Poll Is Star Trek: Khan khanon?

[KRAD]

Does it matter anyway?

I’m more interested in if it will be any good or not.

THIS! SO MUCH THIS!

I will never understand why twenty-first-century fandom invests so much effort struggling over what's real in a fictional construct.

Canonicity only matters if you're writing something for the fictional world. It's completely irrelevant to the consumers of the fiction.

 

[Christopher]

THIS! SO MUCH THIS!

I will never understand why twenty-first-century fandom invests so much effort struggling over what's real in a fictional construct.

Canonicity only matters if you're writing something for the fictional world. It's completely irrelevant to the consumers of the fiction.

Well, I can sort of understand it, but only to a point. I've always been fond of the creative exercise of figuring out how to reconcile different Trek tie-ins, or tie-ins to other series, into a unified continuity. But at the same token, I've recognized for most of my life that you can't fit everything into a single continuity, and that those stories that don't fit aren't worth any less, but are just alternative possibilities, and that having multiple different interpretations of the fictional universe is a good thing, since it means there are more possibilities to be entertained by. There isn't going to be a test, so there doesn't have to be a single "right" answer.

 

[Smiley]

For me, I like a combination of story quality and enough consistency that I don’t have to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to believe that it is the same setting. If a new story supposes that Kirk and Khan had nothing but doughnuts and makeovers during his visit to the Enterprise, then I would expect that to be explained, as it would be wildly different from the version in our collective memory.

 

[Christopher]

For me, I like a combination of story quality and enough consistency that I don’t have to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to believe that it is the same setting. If a new story supposes that Kirk and Khan had nothing but doughnuts and makeovers during his visit to the Enterprise, then I would expect that to be explained, as it would be wildly different from the version in our collective memory.

Well, obviously nobody actually tries to contradict a canonical story (aside from occasionally reinterpreting things in ways consistent with the letter of canon, like revealing that the holoprogram showing Trip Tucker's death was falsified), and our editors and licensing people are there to keep our stuff consistent with screen canon. So what you're proposing here would never remotely be on the table in the first place. Inconsistency only becomes an issue when new canon overwrites tie-ins -- which sometimes happens before the tie-ins are published, due to the much longer lead time of a novel compared to a TV episode. And of course, tie-ins are often inconsistent with each other. Some franchises like Star Wars strive to keep all their tie-ins mutually consistent, but with Star Trek, acknowledging other tie-ins has always been optional.

The only reason it's unclear here is because the Khan podcast is something unprecedented, so we need clarification on whether it counts as canon or not. If it does, then naturally any future tie-ins dealing with overlapping subject matter would be expected to stay consistent with it.

Then again, all this is only true if we're talking about tie-ins. Canon itself has the ability to rewrite itself at will. We already saw a major ret-Khan (forgive me) in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," explicitly establishing that the timing of the Eugenics Wars has been altered due to temporal manipulation. Though even that is consistent in a sense, because it gives an in-story explanation for the change. Yet there's also SNW's wholesale rewrite of everything we knew about the Gorn, which seems impossible to reconcile.