Are novels canon

[Christopher]

Personally, I would even question "or their direct successors." But then again, my decision to ignore all Oz books after Baum's posthumous final opus, Glinda of Oz, is driven by a perceived nosedive in the quality of the writing, from that book (superb) to the only Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz book I ever read (definitely not superb).

I was thinking more in terms of a series like Star Trek or Star Wars which changes hands over time. Naturally there are no absolutes. "Canon" is just a shorthand label for something far more complicated and mutable than five letters can adequately cover. People ascribe too much importance to labels. They expect them to be the final word about what something is, when really they're the crudest beginning of understanding.

I mentioned in another thread that I grew up on The Bobbsey Twins. Like such sister series, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, &c, it was created by Edward Stratemeyer, certainly the first book packager in the children's literature market (and arguably the first book packager, period), with the vast bulk of the individual novels written by uncredited ghostwriters like Howard Garis and Nancy Axelrad, under house pseudonyms ("Laura Lee Hope" for The Bobbsey Twins, "Franklin W. Dixon" for The Hardy Boys), and under close editorial supervision (does this, except for the writers going uncredited and the books being released under house pseudonyms, sound familiar to readers of tie-in books? It should!). In that case, it would be the editorial staff that is the "keeper of canon," just as the executive producer and production staff that have that role for a television series.

Yes. As I said, it's about continuity of authorship. That can mean a single author or a group of creators.

 

[Greg Cox]

I mentioned in another thread that I grew up on The Bobbsey Twins. Like such sister series, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, &c, it was created by Edward Stratemeyer, certainly the first book packager in the children's literature market (and arguably the first book packager, period), with the vast bulk of the individual novels written by uncredited ghostwriters like Howard Garis and Nancy Axelrad, under house pseudonyms ("Laura Lee Hope" for The Bobbsey Twins, "Franklin W. Dixon" for The Hardy Boys), and under close editorial supervision (does this, except for the writers going uncredited and the books being released under house pseudonyms, sound familiar to readers of tie-in books? It should!). In that case, it would be the editorial staff that is the "keeper of canon," just as the executive producer and production staff that have that role for a television series.

I'll cop to writing at least one TOM SWIFT novel as "Victor Appleton." Really.

 

[Smiley]

Halloween is a fun example to illustrate the difference between canon and continuity. All of the movies put in theaters are part of the canon. Which movies are in continuity depends on which movie you are watching, although Carpenter's original is considered to have "happened" for pretty much every movie except Season of the Witch and the two Zombie films.

 

[Christopher]

Halloween is a fun example to illustrate the difference between canon and continuity. All of the movies put in theaters are part of the canon. Which movies are in continuity depends on which movie you are watching, although Carpenter's original is considered to have "happened" for pretty much every movie except Season of the Witch and the two Zombie films.

Yup. In the broader sense, "canon" just means a complete or definitive set of works with something in common, not necessarily continuity. For instance, the Shakespeare canon is all the works recognized as being authored by Shakespeare, and the film noir canon is all the noir movies that the critical consensus counts as essential viewing, the ones that defined and shaped the genre. It's not about the individual pieces, it's about the collective whole they form.

Your description of Halloween reminds me of how the Godzilla franchise works. Between 1954 and 2004, there were seven distinct Godzilla film universes, but all seven included the original 1954 film as part of their history, and the last two universes also included a handful of other movies from the original 1954-77 continuity, while contradicting the rest. Whereas the Godzilla productions of the past decade have all been complete reboots in which none of the earlier films happened.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I'll cop to writing at least one TOM SWIFT novel as "Victor Appleton." Really.

I think you've mentioned that before. Not that it puts you in any loftier company than you'd be in a room by yourself.

Back in Stratemeyer's day, wouldn't publicly admitting to an authorship have gotten him really mad at you? My understanding is that he wanted to maintain the illusion that his house pseudonyms were real people. (I think I was in my teens, with the last original series continuity Bobbsey Twins novels already in the bookstores, before I was even aware they weren't real people.)

Speaking of pseudonyms projecting an illusion of being real people: Betty Crocker was the wife of a high-ranking military officer, named Mills. General Mills.

 

[Greg Cox]

Back in Stratemeyer's day, wouldn't publicly admitting to an authorship have gotten him really mad at you? My understanding is that he wanted to maintain the illusion that his house pseudonyms were real people. (I think I was in my teens, with the last original series continuity Bobbsey Twins novels already in the bookstores, before I was even aware they weren't real people.

