Curious how well the Discovery novels tie in with what's been canonically depicted onscreen!

Even the individual shows have never been able to manage that. TOS brought back dead security guards with no explanation. TNG changed its mind about whether Data could use contractions and retconned a Cardassian war into the first two seasons which had portrayed a peacetime Starfleet. DS9 contradicted the age of the station and Dukat's backstory in "Wrongs Darker Than Death and Night." Voyager couldn't keep its crew complement numbers straight.

Not only is it impossible to catch every mistake and inconsistency no matter how hard people try, but sometimes inconsistencies are conscious choices, when the needs of the current story demand changing things, or when something didn't work and you want to revise it rather than be trapped by past mistakes. In such cases, it comes down to the audience's willing suspension of disbelief, going along with the pretense of a consistent universe despite such revisions or glitches.

 

Yes, that was my point.

 

Or, alien Colt and human Colt are completely unrelated and uninvolved, and "Colt" is a short form of the alien's name that humans can say quickly, like Prill or Romana.

Point is, writers can creatively rationalize pretty much anything.

 

Yeah, it is a visual medium, after all.

Honestly, I find that easier to fudge than the different sets; it's harder to perceive the exact size of ships and whatnot.

 

The corridor height in TOS connie lends itself better to a 400 meter ship.

@F. King Daniel I believe has made images showing this off with Doug Drexler's MSD for the TOS Connie.

 

One of the most unpleasant things to emerge in fictional IP in my lifetime has been the obsession with continuity and the significance of trivia. Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoy when writers can tie trivia together in fun and unexpected ways, or can come up with an amazing retcon, and my neurodivergent brain *loves* making timelines of fictional universes and reconciling different stories, but when it gets to the point that you can't enjoy or advance a story because you're too stuck picking nits, there may be a problem.

That all said, one of the major advantages I think the original lines of Trek originals had, both Bantam and Pocket, was that they started after the show had ended. The writers (presumably) knew the characters and settings and had had plenty of time for them to sink in. Very different than the earliest novels in TNG on where writers may have been writing original stories based on little more than the pilot script and concept art, or the poor DS9 writers writing Cardassian and Bajoran stuff even as those stories were unfolding slowly in the show. One of several reasons I think the overall quality (let alone the interconnectedness) of Trek Lit exploded post-VOY and Nemesis.

 

So is live theater, but you can still use your imagination to pretend the stage in front of you is a mountaintop or a castle or a battlefield rather than just a bunch of wood boards and painted backdrops. So are comic books and animation, but you can still use your imagination to pretend that the ink-and-paint drawings you're looking at are actually living people in real physical places. It may be visual, but it is still a medium, a vehicle for artistic expression, and thus it is missing the point to insist it must be taken absolutely literally.

Amen to all of this. I love playing with continuity, but it's a means to the end of entertainment, not an absolute dogma that overrides everything else. And you can hope for strong continuity while still having enough basic maturity and common sense to understand that absolutely perfect continuity is never going to be attainable, especially in a huge sprawling franchise created by hundreds of different minds over half a century, and that sometimes you just have to accept the humanity of the creators, the fact that sometimes they will be imperfect or change their minds and rely on your good graces as the audience to suspend disbelief, the same way an audience in live theater learns to forgive the inevitable fumbled lines and missed cues.

I don't think this really holds up, because if anything, those early books had far looser continuity than the later ones. Yes, they didn't have to worry about new episodes coming along to contradict them, but they didn't always remember the old episodes accurately, because they only had a few reference books and edited-for-syndication reruns to go on. And many authors had never even seen the animated series, or chose to ignore it, so some acknowledged it and others contradicted it.

Not only that, but so much of the Trek universe was still undefined that there was plenty of room for different novelists to fill in the gaps in wildly divergent ways, so that there were notable differences in the portrayal of the universe between Joe Haldeman, David Gerrold, Kathleen Sky, Vonda McIntyre, Diane Duane, Diane Carey, A.C. Crispin, J.M. Dillard, etc. And there was no effort at the time to reconcile different books with one another, not until the occasional author started choosing to reference Duane's Rihannsu or John M. Ford's Klingons or what-have-you.

