They would probably come up with a cool title to put on the cover if the books ever got reprinted, but I'm not sure how likely that is in today's bookselling world.
Spoilers A proper name for the novelverse?
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
There have been plenty of Trek novels over the decades that didn't fit the current screen continuity, and they never needed a special branding. Historically, tie-ins having a loose relationship to screen continuity has been closer to the norm than the exception. Sometimes because books that fit the continuity when they were written got contradicted by later installments (e.g. the early Marvel Star Wars comic that showed a flashback of Obi-Wan on a mission with Darth Vader and Luke's father), and sometimes because they only loosely fit the screen continuity to begin with (e.g. Gold Key's various tie-in comics, or a lot of the '60s and '70s TV tie-ins that often had their own idiosyncratic takes on the shows they adapted).
But there hasn't been almost two decades worth of novels that have been superseded by new TV shows. Star Wars did a pretty good job rebranding with Legends. I just think it might be confusing for a new fan trying to find a book and being confused as to why it doesn't match up with the new shows at all. Especially at 12 or 13 like I was when I first started reading Trek books.
Yes, there were, all the time -- they just weren't mostly in continuity with each other. But a fair number of them were. There was a loose but expanding novel continuity that developed in the '80s and had to be abandoned when TNG went in a different direction. And fans have continued to buy and enjoy those novels over the decades since, without them needing any special branding.
Like I said, for most of the history of tie-in fiction, this has been more the norm than the exception. I refuse to believe that today's audiences are so stupid that they'd be "confused" by something previous generations had no problem grasping. I mean, audiences today have no problem understanding that the Marvel movies, comics, and animated series are in different realities from one another and don't agree in their details. They have no problem understanding the various Batman or Spider-Man reboots in the movies or the various Batman animated series in different continuities. They have no problem understanding the simultaneous existence of the Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee Miller, and Robert Downey Jr. versions of Sherlock Holmes. So it's ridiculous to say that Trek fans are too mentally inflexible to comprehend what happens all the time in other franchises.
Most casual readers or viewers don't even care about those precise continuity details that nitpickers like us pay attention to. Most of them just want a story with the characters they enjoy, and they often don't even notice that certain details don't line up. They just want to be entertained for an hour or two. They aren't studying for a test or writing a wiki article.
Cute, but I don't think so.
Well, I've already mentioned the in-universe name to which Mr. Mack alludes in the Oblivion's Gate thread, without spoiler tags (and without any fanfare, either), but then again, the whole thread is spoiler-tagged, and the name doesn't really reveal anything that wouldn't be obvious to anybody who got past page 1 of Oblivion's Gate; since not everybody reading this thread has read any of the Coda trilogy yet, I spoiler-tag it here:
I vote we just call it "First Splinter," and be done with it.
And my comments on whether this is truly the last we hear from this quantum reality (along with the existential question raised) can be found in the Oblivion's Gate thread.
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