Perhaps we're finally starting to see the long-term results of Marco's layoff a couple of years ago?
Next Titan novel announced
- Thread starter Defcon
- Start date
Perhaps we're finally starting to see the long-term results of Marco's layoff a couple of years ago?
^If I'm being honest, I was indeed thinking about that very fact when I typed my little rant.
If ever I had to create a list of people that I felt were by and large essential to the diversification and growth of Star Trek... Marco Palmieri would occupy a list including Ron Moore, Michael Piller, & Ira Steven Behr
Trek Lit could do with another Showrunner of Marco's caliber for sure.
If ever I had to create a list of people that I felt were by and large essential to the diversification and growth of Star Trek... Marco Palmieri would occupy a list including Ron Moore, Michael Piller, & Ira Steven Behr
Trek Lit could do with another Showrunner of Marco's caliber for sure.
Uh, no, Abrams has nothing to do with TrekLit.
I think you're projecting things onto your memory of TrekLit under Marco. For one thing, Marco wasn't the only Trek editor -- he was working alongside Margaret Clark, and neither one of them outranked the other. For another thing, there was never a "unified story cohesiveness" to the various Star Trek lines -- lines, plural. The various TREK lines weren't one story, they were many different, sometimes overlapping, stories.
In particular, I seem to remember for years people complaining because the post-finale DS9 novels hadn't gone beyond 2376/2377, yet the TNG and VOY novels had reached 2378 to 2380.
Since when are diehard ST fans in agreement about what they want?
And Pocket reacts to sales figures, pro reviews, and authors' demonstrated abilities to meet deadlines - and many other factors, not just TrekBBS comments and Amazon reviews.
Yeah, all this doom and gloom seems totally unfounded. The next Titan's being written by an author you don't like? It's hardly the end of Trek lit.
And now neither one remains.
True, but they were moving in a more unifying direction for a while; enough that when a trilogy like Crucible chose to exist separately, it was worth a mention.
And now they're complaining because DS9 has a 2-year story gap when we can only assume very little of interest occurred. The difference in setting may have been a liability either way, but I don't think the handling of it was ideal.
There's actually a 4 1/2 to 5 year gap. I don't have a problem with the jump per se, but it wouldn't hurt if we would get a full blown DS9 novel sometime soon to cement the new status quo on the station/Bajor and maybe give us some flashbacks into the gap years.
Yeah, and that's a shame. I liked their works and the authors they recruited. But the authors they recruited remain, and it's not like they were wholly responsible for every good Trek novel written. Ed Schlesinger was responsible for the A Time to... miniseries, for instance, and he's still there.
I think you're conflating "being set in a shared continuity" with "moving in a unifying direction." They were never moving in a "unifying" direction. Most of the novels published circa 2001 to 2009 were set in the same general continuity, yes -- and that's still the case. What Judgments Come, Children of the Storm, Watching the Clock, Rough Beasts of Empire, The Struggle Within, Indistinguishable From Magic, Cast No Shadow, Paths of Disharmony, To Brave the Storm -- these books have all been set in that same continuity.
There are a few more books being published now that are not overtly in the same continuity (though often they have no contradictions with that continuity, leaving the door open for the reader to include them if they wish), but ultimately things haven't really changed since Marco and Margaret left in terms of the shared continuity.
I think Rough Beasts made it clear that many interesting things occurred, even if it did not detail them.
I think that's a fair statement. I didn't agree with Margaret's idea of jumping ahead and syncing DS9 up with the rest of the lines, though I can understand her reasons behind it, and I'm sad to see that her plans won't come to fruition either.
But I also think that the books aren't in as dire a condition as people have been saying, and that there's a certain amount of idealized nostalgia going on here.
The gap in the DS9 narrative is actually just about four years and one month. The Soul Key is in January 2377 and Rough Beasts of Empire begins in February 2381. (However, "Reservoir Ferengi" in Seven Deadly Sins spans 1/77-1/78 and features a number of DS9 characters. And The Never-Ending Sacrifice also extends into 2378.)
And what concept was that? What makes you think there was a unifying, driving concept? From what the authors and editors have said, it's always sounded to me like each line proceeded on its own, according to its own developments, with a lot of improvisation along the way.
Yeah, I never got the impression that there was any kind of overall master plan for TrekLit as a whole; simply that each line was trying to tell good stories and advance the lives of the characters we've known beyond where we last saw them. Beyond that, they pretty much seemed to be making it up as they went along. That's part of why Destiny was such a big deal; it was the first attempt at tying them all together. (Well, unless you count Gateways.)
^ But I think that Marco really did bring a TON of foresight and planning to the table. Look at how seamlessly the whole DS9 relaunch works its way towards the Ascendants arc, for example. This is of course all the more irritating because that didn't actually happen, but that's beside the point.
The Section 31 miniseries foreshadowed an end-of-Section-31 pitch that never ended up being made. The beginning of The Sundered makes explicit references to Forged In Fire, which was published 5 years later. Vaughn appeared in a bunch of books as soon as he was established, adding a lot of depth to his backstory right away.
You got the sense with Marco that this was all going somewhere, that tons of plans and ideas were in the works, that there were 10 stories behind the scenes for every one that we saw.
