Are the Blish novelizations canon?

Is it though? Did we actually see that in TOS?
Kor was the commander of an occupying force. He killed ad tortured, but I don't recall any treachery and scheming. Though the episode does establish that even someone at Kor's level is watched by his government. Not sure that's "treachery".

Not sure how Koloth fits in with Darvin's grain poisoning plan. Was he there to give Darvin a ride home? Still placing Klingons on the station while an operative of Klingon Intelligence is actively involved with sabotage seems a bit foolish. Though I guess they could have been a distraction. Not seeing much scheming or treachery beyond some espionage. And we know from "The Enterprise Incident" even the UFP isn't above such actions.

Kang I think might be the prototype for TNG's Klingons. He not an occupier like Kor or arrogant like Koloth. He and Kirk are victims of same creature.

As for the minor league
Kras in Friday's Child is a bit weaselly. And he does betray Maab.

Krell in "A Private Little War" isn't much of character and we don't learn much about Klingon's from him. Like Kras he's there to gain "allies" for the Empire.

The Klingons in "Elaan of Troyius" are mostly off screen until the end. Once again it's about espionage and gaining a foothold on planet to gain resources.

 

There's a scene in the DSC Season 1 finale where you see a Klingon peeing on a wall, and there's two streams.

 

Yeah and as you said it constantly changed over the years. Kor didn't seem to find it 'dishonourable' to execute a group of unarmed pacifists in 'Errand of Mercy', because Klingon honour hadn't been explored yet.

 

Of course we did. You mention several examples in your own post (Kras, Darvin, Krell, the "Elaan" Klingons), making this a disingenuous question.

The Making of Star Trek spells out the TOS creators' approach to the Klingons explicitly: "Their only rule of life is that rules are made to be broken by shrewdness, deceit, or power. Cruelty is something admirable; honor is a despicable trait." (p. 257)

This is well-known. TOS thinking was that Klingons were treacherous and Romulans were honorable. The Search for Spock was originally going to feature Romulans, so it had villains who spoke of honor and flew in a cloaked Bird of Prey. Then they decided to switch it to Klingons without changing anything else, and as a result, Klingons suddenly became honorable and had cloaked Birds of Prey, and later Trek productions built on that.

Besides, it's just common sense, isn't it? TOS created the Klingons to be The Bad Guys -- and they were basically a sci-fi riff on racist Yellow Peril stereotypes common in the era. So of course they were nasty and villainous. TNG changed them into allies, and thus made them noble and honorable.

 

I wasn't trying to be disingenuous, just trying to see if they were "treacherous and cruel". Darvin was a spy and saboteur. Something our heroes have been as well. Kras, Krell and the other guy were trying to cultivate relationships with other species ( admittedly for their own gain) Kras was the only one to be treacherous.

But do the episodes bear that out? I'd say yes and no.

A couple of Romulans were "honorable". But they spend most of the episode complaining about their leader and society being less than they were before. The other significant Romulan we see is representative the the "new order" back home. The type who has friends in high place who could could make trouble for someone speaking against the Praetor. And in spite of being honorable they cross the neutral zone in direct violation of treaty. Destroy several Earth outpost in a sneak attack using two powerful pieces of technology to feel out "Earth" for a new war. Stand up guys, those Romulans.

True, but by the time we get to Kang, they seem less so.

 

I believe it was David Gerrold who declared (in connection with not being allowed to make big business the bad guy in "The Trouble with Tribbles," if I remember right) that "Klingons fart in airlocks."

Missed that. Suddenly I find myself thinking about how the rather earthy phrase, "pisseth against the wall" occurs (in 2 different versions) six times in the KJV Old Testament. Other translations substitute words to the effect of "adult male," but there may be some truth to the assertion that "pisseth against the wall" carries the additional connotation of "lowlife."

And "Tuskin38," both "Visit to a Weird Planet" and "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" can be found online. And they're best when read together, as a sort of literary diptych.

 

Blish’s adaptation of “The Menagerie” in Star Trek 4 was interesting as he completely jettisons the framing sequences of the Kirk era to simply adapt the first (unaired) pilot episode “The Cage.” At the time “The Cage” as a standalone had not yet been broadcast and all anyone had seen of it was the footage spliced into the two-parter “The Menagerie.” So Blish’s adaptation is the very first time a Pike era adventure appears in print.

I found this personally fascinating because at the time I had only recently learned “The Cage” was the first pilot that failed to sell the series although it did sell the concept. I wondered how much of that story did not make it into the two-part “The Menagerie” which was apparently very little as I eventually learned. When I first saw “The Menagerie” I wondered if there were older episodes of Star Trek featuring Pike and crew that I had somehow missed.

