The plan, reportedly, is for the tie-ins to come out during the season's release and be closely coordinated with it, so I think they probably aren't going to come out before it.
Discovery to get tie-ins!
- Thread starter DarkHorizon
- Start date
If anything, the show's postponement should actually make things easier for the novels. If the show aired in January, we would have ended up with two Trek novels given, January, February, and March already have novels announced. But now that it's airing in May, things work out because there are no novels announced after April. So we'll probably just be getting one novel a month, with either May, June, or July being a Discovery one.
If that happens, I'll be disappointed. I was looking forward to a return of the two-books-a-month schedule, however briefly it may've lasted.
Don't confuse the lack of an announcement with the lack of a planned book. As a rule, books are put on the schedule months before they're publicly announced. You have to have a preliminary due date to start with so you can put it on the contracts, but you can't announce the book until after the contracts are signed and the outline is approved by CBS. Depending on how slow the contract and licensing people are at getting around to your particular project, there can be quite a few months between when a book is put on the schedule and when the general public first learns about it.
Also, the Trek editors generally try to work out a whole year's publishing slate at a time, and they do so early in the previous year. I got my proposal picked up for this coming January's book The Face of the Unknown in February of 2015, almost two years ahead, and I barely managed to squeak it in at the end of the anniversary year (since a publishing year is Feb-Jan). I submitted my pitch for DTI: Time Lock at the same time, and it just came out a couple of weeks ago.
Don't forget that Archer once posed as a student of Surak during his trip to Vulcan (as if you would), that, along with the existence of characters like Amanda, Perrin, and Ki Mendrossen imply a large contingent of humans, at least, who've adopted the Vulcan culture. And what exactly was Iloja of Prim occupying himself with during his exile?
Amok Time shows us that T'Pau, at least, could be pretty unwelcoming to outsiders. It takes a hearty soul to accept a philosophy amongst a group of people who couldn't care less or were actively opposed.
The protagonist of Star Trek: Hidden Evil was a Surakian Human after his parents perished.
Worf, orphaned to Humans, became more Klingon than the Klingons themselves.
In The Tears of Eridanus, Demora is pretty Andorian-ised.
Would it even be physiologically possible for Humans to control their emotions to the same degree as the Vulcans do, or be capable of achieving kolinahr?
Worf, orphaned to Humans, became more Klingon than the Klingons themselves.
In The Tears of Eridanus, Demora is pretty Andorian-ised.
Would it even be physiologically possible for Humans to control their emotions to the same degree as the Vulcans do, or be capable of achieving kolinahr?
Why not? The whole reason Vulcans adopted logic in the first place is because their emotions are intrinsically more intense than most species', so they had more need for control.
Besides, "humans" do not have a single uniform psychology. Plenty of people are naturally more emotionally reserved than others. The Vulcan behavioral ideal is pretty similar to what's often called "high-function" autism.
Yeah, the only difference that might be of importance would be the Vulcans telepathic abilities. Since the 22nd century Vulcans didn't use their telepathic powers, but were still logical that seems unlikely.
That certainly won't be the priority, especially since they'll likely be written with people who've never picked up a Trek novel before in mind. While I'm sure there'll be Easter eggs for those of us who do read the Litverse, no extra effort will be made to make it consistent with the Litverse.
Hell, the Litverse could very well be in a precarious situation at the moment, as Discovery itself could easily with one line a storyline which spanned multiple novels.
I think the Litverse is probably safe for the foreseeable future. Given that DSC is going for that trans-media continuity goodness by having two-way contact between its novels and the series (not to mention having a staff writer who has direct experience with the Litverse), and that they're still commissioning and announcing Litverse novels, I'd say that counts as a tacit endorsement of the novel line as it stands.
There are reasons they won't come straight out and say the c-word in regards to the novels (not wanting to step on the toes of the games and comics that are doing their own thing, and leaving the door open for Prime Timeline adventures set in the future that would contradict it), but if they were at all enthusiastic about the prospect of jettisoning the litverse and doing a Legends-style novel reset with a new, we-really-mean-it-this-time canon novel line (or even just DSC novels are canon, and the other series revet to stand-alone numbered-novel-style adventures), we'd probably already have seen signs of it. With announced Litverse novels going up to the end of 2018, I think it's as safe as it ever was.
Though, looking at the upcoming novels, it occurs to me that we haven't seen any covers for books after "The Hall of Heroes." Maybe someone should shake the tree and see if any art for "The Face of the Unknown" or "Headlong Flight" falls out. (Not saying this is a sign of anything, just observing that we're about due for some updates.)