TrekLit has definitely lost that. It totally feels like they're making up shit as they go along now. I wouldn't say they've lost a "driving concept" exactly, just that everything's gotten a little fuzzier less defined around the edges. The core of each novel is fine, but they're missing that sense of everyone playing well together, of every piece adding to the whole. Now they're just pieces.
(Not to be melodramatic or anything; by and large, they're good pieces. But Marco did bring something to the table that's missing now, I think it's hard to deny it.)
The Section 31 miniseries foreshadowed an end-of-Section-31 pitch that never ended up being made. The beginning of The Sundered makes explicit references to Forged In Fire, which was published 5 years later. Vaughn appeared in a bunch of books as soon as he was established, adding a lot of depth to his backstory right away.
You got the sense with Marco that this was all going somewhere, that tons of plans and ideas were in the works, that there were 10 stories behind the scenes for every one that we saw.
TrekLit has definitely lost that. It totally feels like they're making up shit as they go along now. I wouldn't say they've lost a "driving concept" exactly, just that everything's gotten a little fuzzier less defined around the edges. The core of each novel is fine, but they're missing that sense of everyone playing well together, of every piece adding to the whole. Now they're just pieces.
(Not to be melodramatic or anything; by and large, they're good pieces. But Marco did bring something to the table that's missing now, I think it's hard to deny it.)
Lindley and Thrawn pretty much got to the heart of what I was fumbling to get at originally.
There's not a hidden message of Doom & Gloom for Trek Lit per se, it's just that where once I saw structure, hints of connectedness leading to revelation, pieces of a larger whole... I now see none of that.
I wasn't trying to idealize past fiction under Marco, but I was trying to point out how much more everything seemed to mesh and in turn how satisfying that was. It felt like there was a "guiding hand" backing the authors and helping them by keeping sight of a particular vision and where it was all going.
I don't get that "vibe" anymore.
Think of a Symphony Orchestra without a conductor. While each individual musician might be a good performer in their own right, without a conductor they're not going to be playing together as well as they could be.
There's not a hidden message of Doom & Gloom for Trek Lit per se, it's just that where once I saw structure, hints of connectedness leading to revelation, pieces of a larger whole... I now see none of that.
I wasn't trying to idealize past fiction under Marco, but I was trying to point out how much more everything seemed to mesh and in turn how satisfying that was. It felt like there was a "guiding hand" backing the authors and helping them by keeping sight of a particular vision and where it was all going.
I don't get that "vibe" anymore.
Think of a Symphony Orchestra without a conductor. While each individual musician might be a good performer in their own right, without a conductor they're not going to be playing together as well as they could be.
Sure -- for each individual line. Not for all of Trek Literature as a whole; that's my point.
Well, that, and we should remember that Marco left tons of room for creative changes, too, as the authors have pointed out numerous times.
Or which hasn't happened yet.
"Zero Sum Game" seemed like it was trying to help set that one up again.
Yeah, but was that Marco's doing or Martin and Mangel's?
(I'm not trying to say Marco didn't bring a lot of foreshadowing and planning to the table. I just want to point out that we shouldn't overlook the contributions of the authors to such work, too, or misattribute anything.)
I don't agree. I think that while Marco brought pre-planning to the table, the authors in numerous have also made it clear that a lot of the important developments in his lines were made up as they went along -- Riker and Troi's decision to start a family in Titan, for instance. Given that context, I honestly think that you're over-stating the amount of pre-planning that went into his lines.
And I also think you're understating the amount of pre-planning that went into the post-Marco novels. Typhon Pact, for instance, looked to me like it set up more than a few new potential plot threads. To say nothing of David Mack's work in Mirror Universe and his and Ward and Dilmore's work, post-Marco, in Vanguard.
I don't think post-Marco Trek Literature has, as a whole, lost any sort of interconnectedness or feeling of connectedness. It's not about plot. What I think post-Marco Trek Lit has lost--not entirely, but in part--is Marco's particular set of thematic motifs. Marco's Trek lines, I think, tended to be a bit melancholy, a bit bittersweet; his influence was in a sort of, I suppose I'd call it melancholy optimism, this sort of feeling that things will get better but at the cost of tragedy. I hesitate to say that Trek Lit has lost that thematic concern, because I think it's one that recurs in a number of individual authors' works -- David Mack, for instance, or James Swallow. But I think it is fair to say that that particular creative sensibility is not as widespread across the various Trek Lit lines as it once was. That's not inherently a bad thing -- although I did prefer the TrekLit lines when it was more prevalent.
How often does Pocket leave story gaps? If anything, the authors have filled many of gaps we never thought would be filled in. And who'd have ever thought we'd get a third and fourth book in the originally abandoned "Lost Years" saga?
The cliffhangers of "Challenger: Chainmail", the promise of a second Shatner "Academy" novel (for which no contract was issued), and the recent DS9 narrative jump: not too many in decades of ST publishing.
And you'll get laughed at again because suggesting that someone should be paid 3 cents an hour is beyond insulting.
The idea of deliberately underpaying someone for work that is supposed to be valuable is itself insulting, irrelevant of the amount by which it's underpaid.
