I, for one, am hoping for the former; I've been pushing the idea of full-cast Star Trek audio dramas to anyone who will listen for many years!
Poll Is Star Trek: Khan khanon?
- Thread starter dahj
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I, for one, am hoping for the former; I've been pushing the idea of full-cast Star Trek audio dramas to anyone who will listen for many years!
I'd love that, not just as a listener but as a writer, since I have audio drama experience and would be interested if they were hiring.
I would expect you to be among the first in line to write for any such project, given your track record!
Plus, we've already had a full-cast audio play that was written by Beyer, and there was no ambiguity on that.
I have a friend who I keep getting into irreconcilable debates with on two subjects that have been muddled to the point of meaninglessness- "practical effects" versus "CGI," and what counts as canon, especially in Star Wars. The worst was when I casually mentioned a funny post I saw, and mentioned as stage-setting that it was and always had been public knowledge that Princess Leia was adopted. "No, it's not," he said. I pointed out the scene of her cousin being shitty to her in Obi-Wan Kenobi ("Well, of course the family knows, but doesn't mean it's public,") and then I referenced her bio on the Star Wars website and numerous Disney and EU-era stories, and then he said they not only didn't, but couldn't count, because of the comic that showed the Emperor found and destroyed Yoda's lightsaber, while Luke had it in The Mandalorian, showing that tie-ins were not just non-canon, but somehow anti-canon, always wrong. He said that if it had been public knowledge Leia was adopted, it was absolutely certain that a loyalist senator would've made a cutting remark about Bail Organa's virility during an open debate in the Imperial Senate.
There has, to this day, never been a scene in a Star Wars production of Bail Organa having a debate in the Imperial Senate, with or without any below-the-belt comments.
This guy decided that tie-ins are less canon than scenes he made up from shows and movies that don't exist. That's what canon debates do to people. That's what a loose hand on continuity gets you. I long for the strict, iron fist in the iron glove canon of a video-game franchise's tie-ins.
I think it's more pertinent to tie-ins. As you said before, the canon is always free to disagree with itself, if someone doing a show wants to do something that contradicts the Khan audio play, they'll do it regardless of whether or not its canon. What it'll affect is if someone doing a novel, comic, or RPG supplement wants to drop in a reference to the version of events in To Reign in Hell or Ruling in Hell that's not consistent with Khan (at least, without an attempt to reconcile it with Khan). That's where it being canon comes in, if it's no longer the tie-in authors' prerogative to look at it and go, "No, I'd rather not reference this."
No ambiguity, because it was from Simon & Schuster Audio and was thus unambiguously a licensed tie-in. Kirsten and Mike Johnson have co-written most of the Secret Hideout tie-ins in the comics, and they did the same for the audio.
The problem isn't the makers having a loose hand on continuity, the problem is the audience being too fixated on continuity as the overriding priority of fiction. When I grew up, Trek books were rarely consistent with each other and frequently weren't even consistent with the show, but I accepted that as normal. I didn't need some official authority to tell me what counted as "real" in-universe, because I enjoyed exercising the freedom to decide for myself. And if I chose not to count a tie-in as part of my personal continuity, I was still able to enjoy it as an alternative possibility, because it's all equally imaginary anyway.
Continuity is not mandatory in fiction. It's one ingredient in the mix, and different creative works use it to a greater or lesser degree. It's a choice. I love a series with a strong continuity -- I strive to maintain strong continuity in my own fictional universes -- but I don't consider it a universal requirement, any more than I require that every story be a comedy or that every story conform to the Hero's Journey formula. They're all just options, and it's good that different works use them in different proportions, because it would be boring if everything was done the same way.
Maybe. But we won't decide that here. It depends on what Paramount's licensing people tell the tie-in creators. And until someone does a tie-in covering the subject matter, whether or not it's canon will have no bearing whatsoever on the general audience's experience of listening to the story. So I return to my initial position: Who cares, as long as you enjoy the story?
Don't you mean, "no longer the tie-in authors' prerogative to contradict it?"
Let's face it, "The Man Trap" is canon, but how often do you see a tie-in that references salt vampires?
