So we have alpha canon (the shows and movies) and beta canon (the books) if you could take one book and make is official alpha canon which would you choose? I would pick Vulcan's Glory.
If you could make one trek novel canon which would you choose?
- Thread starter AmandaSmith
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Either that, or A Stitch in Time by Andrew Robinson…two of the best Trek novels of all time, IMHO.
Articles Of The Federation.
Give me a few extra picks and Never Ending Sacrifice, Imzadi, Over A Torrent Sea, Sarek and A Stitch In Time all make the cut.
In a perfect world they'd all fit canonically into the new continuity. That they don't doesn't in any way diminish their quality.
Edit - Also the Vanguard series is pretty damned good.
Give me a few extra picks and Never Ending Sacrifice, Imzadi, Over A Torrent Sea, Sarek and A Stitch In Time all make the cut.
In a perfect world they'd all fit canonically into the new continuity. That they don't doesn't in any way diminish their quality.
Edit - Also the Vanguard series is pretty damned good.
Something I realized when rereading The Final Reflection about 20 years ago or so in preparation for writing my I.K.S. Gorkon books is that the Klingon Empire Ford developed is actually very much like how the Cardassian Union developed on DS9 developed: a totalitarian state jointly run by the military and the intelligence service, with service to the state being of paramount importance.
Aw, thanks!
You're very welcome !
Looking at it realistically, the only way to "make something canon" is if someone adapts it as an episode or film. And any adaptation is inevitably going to tell the story differently, because creativity is not mere copying but interpretation. It would be restructured to fit a different, more visual medium, shortened to fit the run time, reworked in various ways to fit the needs and limitations of casting and visual effects, etc. More importantly, the writer(s) adapting the story would adjust its ideas to fit their own creative vision, even if it's the original writer adapting it years later after they've matured more as a writer and had time to reconsider things. So it wouldn't be the book, it would be a TV episode or movie inspired by the book. The book itself will still be a distinct entity outside of canon, and it will be perfectly fine that way, because all stories are equally imaginary anyway and canon is not a measure of worth or validity.
Just saying "Hey, this book officially happened" won't cut it, because it's not binding. Jeri Taylor tried that with Voyager: Mosaic and Pathways while she was showrunner, declaring them canonical and occasionally working ideas and references from at least the former novel into the show, but subsequent showrunners ignored and contradicted them, so only those elements actually incorporated into the show became canonical. Anything that one creator may consider canonical can always be contradicted by a later one if it didn't actually appear onscreen -- and frequently even if it did, like "James R. Kirk" or Data's early use of contractions or Spot being a male cat.
And going back to an older book and wanting it to be canonical would rarely work, because a lot of new canon has been added since then and taken a lot of things in directions that contradict older books. It would have to be retold to fit the modern continuity, and then that's not making the book canonical, it's creating new canon adapted from the book.
Also, I think the concept of "beta canon" came from Star Wars tie-ins, and it's not applicable to Star Trek tie-ins. Trek novels and comics have never pretended to be any level of canon; they're strictly apocrypha. A canon is a complete body of works sharing some unifying element. Star Wars novels, comics, and games from the 1990s onward adopted the pretense of representing a single unified continuity (which retroactively included older tie-ins despite their contradictions), so that one could define a "canon" of SW tie-ins analogous to, and presented as an extension of, the canon of the screen works. But in Trek tie-ins, there has never been such a systematic policy. Certain subsets of tie-ins have maintained internal consistency, like the DC comics or the post-2000 novelverse, but other contemporaneous subsets and single works have gone their own separate ways, staying consistent with screen canon but freely contradicting one another. There have always been multiple coexisting, incompatible continuities among Trek novels, comics, and games, so it can't be called a canon in the sense of a unified continuity.
Just saying "Hey, this book officially happened" won't cut it, because it's not binding. Jeri Taylor tried that with Voyager: Mosaic and Pathways while she was showrunner, declaring them canonical and occasionally working ideas and references from at least the former novel into the show, but subsequent showrunners ignored and contradicted them, so only those elements actually incorporated into the show became canonical. Anything that one creator may consider canonical can always be contradicted by a later one if it didn't actually appear onscreen -- and frequently even if it did, like "James R. Kirk" or Data's early use of contractions or Spot being a male cat.
