Is there any kind of ratings system or way to know if Trek novels are appropriate for kids, teenagers, or adults? I mean something similar to movie ratings in order to know if a novel has sexual content or adult language, etc.?
Content Rating in Trek Novels
- Thread starter Starfleet Engineer
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Not as far as I know, no.
As far as I know, the level of adult content in the books is about the same as the shows. Which is to say, hardly any. I've read some TOS books and I'm going through ENT books now, and none of them have had anything explicit. In one ENT book, Trip has a brief affair with a doctor, but everything more graphic than kissing is just implied. I guess it all depends on the kid's age, and the individual kid's maturity level though. Only the parent knows the answer to that.
Why would want one ?
I read all of the Ian Fleming Bond books in my early teens. They were fantastic !
Yeah, all kids are different, but my parents were very laissez-faire about books. I read adult law thrillers, Stephen King, and Titus Andronicus before I hit high school.
If a child can read the Bible, they can read any Star Trek novel, they have far less sex and violence. I have only come across two love scenes between Trip and T'Pol and they were tastefully done. As for TOS novels, those guys were more celibate than nuns and monks.
Generally speaking, unless you can find it in the kids/young adult section of the bookstore, expect going into any book that you may run into varying degrees of violence, language, sexual situations, and so on. That said, Trek tends to be pretty restrained in that regard. There have been a few exceptions, but otherwise? PG-13 is about as far as it goes.
(Also, when it comes to young adult stuff? It ain't all exactly Dr. Seuss and Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys, anymore.
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(Also, when it comes to young adult stuff? It ain't all exactly Dr. Seuss and Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys, anymore.
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I wouldn't say that. The scene in the third Cold Equations book with the security team inside the Machine comes to mind.
High levels of violence aren't common, but they aren't 100% absent either.
A number of the modern books, particularly David Mack's and mine, tend to go farther with portrayals of nudity and sex than you'd get on TV, but there's a difference between actually seeing such things onscreen and just reading words about them, which is probably why we're permitted to go that far.
There is no industry-standard or government-mandated content rating system for novels, at least not in the US. I'm sure something like that would be a headache to implement. Who is going to go through each and every novel and make quantitative and qualitative judgments of what needs a stricter age rating? Would each publisher make their own determinations, or would some kind of government regulatory body be involved? Either way, lots of people would be unhappy. I suppose even now, technically, it might still be possible for written prose to run afoul of obscenity laws. But that's in extreme cases, and nothing in any Trek novel is ever going to be at that level.
I remember being uncomfortable with the content of some of the works of celebrated contemporary literature that we had to read in college, not expecting it at all because there was nothing on the cover to indicate anything of the sort. Call me a prude, but this is the same reason I avoid a lot of unrated art-house or independent cinema if I can't find any descriptions of the content.
Kor
I remember being uncomfortable with the content of some of the works of celebrated contemporary literature that we had to read in college, not expecting it at all because there was nothing on the cover to indicate anything of the sort. Call me a prude, but this is the same reason I avoid a lot of unrated art-house or independent cinema if I can't find any descriptions of the content.
Kor
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The one example I can think of is Archer's response to the destruction of the Kobayashi Maru; I can't think what JD's second example might be. What was the other one, JD?
I dunno, some videogames can take much longer to get through beginning-to-end than a novel, but the ESRB does all right. Granted, I think they go off of submitted representative samples with some sort of penalty for misrepresentation, but there's always the possibility for something similar on the book side.
I don't think it's necessary, yeah, but I don't think it would be inexorably difficult either.
Cervantes Quinn in Vanguard: Precipice.
I've always got the impression that they were PG-13, as Dayton Ward indicateds. As someone else indicated, a nude scene in a book isn't the same thing as a nude scene on-screen, so the books still maintain something of a PG-13 rating by way of language and violence. Peter David had his fair share of this content, and when I was reading them at a much younger age, I still felt like certain scenes were bumping up the rating level, my own imagination would be what put a book at the next level, not the book itself. Some authors will go graphic with their descriptions of violence, but to some extent the reader can maximize or minimize the visual in their head (Stephen King gets an R-rating for violence because he gets very detailed about it, even though it's just words on the page). The occasional F-bomb can still be counted as PG-13 (I think a movie gets one F-bomb, any more and it jumps to an R, that's the impression I get).
Mind you, there's a book from the 80's that I haven't read called Killing Time, that's been flagged as a slash fiction that somehow got through the process to get published (that's not what I personally believe, because I haven't read it, but it is what others have said). I skim a copy for purchase, to see if it was the first edition that retained content that was subsequently cut in later editions. I wonder what rating Killing Time merits, does that one still fall into the PG-13 category?
Mind you, there's a book from the 80's that I haven't read called Killing Time, that's been flagged as a slash fiction that somehow got through the process to get published (that's not what I personally believe, because I haven't read it, but it is what others have said). I skim a copy for purchase, to see if it was the first edition that retained content that was subsequently cut in later editions. I wonder what rating Killing Time merits, does that one still fall into the PG-13 category?
Kids are smart, they can handle adult books.
Often it's not about the subject matter, be it sex, nudity, or violence, as much as it's about how graphically it's described. As noted, saying that a character "emerged nude from the pool" is not the same thing as showing that on film or describing their naked body in detail. Ditto for violence. You can kill or injure characters without describing the violence as graphically as you might in, say, a horror novel.
In other words, it's not about the act; it's about the emphasis.
In other words, it's not about the act; it's about the emphasis.
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