Of course, since that other source is also licensing it from the owners of the original work.
Discovery to get tie-ins!
- Thread starter DarkHorizon
- Start date
Of course, since that other source is also licensing it from the owners of the original work.
Even if you try to say that you are using Online as your references point, I doubt it would work since Online still got it from the '09 movie. Even if you've got something in the middle there, it still came from the Kelvin timeline.
"Sir, remember that online rpg game that some people played in the 2010s?"
"No, that's like 400 years ago, Ensign."
"Well the premise of the game was that Romulus blew up. And that pretty much happened in real life too."
"Oh, great so we don't infringe on Paramounts copy right!"
"No, that's like 400 years ago, Ensign."
"Well the premise of the game was that Romulus blew up. And that pretty much happened in real life too."
"Oh, great so we don't infringe on Paramounts copy right!"
As for the "canon" and what was shown on screen and all the rest of it, I know this is going to come as a shock to some people... but it's come up in conversation a few times between authors and editors, dating back to...oh...May 2009.
I was concerned about this for a few days but as Dayton says, well hinting at but it seems to be strong hint
that they have been thinking about this for awhile. I'm going on the assumption they are going to come up with something that's going to make sense and work out. If they haven't done so already.As far as the issues with the DS9 time jump I'm not worrying that something like that is going to be repeated. It's my understanding a big factor in that was the economic collapse and the publisher deciding to save money by firing all the senior editors which disrupted a lot of things.
To a degree, yes. The global economic crash forced Simon & Schuster to lay off a lot of their higher-paid people, including Marco Palmieri (who was thus a victim of his own success, really), and that meant that stewardship of the DS9 line fell to Margaret Clark. And she decided to make a time jump and start fresh. But that was largely because there'd been some fan complaints about the DS9 narrative advancing too slowly and having to be left out of crossovers like Destiny. The time jump brought DS9 more or less into sync with TNG and Titan. (Although, interestingly, we now have a similar situation with Voyager lagging a few years behind the other 24th-century series. And DTI following its own pace in between VGR and the others.)
But the destruction of Romulus would be a huge event, even fifteen years later it would still be talked about in everyday conversation, just as we still talk about 9/11 in everyday conversation fifteen years later. Can you imagine writing military fiction today without making a single reference to 9/11? That'd be pretty damn hard given how much of the modern world was shaped by that one day, especially for the militaries of the world, even outside the US. Likewise, I just can't see how a Trek story set in 2400 is going to avoid mentioning something like the loss of Romulus. That would be a huge event, which would define the state of the Alpha Quadrant, even fifteen years later.
Sure, but those conversations don't have to happen in the particular stories we choose to tell. The novels are just a small cross-section of everything that's going on in the huge Federation. So it's easy enough to focus on the stuff where that isn't being talked about. I mean, surely you've had plenty of interactions and experiences in the past 15 year where 9/11 didn't come up, alongside the ones where it did. It's just a matter of which events you choose to focus on.
I mean, apply that logic more broadly. There are plenty of huge events we've seen in Trek that should've been talked about 15 years later. What about V'Ger? A living machine the size of Maui comes out of nowhere, wipes out three Klingon ships like they were nothing, attracts the attention of telepaths all over the Federation (presumably), shuts down all of Earth's defenses, nearly destroys the planet, then erupts into a mighty fireworks show in space and ascends to a higher plane of existence. People would be discussing and analyzing those events for centuries. But we've never seen a story that depicted one of those conversations, other than Ex Machina.
Then, of course, there are the retcons. Nobody in TOS ever mentioned the Xindi attack on Earth. Nobody on TNG mentioned the Cardassian war for the first three seasons, even though it was supposedly going on during the first two seasons. There are plenty of instances where something that logically would be talked about a lot never gets talked about on-camera. And that can be reconciled just by assuming that all the conversations happen off-camera -- between the episodes/books or on different ships/planets than the ones we focus on. It's a big galaxy, after all.
I think you're massively overstating the Romulans' importance in the grand scheme of things. Like I said, they've been in only 59 out of c. 737 episodes and movies. That's 8% of the whole, and that's including things like "The Time Trap" or The Final Frontier where there's a Romulan character in a story that isn't actually about the Romulans.
You mean Final Frontier wasn't about the epic, tragic romance between Caithlin Dar and St. John Talbot during the Paradise hostage crisis?!
TC
You mean Final Frontier wasn't about the epic, tragic romance between Caithlin Dar and St. John Talbot during the Paradise hostage crisis?!
TC
No story ideas, Talon.
The Romulans now come from a different sector, and reside on two planets they call New Romulus and New Remus. Problem solved.
They don't even have to come from a different sector. It's a Star Empire. That means it exists on more than one planet. Romulus is just the capital, not the whole thing. If the US lost Washington, DC or Japan lost Tokyo, it'd be a massive setback, to be sure, but the rest of the country would still exist and endure. (There's one Godzilla movie set in a timeline where the Japanese government relocated to Osaka after Godzilla destroyed Tokyo in 1954.)
I find it incredible in the first place that the Romulans have their own "Star Empire" which competes with the Federation on more or less equal footing, but the Vulcans are merely one member species of the entire Federation. The Romulans must have bred like rabbits after settling on Romulus.
Or the Vulcans just weren't that interested in empire building.
