• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

marlboro said:
Is the Alan Dean Foster novelization of Alien as good as people say it is? I've been doing a little googling and that one seems to pop up on a lot of people's lists.
Click to expand...

I read it before I saw the movie, and enjoyed it a lot. In fact, it was quite memorable for me. I grew up in a small town with one small theater, so new movies took a while to reach us. When I read the Alien novelization, I had just graduated from high school, and was house-sitting for some family friends. I got off work late at night at the local A&W restaurant, and went to the house, where I proceeded to finish up the book. So there I was, having just finished this book with scary stuff up to the last page, sitting in a bed in a strange house in a strange neighborhood, hyper-aware of all the little noises around me. Needless to say, I didn't fall asleep for quite a while...

Christopher said:
It's hard to believe in these spoiler-phobic times, but a lot of movie novelizations used to be released ahead of time to build interest for the film.
Click to expand...

I remember starting to read Roddenberry's ST:TMP novel before the movie opened.

Greg Cox said:
I remember BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES only played at my local drive-in for about a week, so I ended up missing it. Thank goodness for the novelization by David Gerrold, which I still prefer to the actual movie, which I didn't get to see until a year or so later--and found disappointing compared to the novelization.
Click to expand...

Yes, I read most of the Planet of the Apes novelizations before I was able to see the movies. I got some through the Scholastic books program at school. I recognized Gerrold's name as connected with Star Trek, so that was a must-buy. Pretty sure I read Boulle's original novel before seeing the first movie; they were quite different from each other. (I'm still taken w/ Poulle's idea of the bubble spaceship in the story's framing sequence.) I heard there's a comic adaptation of Rod Serling's unproduced script for Planet of the Apes, which apparently hewed much closer to the novel. I'd be interested in reading that.
 
You know what source material / novelization would have been helpful as pre-watch material? The Lord of the Rings.

"Ohhhhh. So that's why they didn't just fly to Mordor on the ostensibly very useful eagles."
 
Greg Cox said:
I assume no publisher bought the rights to RISE, or that the studio didn't want to sell the rights.

To make a novelization happen, you need at least three things: a publisher who wants to pay for the rights to do a novelization, a studio willing to sell those rights, and a price both can agree on.

Sometimes the stars just don't come together . . . .

True story: I edited at least two fully-written novelizations that never saw the light of day because the deal with the studio fell through at the last minute. (Both times I made sure the authors got paid in full anyway.)
Click to expand...

David Weller said:
Yeah, I understand that but it slightly irks me that I have book series based round movies with gaps in them.
Click to expand...
Are you guys talking about Andy Serkis Planet of the Apes movies? I'm not really that bothered by there being no prequel novel to Rise, that really was the beginning of the apes, so can't really see there having been much interesting going on before that. There was a series of free short digital comic prequels, but I'm not exactly sure what they're about since I haven't read them. I do have the first one, but I never bothered to read it.
DrCorby said:
I heard there's a comic adaptation of Rod Serling's unproduced script for Planet of the Apes, which apparently hewed much closer to the novel. I'd be interested in reading that.
Click to expand...
Here you go.
 
JD said:
Are you guys talking about Andy Serkis Planet of the Apes movies? I'm not really that bothered by there being no prequel novel to Rise, that really was the beginning of the apes, so can't really see there having been much interesting going on before that. There was a series of free short digital comic prequels, but I'm not exactly sure what they're about since I haven't read them. I do have the first one, but I never bothered to read it.

Here you go.
Click to expand...
We are talking about the recent Apes movies.

I’m a little annoyed that there was no novelisation of Rise. I wasn’t wanting a prequel to Rise.
 
Oh, I thought you guys were just talking about prequels, sorry. In that case I do agree, it is a annoying.
When it comes to novelizations, I'm kind of confused by how they are doing novelizations for the Worlds of DC movies. Man of Steel got one, Batman v Superman didn't, then Suicide Squad did, then Wonder Woman did, then Justice League didn't, and now Aquaman didn't.
 
Chalk up another Enterprise Chief Engineer in tonight’s episode — a “Chief Louvier,” who seems to have served in the position between Caitlin Barry (Child of Two Worlds) and Moves-With-Burning-Grace (Burning Dreams, circa 2262).
 