There are reasons they won't come straight out and say the c-word in regards to the novels (not wanting to step on the toes of the games and comics that are doing their own thing, and leaving the door open for Prime Timeline adventures set in the future that would contradict it), but if they were at all enthusiastic about the prospect of jettisoning the litverse and doing a Legends-style novel reset with a new, we-really-mean-it-this-time canon novel line (or even just DSC novels are canon, and the other series revet to stand-alone numbered-novel-style adventures), we'd probably already have seen signs of it. With announced Litverse novels going up to the end of 2018, I think it's as safe as it ever was.
Though, looking at the upcoming novels, it occurs to me that we haven't seen any covers for books after "The Hall of Heroes." Maybe someone should shake the tree and see if any art for "The Face of the Unknown" or "Headlong Flight" falls out. (Not saying this is a sign of anything, just observing that we're about due for some updates.)
Not really. Pocket novels are not automatically "Litverse" novels; that's just the largest of the many separate continuities that the Pocket novels have encompassed over the years. And a given writer can work in more than one continuity. When Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens joined the Enterprise writing staff in season 4, they didn't hesitate to contradict their own earlier books, because they were working within the show's continuity instead of their books' continuity.
I know from experience that Kirsten Beyer prefers to prioritize the needs of the story she's telling over consistency with other, indirectly related works, which is why her version of Species 8472 in the Voyager novels makes no reference to mine in Places of Exile (although she has consulted with me about matters where continuity would help the story she's telling). And she's just one member of the DSC writing staff, so her own agenda wouldn't be the dominant one anyway. As for Dave, I assume he's doing what any licensed tie-in author does: Following the instructions of the property's owners about how to approach its continuity. Just because he's working with Kirsten to keep his books as consistent as possible with the show, that does not mean it's a symmetrical relationship.
The writers of the show will make whatever decisions are best for the show. They won't be under any obligation to honor the novels. It's hard for fans of the novels to accept, but what we do is not the real Star Trek. It's just as good an imitation of Star Trek as we're able to pull off. The shows and movies are the real thing, and we're just an echo. Yes, occasionally a screen canon has picked up ideas from its tie-ins, but only if it served the screen canon, and often with the adapted ideas being taken out of context or changed.
It's not about canon, just about consistency. The work that Kirsten is reportedly doing to keep the books and comics consistent with the show sounds pretty much like the same thing Roberto Orci did with the IDW comics, and we know those comics aren't canonical. The goal is simply to keep the tie-ins as authentic to the source as possible. A lot of the time, early tie-ins to a franchise don't get the details quite right, because they're written ahead of time based on imperfect information. And so we get oddities of the sort Hey Missy alluded to a few posts ago, and the tie-ins end up not being optimal representations of the source. So coordination between the producers and the tie-in writers is not at all about making the tie-ins canonical, it's just about avoiding weird errors and misinterpretations. The goal is to make the stories feel like they could have happened in the show's reality, which is not the same thing as saying that they did.
That said, I'd expect the most likely scenario is the same one we already contended with when Enterprise was on: The show would occasionally contradict details from the novels (like in the portrayal of Andoria and Andorian culture, or in the design of the Tholians), and subsequent books would either try to reconcile the inconsistencies or just quietly "correct" their portrayal to the new version without addressing the conflict. The canon does what it wants, which is its absolute right, and the tie-ins just scramble to adapt.
I think something should be coming along pretty soon now...
Bah? As far as I can tell, the announced novels don't go beyond David Mack's Section 31 Control at the end of April 2017, with the Discovery novel(s) currently having no fixed date, though believed to be concurrent with Discovery's broadcast/streaming/whatever. While I know Pocket likely has plans extending to the end of 2018, I was not aware any of these had been made public.
Well that's not encouraging. I hadn't realized this.
It's always been the trade-off for getting new on-screen Trek material. We got lucky in 2009 that the new movies were in a different timeline. Granted, the Litverse was still impacted, what with that certain event they showed from the Prime Universe in the movie they're not allowed to cover in the novels, but the novels were otherwise unscathed. As soon as it was announced the Discovery would be set in the Prime Universe, the Litverse's future became very much in question.
And the truth is we all knew this day could come. Such is the nature of tie-in materials. Even Disney's canon Star Wars tie-ins could well be de-canonized at some point in the future.
It-that-must-not-be-named... Or depicted.
MA has Dayton Ward's next-next TNG novel, Hearts and Minds, coming out in December of '18.