One thing that Trek usually ignores (with the exception of the Dominion and the Son'a) is that an empire, by definition, is one state ruling over multiple other states. So an interstellar empire shouldn't be just one species; it should be one culture ruling over multiple subject peoples. The Romulans could have a comparatively small population yet still rule a sizeable empire of subject species. They wouldn't need greater numbers if they were effective enough conquerors. The Mongols weren't that large a population, but they built an empire that spanned all of Asia. Britain is a small island, but it ruled an empire that circled the globe. Empires work by having a hierarchy of authority. The central state co-opts local authorities to work on its behalf. Those regional rulers get power over their own peoples, so long as they provide proper tribute and revenues to their superiors in the imperial hierarchy. Giving them local power earns their loyalty to the metropolis, even if they aren't from the same nation or culture.
And insurrections are swiftly put down by military force, the stick along with the carrot. This is another thing Trek usually gets wrong. An empire's military isn't made up exclusively of the ruling people; one of the main functions of the subject peoples is to provide cannon fodder, because they're the expendable ones. Most of the Roman army was made of subject peoples from all over the empire; they would generally be moved all over the map, relocated far from home so that they'd come to identify more with the empire than with their own communities. The British Army sent troops from India and African colonies to fight the Nazis. So really, when we've seen the crews of Klingon or Romulan or Cardassian ships, they should've been multispecies, made up of the empires' subject peoples. Maybe the officers could've been from the ruling species, but in historical empires, even the officers and generals were often subject peoples -- again, giving them power earns loyalty. The one time Trek ever got this right was in Nemesis, when the Remans were introduced as a Romulan subject people who had been used as cannon fodder in the Dominion War.
I often wish that, instead of going for the whole genetic-engineering angle, ST had just established that the different-looking Klingons we've seen in the franchise had just been different species within the Klingon Empire, identifying themselves by their cultural and political allegiance rather than their species.
^^ Very much agree, @Christopher ! And I love the idea of separate species Klingons and notions of cultural affiliation. If this was so, they would be more like the Culture in Iain Banks's books.
Also how did John Ford deal with different Klingons or subject species in The Final Reflection? I can't remember, but I remember it being interesting.
I wonder if one of the reasons the writers did not understand empire was indeed the epoch they were writing in. Although empire-like structures arguably existed in the mid-century (say the Soviet Union), the multi-national, intercultural and transcultural reality of state-empire was in its dying days by the 1960s. The model you depict probably can be said to end with first the Austrian Empire and Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1, and then the end of the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire in 1945, and then the British and French imperial decline or fragmentation from the 1940s to the 1960s.
For the 80s/90s Trek writers, none of them social historians or old enough or well-travelled enough to have experienced an actual empire, no wonder they assumed that empires functioned like contemporary single-country states. Even the USSR, somewhat an empire (depending on definitions), was generally perceived as nominally white and caucasoid and single culture (russian) rather than a mix of ethnic Belorussians, Czechs, Lithuanians, Germans, Armenians, Russians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Jews, non-slav balkanites, turkmen and other turkish ethnicities, and some 'central' and 'east' asian ethnicities.
There is a lot of interesting lit on the Soviet Union as empire, some publically available. Check out this chapter, this short article on how soviet states' nationalism and national identities sabotaged the imperial project, and an interesting chapter on rethinking empire in the wake of the soviet collapse.
Also how did John Ford deal with different Klingons or subject species in The Final Reflection? I can't remember, but I remember it being interesting.
I wonder if one of the reasons the writers did not understand empire was indeed the epoch they were writing in. Although empire-like structures arguably existed in the mid-century (say the Soviet Union), the multi-national, intercultural and transcultural reality of state-empire was in its dying days by the 1960s. The model you depict probably can be said to end with first the Austrian Empire and Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1, and then the end of the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire in 1945, and then the British and French imperial decline or fragmentation from the 1940s to the 1960s.
For the 80s/90s Trek writers, none of them social historians or old enough or well-travelled enough to have experienced an actual empire, no wonder they assumed that empires functioned like contemporary single-country states. Even the USSR, somewhat an empire (depending on definitions), was generally perceived as nominally white and caucasoid and single culture (russian) rather than a mix of ethnic Belorussians, Czechs, Lithuanians, Germans, Armenians, Russians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Jews, non-slav balkanites, turkmen and other turkish ethnicities, and some 'central' and 'east' asian ethnicities.
There is a lot of interesting lit on the Soviet Union as empire, some publically available. Check out this chapter, this short article on how soviet states' nationalism and national identities sabotaged the imperial project, and an interesting chapter on rethinking empire in the wake of the soviet collapse.
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He had various kinds of "fusions," genetically engineered hybrids of Klingons and other species. Implicitly, TOS Klingons were Klingon-human fusions; the Empire bred fusions with various species to better deal with those species, sort of like the Imperial Chinese motto "Use barbarians to deal with barbarians." (That's my analogy; I don't think Ford used it.)
More likely they just thought it was simpler and less confusing to the viewer if all the bad guys were the same species. It's part and parcel of the species-essentialist simplifications we see throughout Trek. For instance, how come only Vulcans ever follow Surak? Why aren't there culturally Vulcan people of many species? Realistically, there would be, but the "Planet of Hats" model is a convenient simplification for the purposes of a TV show where there's limited room for in-depth worldbuilding and where you want your audience to be easily able to tell who's who.
Well @David Mack should have plenty more time to write that first tie in novel now.