Ah, I haven't read those, but I do remember seeing that on your site at some point now that you mention it. So Thad would be only the second... not great...
No. In my opinion, the books should stay as they were originally written, with updates limited to things like spelling, grammar, or formatting errors. It’s up to fans to use their imaginations to make them consistent with the current continuity (if that matters to them).
Exactly. This is not reality. It's not a history exam you have to study for. It's just stories, imagined adventures of imaginary people. So they don't have to fit together. It can be entertaining to have a set of stories fit together if they're written to do so in the first place, but if each one represents a distinct, separate way of imagining the universe, that's perfectly valid and is part of the identity of those respective works. The cool thing about make-believe things is that you're allowed to have more than one version of them.
That way madness lies. I think we just have to accept older books as artifacts of their time. Just note that newer movies or episodes may have rendered some details apocryphal and move on -- which, honestly, is how TV tie-in books have always worked.
It's how science fiction in general works, except it gets contradicted by new discoveries and the calendar catching up. Nobody's going to rewrite 2001: A Space Odyssey to reflect the real 2001.
I am well aware it won't actually happen; I was responding to @Sci's suggested retcon (which came up a couple months ago from someone else, too). Clarke never did that per se, but he did do things in the later books that indicated 2001 no longer took place in 2001 in his mind. (I think 3001 establishes that Frank Poole was born in the 1990s, meaning the Jupiter mission must have happened several decades later.)
Yeah, but Clarke didn't really make any effort to treat the Odyssey sequels as being in the same universe as each other. Clarke never really did continuity; aside from his "White Hart" series which had a common frame element of Harry Purvis telling tall tales in the titular bar, pretty much all his works were in standalone realities. So even when he did grudgingly give in to doing 2001 sequels, he did them his own way and made each one its own distinct variation on the theme. (Which is most obvious in 2010, since it's a sequel to the movie version of events where the Monolith was at Jupiter, rather than the book version where it was at Saturn.)
It's complex in the context of this being tie-in literature that is meant to be secondary to the show. Partly because it would fit into an unfortunate part of modern media where LGBTQ+ characters get to be so in tie-in literature and cut scenes and also often die in unfortunate circumstances. If you are going to create a transgendered character - do it front and centre on-screen as a main character.
Exactly. I’m entirely comfortable placing books from the 80s, before Discovery, before TNG, on the same shelf, even right before and right after a book published today in my reading order. Hell, going to more recent books, I have Child of Two Worlds, which focuses on Pike-era Spock with no mention of Michael, right before several Discovery novels on my shelf. I don’t need to jump through hoops to “smooth over” hiccups in continuity. If I HAD to explain it, which, really, I don’t, I’d pass it off as various alternate timelines, because Star Trek has always been open to that possibility. But, again, I can just enjoy these things as Star Trek stories without worrying about trying to fit them canonically.
There was a time a few decades ago when I tried to rewrite older books in my head to force them to fit with later shows and movies, but then I realized that by doing so, I was stripping them of the elements that gave them their distinct character, and that did them an injustice. They deserved to be appreciated for what they were meant to be. Trek continuity is a moving target, an evolving process. Older books that fit the assumptions of an earlier version of the continuity are part of its history, a reflection of the form it took at the time, and that's worth preserving. Which doesn't mean that it's wrong to change it or to do new shows and movies in a different way. It's not a competition, and there is no "right" or "wrong" version of things that are purely imaginary. The older and newer stories are steps in an ongoing process of creative evolution. They are all "right" for their own place within the sequence. Altering things to force them into conformity would be like rewriting history -- or like creationism, denying the reality that things have evolved over time and still are evolving.
I view all the books like historical documents - they are a product of their time. It can be fun reading older books and seeing how they interpreted and extrapolated events compared to later tv series.
Nobody even considered the idea of rewriting Federation to accommodate the Zephram Cochrane backstory in First Contact, nor should they have. Like I keep saying, don't stress about what's real in a fictional construct.
Actually, I'm pretty sure there have been threads here where people have tried to reconcile/rewrite Federation to fit around FC
Those are both very good points that I had not considered. I still personally like the idea of reconciling Natasha and Thad as one person, but you two are quite right to point out that one of the earliest major transgender characters in TrekLit should not be a retcon and should not be a variation on the "Bury Your LGBT" trope. Thank you for pointing that out. I try not to stress about it, but I do sometimes try to have fun with it.