Am I the only one who'd like to see a new novelization of TMP?
- Thread starter ScottDS
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I actually liked Roddenberry's novelization of TMP--it was my first Trek book and really made me pursue more. I can see the parts that might bother some Trekkies, but I didn't mind them.
Gene's novelisation is invaluable the way it is because it gives us an idea of Trek the way he would have liked to have done it if he'd had complete freedom and money wasn't an issue.
As for going back and redoing it, I think it's a bad idea. It would be like saying his version wasn't good enough. I mean, who cares if it doesn't mesh perfectly with what came later. The movie that was on screen is the Canon version, not the novelisation.
As for going back and redoing it, I think it's a bad idea. It would be like saying his version wasn't good enough. I mean, who cares if it doesn't mesh perfectly with what came later. The movie that was on screen is the Canon version, not the novelisation.
^And not even the movie (in any of it's three versions) is entirely consistant with what came before or after. OTOH, the idea that warping inside a solar system being dangerous (when other Treks did it all the time and continued to do so afterwards) and that the warp-drive imbalance created a wormhole, when either DS9 or VOY (I can't recall specifically) made a big fuss that wormholes have never been created artificially, are the biggest discrepancies. But, frankly, it doesn't matter.
On the first point, going to warp inside a solar system was treated as a bad idea in "By Inferno's Light" on DS9. It kind of makes sense that it would be unwise to go to warp in a high-traffic area just as it would be unwise to go at freeway speeds in the heart of a city's downtown, and that it would be reserved for emergencies. And in Ex Machina I treated the hazard as a matter of calibration; a spacetime metric like a warp field is affected by nearby sources of mass or energy, so a nearby star or planet could throw off the field's shape and lead to problems unless you've properly corrected for its effect. The problem in TMP, as I interpreted it, was that the new warp engines hadn't yet been calibrated well enough to allow this.
On the second point, what was established later was that a stable wormhole had never been created (or discovered prior to DS9). "Rejoined" does have Sisko refer to the creation of "the first artificial wormhole," but it's not as if people are never imprecise. It stands to reason that he implicitly mean the first stable, traversable artificial wormhole.
So you don't go along with the Borg connection as per Shatner's The Return?
I always thought you were a big fan of that theory... (sits back and opens bag of popcorn)
"Everybody duck!" [/joanie_cunningham]
I always viewed it as being that it was dangerous to go to warp inside a solar system (read: too deep into a star's gravity well) if the engines were not properly balanced for that star. The Enterprise, flying around, would likely have a whole database of how to balance the intermix for different stars, and whenever they were about to enter a solar system they'd just have to load up the appropriate specs and the engines were fine to use. In TMP, they were rushing her to get out into space, so the intermix wasn't balanced, which is what created the wormhole.
BTW, didn't they say that a STABLE wormhole had never been made? I suspect it would be quite easy for them to make an unstable wormhole, and they just don't because it would be completely useless.
And, the whole Borg connection with V'Ger doesn't work for me. IT raises too many unanswerable questions. For example, if V'Ger was from the Borg, why would it be unfamiliar with carbon units, considering that the Borg used Carbon units in every single drone? And do you really see the Borg coming across a primitive space probe and deciding to help it out? I sure don't.
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