Before Dishonour....seriously?!
- Thread starter sosolidshoe
- Start date
I don't want to contribute any misinformation, so please don't quote me, but I want to say that it was Paramount (or CBS or whoever) that added in the out with Q, not PAD. Clark told him to kill her off, he did, but Paramount wanted the out put at the end of the novel in case they needed her back later.
PAD has said he was directed to add the Q scene at the behest of someone above Margerat as an escape clause in case Janeway returned in live-action Trek. as far as he and Margerat were concerned, she was as dead as dodo.
at least, that's what i remember reading on here.
or, what Thrawn said....
at least, that's what i remember reading on here.
or, what Thrawn said....
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Peter David told me at a Vulcon convention that he didn't like the idea of killing Janeway, just like he didn't like the idea of killing Janos. However, he was asked to write the book and he knew if he didn't someone else would so he might as well be the one collecting a paycheck. I got the impression from him that Q taking Janeway was his idea, but I may have misunderstood. I do know he liked it ending that way because it allowed the possibility of her return.
He said he has received a lot of hate mail for killing Janeway and has told these angry fans that the decision was not his and that he wrote the possibility of her return. Apparently some individuals have written him some pretty venomous comments.
He said he has received a lot of hate mail for killing Janeway and has told these angry fans that the decision was not his and that he wrote the possibility of her return. Apparently some individuals have written him some pretty venomous comments.
That doesn't surprise me. R.A. Salvatore got a lot of hate mail (and, supposedly, death threats) because he killed Chewbacca in Vector Prime, his first Star Wars novel. There are some people out there (just a small minority, thankfully) who, unfortunately, take their love for fictional characters to absurd levels.
FWIW That's exactly what I've read over the last few years.
Metthias, Peter David is amazing. Like we have said in a conversation on another board, if it wasn't for him, we may not have been given a way out. David has been a favorite author of mine for novels and comics for years and he's famous for leaving ways out for characters to return from the grave. I know David has never been a big Voyager fan, but I know he doesn't hate Janeway either. I will never believe killing Janeway was a good idea. It's about as good of an idea as Star Wars killing Chewbacca....
Despite my problems with PAD's storytelling choices (to the point where I now boycott nearly everything he writes), he does write Q extremely well, probably because that character fits his absurdist concepts like a glove.
Yes, yes he does,lol. I sometimes wonder if he sometimes gets confused because he writes for so many titles!
He was told to remove Janos? I hadn't heard of that before. Was the reason why given?
When Janos first appeared, then-Viacom (or CBS) Consumer Products expressed concern about PAD's making mugatos sentient and capable of speech, and he was asked to remove specific references at the last minute, although the physical description could remain, leaving an in-joke Easter egg for TOS fans. But... one reference to his species was accidentally left behind in the galleys. It was then inferred that this creature was unique among his kind. Later, David Mack's Minipedia supplement to NF again confirmed that Janos was a mugato, and the artist on WildStorm's "Double Time" comic even slipped in a visual cameo of Janos on Excalibur's rec deck.
There was supposedly a request from on high that Janos be phased out of NF, and it was finally made specific that he was a mix of mugato, Caitian and other alien DNA, with only a physical resemblance to mugatos. As "Stone and Anvil" concluded, Janos was left with a herd of white, furry ape-like animals (ie. mugatos) on a planet called Neural: another Easter egg for TOS fans. Neural isn't a canonical planetary name, being only from the script of "A Private Little War", and reported in the "ST Concordance", but not from aired/canonical dialogue from the episode itself.
Why would TPTB get such a weed up their asses about mugatos? This isn't the Arnold era, after all.
Yeah, why go ape shit over Mugatos?
The Licensing staff at CBS Consumer Products still attempt to keep things on track. The canonical material never suggested that mugatos were sentient, nor might one day have representatives in Starfleet. It's CBS Consumer Products' job to challenge the tie-in authors/editors to defend/explain/modify any deviation-from-canon ideas that are in proposals, lest the tie-ins drift so far from ST as to be unrecognizable.
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As long as it's clear that Janos was a special case, why would there be a problem?
sounds like gorilla warfare to me!
sounds like gorilla warfare to me!
