Enterprise Relaunch Novels = Amazing!

[WebLurker]

Again, people don't generally like to advertise it when they sweep a bad episode under the rug. Series fiction relies on the illusion of a consistent reality. But sometimes that illusion is maintained by quietly ignoring a past mistake and just pretending it all still holds together. It's the fans who get all fixated on what's "real" in an imaginary universe. That's because they only see it as a fixed end product and expect it to remain fixed. But creators see it as the end result of a long process of trial and error and evolution, and so the "reality" of it all looks a lot more tenuous and mutable from our end. We're not historians presenting an authoriative scholarly account, we're magicians trying to sell an illusion and hoping you don't look closely enough to see the cards up our sleeves. What I'm saying is that if you look beneath the surface claims, it's evident from practice that some episodes are effectively disregarded.

Okay, that makes sense. (You seem to have become something of a victim of your own success, if this magic act has become so accepted, that we readers get annoyed when the cards get shown!)

No. You're still not getting it. It's the opposite of this. Only canon has the freedom to do its own thing. The books are required to stay consistent with the canon. The only reason TGTMD's retcon of TATV was even possible was because TATV itself made it possible by presenting the events as a simulation after the fact. If TATV hadn't left that opening, if it had shown Trip's death in "real time," then the books would've had no choice but to accept it as fact. All the novels did was take advantage of the opening the episode itself created.

Okay, sure. I was thinking along the lines that the Star Trek tie-ins didn't affect the TV show's story, but I see what you're saying.

"Correctly?" There's no "correctly." This isn't a math test. Analyzing fiction is subjective.

I re-read my original comment here, and I've kind of forgotten where I was going with it. I think it had something to do with the idea that therorizing reaches a point were an analysis can so undermine the intent of the story that it's not very useful outside of personal thinking. (For example, one could read your books as assume that it's about robot duplicates who aren't aware they're robots, but most readers would agree that that's not an accurate look at the story).

And no, I'm not saying every meaning needs to be thrown out. I'm saying there's room for it if there's a valid story reason for it. There shouldn't be the kind of rigid, absolute restrictions that you seem to want. Heck, even in real life, it's important to keep an open mind and realize that your conclusions about the world might be wrong, might need to be revised if further information comes along. That doesn't mean you're not allowed to believe in anything, it just means you need to avoid becoming inflexible. Go with the preponderance of evidence, don't assume facts not in evidence, but don't close your mind to new evidence that might alter your conclusions.

I have been burned by retcons before in other franchises, so I will be the first to admit that I'm probably being unreasonable about them.

Because nobody should be forbidden to correct a mistake. The T. rex thing wasn't just a matter of storytelling, it was a scientific fact that was wrong.

Given that none of the science in Jurassic Park is correct, I'm not sure why this one is such a problem (esp. with the frog DNA explanation handy), but then again, I'm not a big hard sci-fi fan in the first place.

If a writer incorrectly says that, say, New York City is the capital of New York State, should they be forbidden to correct it to Albany in the next installment? Writers are human. We goof up. Why should we be deprived of the right to correct our mistakes like everyone else? One of the worst attitudes in society today is this belief that people who make mistakes should deny them and double down on them rather than admitting and fixing them. Fixing your mistakes is the only way to improve. Writers who goof up should get to fix their goofs. It happens all the time. Vonda McIntyre depicted CPR wrong in her Wrath of Khan novelization, so in her Search for Spock novelization she had the character abashed that he did it wrong and almost killed the person he was trying to save. Heck, sometimes you can get a whole new story out of fixing a mistake. Larry Niven wrote The Ringworld Engineers because his readers pointed out to him that the Ringworld was dynamically unstable, so he wrote a book explaining how it maintained stability.

Refusing to correct mistakes in real life is a big problem, all right. I think I like your Wrath of Khan and Ringworld examples the best, since the original material isn't being ignored or we're supposed to pretend that the text said something else. We can read the original as it was, know that it happened like that, and then get more material to dig deeper into the story.

You talk about the change "undermining the illusion," but you're forgetting again that the reader is not a passive absorber. It's called willing suspension of disbelief because you choose to do it. Something only undermines the illusion if you let it, if you refuse to play along. If you understand that the writer is correcting a mistake, that it should never have been done X way in the first place, then you forgive the inconsistency and accept the revised version as the more accurate one.

