Has the Trek EU Ever Directly Contradicted Canon? (Outside of Countdown)

[Kirk-to-Enterprise]

Being a Star Wars fan in the '00s, I saw a lot of battling over message boards about the "Canonicity" of the Expanded Universe, the books, comics, games, etc. With Trek, you never get that. The EU is fairly unanimously not taken seriously or canonically, even to the point of not being mentionable on Memory Alpha (although I do think it's clever they came up with Memory Beta).

I get the difference. Star Wars was, at the time, only 3-6 movies. Fans were hungry for more. With Trek, however, it's already a daunting task to get through the hundreds of episodes of television (it took me a decade, pre-Discovery).

Nevertheless, I like to think of anything that's been officially published to have some level of authenticity to it. Otherwise it's kind of insulting to all the hard-working creators.

Spoiler

The only instance that I know of where EU directly contradicted canon, or rather, where canon contradicted previous EU, is Star Trek: Picard contradicting the events of Countdown from 2009.. Which is funny because that comic was co-written by Alex Kurtzman, the Godfather of New Trek, so he's contradicting his own work now. That comic showed Data being alive again just a few years after Nemesis, whereas in Picard, we see that he's been dead this whole time.

Also, the glimpse of seeing Kirk's body in stasis at Daystrom would seem to contradict the Shatnerverse novels. Unless he died again, which is perfectly plausible.

So, what are you guys thinking?

 

[Racefuel]

Yeah in a few cases.

In the lead-up books to Nemesis "A Time For..." series you had some weirdness like the E-E having to lower shields to fire quantum torpedoes.

 

[1001001]

So, what are you guys thinking?

I’m thinking that no one should post any spoilers until 6 months after airdate.



Please take a few moments to review the pinned threads at the top of this forum. That will help.

And of course, welcome aboard.

 

[The Wormhole]

I don't follow. You're asking if the tie-ins have ever "contradicted canon" but your example is of canon contradicting a tie-in. If the latter is in fact what you're asking, then yes, this goes on all the time. You have the novel Federation which was later contradicted by First Contact. There were comics in the 80s set after TSFS that had the TOS gang pardoned and assigned to the Excelsior which got contradicted by TVH. There's the Litverse Continuity that got completely squashed by Picard's first season alone, in particular in LitCon Picard was in a situation where he could never be promoted passed Captain, yet in the series he was a retired Admiral.

And that's just off the top of my head. Point is there's a lot of this that has gone on in Trek.

 

[David cgc]

Uh, just a touch.

Following the end of Deep Space Nine, the editors of the Star Trek novel line decided to continue the DS9 story, since those characters and situations were unlikely to be foregrounded on screen again (no DS9 movie was in the cards). That was a popular decision, and as shows went off the air and weren't replaced, the novels continued, developing ongoing, interconnected storylines continuing Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and The Next Generation (along with new series that originated in the books, like New Frontier and Corps of Engineers).

When Picard came out, the backstory they developed for the show was utterly incompatible with the storyline the novels had been developing for what happened in the seven or eight years after Nemesis (for legal reasons, the novels were prohibited from drawing on any elements of the new Star Trek movies, but also couldn't contradict them, which meant they were asymptotically approaching the year 2287 and the destruction of Romulus for about a decade). From Picard being promoted to Admiral and leaving the Enterprise just a couple years after Nemesis, to the Borg being, um, it's a long story, but not as the shows depicted them, the entire thing was essentially wiped out.

In a... controversial... decision, the ongoing novel storyline was given the opportunity to wrap itself up, which was done in an apocalyptic trilogy where it was revealed it had actually branched off from the canon universe around the time of the movie First Contact, and the novel-version of the timeline was utterly destroyed and erased from existence so the TV version could continue, none the wiser, in a somewhat mean-spirited dramatization of what had happened in the real world.

This wasn't the first time, though it was the grandest. TOS novels before TNG came out established plenty of things that turned out to be incompatible with how the TV shows developed, early novels for new shoes are written before the first episodes are completed and frequently include abandoned ideas that never made it to screen (early TNG novels have characters calling Riker "Bill," and early YGR books have the Doctor nicknamed "Zimmerman," after his programmer and model).

