A Little Bit of Love For Diane Carey

[Cake Is Eternal]

Final Frontier is one of my all-time favorites, and I like some elements of her other books, like the scene in one of the New Earth novels where Chekov takes command of a civilian ship and helps to save them from Orion pirates. I was very happy to have her novelization of DS9's Season 6 Dominion War arc, since I wasn't able to see those episodes when they aired and they weren't out on video yet. It bugged me how she wrote her personal disdain for Jake Sisko into the story, though.

I LOVE your user name! Final Frontier is one of my favorites too.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Carey probably drew attention to herself and the Broken Bow novelization by giving an interview around the same time where she criticized the script and show pretty harshly.

There was also a faked Carey quote, riffing off of that interview, that circulated on the Trek news sites at the time to the effect that Carey was thinking about writing a time-travel novel in which Kirk showed Archer how to be a captain. When someplace like Trekweb was reporting this fake quote as news on its own, it gets noticed. It certainly sounded plausible; it's very much of a piece with Carey's non-23rd-century work. I have no idea who was responsible, though I've long had suspicions.

 

[Stevil2001]

You can see excerpts from the interview here; Internet Archive doesn't seem to have captured the site the interview was actually on at the right time to get it: https://web.archive.org/web/2001110...ekweb.com/articles/2001/10/23/1003843664.html

I should say that though I didn't like her episode novelizations, I liked a lot of Carey's original novels. Dreadnought!, Battlestations!, Final Frontier, The Great Starship Race, and Challenger are all novels I remember fondly, and Shucorion is one of the greatest original characters of Star Trek fiction.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Reading that excerpt, I have to wonder if Berman and Braga were more pissed off by Carey's dismissal of television writers than anything she slipped into the Broken Bow novelization. Yeah, that was bad, but saying television staff writers today (well, twenty years ago) are talentless hacks isn't a good look.

 

[David cgc]

I forgot about people complaining about all the meal scenes in Enterprise.

 

[Christopher]

You can see excerpts from the interview here; Internet Archive doesn't seem to have captured the site the interview was actually on at the right time to get it: https://web.archive.org/web/2001110...ekweb.com/articles/2001/10/23/1003843664.html

From Carey's comments: "These new shows are all written by the same handful of staffers. If a script is somehow accepted from outside, it's rewritten by the staff."

She evidently didn't realize that the same thing happened on TOS. The story editor and Gene Roddenberry rewrote every freelance script. That's what story editors and showrunners do, then and now. They write the final draft to keep the show and the characters consistent.