Charting the Novel-verse's Discontinuities
- Thread starter Jsplinis
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The only one which comes to mind is Admiral Nechayev being replaced by a monster in a skinsuit in Star Trek: New Frontier.
I keep mixing up which novels, but in the early TNG-relaunch books, either Death in Winter, Resistance or Before Dishonor, there is a contradiction where Worf meets Janeway, then later claims he never has done.
The Q's backstory in the Q-Continuum trilogy is incompatible with The Eternal Tide. Kirsten Beyer admitted in a podcast that she ignored all prior Q novels when writing hers.
Cold Equations #2: Silent Weapons references Ship of the Line, an older novel contradicted quite a bit by DTI: Watching the Clock (although I should point out, SotL has some continuity issues with TNG too)
Indistinguishable From Magic is swept under the rug by Plagues of Night and completely ignored by Cold Equations. This was by editorial decree.
I should also point out that considering the immense depth and complexity of the Trek novelverse, contradictions inevitable and understandable. The writers do an amazing job keeping things largely consistent!
The Q's backstory in the Q-Continuum trilogy is incompatible with The Eternal Tide. Kirsten Beyer admitted in a podcast that she ignored all prior Q novels when writing hers.
Cold Equations #2: Silent Weapons references Ship of the Line, an older novel contradicted quite a bit by DTI: Watching the Clock (although I should point out, SotL has some continuity issues with TNG too)
Indistinguishable From Magic is swept under the rug by Plagues of Night and completely ignored by Cold Equations. This was by editorial decree.
I should also point out that considering the immense depth and complexity of the Trek novelverse, contradictions inevitable and understandable. The writers do an amazing job keeping things largely consistent!
I haven't read The Genesis Wave books, but I reading somewhere the sex of Nurse Ogawa's child is different in them than it is in the Titan books. I'm pretty sure some of the books have included the Genesis Wave when discussion recent events, so they are part of the novelverse.
Alexander's diplomatic efforts in GW book three were brought up in A Time For War, A Time for Peace as part of his qualifications to replace his father as the Ambassador to Kronos.
The big one that still gets me is that both SCE: Aftermath (my debut) and DS9: Unity feature Keiko O'Brien telling Miles for the first time about her new job on Cardassia. I blame myself for that, because I knew there was a need to coordinate with S.D. Perry to keep our respective works straight, but I didn't have the confidence yet to ask to see a copy of Unity so I could make sure. I'm sure Marco would've caught it normally, but he was dealing with having a baby at the time. I hadn't yet learned that you need as many eyes on a project as possible to make sure you catch most of the errors.
Another one that slipped through around the same time, due to different projects having different editors, was that DS9: The Left Hand of Destiny portrayed the Klingon holy world Boreth as a barren ball of ice with no native life while the VGR Relaunch portrayed it as a world with a lush jungle preserve for Klingon hunting rituals. But I think those can be reconciled if you assume the jungle preserve is just a finite, terraformed portion of the planet with all its life forms imported from elsewhere -- that way Boreth still has no native life.
There's also a more recent discrepancy between novels' portrayals of the Rigellian (or Rigelian) species mentioned in "Journey to Babel," the one with similar anatomy to the Vulcans. Catalyst of Sorrows claims that they have Vulcanoid internal anatomy but all look human externally (presumably on the assumption that Hengist from "Wolf in the Fold" was one of them), but David Mack's novels describe Safranski, the Rigelian in President Bacco's administration, as looking like a Vulcan. (I don't remember whether Articles of the Federation claims this as well.)
Another one that slipped through around the same time, due to different projects having different editors, was that DS9: The Left Hand of Destiny portrayed the Klingon holy world Boreth as a barren ball of ice with no native life while the VGR Relaunch portrayed it as a world with a lush jungle preserve for Klingon hunting rituals. But I think those can be reconciled if you assume the jungle preserve is just a finite, terraformed portion of the planet with all its life forms imported from elsewhere -- that way Boreth still has no native life.
There's also a more recent discrepancy between novels' portrayals of the Rigellian (or Rigelian) species mentioned in "Journey to Babel," the one with similar anatomy to the Vulcans. Catalyst of Sorrows claims that they have Vulcanoid internal anatomy but all look human externally (presumably on the assumption that Hengist from "Wolf in the Fold" was one of them), but David Mack's novels describe Safranski, the Rigelian in President Bacco's administration, as looking like a Vulcan. (I don't remember whether Articles of the Federation claims this as well.)