^ Yeah, at this point (or at least in the Litverse, and relative to Discovery), Pike's Enterprise is looking more and more like Picard's Enterprise circa TNG season one, with a constant revolving-door of Chief Engineers until Scotty comes along.
 
Leto_II said:
^ Yeah, at this point (or at least in the Litverse, and relative to Discovery), Pike's Enterprise is looking more and more like Picard's Enterprise circa TNG season one, with a constant revolving-door of Chief Engineers until Scotty comes along.
Click to expand...

Well, not every book fits into the "Litverse." Most of the various Pike-era stories over the years are incompatible with each other in various ways, crew composition among them. (After all, most of them crowd in right before or after "The Cage"; there's been surprisingly little exploration of the later years of Pike's Enterprise tenure before now.)
 
I was mainly just referring to Burning Dreams, Child of Two Worlds, and the Marvel Early Voyages series (which had a few characters cross over into the modern Litverse), in that post, there. Stuff like The Children of Kings is much harder to reconcile with those other works.

And yeah, agreed -- Burning Dreams is pretty much about the only major work I can think of off the top of my head to detail Pike's final years in command of the Enterprise (though there've been several depictions of his handoff of the center seat to Kirk published over the years, like Enterprise: The First Adventure, the first DC Comics volume, and John Byrne's recent photocomics). Will your upcoming novel show us this event in a "modern" (up-to-date with continuity) fashion?
 
Leto_II said:
And yeah, agreed -- Burning Dreams is pretty much about the only major work I can think of off the top of my head to detail Pike's final years in command of the Enterprise
Click to expand...

Michael Jan Friedman's Legacy has flashbacks spread throughout Pike's tenure.

(though there've been several depictions of his handoff of the center seat to Kirk published over the years, like Enterprise: The First Adventure, the first DC Comics volume, and John Byrne's recent photocomics). Will your upcoming novel show us this event in a "modern" (up-to-date with continuity) fashion?
Click to expand...

Yes, The Captain's Oath covers the transfer of command and Kirk's first Enterprise mission, and while it's mainly about Kirk's pre-Enterprise command, let's just say the cover image does basically happen in the novel.


Yistaan said:
So, hasn't Desperate Hours already been contradicted? Am asking here... https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Number_One says that Number One was a Commander in Desperate Hours, yet is a Lieutenant Commander in Discovery. I would imagine this is a contradiction, unless she was demoted...?
Click to expand...

That seems like a pretty trivial inconsistency that's easy to rewrite in one's head, especially since Trek has sometimes had characters address lieutenant commanders as "Commander" (e.g. Gary Mitchell, Ben Finney, Giotto in "The Devil in the Dark," and Scotty in "Bem").
 
Now that I remember, here, there was also a story in (IIRC) the very Strange New Worlds anthology, depicting the crippled Pike reminiscing at Starbase 11 on his previous career, and at least one flashback-vignette was set fairly late in his command of the Enterprise prior to Kirk, I think.
 
Leto_II said:
Now that I remember, here, there was also a story in (IIRC) the very Strange New Worlds anthology, depicting the crippled Pike reminiscing at Starbase 11 on his previous career, and at least one flashback-vignette was set fairly late in his command of the Enterprise prior to Kirk, I think.
Click to expand...

Yeah, he fearlessly runs underneath some sort of giant monster thing and blasts it, partially because he can't shake the feeling that his life isn't real after Talos.

The story is A Private Anecdote from SNW 1. A grand prize winner that is one of the best stories from any of those books, imo. If Discovery ever starts telling stories as good as that one, I'll sign up for all access in a heartbeat.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
marlboro said:
Yeah, he fearlessly runs underneath some sort of giant monster thing and blasts it, partially because he can't shake the feeling that his life isn't real after Talos.
Click to expand...

They haven't come back to it yet, but I've been wondering if DSC might be intending to play with that concept, from what Pike mentioned at the end of the second episode about know what it's like to live with doubt. I'm not sure whether I think it's likely or not based on how this season is shaping up in terms of its goals and philosophies, dramatically. It seems to be moving towards greatest-hits, crowd-pleasing fanservice Star Trek, so the question is, would they see a story about Pike never being sure if he really escaped as a loose remake of "The Cage" (point towards them doing it) or as a new extrapolation built on "The Cage" (point against).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top