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Star Trek: Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion

I am a big fan of the Vanguard covers, by Doug Drexler. What are some of your favorite book covers from the past/present? I could look a few up in my new book:)
 
Yeah, I'd suspect that's an early cover that only exists on the Internet.

Due to the quality of the image I kind of figure that it's not an early cover, since remember we are talking about a book that came out in March 1999, so early covers would've been released in 1998, and if it was released online, it would've probably been released as a 256 gif back then and we'd have an image like the scan of "The Murdered Sun" on Memory Beta.
 
Due to the quality of the image I kind of figure that it's not an early cover, since remember we are talking about a book that came out in March 1999, so early covers would've been released in 1998, and if it was released online, it would've probably been released as a 256 gif back then and we'd have an image like the scan of "The Murdered Sun" on Memory Beta.

Has anyone ever seen a copy of the completed book with Janeway and Tuvok on it? I'm fairly certain all copies of the published book had just the ship, no people.

Proposed/rejected cover art can exist in many forms, though. The marketing people often had high resolution slicks to give to sales reps. Perhaps the artist scanned his own version and put it online at some point? I'm guessing Ms Mulgrew might have nixed it with her cover approval.

I own high resolution cover slicks of radically-alternate placeholder artwork for the "Star Trek IV" novelization and the YA adaptation. A scan of those cover slicks would give high resolution images for a book published way back in 1986.

There is a variation of "Strike Zone" with a different Klingon face for Kobry. I've also seen Picard with hair (replaced by Tuvok in the final) on "Double Helix: The First Virtue" at:
http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/The_First_Virtue
IIRC, Patrick Stewart nixed that one.
 
I liked it. I did think Strange New Worlds got a bit too much coverage, but that's a matter of opinion.

I completely agree. I thought the fan fiction got way too much coverage.

But a great book though.

Aren't ALL Trek books fan fiction? They are fiction, written by fans. Sure, the fans who get published are professionals, but still.

As for those anthologies getting more coverage, that makes sense. The typical novel is written by a single author. Sometimes two, and in a few cases, more. An anthology by its nature is written by multiple authors. They tried to interview each author. Should they have picked a single person per anthology and left the others alone? If so, how does the person conducting the interviews pick that one subject over all the others in that same anthology?
 
Actually the SNW anthologies are not fan fiction, since that term technically refers to unlicensed, unauthorized, usually self-published amateur fiction. All the SNW authors signed contracts and got paid for their work, so it was professional fiction just as much as anything else from Pocket. Sure, the contest was only open to authors with no more than two prior professional sales, but I only had two prior sales when I was hired to write SCE: Aftermath. Past experience doesn't matter; as long as it's licensed, contracted, and paid for, it's professional fiction, not fan fiction.

And the reason the SNW anthologies got so much coverage was simply because there were so many of them with so many distinct stories to cover.
 
So you're saying that the people who write Trek fiction are not fans of the series? That's odd.

You're taking the term "fan fiction" too literally. It doesn't just mean fiction by fans. Over the past forty-plus years, it's acquired a distinct technical meaning which I've already stated: unlicensed amateur fiction based on a copyrighted franchise. It means fiction by people who are purely fans, i.e. who are not professionals and are not getting paid for what they write. Of course most of the people who write professional Trek fiction are Trek fans, but that's not what the term "fan fiction" refers to.
 
So you're saying that the people who write Trek fiction are not fans of the series? That's odd.
I'd say that most writers who have written Star Trek fiction are fans. Maybe not of all five series, but at least three. But there is a handful of writers who have written Star Trek fiction that aren't fans either of the series that they wrote for or the franchise as a whole.
 
So you're saying that the people who write Trek fiction are not fans of the series? That's odd.

You're taking the term "fan fiction" too literally. It doesn't just mean fiction by fans. Over the past forty-plus years, it's acquired a distinct technical meaning which I've already stated: unlicensed amateur fiction based on a copyrighted franchise. It means fiction by people who are purely fans, i.e. who are not professionals and are not getting paid for what they write. Of course most of the people who write professional Trek fiction are Trek fans, but that's not what the term "fan fiction" refers to.

Exactly. Just for clarity's sake, it's a way to distinguish between amateur fan productions and commercial fiction authorized and approved by the licensor. It's not a value judgment or literal description; it's just the term people use to distinguish the fan-made stories from the paperbacks on sale at Barnes & Noble.

Both are written by Trek enthusiasts, but it can get confusing when they're lumped together . . . especially since they're produced under very different circumstances, with different expectations and constraints. (The authorized books are required to follow the guidelines and continuity laid down by the movie and TV people; the fan fiction can have Kirk marry Spock or whatever.)

So we use terms like "fan fiction" or "licensed media tie-in novels" just so we're not using the same term to describe different kinds of Trek fiction . . .
 
I liked it. I did think Strange New Worlds got a bit too much coverage, but that's a matter of opinion.

As for those anthologies getting more coverage, that makes sense. The typical novel is written by a single author. Sometimes two, and in a few cases, more. An anthology by its nature is written by multiple authors. They tried to interview each author. Should they have picked a single person per anthology and left the others alone? If so, how does the person conducting the interviews pick that one subject over all the others in that same anthology?

*shrug* I don't think the short stories should have taken up nearly a 1/3 of the book vs the novels, frankly. SHORTER interviews, maybe, might have worked better. Especially since a lot of the SNW interviews amounted to "SQUEE! I GOT PUBLISHED! YAYS!"

No insult intended, of course. :cool:
 
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