Discovery to get tie-ins!
- Thread starter DarkHorizon
- Start date
Hmm, I don't remember all the nods from one book to another, but there were a few. I think Fallen Heroes contained a passing reference to the poker tournament from the previous book, The Big Game, and I think there were similar subtle nods among the first several books. The big connection is that Betrayal by Lois Tilton is a sequel to Valhalla by "Nathan Archer" (i.e. Lawrence Watt-Evans) -- they form a 2-book mini-arc about the rise and fall of a Cardassian Revanchist party -- although Valhalla was delayed and ended up being published nearly a year after Betrayal (and had a reference to the Defiant mistakenly added in rewrites even though the two books clearly take place before season 2).
Thing is, the destruction of Romulus would be a pretty huge event for the Trek universe, that I don't see how one could manage to avoid mentioning it, even if we jump ahead to 2400. Might just be best to sweat out 2386 being stretched out for several years much like 2376 was.
All the licenses are under CBS Consumer Products. CBS owns Star Trek, every bit of it. They even own the Kelvin movies. But the Kelvin movies are co-created with Paramount and Bad Robot, and that means there are other parties besides CBSCP that have a say in the decision.
As I've said, Bad Robot gets to decide who they license their ideas to, and they've chosen to work with the comics and game creators but not with the novels. You'd have to ask them what their reasons are for that, but I suspect it's because they could get in on the ground floor with the comics and games and thus have more creative control than if they tried to fit in with the long-running Pocket novel line. Or maybe it's just because the comics and game people are based in Southern California and are easier to meet up with than the Pocket folks in New York City. But I don't know, since I've never met any of the Bad Robot people. You'd have to ask them.
As I recall, the time jump itself wasn't so bad, and most of the poor reaction to that book came from Sisko's character arc.
Personally, I think that the smaller time jumps also hurt the other series, even if it is just a few months between books.
Massive reaction to the beginning of the arc and DRG3 hasn't been back since. It's too bad, because all the crap people were angry about pretty much gets worked out by the end of the 3-part arc. It makes me wonder that if RBoE and the duology that followed the next year had been billed as a trilogy, it would've been easier for people to swallow...
Yeah, getting to feature those events in the novelverse (as well as the loss of Spock, which is massive) would be preferable. I was just speculating on how the current issue can be circumvented.
I wouldn't mind this. I enjoy these kind of jumps where we don't know what to expect and what situations we'll the characters will be in, hopefully. Sometimes this doesn't always work out, like the DS9-R, but sometimes it does..
My main concern was when DS9 did its time jump we were inundated with everyone going on for years of "when are we going to get our Ascendants story? When will we explore the missing five years?" We jump ahead to 2400 everyone's just going to start whining about "when are we getting the story of the missing 15 years? Why don't the new novels mention anything about the Typhon Pact at all?"
Sadly, there may not be any good solutions to this conundrum.
Sadly, there may not be any good solutions to this conundrum.
^There's no reason to avoid mentioning the Typhon Pact. Just because Romulus was lost, that doesn't mean the entire Romulan Star Empire was lost. The Roman Empire continued after Rome fell, even if Western historians like to call it the Byzantine Empire after that.
And even that's getting less popular among Western historians as of late since it's a completely ahistorical term.
But the best way to avoid mentioning the loss of Romulus is to just ignore the Romulans altogether, and then we get to "Well how do we feature the Typhon Pact without featuring the Romulans?" So that ultimately means the Typhon Pact won't be mentioned either. My point is even a time jump is going to run into problems since it still can't mention the loss of Romulus. The only solution to the problem will be the novels getting the license to cover Abrams material.
Not so. Memory Alpha lists 59 episodes and films that feature Romulans, and a search of the transcripts reveals that fewer than half of those mention the name Romulus, and many of those are just passing references that are more about the political entity than the actual planet. There are too many to go through the whole list, but just limiting it to the 23rd century, out of three TOS episodes, three TAS episodes, and two TOS-Prime movies featuring Romulan characters, the only one that ever mentions the planet Romulus is "Balance of Terror."
So the fact of the matter is that the majority of canonical stories about the Romulans have not referred to the planet Romulus at all. Just as there are many episodes that don't mention Earth despite heavily featuring humans. Just as there are many episodes about Klingons that never mention Qo'noS. And so on.
This is also wrong, because the Typhon Pact is not a politically or culturally monolithic body. The whole original idea behind the Typhon Pact was to serve as a framework for telling focus stories about the individual member civilizations. It was sort of a second try at the format of Worlds of Deep Space Nine, a series of separate focus novels on under-explored alien cultures, with the Pact as just the umbrella concept unifying the series. True, the Pact narrative has become somewhat more unified since then, but the Pact is still very, very divided and its members are not all featured equally. The Kinshaya have barely been featured at all, except in A Singular Destiny and The Struggle Within.
Also, of course, since the Pact is a loose and uneasy alliance, there is no reason to assume that it must retain the same membership forever. As I recall, there have already been signs of a potential schism between the Gorn and the other members. It's entirely possible that the Romulans could withdraw from the Pact as well -- say, if the Pact fails to provide them with support and relief after the disaster, they could see it as a breach of trust (especially since the Federation came unhesitatingly to their aid).
Pretend how? Countdown is part of the Kelvinverse, and STO isn't compatible with Treklit already in dozens of ways, so you couldn't bring either into Treklit generally. And even ignoring the question of if that would be legally valid (which I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be), without bringing the work more generally into Treklit I'm not sure how you could go about doing that.
And getting into the "would it be legally valid" side, taking letter of the law over spirit to subvert the intention of a legal agreement doesn't actually work as much as people might think; it only really works for interpretations that you can successfully argue a person could reasonably be expected to have without any actual intent at subverting the intention. You need to be able to argue that you were acting in good faith, not just that it's a potentially valid parsing of the wording of your contract. And there's not really any way you could argue that doing that would be in good faith.
Basically if your argument would include the phrase "well, technically..." then most of the time it won't actually hold up as a legal argument. The Air Bud argument isn't actually a thing.
"Pretend?"
As in, try to fool Bad Robot into thinking that their own story ideas actually didn't come from them? Hope that J.J. Abrams somehow forgot that he co-created those events? Not only would that obviously never work, but it'd be a jerk move to try to violate someone else's intellectual property rights by some kind of trick.