And I've honestly never forgiven you for that.
I want to go home again...
- Thread starter Chancellor M'rek
- Start date
And I've honestly never forgiven you for that.
I'd love to go back to stories set in the canon timeframes. The books now are a progression of the series', which I appreciate needs to happen otherwise stagnation would set in, but I haven't found myself as enthralled with them as I was before so I haven't read anything from Treklit in a long time.
Also a coincidence (or probably not because of the 30th anniversary of TNG) Star Trek Online just released a playable Husnock ship.
I've only been reading since the Destiny trilogy and forward; Titan, TNG and DS9. Have they retconned everything from the shows that kind of didn't make sense or was contradictory? That would probably please readers who would otherwise be bored with the lack of character development.
Nope, nothing's been retconned at all except (sort of) "These Are The Voyages" in The Good That Men Do. And even that wasn't exactly a retcon, more "this was a holodeck simulation, there's no guarantee of veracity when compared to actual events".
Books aren't allowed to outwardly contradict the screen stuff. Plenty of stuff has been recontextualized in a way that improves it, but nothing outright wiped clean.
But that's what "retcon" means -- retroactive continuity, a new story revealing new information about a past event or introducing a continuity relationship between events that didn't previously have one. Revealing that something never happened at all is an extreme example of a retcon, but it's hardly the exclusive meaning of the term. A retcon is anything that modifies our understanding of an event from a prior story.
So, yes, a ton of things in canonical Trek have been retconned by Trek Lit. Like
Vanguard explaining Project Genesis as an outgrowth of the Taurus Metagenome, or Admiral Cartwright being revealed as a Section 31 member, or my suggestion in DTI that the Eugenics Wars were a front of the Temporal Cold War.
Section 31: Cloak and DTI: Watching the Clock.
My bad, I was thinking specifically "retcon out".
I think it was mentioned upthread, but it's real-world licensing issues that are preventing ST novels from addressing the destruction of Romulus — and that event's lasting impact on the ST prime line — as 2387 draws nearer and nearer in the novels' timeline?
If so, how was STO able to address that catastrophic event? Or was it able to?
If so, how was STO able to address that catastrophic event? Or was it able to?
STO isn't a Pocket Books Star Trek novel. Games (and even books from other publishers, like the Kirk autobiography or the Federation history book) have their own deals with CBS and Paramount with their own arrangements or rights and permissions. It's nothing new. Back in the '90s, comic companies might only have the license to Deep Space Nine but not TNG, for instance.
Even up until a year ago, IDW's license only allowed them to do TOS, TNG, and the Abrams movies. I gather now they can do the whole franchise, if the Waypoint series is anything to go by.
Has it changed that recently? I know they only had the rights to TOS and TNG when they first acquired the license in 2006 but they expanded it to at least include DS9 as well as the Abrams movies in 2009 (they published a DS9 mini, Fool's Gold, that year). They also used the DS9 characters in the Kelvinverse ongoing in 2014. I just assumed they've had the rights to everything since 2009, they just didn't feel the sales would justify publishing anything with the other series. Even their TNG stuff has been sporadic the last few years, so I figured the sales weren't there.
IIRC, they did get the license to do DS9, but after low sales for Fool's Gold they let the license expire. Though, I'm not sure how they were able to use the DS9 characters for the Kelvinverse comics. In fact, I'm very surprised they didn't go with TNG for that one.
I figured the studio may not have allowed them use TNG since there's a (remote) possibility they'll do something with a reboot TNG.
I've often wondered, since the storyline was done up at a time when Orci's third movie was in development, the one that had Shatner returning to restore the Prime Universe or whatever, if there were plans for Kelvinverse versions of the TNG characters in that movie.
On past projects, such as The Last Generation, IDW has asked CBS Licensing if they can use characters from parts of the franchise their license doesn't cover on a case-by-case basis.
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