Personally, I loved that wide-open, wild-and-wooly era, when Star Trek wasn't some well-defined set of strictures to operate within, but a loose theme that different writers could reinterpret in their own voice and style. It was the very lack of uniformity that made the different interpretations so interesting -- IDIC and all that. It made ST feel populist, something individuals could define as they chose, rather than a doctrine imposed from the top down the way many modern fans seem to expect and want it to be.

 

That sort of gets touched upon in The Enterprise War with a vague reference to Colt having "changed a great deal since the Talos mission." Curiously, Colt is the one character in that novel to not have any kind of description applied to. No reference to her species, general appearance, or even hair colour.

 

Yeah maybe she under went some metamorphosis caused by an alien device or plant or virus or any number of things that have changed people before in Star Trek.

 

I think the professional writers here will most likely agree when I say, just from writing a novel that may or may not see publication, that maintaining perfect continuity is hard enough when you're the sole author in a milieu that is entirely yours. Baum had continuity bumps in the Oz canon; Doyle had continuity bumps in the Sherlock Holmes canon, Asprin had continuity bumps, as I recall, in the "Myth-" canon, and ADF has continuity bumps in both the HC canon and the Spellsinger canon.

 

I always wanted my original SF universe (now called the Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe) to be as perfectly consistent as I could make it, but since my first published story had a number of flaws I recognized in retrospect, I made the choice to deliberately change it and replace it in the canon with Arachne's Crime, the first half of which is a revised and expanded version of the same events (though still keeping as much as I reasonably could from the original). So it's still as consistent as possible except for that one intentional change (and whatever other inconsistencies I haven't caught).

It's the prerogative of a creator to change one's mind, the same as anyone else. Some people think we should always be slavishly faithful to the first version of anything, seeing any retcon as a betrayal, but the first version is usually the worst. Creativity is a process of trial, error, and refinement, and that process doesn't always stop when the work is released.

 

Star Wars has it's story group, which is supposed to keep everything consistent, and even they've still had some inconsistencies sneak through.

I think pretty every long running series, even ones with one author, is going to end up having at least a few inconsistencies as the number of entries gets higher.

 

And that is even more true of engineering than it is of literature.

 

The thing to understand is that continuity is a means, not an end. The end is telling stories. The illusion of a consistent reality generally helps tell convincing stories, but sometimes an overly slavish adherence to past continuity just gets in the way of the stories you need to tell, so you make exceptions.

 

The Star Wars Story Group is mostly continuity clean up (trying to make things make sense) and archiving, unless the creator specifically consults them in their work and listens to them.

From what I've heard, the novel/comic writers, Rian Johnson and the Side movie writers used them more than JJ Abrams did.

 

Honestly, I perceive the existence of the "Lucasfilm Story Group" as more propaganda to impress the hyper-fans than a genuine endeavour at intellectual thinking. I would bet a large quantity of money that they would not be bothered for any Star Wars project as big as The Rise of Skywalker because big entertainment does not work that way.

 

No one tell her her wife was crushing on Pike!

I never got the impression the Cardassian War was during TNG. O'Brien served in it and he was in TNG from day 1. Were there dates given?

 

Picard’s opening log entry in The Wounded establishes that the treaty that formally concluded the conflict was only signed a year prior, so during TNG Season 3.

 

I just wanted to recommend D. Mack's Desperate Hours even if it doesn't perfectly fit what we learn about the Spock / Burnham relationship from the series. In my opinion Mr Mack's take on it is simply better and I suggest not caring about that it's not canon :-) Also: the novel is really expertly paced.

 

Discovery season 2 is three years after "The Cage." I was suggesting she got married in the interim.