Yeah, I'm discussing this with a lot more seriousness than it deserves. I'm not as anal as I come across here. I just prefer a tighter continuity when that's the intent for the series and get a kick out of seeing it all work together if it was as seamless as reality.

I think you summed it up the best with what you said earlier: "It's the fans who get all fixated on what's "real" in an imaginary universe. That's because they only see it as a fixed end product and expect it to remain fixed. But creators see it as the end result of a long process of trial and error and evolution, and so the "reality" of it all looks a lot more tenuous and mutable from our end."

So, hopefully in the future we can both be happy; the writers getting enough flexibility to make the best stories possible and the readers getting enough consistency that we don't feel like there's no rules in place for the settings.

 

[Christopher]

Okay, sure. I was thinking along the lines that the Star Trek tie-ins didn't affect the TV show's story, but I see what you're saying.

That's always been the paradox of tie-ins. On the one hand, they're not supposed to have an impact on the canon (usually), but on the other hand, they're not allowed to do anything that would conflict with the canon (as far as they know it at the time). It seems strange -- if they're not supposed to count, why not give them free rein? But tie-ins exist to supplement the canon. They're seen as a product that promotes the core work, like soundtrack albums or t-shirts or specialty breakfast cereals. So they're expected to follow the lead set by the canon, to feel like they could be part of it, even though they aren't.

I re-read my original comment here, and I've kind of forgotten where I was going with it. I think it had something to do with the idea that therorizing reaches a point were an analysis can so undermine the intent of the story that it's not very useful outside of personal thinking. (For example, one could read your books as assume that it's about robot duplicates who aren't aware they're robots, but most readers would agree that that's not an accurate look at the story).

But if someone could imagine that as a credible and well-argued alternative reading of the text, that wouldn't be a problem. There are a lot of intriguing fan theories that reinterpret works of fiction, often in surprisingly plausible ways. Like the one about how "James Bond" is a code name for a variety of different spies. Or the surprisingly convincing Sherlock fan theory where all Sherlock's cases are just fakes arranged by Mycroft to keep his brother sane, with Watson just being an actor playing his part. This article has some more cool ones, and you can find plenty more online.

Good fiction shouldn't prevent people from using their imaginations; it should inspire them to do so. If readers can find a meaning in a work of fiction that the author never imagined, that's wonderful. Most writers, I think, are quite pleased when their readers are able to surprise them by finding whole new layers of meaning in their work. All creativity is a dialogue, a response to what came before. Many stories originate because writers see an existing story and think, "What if it had gone this way instead?" So if fans come up with a creative reinterpretation of their own, they're just engaging in the same kind of creativity as the writers themselves. Why should we object to that? Again, this isn't a history test. There doesn't have to be a "right" answer that everyone is compelled to accept. That's not how imagination works.

Given that none of the science in Jurassic Park is correct, I'm not sure why this one is such a problem (esp. with the frog DNA explanation handy), but then again, I'm not a big hard sci-fi fan in the first place.

I think you've been misled. Certainly there are a few flaws in JP's science that have gotten a ton of attention and shaded people's perceptions of the tale, but in fact, those are the exceptions. Michael Crichton was a writer who always tried to ground his work in credible science, and for the most part, the science in Jurassic Park was quite good for its time. A lot of the things it got wrong were believed to be correct at the time the book and movie came out and only later discovered to be wrong -- which is always an occupational hazard in science fiction. The movie fudged a few things for dramatic license, but overall -- certainly compared to most previous dinosaur movies -- its science was extremely good. (When it comes to science in movies, you kind of have to grade on a curve.) At the time it came out, it was probably the best-researched and most accurate dinosaur movie ever made, with just a few glitches. The fact that so much more about it seems wrong today is not a mark against the movie or novel, it's a testament to the continued progress of paleontology.

Refusing to correct mistakes in real life is a big problem, all right. I think I like your Wrath of Khan and Ringworld examples the best, since the original material isn't being ignored or we're supposed to pretend that the text said something else. We can read the original as it was, know that it happened like that, and then get more material to dig deeper into the story.

