Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

It's not unprecedented -- Sulu and Uhura's first names, the Klingon Day of Honor, George and Winona Kirk. There's also a TNG episode that mentions a planet Endicor, a name previously used in passing in a Peter David TOS comic, but it's such a random connection that it might just be coincidence.

Kirsten did mention to me that she's used examples from the books to illustrate certain points to the other writers. So awareness, yes, but that doesn't necessarily translate to use.

 

Like Star Wars, much of the non-canon Star Trek books are being thrown out the window, but there are elements of the side stories that will be represented in Discovery, Goldsman told IGN.

Um, Star Trek novels were never canon, so all that throwing out of windows seems kinda superfluous. But hey! It makes for good webfodder.

 

Oh man, just imagine the reactions to that. All the YouTube videos complaining about how Discovery wants to force us into accepting evil non-binary folks and how the old Star Trek was never political and would never do such a thing as support four gendered species or even marriage between four people. It would be hilariously stupid. So much shit to watch. God, I want them to include the four Andorian genders so bad now!

 

Man, I didn't even think about how that would be received by...those people. I mean, I already wanted the four genders given their prominence in the books, but now more than ever!

But if not, here's hoping that they don't go and specifically say that there are ONLY two genders. It would be sad if it were the Andorians that would destroy the current treklit continuity. I wonder how our writers would get around that.

 

It doesn't seem likely that such a definitive statement would ever be made. After all, most people assume two sexes are the default, so there'd be no reason to go out of their way to explicitly exclude other amounts of sexes. More likely they'd just do what Trek has always done and refer to male and female Andorians -- but since the books have already broken it down so that two of the sexes are effectively "male" and two are effectively "female," that's essentially already taken care of.

Granted, it would be a problem if they showed a married Andorian couple and had dialogue indicating that such pairings were the norm instead of the exception -- e.g. something like "It's customary among Andorians for the bride and groom to..." etc. But that would contradict onscreen canon, since it was "Data's Day" which established that Andorians marry in groups of four. All the books did was to establish that that meant one of each of four sexes, rather than two of each or a male and three females or something.

 

Imagine - instead of a sliding scale from one to another, they'd have some sort of grid or matrix to get wound up by. How about if a character identified with three or four of the sexes ? I'm mainly thaan, but partially shen. And chan. With a bit of zhen !

 

Wasn't making the Andorians having 4 genders based off an off hand line Data made in an episode of TNG?

Well STO also calls it Hobus.

 

I think if you take what he said word-for-word, he doesn't explicitly cite four 'genders' but that the marriages take place in groups of four, as @Christopher mentioned above.

 

Welp, how did I miss that.

 

That flash in the sky from when Hobus exploded must have been blinding

 

Yeah, I seem to recall reading some author comment or interview saying that four Andorian sexes/genders was conceived as the interpretation of Data's four-person marriage comment that would allow for the best storytelling in the DS9 relaunch.

 

With the producers being aware of the books and Kirsten Beyer in the writing staff, do you think some novel characters may show up or some things that happened in the books may be mentioned?

 

Unlikely. Besides, the novel continuity hasn't really established much about the 2250s for the show to draw on anyway. The most I'd expect is if an Andorian showed up they could give him or her a name done in the style of Andorian names in the novels, but even that I'm not holding my breath on.

 

Agreed on all counts.

 

Do any of the Starfleet characters specifically refer to the 4 genders in either dialogue or thoughts in any of the ENT or TOS novels? There is one way I thought of to possibly get around the 4 genders thing, but it depends on the answer to that question, and is bordering on a story idea.

 

IIRC, it was mentioned in Enterprise novels at some point.

 

I think it's more accurate to say that Andorians have four sexes. Our culture has a tendency to use "gender" when we mean "sex" out of prudishness about using the word "sex," but they're different concepts. Sexes are biological configurations, genders are cultural and psychological identities (or linguistic categories).

I think a case could be made that Andorians have four sexes but two genders, at least in human terms. Both thaans and chans are considered "male" and referred to as he/him, and both shens and zhens are considered "female" and referred to as she/her. So even if Andorians see the four categories as distinct genders, they accept a two-gender paradigm when interacting with two-sexed species. I think that's a handy way to handwave the conflict that already exists between the novels and Enterprise, which treated the Andorians as fitting a male-female paradigm. As long as the story doesn't directly involve their reproductive process or marital customs, it's easy to accept that they're just adapting to the pronouns and gender conventions of the other races around them.

 

I can never remember what the difference is between sex and gender, and I got them backwards.

 

So...huh. From the episode:

Spoiler: "The Vulcan Hello"

Georgiou: "No one has seen a Klingon in a hundred years!"

EDIT: Okay, never mind, there's a bit of wiggle-room here, when

Spoiler: DSC Premiere

the Starfleet admiral Georgiou contacts in the episode gets more specific and says a couple times that the Federation has "barely had any contact" with the Klingons for a century, not a total cutoff. Still, it does raise questions not only with series like the Errand of War and Errand of Fury books, but also with TOS's own canonical "The Trouble With Tribbles," both of which place the Battle of Donatu V in 2244, and the admiral makes it sound like there's yet to be any sort of major engagement between the two powers recently.

I suppose it could end up being more of a pre-"Balance of Terror"/post-Tomed Incident type of situation, where there's occasional subspace contact taking place, but no actual, physical face-to-face interactions. Also, there's a major Klingon raid on a Federation science-colony briefly seen in the episode in flashback, and it appears that the Starfleet admiral was including this in his dialogue with Georgiou, so perhaps Donatu V falls under this same assessment.

 

Well, Live by the Code is in 2165, so it's 91 years -- close enough.

On the other hand, the episode puts the first Vulcan-Klingon contact just last year -- 240 years before the episode -- which is about a century later than I put it in dialogue in A Choice of Futures. Well, maybe Captain Shumar is bad at subtraction.

As for Donatu V, "Tribbles" only says there was a battle; it doesn't say how big it was. For that matter, it doesn't explicitly say who the combatants in the battle were, although the context implies it's the UFP and Klingons.