose ideas all the time. You're talking as though it's impossible to do that, but I'm telling you as an experienced writer that it's a basic and inseparable part of what writers do all the time.

Okay, maybe sometimes we're less successful at adapting an idea to a new setting than we are at others. In those cases, it would probably stand out and feel like it doesn't "belong." But that just means we didn't do the adaptation well enough, not that it's impossible or wrong to adapt the ideas at all. You may notice the occasional instances where it doesn't seem to fit, but you might be unaware of hundreds of other instances where the fit is perfect. So you can't validly assume that it can't or shouldn't be done at all.

 

[Greg Cox]

You keep going back to TOS and episodes, which really is another subject. .

I'm confused. Why don't TOS episodes count? That's the root source of all STAR TREK. Everything else is a spin-off.

And, another example: "Wolf in the Fold" by Robert Bloch is basically a sci-fi take on his classic horror story, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper."

Worked fine as a STAR TREK episode.

 

[Christopher]

^Yep. TOS was written in a time before shows had the kind of large writing staffs and internally-generated storytelling that they do today. A great deal of the ST universe was created by freelancers who came in and did their own thing -- Paul Schneider creating the Romulans, Jerome Bixby creating the Mirror Universe, etc.

Not to mention the filmmakers who came in and put their own stamp on things -- Robert Wise doing Trek a la The Andromeda Strain, Nicholas Meyer turning it into an 18th-century maritime adventure.

 

[Valin]

The Case of the Colonists' Corpse.

Tied with "A Stitch in Time" as my favorite un-Trek Star Trek novel. I wish more of those pseudo-Perry Mason novels had been published.

 

[Valin]

As for Carey's Trek novels, I loved Final Frontier and (slightly less) Best Destiny, as well as First Frontier (the one with the dinosaurs ).

I liked her Trek novels quite a bit. As a matter of fact, "Final Frontier" is my favorite Star Trek novel.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I also disagree with ShiliakBob (aka Richard Arnold?)'s opinions of what he calls "non Trek" ideas. I don't see how such stagnant thinking could produce anything worth reading.

The only time I've seen a non-Trek idea badly rammed into Star Trek was Asimov's "psychohistory" in Spectre. Such a system could *never ever* work in a universe with new aliens every week. Yet The Shat and J+G R-S decided otherwise.

Besides, bird people have been in Trek since the first episode of TAS (and who could forget the USS Surak's giant chicken doctor in the old comics?)

I would love to see reimagined Skorr one day - when I saw a trailer for the Max Payne movie with the weird "dark angels" (or whatever, I havent seen the film itself) I was thinking "now is the time to bring back the Skorr!"

 

[Christopher]

Besides, the Shesshran are more pterosaur people than bird people...

 

[F. King Daniel]

Yeah I know. There are loads of reptillian aliens in Trek too. The Xindi had both reptiles and bird-men.

Such un-Trek ideas!

 

[Stevil2001]

Worked fine as a STAR TREK episode.

"Fine" might be an exaggeration when it comes to "Wolf in the Fold".

 

[Greg Cox]

Worked fine as a STAR TREK episode.

"Fine" might be an exaggeration when it comes to "Wolf in the Fold".

I don't know. I always enjoyed that episode.

STAR TREK meets Jack the Ripper. What's not to like?

(Then again, my first professional sale was a Jack the Ripper meets Sweeney Todd story, so I may be biased . . . .)