But tons of stories have been about revealing that earlier stories were not what they seemed. "The Adventure of the Empty House," bringing Sherlock Holmes back to life, was a classic example. And comic books are full of such retcons, like the way the X-Men comics brought Jean Grey back to life (though many people weren't fond of that one). Even Star Trek: First Contact flirts with it, with the Borg Queen being retconned into the events of "The Best of Both Worlds," although Picard's "I thought you were dead" reaction is undermined because the character's death wasn't actually portrayed in the original work.

 

[WebLurker]

That's always been the paradox of tie-ins. On the one hand, they're not supposed to have an impact on the canon (usually), but on the other hand, they're not allowed to do anything that would conflict with the canon (as far as they know it at the time). It seems strange -- if they're not supposed to count, why not give them free rein? But tie-ins exist to supplement the canon. They're seen as a product that promotes the core work, like soundtrack albums or t-shirts or specialty breakfast cereals. So they're expected to follow the lead set by the canon, to feel like they could be part of it, even though they aren't.

Yeah, more far afield stuff, like the Myriad Universes series, or the crossovers (like X-Men, Doctor Who, etc.), would be nice.

But if someone could imagine that as a credible and well-argued alternative reading of the text, that wouldn't be a problem. There are a lot of intriguing fan theories that reinterpret works of fiction, often in surprisingly plausible ways. Like the one about how "James Bond" is a code name for a variety of different spies. Or the surprisingly convincing Sherlock fan theory where all Sherlock's cases are just fakes arranged by Mycroft to keep his brother sane, with Watson just being an actor playing his part. This article has some more cool ones, and you can find plenty more online.

Good fiction shouldn't prevent people from using their imaginations; it should inspire them to do so. If readers can find a meaning in a work of fiction that the author never imagined, that's wonderful. Most writers, I think, are quite pleased when their readers are able to surprise them by finding whole new layers of meaning in their work. All creativity is a dialogue, a response to what came before. Many stories originate because writers see an existing story and think, "What if it had gone this way instead?" So if fans come up with a creative reinterpretation of their own, they're just engaging in the same kind of creativity as the writers themselves. Why should we object to that? Again, this isn't a history test. There doesn't have to be a "right" answer that everyone is compelled to accept. That's not how imagination works.

Sure, I'll concede.

I think you've been misled. Certainly there are a few flaws in JP's science that have gotten a ton of attention and shaded people's perceptions of the tale, but in fact, those are the exceptions. Michael Crichton was a writer who always tried to ground his work in credible science, and for the most part, the science in Jurassic Park was quite good for its time. A lot of the things it got wrong were believed to be correct at the time the book and movie came out and only later discovered to be wrong -- which is always an occupational hazard in science fiction. The movie fudged a few things for dramatic license, but overall -- certainly compared to most previous dinosaur movies -- its science was extremely good. (When it comes to science in movies, you kind of have to grade on a curve.) At the time it came out, it was probably the best-researched and most accurate dinosaur movie ever made, with just a few glitches. The fact that so much more about it seems wrong today is not a mark against the movie or novel, it's a testament to the continued progress of paleontology.

Okay, sure. I wasn't knocking the franchise, I love it (although I'm most attached to the movies rather than the books -- I only read the later because of my love for the former). The "T. Rex only sees movement" was always one of those details I always thought was really cool, even if that's not how real life works. So I was kind of sorry to see it go (and be described as an idiotic idea, even if I understand that it's a bad design for a predator).

But, then again, I'm not really looking for realism in this series. I mean, I was one of those people who was happy that the Jurassic World dinosaurs didn't have feathers, since I preferred visual consistency in the series. (But I did really like how they explained why the dinosaurs were bald and tied it into the story so that it was more than just a throwaway line.) So, if it made plausible sense within it's own world, I'm an easy grader, I guess.

But, then again, I did love how the novel had the villains were misinformed about the Rex's eyesight and how that cost them dearly. While the printed page doesn't really capture the terror that the movies could (Crichton's version of the Rex breaking out of the paddock understandably seems clinical compared to Spielberg's, but that's an unfair comparison), I did like how Crichton described Dodgson's crew realizing that they were in trouble and were completely wrong.