Thank you for the vote of confidence. There's been some discussion, but like a supertanker making a u-turn, these things move slooow...
Species M113 appears in DTI: The Collectors, STO, ST Timelines.
Species M-113
Species M-113, or salt vampire, was a sentient humanoid species native to planet M-113 in the galaxy's Beta Quadrant. With the death of the last specimen on M-113, the Federation believed the salt vampires extinct. (TOS episode: "The Man Trap") The creatures were a highly intelligent species...
memory-beta.fandom.com
As a brief, implicit cameo, though.
Also, I've never heard them called "Species M-113," like a Borg designation -- where does that come from? That's like calling humans "Species Earth." (Although "human" is from the same root as "humus," meaning "earth/soil," so that kind of is what we're called.) The default name for the "Man Trap" monster has always been "M-113 Creature" or "Salt Vampire."
Well, sure, but you couldn't write something like, "McCoy had never felt the anguish of aiming a phaser at a loved one before" if you were writing a story set in season two, for instance. I phrased it that way because I was thinking more of places where Khan might foreclose some peripherally-related possibility rather than writers specifically deciding to contradict it. That's the big complaint about having an expansive canon, isn't it, that it eliminates too much freedom in its margins?
Not really. Canons contradict their own past details all the time, as in the examples I gave before about Data's contraction use and whether the Federation was at peace or at war with Cardassia in TNG seasons 1-2. Despite fandom's almost entirely wrong perception of what "canon" means, it is not a word that applies to individual lines or factoids; it's a term for the collective body of works that pretend to represent a consistent universe even when they conflict in matters of detail.
Yes, writers do try, in general, to stay broadly consistent with past information in order to sell the illusion of a consistent reality. But as with any illusion, what matters is faking it well enough to be entertaining at first blush, even if a deeper analysis would expose the artifice. So it's wrong to assume that writers are rigidly forbidden from writing anything that conflicts with past details. They do it all the time and always have. They just try to do it subtly enough that casual audiences don't notice the discrepancies, though it rarely gets past the hardcore fans. (I say "rarely" because I seem to be the only person who thinks the retconned-in Cardassian war creates an enormous discontinuity with TNG seasons 1-2.)
I mean, "The Man Trap" is a bad example, because it suffers from early-installment weirdness in that the general philosophy of the characters hadn't been clearly defined yet, so you have the crew unhesitatingly hunting down and exterminating the last member of a seemingly sentient alien species, when later in the season Spock would have surely argued that it had to be taken alive and Kirk would have probably resisted at first but ultimately agreed with him (as in "The Devil in the Dark").
My whole point was that
ST has actually been rather good about new canon not unnecessarily contradicting older canon. Not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly it's done better with this than Baum did with Oz, or Doyle did with Holmes.
And yes, MT is hip-deep in early-installment weirdness. (Then again, you find early-installment weirdness in almost any series that's been around long enough to evolve, including Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.) Of course, MT also has lots of good character moments (something David Gerrold pointed out in one of his nonfiction books), although I question whether they're worth all the nightmare-fodder. And I vaguely recall that the salt vampire was shot twice. I wonder if there would have been time to find a stun setting heavy enough to render it unconscious, without being lethal.
implies that canon status means a mandate to reference, whether it's relevant or not, rather than merely an injunction against contradicting it (intentionally or otherwise), and I cited salt vampires because (until they started showing up as an in-joke in LD) they were probably one of the least-referenced sentient species over the course of a huge number of episodes, novels, short stories, comics, &c.
ST has actually been rather good about new canon not unnecessarily contradicting older canon. Not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly it's done better with this than Baum did with Oz, or Doyle did with Holmes.
And yes, MT is hip-deep in early-installment weirdness. (Then again, you find early-installment weirdness in almost any series that's been around long enough to evolve, including Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.) Of course, MT also has lots of good character moments (something David Gerrold pointed out in one of his nonfiction books), although I question whether they're worth all the nightmare-fodder. And I vaguely recall that the salt vampire was shot twice. I wonder if there would have been time to find a stun setting heavy enough to render it unconscious, without being lethal.