 

That blog is a good one and I was able to help with a bit of information here and there!
JB

 

That's beside the point. I'm not talking about the limited question of "Is this canonically 'true' in-universe?" I'm talking about Star Trek as a fictional creation and the assumptions and intentions of the people who created that fiction. It is a well-documented fact in real life that the the creators of TOS intended the Klingons to be the treacherous ones, and that making them honorable was a retcon decades later. That is true in our universe, which is the universe I'm talking about here.

 

Get some help moving those goal-posts. Lift with your knees.

 

It was Nerys who moved the goalposts, no doubt unintentionally; I was returning them to where I originally placed them in this post, in the context of a discussion about how real-life creators like John M. Ford and Ron Moore portrayed the fictional Klingons. If you're talking about the intentions and perceptions of creators, you can't limit yourself to talking exclusively about the in-story depictions of things, because the stories exist in the larger context of the real world.

My original point (see the above link) was that John M. Ford's depiction of Klingons was based on TOS-era assumptions, which would surely have included The Making of Star Trek as well as the episodes themselves. People today have forgotten how influential and authoritative TMoST was to the first generation or two of fans. It was the source of many ideas that were never explicitly stated in TOS but were universally accepted as true, like the show being in the 23rd century, Kirk being the youngest captain, the Klingons and Romulans having an alliance, the forward dish on the Enterprise being a navigational deflector, and so on. Ford's generation of Trek fans and writers was heavily influenced by offscreen materials, because there was far less onscreen than there is today, so fandom hungered for anything new regardless of the medium, in stark contrast to modern fandom's elitist rejection of anything that isn't onscreen. And TMoST was seen as just as authoritative as the show itself, because it came straight from the source, a direct insight into the minds of the show's creators during its production.

Indeed, we know for a fact that Ford was influenced by offscreen materials, since his version of Federation history in The Final Reflection is based on the Spaceflight Chronology. So it makes no sense to exclude offscreen materials from a discussion about Ford's influences and intentions in writing The Final Reflection.

 

Of course, we must remember that lack of understanding of another's mindset and worldview leads to a default assumption that the other is a treacherous and dishonorable. We see that all the time in the real world.

Setting Klingons and Blish aside for a moment, there was a Star Trek novel -- early Pocket, if I remember right -- in which we visited a society in which every adult carried a firearm. A smoothbore short-barreled pistol, firing large caliber steel slugs, if I remember right. Not very accurate, but it made a lot of noise. And anybody not armed with one of these "social necessity" (I believe that was the author's own phrase, as used by Starfleet personnel) firearms was assumed to place no value on life. A mindset and worldview utterly foreign to many, perhaps most, Star Trek fans, and yet not to a sizable (and disproportionately vocal) portion of the U.S. population.

Star Trek is all about learning to understand those with points of view that at first seem irreconcilably different from one's own, so it is only natural that the interpretation of Klingons would evolve over time. And both that evolution, and the initial cultural misunderstandings that led Humans and Klingons to each initially assume the other to be treacherous and dishonorable, have made for a great many interesting stories.

 

Sure, and that was basically the point John M. Ford made in The Final Reflection, that the Klingons had more nuance and nobility than TOS had led us to assume. But some people here seem to be contending that The Final Reflection's Klingons are basically identical to TNG-era Klingons, and that's not the case. They both made the Klingons more sympathetic and gave them a sense of honor, but they did so in different ways. TFR notably put a lot of emphasis on Imperial Intelligence and the deceit and scheming of the people in power in the Empire. To be sure, TNG/DS9 Klingon politicians were pretty treacherous at times, but it was treated as a corruption of the honorable way the system was supposed to work, while in TFR the deceit and espionage were built into the system as an expected norm (which is where the Cardassian parallels come in).

In short, where TNG simply reversed and papered over the TOS-era assumption of Klingon treachery, Ford acknowledged their deceitful side but made it just one aspect of a complex, contradictory society, rather than trying to define the entire society by a single value.

Maybe The Abode of Life? I remember the phrase "code duello" popping up a lot in that book.

 

On The Abode of Life, that sounds more likely than anything I could think of off the top of my head.

And let's face it, lots of societies seem like "one note" from the outside, and yet reveal great complexity and nuance from the inside.

 

That depends on who you believe. Justman was against such return engagements of the same Klingons and wrote a screed against it in a memo when Kor was pitched to make a 2nd appearance (for “A Private Little War” IIRC).

And William Campbell’s story about Koloth being intended to be a recurring villain is nowhere supported in the extant production documentation, fails the smell test, and collides head-on with Justman’s gripe.