It was hoped that there'd be a closer degree of coordination between the novels and shows in the streaming era; not that they'd be canon, and restrict what the TV writers could do, but that they'd be given warning of potential plotlines that might appear on the show, and steered into developing stories that were prequels to the show, or otherwise things that were unlikely to change. That was a mixed success; Bryan Fuller specifically suggested the first DSC novel should be a crossover with TOS, since he intended to never actually show Pike, Spock, or the Enterprise on the show, and doing it as a book would be a fun way to avoid the controversy of recasting and redesigning the TOS setting. The author, David Mack, developed names and backstories for the minor characters on the Shenzhou, which were used in the show, but the creative teams changed, the new showrunners did want to put Pike and Spock and the Enterprise on the show, and the novel was pretty much totally contradicted by the second season of Discovery.

So, TL;DR, people making Trek novels, comics, and games try their best, and are obligated to remain consistent with the canon as it stands with extremely rare exceptions, but the shows have no need and little inclination to do the same. Things from Trek tie-ins have made it into canon, but it's extremely rare, and it's always an act of personal sentiment by whoever is writing or designing on a show or movie, not any kind of policy.

Spoiler: Picard Season 3 and Lower Decks

And even within the canon, they can stretch things to the breaking point if someone doesn't agree with some bit of established lore; aside from the gold model in the conference room and the "-A" on the hull, PIC is emphatic that the Titan in that show is the same ship Riker left to take command of at the end of Nemesis, even though the equally-canon Lower Decks had already established his ship was the totally different design that originated in the novels.

 

[Sci]

In a... controversial... decision, the ongoing novel storyline was given the opportunity to wrap itself up, which was done in an apocalyptic trilogy where it was revealed it had actually branched off from the canon universe around the time of the movie First Contact, and the novel-version of the timeline was utterly destroyed and erased from existence so the TV version could continue, none the wiser, in a somewhat mean-spirited dramatization of what had happened in the real world.

It was not mean-spirited. The Coda trilogy was written from a position of profound love for the TrekLit continuity that was being wrapped up. Ask any of the authors and they'll tell you how much they loved the continuity they had worked for twenty years to develop and how sad they were to end it.

Spoiler: Picard Season 3 and Lower Decks

And even within the canon, they can stretch things to the breaking point if someone doesn't agree with some bit of established lore; aside from the gold model in the conference room and the "-A" on the hull, PIC is emphatic that the Titan in that show is the same ship Riker left to take command of at the end of Nemesis, even though the equally-canon Lower Decks had already established his ship was the totally different design that originated in the novels.

Spoiler: PIC S3, Lower Decks

Well, this goes back to Terry Matalas's habit of conflating refitting a ship with building new ships in dialogue -- he did the same thing with the Stargazer in S2. But the Titan-A is not actually the same ship as the Titan Riker commanded; it's a new ship constructed with materials from Riker's Titan.

 

[Kirk-to-Enterprise]

Wow! Thanks for all the good answers, guys! I had no idea the contradictions went as far back as Star Trek IV! Now I understand all the more why Trek lit is considered apocryphal!

Still, from what little I know of Star Trek EU, I have seen that the canon does acknowledge it at times. The Enterprise F and, as I learned in this thread, the first Titan, were taken from the EU, so good for them for acknowledging those creators!

 

[Christopher]

Have Trek tie-ins contradicted the canon? Never intentionally. The specific job of tie-in authors is to tell stories that convincingly seem like they could have happened in the onscreen continuity, as far as it's been defined up to the point the stories are written and edited. The writers, editors, and studio licensing department do everything they can to ensure consistency, though mistakes have gotten through from time to time, especially in the older days when writers were often working from memory or incomplete reference books.

Otherwise, contradictions only happen when new canon depicts something differently after the fact. Sometimes this happens after the text of the book is locked down but before it's published.

Being a Star Wars fan in the '00s, I saw a lot of battling over message boards about the "Canonicity" of the Expanded Universe, the books, comics, games, etc. With Trek, you never get that. The EU is fairly unanimously not taken seriously or canonically, even to the point of not being mentionable on Memory Alpha (although I do think it's clever they came up with Memory Beta).

I get the difference. Star Wars was, at the time, only 3-6 movies. Fans were hungry for more. With Trek, however, it's already a daunting task to get through the hundreds of episodes of television (it took me a decade, pre-Discovery).

It's not about Trek specifically. It's always been the nature of media tie-ins in any franchise that they follow the lead of the canon, but are not acknowledged by the canon. After all, tie-ins are usually read by a minuscule fraction of the viewing audience, so it wouldn't make sense for new screen productions to be bound by them or make mention of them.