In New Frontier #13: Gods Above, Spock arrives via the Romulan Praetor's personal transport, the Bird-of-Paradise - but five or six years later at the start of Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire, Spock is still languishing in the caves beheath the Romulan capital city, having made no progress since "Unification"
According to Memory Alpha and Beta, the Rigel Colonies encompass a variety of humanoid species, all of whom seem to be referred to as Rigellians (or Rigelians), including the Chelons. At this point, I think "Rigellian" is more a descriptor of origin than of species, sort of like saying someone is a "Texan" doesn't tell you anything about his or her ethnicity.
^So Safranski could actually be Vulcan by ancestry but Rigelian by nationality and culture? Maybe a third- or fourth-generation descendant of Vulcan immigrants? That would be cool. Trek too often assumes that every member of a given species is native to that species' homeworld.
One of the smaller touches I really liked to your book DTI: Forgotten History was the Tellarite Chab jav Lorg, the Federation Councillor (and later President).... from Mars. The idea that Mars has a longstanding Tellarite community was, I thought, really cool and really interesting.
Like Tuvok's son being a police officer on Deneva, as a properly multicultural/-special world, in Destiny - which felt appropriate to an inner(?) world (like the mix of backgrounds in the US east coast in the 18th and early 19th centuries). I remember loving that sense of the Federation as an intermingled society in that glimpse, then being a bit dissapointed that Losing the Peace's Deneva-as-presented was firmly human in make up.
And let's not forget Susan Wright's The Best and the Brightest, whose ensemble cast included a character who belonged to an alien species called the Rex, but was born and raised on Earth and was named Bobbie Ray Jefferson.
Don't forget about Dr. Selar adopting the Andorian child in TNG #13 "The Eye Of The Beholder", but not having any kids when New Frontier starts. Not to mention, but in TNG#13 as well the Andorians are a 2-gendered species and are able to have kids, just like humans, unlike the 4-gendered Andorians we're currently seeing.
But, really, due to the amount of time that's taken place since "Mission To Horatius" came out in 1968, there's going to be contradictions between most of the novels.
But, really, due to the amount of time that's taken place since "Mission To Horatius" came out in 1968, there's going to be contradictions between most of the novels.
Those novels aren't part of "the novelverse," though.
The term "novelverse" is generally used to refer to shared continuity that has developed in the Trek lines since circa 2001 (though I prefer to call this continuity the Destinyverse, or the Palaisverse). Some earlier novels have been "grandfathered" into that continuity -- The Captain's Daughter and Vendetta come to mind -- and some elements of earlier novels (but not every detail) have been grandfathered in. (And the New Frontier series is kind of "half in, half out.") But most pre-2001 novels are not part of the Destinyverse.
I apologize. I may have been unclear when I started this thread.
What I was asking was if there was a thread or website that covers how any particular novel might contradict another novel or TV canon. For example, New Earth and Deep Domain show Chekov receiving his promotion transfer in different ways.
You guys have given a lot of good examples of contradictions but I was looking for something a little more comprehensive.
Being a Doctor Who fan as well, I have been spoiled by incredibly thorough sites such as The Doctor Who Reference Guide, The Discontinuity Guides, etc. and was wondering if there was a Star Trek equivalent. I've checked Memory Beta but its not quite what I was thinking of even though it IS a great resource.
Thanks for your help,
Jsplinis
What I was asking was if there was a thread or website that covers how any particular novel might contradict another novel or TV canon. For example, New Earth and Deep Domain show Chekov receiving his promotion transfer in different ways.
You guys have given a lot of good examples of contradictions but I was looking for something a little more comprehensive.
Being a Doctor Who fan as well, I have been spoiled by incredibly thorough sites such as The Doctor Who Reference Guide, The Discontinuity Guides, etc. and was wondering if there was a Star Trek equivalent. I've checked Memory Beta but its not quite what I was thinking of even though it IS a great resource.
Thanks for your help,
Jsplinis
I've stopped counting NF in these kinds of situations. There are so many things like that that I've started thinking of NF taking place in a separate universe that is very similar to the one in the novelverse.
I doubt anyone has catalogued the inconsistencies that exhaustively. I'm not sure there's a need to. It seems a rather negative way of approaching things. Trek tie-ins have always encompassed a variety of parallel continuities and interpretations; I like to see the different versions of the same event not as a "contradiction" so much as a selection of alternatives.
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