We know Kor was pitched to return by writers, but the idea appears to have been nixed by the time the script assignments were made. Gerrold may have intended Koloth to reappear when he pitched “More Tribbles” to Freiberger, but we know that pitch didn’t go until it was brought to Star Trek Animated.

 

I believe there was also the idea that if the Enterprise was heading “out there” then it would be highly unlikely they would run into the same individuals again. Harry Mudd seems to be the exception.

 

Rather like a proverbial bad penny.

 

As I wrote in post number 9 on page 1:

Christopher wrote:

In my post number 9 I wrote:

https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek_2

https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek_6

https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/James_Blish

The other day I happened to find my copy of the February 1968 issue of Analog Science Fiction Science Fact with "To Make a Star Trek".

On page 74 Stine says: "As a matter of fact, even if they did stop to explain it in detail,would we understand the technology of two hundred years hence? If we did, we could have it now!".

I guess that Stine means that TOS happens sometime with the span of 200 year, plus or minus 25 years and thus sometime in the span of 2143 to 2193. Or possibly Stine means within the span of 200 years plus or minus 50 years, and thus sometime within the span of 2118 to 2218. Or possibly Stine means within the span of 200 years plus or minus 100 years, and thus sometime during the span of 2068 to 2268.

On page 74 Stine talks about his 31 page copy of the Star Trek writers' guide, which was obviously an edition issued sometime before his article was published in February 1968. And he says that the readers may be interested in the contents of the writers' guide. This strongly suggests that most or all of the information in the rest of the article comes from the writers' guide, which can be checked for accuracy by anyone with access to both.

And the next paragraph begins with:

"The time period of "Star Trek" is about two hundred years hence."

And if that is taken from the writers' guide, then writers were instructed by the guide to write details consistent with TOS being about 200 years in the future whenever they included details that would imply when TOS happens. How successful those writers were in implying that TOS was about 200 years in the future, instead of earlier or later, remains to be seen.

On page 78, when talking about the lack of relativistic effects in TOS, Stine says:

"I'll buy the possibility that two hundred years of research permit this, but some scientists won't. Who cares? This is great fun!"

"In so far as the structural soundness of the ships overall engineering design is concerned, again who wants to argue with the technology two centuries in the future?"

Discussing the sensors on page 82 Stine says:

"In fifty years we've sensed the interior of the atom and beyond the farthest galaxies; in two hundred years' more effort the level of sensing technology is likely to be be quite high and also quite beyond our primitive comprehension."

And how precisely or loosely was that "about two hundred years" interpreted by the creative staff of TOS, if they were responsible for it?

Did they mean: 1) 200 years plus or minus 10 years,2) 200 years plus or minus 25 years, 3) 200 years plus or minus 33 years, 4) 200 years plus or minus 50 years, 5) 200 years plus or minus 66 years, 6) 200 years plus or minus 75 years, or 7) 200 years plus or minus 100 years?

1) puts TOS sometime between 2158 and 1278, 2) puts TOS sometime between 2143 and 2193, 3) puts TOS sometime between 2135 and 2201, 4) puts TOS sometime between 2218 and 2218, 5) puts TOS sometime between 2102 and 2234, 6) puts TOS sometime between 2093 and 2243, and 7) puts TOS sometime between 2068 and 2268.

Since the 23rd century is officially from 2201 to 2300, and popularly from 2200 to 2299, "about two hundred years" in the future of 1968 can be interpreted as being in the 23rd century. But most persons would probably interpret it as being in the 22nd century.

So as far as I can tell, Stine's article gives a date for TOS that is more likely to be in the 22nd century than the 23rd century, and does not include any direct statements that TOS happens in the 23rd century. So Blish seems likely to be the first to state that.

However, on page 74 to 75 Stine writes:

"Contact has been made with a number of extraterrestrial races, some of which are quite humanoid. For example, the Vulcanians from a planet circling 40 Eridani are so humanoid that a mating between Terran and Vulcanian can result in issue -- namely Mr. Spock."

So Stine named 40 Eridani as the star of Vulcan in an article published in the February 1968 issue of Analog Science Fiction Science Fact, and Blish named 40 Eridania as the star of Vulcan in his adaptation of "Tomorrow is Yesterday", published in Star trek 2, with a publishing date of February, 1968.

So G. Harry Stine (Lee Correy) and James Blish seem to be tied as the first persons to name 40 Eridani as the star of Vulcan.

 

Blish used 40 Eridani as the location of Vulcan in Star Trek 1 (1967). Specifically in his adaptation of "Balance of Terror." I believe he was first.