Really, screen productions aren't necessarily even bound by their own past continuity. Ongoing series rewrite their canons all the time, like how Marvel Comics pretends to be a single continuity but keeps revising the timeline so that events originally depicted to occur in the 1960s are now presumed to have happened in the 21st century. Continuity is a tool for telling stories, not a straitjacket upon them.

Nevertheless, I like to think of anything that's been officially published to have some level of authenticity to it. Otherwise it's kind of insulting to all the hard-working creators.

It's not insulting at all, because there is no "true" version of a totally imaginary story. All Trek, canon or otherwise, is just make-believe for entertainment. There are no right or wrong answers, there are just different exercises in imagination. Different creators have every right to imagine different possibilities, and that difference is not a value judgment, it's just individual creativity. If you enjoy the story, that's all the payoff we need for our work. It doesn't have to "fit" with other stories, because it's all just exploring possibilities.

It's also not insulting because we're just borrowing what belongs to someone else. We're hired contractors, not equal partners. What we create under contract for them is on their behalf, not our own. Our job is to follow their lead, and they're under no obligation to follow ours.

It's also just the inevitable occupational hazard of the science fiction writer. Every SF story set in the future is bound to be contradicted eventually, when new science or the passage of time catches up. There's always an expiration date on any story you tell. And that's okay, because they're just speculations. The goal is not to "get it right," merely to offer entertaining possibilities.

 

[Shawnster]

Gold Key comics depicted Spock eating meat. Now, was it established in TOS that Spock was a vegetarian?

Typically though, as explained above, EU material is written based upon established canon at the time of writing. Sometimes behind the scenes information is used as background for novels. For example, numerous novels detail McCoy's divorce and daughter, Johanna. However, those details were never presented on screen in TOS.

James Blish novelizations of Trek episodes sometimes contradict or distort what actually was on screen. This is because many times Blish was adapting early script drafts and not what appears on screen.

Franz Joseph's blueprints do not match on screen visuals of the Enterprise interior. Then again, TOS was not always consistent on the locations and interior details of the Enterprise interiors.

Canon is often confused with continuity. What we really are discussing is continuity.

 

[Christopher]

Gold Key comics depicted Spock eating meat. Now, was it established in TOS that Spock was a vegetarian?

Yes, quite clearly. But the Gold Key comics were not known for their accuracy. In the early issues, at least, they were written and drawn by people who hadn't seen the show.

James Blish's novel Spock Must Die! also forgets Spock's vegetarianism. As I mentioned, inaccuracies were more common in the early years, when it wasn't as easy to research things as it is now with Memory Alpha a click away. Also, back then, the studio probably wasn't as concerned with riding herd on the books' content, because Trek wasn't as much of an active concern as it would become later on.

Typically though, as explained above, EU material is written based upon established canon at the time of writing.

That's true, except I wish people wouldn't call it an "EU." "Expanded Universe" is a term from Star Wars tie-ins, and it's misleading to apply it to Trek. There's never been an attempt to make all the tie-ins fit into a single shared universe; the only requirement is that they be consistent with screen canon, not each other. There have been subsets of Trek tie-ins that have built their own ongoing continuities, notably the post-2000 novel continuity (which included most but not all of the novels), Star Trek Online, and various comics series; but they've been self-contained and mostly inconsistent with other contemporaneous tie-in continuities. So it's not an "Expanded Universe," it's just a set of various independent extrapolations upon the canonical universe.

James Blish novelizations of Trek episodes sometimes contradict or distort what actually was on screen. This is because many times Blish was adapting early script drafts and not what appears on screen.

That's only part of the reason. Blish added his own embellishments, sometimes to make the science more credible, and he occasionally worked in references to concepts from his own original science fiction, like the Vegan Tyranny and the Cold Peace. He basically wrote his Trek adaptations as if they took place in something close to his Cities in Flight universe.

He also streamlined a lot of the stories to work better in the short format he used, leaving out subplots or summarizing the opening scenes in a few paragraphs. Over the years, as readers complained about the differences, he (and his wife J.A. Lawrence when she started assisting him without credit in the later volumes) made the adaptations more accurate to the episodes.