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That's the point. It wasn't necessarily clear that he was a special case in his first appearance, nor that he was the result of genetic tampering. Just that for some reason he had a cultured (British?) accent.
Not to flog a dead horse, but with regards to the objection against what Sisko goes through in Rough Beasts of Empire, I'd just like to say this:
I know that as science fiction fans in the 21st Century, we see a genre with an unfortunate underrepresentation of African-American voices, and of empowering portrayals of African-Americans. For every Benjamin Sisko in sci-fi, there are two or three Captain Terrells -- poor Paul Winfield practically made a career of dying to protect white guys in his movies. And I think we all understand that a story can have an unegalitarian EFFECT or CONNOTATION even if that's not the INTENT of the author.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that Sisko was treated poorly in RBoE, or that the apparently disempowering situation he was in was itself a bad thing. It was, frankly, a logical continuation of the story begun in S7 of DS9 -- if you marry her, you will know only sorrow. It's clearly building the seeds of a new story for future DS9 novels.
And further, that Sisko goes through this dark phase of his life is not unequal treatment. Really, Sisko's situation in RBoE is no worse than Picard's in the Destiny trilogy -- Picard goes through this very dark period where he confronts his greatest weakness, his achilles heel, the thing that turns him into the worst version of himself. Which, I mean, we all have that -- we all have our triggers, problems that seem so vast that we find ourselves reduced to our least admirable selves. And Sisko, as dark as his journey is in RBoE, doesn't go through anything as bad as what Picard goes through in Destiny -- he doesn't have a complete emotional breakdown and find himself reduced to a state of utter helplessness, falling onto the bridge and crying like an infant because he just can't function anymore.
So I very strongly disagree with the assertion that Sisko is treated in a manner that is in some way unegalitarian. Not in intention, and not in effect. White and black primary characters alike have gone through harrowing, disempowering personal crises in modern Trek Literature, and white and black primary characters alike have gone through empowering stories as well.
I know that as science fiction fans in the 21st Century, we see a genre with an unfortunate underrepresentation of African-American voices, and of empowering portrayals of African-Americans. For every Benjamin Sisko in sci-fi, there are two or three Captain Terrells -- poor Paul Winfield practically made a career of dying to protect white guys in his movies. And I think we all understand that a story can have an unegalitarian EFFECT or CONNOTATION even if that's not the INTENT of the author.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that Sisko was treated poorly in RBoE, or that the apparently disempowering situation he was in was itself a bad thing. It was, frankly, a logical continuation of the story begun in S7 of DS9 -- if you marry her, you will know only sorrow. It's clearly building the seeds of a new story for future DS9 novels.
And further, that Sisko goes through this dark phase of his life is not unequal treatment. Really, Sisko's situation in RBoE is no worse than Picard's in the Destiny trilogy -- Picard goes through this very dark period where he confronts his greatest weakness, his achilles heel, the thing that turns him into the worst version of himself. Which, I mean, we all have that -- we all have our triggers, problems that seem so vast that we find ourselves reduced to our least admirable selves. And Sisko, as dark as his journey is in RBoE, doesn't go through anything as bad as what Picard goes through in Destiny -- he doesn't have a complete emotional breakdown and find himself reduced to a state of utter helplessness, falling onto the bridge and crying like an infant because he just can't function anymore.
So I very strongly disagree with the assertion that Sisko is treated in a manner that is in some way unegalitarian. Not in intention, and not in effect. White and black primary characters alike have gone through harrowing, disempowering personal crises in modern Trek Literature, and white and black primary characters alike have gone through empowering stories as well.
^ Do you think Avery Brooks himself would approve of what has happened to Sisko?
I do not know, and I would not presume to speak for him.
I do understand not liking seeing an African-American character undergo a divorce, but I don't think it's fair to conclude that this happens in RBoE because of any sort of racial insensitivity or unconscious racial bias. As I said before, I think that the ultimate merits of this narrative development are non-racial in nature, and do not exist in a larger context of depicting non-African-Americans in a more empowering way.
After all -- even if one major African-American character is having a divorce, another -- Jake Sisko -- has, so far as I know (having not yet read Fearful Symmetry or The Soul Key), been depicted as having a successful marriage.
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