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You're talking like "nightmare-fodder" is a bad thing.
As I like to point out, we kinda expected to SF to be scary sometimes back in the sixties. See The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, even Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, etc. That was part of the appeal.
The Outer Limits often terrified me as a kid, but I watched it religiously -- and even collected the bubble gum cards!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if MT had been my first experience of ST, it would have likely also been my last.
I will also note, however, that some years ago, I wrote a short story called "Interview with Dr. Ambrose Crater, or 'The Salt Vampire Ate My Parents!'." It was framed as a newspaper interview about a "Captain Sulu" adventure.
I will also note, however, that some years ago, I wrote a short story called "Interview with Dr. Ambrose Crater, or 'The Salt Vampire Ate My Parents!'." It was framed as a newspaper interview about a "Captain Sulu" adventure.
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Heck, the whole reason NBC picked "The Man Trap" as the debut episode was because it conformed most closely to TV executives' stereotyped assumption that science fiction meant monster stories, an assumption based on the prominence of monster movies in the 1950s-60s. The makers of The Outer Limits wanted it to be a literate, thoughtful science fiction anthology, but the network insisted that every episode be written around a monster of some kind, because that's what they assumed SF was.
I've often found it ironic that the TNG-era shows, with their higher budgets and more advanced makeup technology, still tended to rely mostly on bumpy-headed humanoid aliens and didn't have anywhere near as high a percentage of weird creatures as TOS had. But I guess that's because the "sci-fi means monsters" attitude wasn't as strong in the '80s-'90s as it had been in the '60s.
If you mean that new productions are not allowed to contradict it in a major way, then no it's not canon. For it to be canon, CBS would have to institute a policy that the audio drama is required listening for all writers. Then again, SNW has contradicted TOS and TAS in major ways, so maybe there's no such thing as canon anymore.
I consider all of Star Trek licensed works to be canon as long as they have at least one established character.
That's not remotely how it works. It's never been a requirement that writers personally familiarize themselves with every bit of the canon; it's the job of the editors and the studio licensing people to let authors know if something in a story conflicts with the canonical continuity. If they or the writer think it's important, the editor can just arrange to send the writer a copy. Back in the 2000s when I was starting out, Pocket would mail me broadcast-quality videotapes of episodes I wanted to consult, though I had to send them back when I was done.
Of course, it looks like this is a free, ad-supported podcast that should be easy for anyone to access if they think it's relevant. But there's no reason it would be "required" for anyone who isn't writing anything related to its specific subject matter. I mean, come on, why would someone writing a TNG or Starfleet Academy novel have to know about what happened to the Augments on Ceti Alpha V? If they should happen to make some passing reference that's inconsistent with it, the editor or studio licensors would just tell them what was wrong with it so they could fix it.
No, it's just that "canon" has never meant "absolute internal consistency." That's one of the many ways that fandom gets the definition of the word almost entirely wrong. A canon is just a complete body of works with some common element. The word refers to the collective whole, not the individual parts. A fictional canon is generally a set of stories that pretend to represent a shared, internally consistent reality. But that internal consistency is often as much an illusion as everything else, requiring the audience to suspend disbelief and play along with the conceit. Canons often rewrite themselves as they go and pretend they haven't, like Marvel Comics pretending everything from 1961 to the present has happened in a single reality while the characters have aged no more than 10-15 years, with the real-world historical and cultural details being rewritten every time the older stories are retold.
Yes, the original series was such a model of consistency, following as it did the adventures of Captain James R. Kirk and his part-Vulcanian science officer Spock on the U.S.S. Enterprise, an Earth ship in the space service UESPA and powered by lithium crystals.
Canon just means an official body of work.
The ur-Canon, the Bible, is contradictory and not consistent with itself. The ur-literary-Canon, the Sherlock Holmes stories, is also occasionally contradictory -- what is Watson's name? where is Watson's wound? what was Sherlock Holmes doing in 1892? -- and inconsistent.
A Canon is a body of work. It makes no value judgments. It's just work.
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