Really, Blish's looser approach to adaptations was the norm for the era, not the exception. The reason for adapting a story to a different medium was largely to make it available for people who hadn't seen the original version, or who only partially remembered it. There was no home video at the time, and until 1961, studios wouldn't allow post-1948 movies to be rerun on TV. It also took a while for syndicated reruns on TV to become a major thing. So you couldn't always get a chance to see an old movie or TV series again, if you'd ever seen it at all, and thus book adaptations were basically their own self-contained things, the only version of the story you were likely to own. Thus, the priority was not to faithfully match the original, but to reinvent the story to work as a prose tale. Just as movie adaptations of books are free to take liberties and alter the story to work better as a movie, so book adaptations of movies/TV were free to do the same.

This freedom to take liberties remained the norm for decades, as seen, for instance, in Vonda N. McIntyre's novelizations of The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock. But as home video came along and it became easier for people to see the original versions, there was more pressure for novelizations to be "accurate" rather than to be reinventions. These days, studios crack down hard on novelizations and don't allow their writers to embellish, even to add new material that could enrich the story. And of course, there are fewer novelizations in general, since their purpose has largely been supplanted by home video and streaming.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I mean, sure, you can watch it again, but experiencing it in another way (novelization vs movie) feels different, whether there are new details in the book or not. It's like watching it through someone else's eyes instead of your own. You can linger on a moment/imagine it differently than you saw it the first time, or pick up on other details that didn't leave as much of an impression on you as the author.

 

[Christopher]

I mean, sure, you can watch it again, but experiencing it in another way (novelization vs movie) feels different, whether there are new details in the book or not. It's like watching it through someone else's eyes instead of your own. You can linger on a moment/imagine it differently than you saw it the first time, or pick up on other details that didn't leave as much of an impression on you as the author.

Sure, I agree with that, but not everyone does, which is why novelizations have become less common. Most of the businesspeople making the decisions of whether to pay for the creation of novelizations probably don't read them, so they might just see them as redundant.

Although for my own part, I feel a novelization that doesn't add something new is kind of pointless. I want something that complements and expands on the original, rather than simply restating it.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Are most novelizations written for children these days?

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Have Trek tie-ins contradicted the canon? Never intentionally.

I don't know if that's entirely true. D.C. Fontana slyly put in a reference in her TOS novel Vulcan's Glory that referred to Spock as "the only child of Sarek of Vulcan," which intentionally contradicted the plan in the then-upcoming Star Trek V to have Sybok be Spock's heretofore unmentioned half-brother. Fontana confirmed this to @Therin of Andor when he asked her about it.

Diane Carey put a lot of contradictions to the TNG episode "Cause and Effect" in her novel Ship of the Line, like having the Bozeman have an all-male crew despite the episode showing female officers on camera, and depicting the Typhon Expanse as a previously-explored and well-known sector of space in 2278, despite the episode saying it was unexplored in 2368. Now whether that was intentionally changing what the episode showed us, bad memory, sloppy research, or just a general indifference, I can't say. But Carey's novelization for the ENT premiere episode "Broken Bow" was similarly filled with passages of characters thinking things like "That was a stupid thing to say" right after quoting from Rick Berman and Brannon Braga's dialogue. Brannon Braga even commented on it in the special features on the ENT BluRays, and apparently Carey got in trouble for this attitude and didn't write any more Trek books after this.

And I suppose this counts as a contradiction of sorts, but DC Comics artists Tom Sutton and Ricardo Villagran continued to use the likeness of Kirstie Alley as Saavik in DC's monthly Star Trek comic after the role was recast with Robin Curtis for ST3 and 4. They drew Saavik to look like Curtis in the movie adaptations, but in the regular comic, she still looked like Kirstie Alley, as they just liked her features better.

I'm sure folks here can think of other examples.

EDIT: Just thought of one more: Vonda McIntyre called Ceti Alpha V and Regula I "Alpha Ceti V" and "Regulus I" in her novelization of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which contradicted both the original episode "Space Seed" and the movie. Hard to see how that wasn't intentional, as she would've been working from the movie's script.

EDIT 2: Another example from McIntyre: Her Enterprise: The First Adventure (telling her version of Kirk's first mission as Captain of the Enterprise) describes Janice Rand as being only 16 years old, which pretty clearly contradicts "Charlie X," where Rand is unquestionably significantly older than the 17-year-old Charlie Evans. And McIntyre's story also contradicted Mike W. Barr's "All Those Years Ago..." from DC's Star Trek Annual #1, which told a different version of Kirk's first mission aboard the Enterprise.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Canon Trek has trashed the novels a million times. The 80's continuity, Federation vs. First Contact and the entire First Splinter novelverse.