And going back to an older book and wanting it to be canonical would rarely work, because a lot of new canon has been added since then and taken a lot of things in directions that contradict older books. It would have to be retold to fit the modern continuity, and then that's not making the book canonical, it's creating new canon adapted from the book.
Also, I think the concept of "beta canon" came from Star Wars tie-ins, and it's not applicable to Star Trek tie-ins. Trek novels and comics have never pretended to be any level of canon; they're strictly apocrypha. A canon is a complete body of works sharing some unifying element. Star Wars novels, comics, and games from the 1990s onward adopted the pretense of representing a single unified continuity (which retroactively included older tie-ins despite their contradictions), so that one could define a "canon" of SW tie-ins analogous to, and presented as an extension of, the canon of the screen works. But in Trek tie-ins, there has never been such a systematic policy. Certain subsets of tie-ins have maintained internal consistency, like the DC comics or the post-2000 novelverse, but other contemporaneous subsets and single works have gone their own separate ways, staying consistent with screen canon but freely contradicting one another. There have always been multiple coexisting, incompatible continuities among Trek novels, comics, and games, so it can't be called a canon in the sense of a unified continuity.
Federation
All of this is absolutely true.
Taking a less professional viewpoint, I think some readers (and I'm using myself as a yardstick) just wish that their favourite novels meshed with on-screen canon.
There's unlikely to be any business case for rewriting them to comply, and it's not exactly a given that an author would wish to. Besides, how long would it be before something on screen contradicted it ?
I'd buy a revised novel that I love, but how many others would ?
I used to feel that way, but I came to realize it didn't matter. A good story is a good story, and they don't have to agree with each other to be worthwhile, since they're all equally unreal. Canon is not some magic standard of worth, it's just a pretentious nickname for a complete body of related works. Whether different works of make-believe agree with each other or not is simply a difference of approach, not a difference of importance or value.
There was a time when I tried to force books to fit into screen canon by ignoring or overwriting inconsistent passages, but I finally realized I was doing the books an injustice by trying to change them from what their authors intended. I came to realize that the older, contradicted books are valuable because they don't fit canon, not in spite of it -- since that makes them a distinct alternative interpretation of the imaginary universe, and that difference is what makes them notable and intriguing. Star Trek is supposed to be about celebrating diversity in combination, after all -- seeing difference as a positive to be embraced instead of a problem to be complained about or expunged.
I mean, look how many fascinatingly different versions there are of Sherlock Holmes, or Batman, or Count Dracula, or Scooby-Doo. The fact that you can take fictional characters and worlds and reinvent them in different ways is a feature, not a bug. I can enjoy Adam West's Batman without feeling disappointed that it's incompatible with Christian Bale's Batman. So why is it so hard for people to do the same with Trek stories?
Which is a lot closer to TOS than what came after.
I haven't read that one.
Ishmael, because I love their Klingon backstory and IMHO it's the only way such a dysfunctional society could ever get into space.
Not necessarily. ENT: "Judgment" established that the Klingons weren't always dominated by the warrior class, that it only happened a century or so before ENT. So when the Klingons got into space, they presumably had a more balanced society that the warriors hadn't taken over yet.
(Which makes me really curious about what the Klingons are like in the 32nd century. I hope that if we see them in Discovery, they aren't the same as they are in the 22nd-24th century, but have undergone some major change as a society. Like maybe they've had their own Surak and become a society of pacifists, say.)
Federation or the DS9 Millennium trilogy.
Runner-up: For gits and shiggles, Planet X, a Trek book follow-up to the two Star Trek/X-Men comic crossovers (the latter of which featured Borg Sentinels, X-Men fighting in the Battle of Wolf 359, and other interesting things)
Runner-up: For gits and shiggles, Planet X, a Trek book follow-up to the two Star Trek/X-Men comic crossovers (the latter of which featured Borg Sentinels, X-Men fighting in the Battle of Wolf 359, and other interesting things)
This does raise an interesting question... if the Nicholas Meyer Khan on Ceta Alpha V audio drama ends up happening... would it be canon? And, what would the dividing line be between it and, say, the PICARD audio drama with Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd co-written by a series co-creator?
"Word of god"?
"Word of god"?
No
Two simple words:
Spock's World.
And Mr. Bennett, this thread isn't reality: this is fantasy!
Spock's World.
And Mr. Bennett, this thread isn't reality: this is fantasy!
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