True story: Back when I first wrote that TOM SWIFT book, I asked if I could reveal I wrote it, post it on my website, list it in my bibliography, hype it at conventions, do book signings, and so on, and was indeed told absolutely not. We had to maintain the fiction that all the TOM SWIFT books were written by "Victor Appleton" -- even though he would be well over a hundred years old now.

To be honest, I thought this was a bit silly, given that the first TOM SWIFT novel came out in 1910, but played along because that's how they wanted it.

Nowadays, however, I feel comfortable revealing it simply because that was many years ago and that entire line of rebooted TOM SWIFT novels has come and gone. It's old news now.

 

[Stevil2001]

Personally, I would even question "or their direct successors." But then again, my decision to ignore all Oz books after Baum's posthumous final opus, Glinda of Oz, is driven by a perceived nosedive in the quality of the writing, from that book (superb) to the only Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz book I ever read (definitely not superb).

I mentioned in another thread that I grew up on The Bobbsey Twins. Like such sister series, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, &c, it was created by Edward Stratemeyer, certainly the first book packager in the children's literature market (and arguably the first book packager, period), with the vast bulk of the individual novels written by uncredited ghostwriters like Howard Garis and Nancy Axelrad, under house pseudonyms ("Laura Lee Hope" for The Bobbsey Twins, "Franklin W. Dixon" for The Hardy Boys), and under close editorial supervision (does this, except for the writers going uncredited and the books being released under house pseudonyms, sound familiar to readers of tie-in books? It should!). In that case, it would be the editorial staff that is the "keeper of canon," just as the executive producer and production staff that have that role for a television series.

If Royal Book is your only Thompson, I would give her another shot. My son and I are reading through the Oz canon, and she's got some good stuff. Kabumpo is now one of my favorite Oz novels full stop.

 

[Greg Cox]

On the subject of "house names," I'll admit I was mildly scandalized to discover, many decades ago, that "Kenneth Robeson," the alleged author of the DOC SAVAGE and THE AVENGER novels, was merely a house name and not a real person.

 

[DWMarch]

I like the idea that anything is canon particularly since it's supported within the franchise. We know Star Trek has a multitude of different universes and we know our favorite characters are having adventures in those universe except maybe Tasha Yar is still alive or Worf is married to Deanna Troi or etc. So when it comes to novels that have been explicitly contradicted by onscreen events (for example the Destiny trilogy being overwritten by season 1 of Picard) I don't need to worry about it since the stories I like still took place. I don't need a TV or movie producer to tell me "this officially took place in the Star Trek universe" to be able to accept it as an adventure my favorite characters went on between episodes or movies. And who knows? Maybe one day with evolving technology we'll be able to re-create these stories in cinematic form on holodecks of our own.

I am curious if anyone here is familiar with the origin of the disclaimer in Prime Directive: "The plot and background details of Prime Directive are solely the authors' interpretation of the universe of Star Trek and vary in some respects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry." I re-read Prime Directive recently and I don't remember anything that odiously craps on canon other than the idea that the Enterprise crew had about a year off while the events of the book were taking place. And I am not sure if that disclaimer popped up anywhere else. I don't think the Myriad Universes books had any such disclaimers and they were definitely "varied in some respects".

 

[Christopher]

I am curious if anyone here is familiar with the origin of the disclaimer in Prime Directive: "The plot and background details of Prime Directive are solely the authors' interpretation of the universe of Star Trek and vary in some respects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry." I re-read Prime Directive recently and I don't remember anything that odiously craps on canon other than the idea that the Enterprise crew had about a year off while the events of the book were taking place. And I am not sure if that disclaimer popped up anywhere else. I don't think the Myriad Universes books had any such disclaimers and they were definitely "varied in some respects".

Those disclaimers only existed on a handful of books published during Richard Arnold's tenure in charge of licensing approvals, in which he cracked down hard on anything in the tie-ins that didn't fit his narrow vision. The disclaimers went on a few books that were too far along in the process for him to order them rewritten. I don't know what might have set Arnold off in this case, but his rulings could be pretty arbitrary. He was long, long gone by the time Myriad Universes came along, though. He was fired as soon as Roddenberry died.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Nowadays, however, I feel comfortable revealing it simply because that was many years ago and that entire line of rebooted TOM SWIFT novels has come and gone. It's old news now.