The other way around? Read Diane Carey's novelisation of "Broken Bow". She buries the story while telling it. And there's "The Good That Men Do" which creatively reinterprets "These Are the Voyages" as a Section 31 coverup so Trip didn't die.

 

[Christopher]

And there's "The Good That Men Do" which creatively reinterprets "These Are the Voyages" as a Section 31 coverup so Trip didn't die.

That's an invalid example, because it doesn't actually contradict the text of TATV. After all, we only saw that a simulation showed Trip dying and that the characters viewing the simulation believed it to be accurate. The novel explained that the simulation was falsified, explaining the discrepancies and thus remaining consistent with the letter of canon. Heck, even the simulation never actually showed the moment of Trip's death. We saw him being rolled into the imaging chamber, then we saw Archer and T'Pol talking about his death after the fact. Everyone knows that if you don't see the body, the death is ambiguous. It's clear that, by only showing Trip's death indirectly, the writers were leaving themselves an opening for reversing it, in the event that they got an opportunity to revisit the series somehow. The novels just did it first.

It's never been forbidden to reinterpret the meaning of what we see onscreen, as long as we're consistent with the events depicted in the episode. A number of novels over the years have retconned events to be not as they appeared, to acknowledge that the events happened as shown but did not mean what the characters believed them to mean. For instance, Greg Cox's Eugenics Wars novels revealing the secret history behind how Khan's people were exiled on the Botany Bay and why the ship was so advanced for the 1990s, or the String Theory trilogy reinterpreting the events of Voyager: "Fury" and revealing a secret behind the events of "Night," or the Vanguard novels revealing the real reason Ceti Alpha VI exploded. I've done it myself on occasion, most recently in TOS: The Higher Frontier.

No author is allowed to intentionally contradict the facts and events of onscreen canon, because there are studio employees who have to approve every outline before it's written and every manuscript before it's published. We're allowed to reinterpret the meaning of events, build secret histories behind the scenes, or retcon better explanations for things that didn't make much sense onscreen or were badly received (like Trip's death or Kes's characterization in "Fury"), but it has to fit with the surface facts of what happened onscreen. Inconsistencies generally only happen when a mistake slips through the process, like in the early DS9 novel Warchild where the author mistakenly believed Deep Space 9's runabouts were Cardassian craft that came with the station, and somehow the licensing people didn't catch the error. Or like some of the stories in the Strange New Worlds anthologies, like the one that erroneously depicted Picard's time jumps in "All Good Things..." as the result of his Irumodic Syndrome rather than being caused by Q, or the one that mistakenly portrayed Vic Fontaine as a bartender instead of a lounge singer and called his programmer Fritz instead of Felix.

 

[somebuddyX]

I like the one you guys brought up in the Diane Carey thread where in "Ship of the Line" and the events that immediately precede "Cause and Effect" she got almost every detail wrong.

 

[Christopher]

I like the one you guys brought up in the Diane Carey thread where in "Ship of the Line" and the events that immediately precede "Cause and Effect" she got almost every detail wrong.

True, but I think that's probably due to flawed memory and the lack of handy resources like Memory Alpha at the time, rather than intentional contradiction. The goal is always to stay consistent with canon, but as with anything else, sometimes the effort is not fully successful.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

There's so many more resources and much better access to them than writers ever had before. Easy questions can be answered with a quick search. It's when you try to describe things that aren't straightforward that you wind up becoming more likely to make errors.

Things like establishing whether two people met before or after a third character did something off-screen that was only mentioned, not shown. Whether it would have been impossible for someone to do something at the time stated (they were in jail, too young, elsewhere at the time). Whether or not somebody already emphatically claimed a fact was not true, and there's no clever rationale that fits with your story/the character's nature to explain how your fact can be true despite what has been established (does not have siblings, is one species rather than another, alive yet served on a ship that was wrecked when they were supposed to have been there with no survivors, etc)

 

[Greg Cox]

Are most novelizations written for children these days?

Marvel only seems to do kid's novelizations these days, but there are still adult novelizations for other franchises: GODZILLA, PLANET OF THE APES, etc.