There was an increasing interconnectedness among the '80s novels over time, though, as the editor at the time encouraged the books to cross-reference each other. Had the process continued, a more unified continuity would've likely emerged.
Very true. The last gasp of the 80s novelverse would be the books around
Spock's World,
Final Frontier,
Time for Yesterday, and
The Lost Years, particularly the last three, where the authors were each playing around with others' material. (Unfortunately, we never got the book that was to lead into
The Lost Years, Diane Carey's "The Federation Mutinies.") That's the high water mark; then we enter a period of self-contained books that continues for six years until
Invasion!, and the novel continuity that starts to form after that does so on its own terms, leaving the 80s behind.
Ahh, okay. I read
Final Frontier and
The Lost Years at the time, but I didn't read
Spock's World until
The Empty Chair was about to come out, and
Time for Yesterday is still sitting on my shelf patiently waiting its turn.
So either I didn't notice the cross-referencing at the time or I forgot. Thanks to both of you for clarifying that for me.
Still, any time something in TrekLit has been contradicted by the unfolding canon, it seems that Trek fandom in general has just kind of shrugged and said "Oh well, they were still good stories," kept what might still fit and just disregarded what didn't, adapting to the new status quo. Diane Duane's
Dark Mirror comes to mind; when DS9 re-introduced the Mirror Universe, it totally negated that book, but you didn't see Paramount scrambling to try to reconcile both of them the way that starwars.com does to try to reconcile whatever Clone Wars is contradicting in the EU this week.
While I admire the Star Wars licensing department for trying to keep
everything canon, once it becomes this much of a headache I think it's much simpler to take the approach of most other licensed properties and say "film is canon, print isn't" and be done with it.