And of course, it was many years ago that James Keeline gave the entire Stratemeyer stable the credit they were long overdue.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I am curious if anyone here is familiar with the origin of the disclaimer in Prime Directive: "The plot and background details of Prime Directive are solely the authors' interpretation of the universe of Star Trek and vary in some respects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry." I re-read Prime Directive recently and I don't remember anything that odiously craps on canon other than the idea that the Enterprise crew had about a year off while the events of the book were taking place. And I am not sure if that disclaimer popped up anywhere else. I don't think the Myriad Universes books had any such disclaimers and they were definitely "varied in some respects".

Those disclaimers only existed on a handful of books published during Richard Arnold's tenure in charge of licensing approvals, in which he cracked down hard on anything in the tie-ins that didn't fit his narrow vision. The disclaimers went on a few books that were too far along in the process for him to order them rewritten. I don't know what might have set Arnold off in this case, but his rulings could be pretty arbitrary.

I know that that disclaimer appeared on Peter David's giant TNG novel Vendetta, because Arnold objected to a subplot of Geordi trying (and failing) to awaken a female Borg's individual consciousness away from the collective. Richard Arnold maintained that the Borg only assimilated men, as we'd only seen male Borg onscreen until that point (This was years before Seven of Nine was introduced, of course). David rightfully found it absurd that the Borg would only assimilate one gender, but that's a good example of how bizarre and arbitrary some of Richard Arnold's directives could be. (Vendetta might've been the first novel to carry that disclaimer, but I can't remember for sure.)

Also among Richard Arnold's greatest hits:

• Arnold objected to Kirk having a romantic subplot in the Star Trek comic book that PAD was writing for DC Comics, telling him "Captain Kirk is no longer interested in pursuing relationships with women" in the movie era.
  
  
• Arnold told Michael Jan Friedman to remove Chekov from one of his TOS novels (Double, Double, IIRC), as he wasn't officially aboard ship yet. When MJF asked how he knew that, Arnold told him to check his Stardate, as it was lower than the Stardate from Chekov's first appearance's on TOS. MJF asked if he could simply revise the Stardate instead of rewriting a major chunk of his book, and Arnold replied that that was acceptable.
  
  
• Arnold was also responsible for Margaret Wander Bonanno's Music of the Spheres being extensively rewritten as Probe by an uncredited Jean Lorrah and Gene DeWeese, Brad Ferguson's A Flag Full of Stars being rewritten by J.M. Dillard, and the originally intended third Lost Years novel, Irene Kress' The War Virus, never coming out at all. (MWB and Brad Ferguson both eventually posted the original versions of their novels on their websites as downloadable PDFs, but I don't believe they're still available.)
  
  
• Voyages of the Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion has loads of other stories of how much Arnold interfered in Trek novels in the late '80s and early '90s. (Paramount fired him right after Gene Roddenberry died, so apparently he wasn't very popular there.)

 

[The Wormhole]

Richard Arnold maintained that the Borg only assimilated men, as we'd only seen male Borg onscreen until that point

The thing that always confused me about that was that, IMO, the particular Borg drone that abducted Picard in TBOBW did look somewhat feminine.

 

[David cgc]

The thing that always confused me about that was that, IMO, the particular Borg drone that abducted Picard in TBOBW did look somewhat feminine.

Indeed, nowadays you can find the names of several women who played Borg in Q-Who and BoBW on Memory Alpha. Ironically, it seems like it became much less common for background Borg to be female after Seven very conclusively proved that Cubes were co-ed. My guess it was the stiffer, more detailed costumes made for First Contact locking them in to a more specific body type than the leotard-with-tech-crap-attached design did.

Also, that phrase about “Captain Kirk is no longer interested in pursuing relationships with women,” depending on the exact wording he used, feels like it walks right up to an endorsement of K/S. I guess he wasn’t thinking through the implications.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Let's not mince words. Richard Arnold was a swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Arnold objected to Kirk having a romantic subplot in the Star Trek comic book that PAD was writing for DC Comics, telling him "Captain Kirk is no longer interested in pursuing relationships with women" in the movie era.

Ah, a K/S shipper