Spoilers It’s Official... (probably TV spoilers here too)
- Thread starter ryan123450
- Start date
Is it? I had the impression it was so far in the past that it hadn't really been affected by the new canon. In any case, its subject matter is removed enough in time from that of the movies and shows that it isn't really offering a competing version of events or major characters. That wouldn't be true of STO, whose timeframe is only about a decade or so after Picard's. So it's not a good analogy.
Not to mention that Star Trek has never done things exactly like Star Wars, so there's no reason to expect it to start.
Uh, Baum was the original source. And he frequently contradicted himself. Hell, Conan Doyle occasionally did so with Holmes, and it's with Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories that the word "canon" was first applied to a secular text.
At any rate, when something out of a book is promoted to canon (e.g., Sulu's first name being Hikaru (somebody remind me of which movie the name was first made canonical in), or various bits and pieces from FJS's Technical Manual and General Plans made cameo appearances in TMP), it's special, and we should treasure it. When something out of a book gets contradicted by canon, it's commonplace to the point of being downright banal.
Not quite. The concept of a "literary canon" was in use by the mid-1800s, to refer to a full set of authoritative or important works, e.g. the literary canon of Ancient Greek playwrights. References to the "Shakespearean canon" go back to the early 1880s, a few years before Holmes's debut.
At most, I think Holmes was perhaps the first time the (rather highfalutin) term was applied to a popular fiction series, or specifically to distinguish the authentic stories in a series from derived works and pastiches.
STO has been a jumble of time-travel and alternate universes since day one, and it's only gotten more byzantine since they started incorporating the KT movies, Discovery, and now Picard, never mind the retcons and revisions they've done to stuff from the game itself. They can easily declare themselves an alternate timeline, and have the Guardian of Forever or something let you jump to PIC for a fun tie-in arc before jumping back to the STO universe. Or they'll incorporate some amount of the new PIC backstory, ships, and characters as if they had always been there, and say Q did it.
I think The Old Republic is able to sit in a grey area, where it’s so far removed from the era depicted in the films and shows that it’s been able to continue unimpeded, but, due to beginning while the Legends line was still the only Expanded Universe, it draws on that more and more than it does the things established since the reboot, and no one is saying for certain which continuity it is officially classified as existing in.
Like, right now, the only Disney canon reference to Tython, the world where new Jedi start on, is in one of the comics, as a world shrouded in legend and mystery. Meanwhile the starting Sith world, Korriban, got renamed “Morraband” in a Clone Wars episode, but is still called Korriban in the game. It might be the loss or permutation of history over the course of several thousand years, or it might be a reset and putting TOR in the realm of “non-canon” (for whatever that term is worth). No one’s really saying either way, seemingly as long as TOR is still active, putting out new content and making money.
It would be implausible if a place name didn't go through some kind of linguistic shift over such a huge span of time.
But that uncertainty is the point. That game is in a unique situation by virtue of its remote time frame, making it easier to stay ambiguous about such things. So it's not a template for how other tie-ins to other franchises would behave in the same circumstances.
Admittedly, I'm not totally caught up on the relaunch books... but what has been contradicted so far by STP which is set more than 10 years after the last of the relaunch books (which never went beyond the supernova)...
Data is still dead (apparently - wouldn't count out those dreams of Picard's), so is Lal. Apparently androids were still fighting for equality by the time of the attack (contradicting AotF)... otherwise it would have been difficult to strip them of their rights... What happened to androids (and presumably holograms and other artificial lifeforms) after the attack? Were they all dismantled or only those similar to Data?
We don't know any details surrounding the supernova - what led to it? When did the preparations start, how long before was it known it would happen (the books don't mention it after all and they're pretty close to the supernova happening, meaning end of 2386 or beginning of 2387)? What about the political situation before the supernova (was there an effort to preserve the alliance after the end of DS9? Or what happened after NEM?) The resistance of the Federation against helping Romulus... what about Spock? When exactly did the UP shipyards get destroyed (the 2 years before the supernova wasn't established in the pilot episode)?
I think that STP left things pretty vague so far, so that at least local events could have happened in broad strokes as established by the books (esp surrounding DS9 and Cardassia). I wouldn't even count Destiny out so far because just because there's a Borg cube doesn't mean there are Borg... could have been something they found etc (albeit Picard's dreams, this sort of collective memory, could also lead back to the Borg, who knows as of yet).
But assuming the relaunch books are history, I'd have loved to see them go out with a scripted ending, so to speak, not sizzle out with several cliffhangers... (And I'd have loved to see one last book by Una McCormack about Garak, Cardassia and Bashir...)
Data is still dead (apparently - wouldn't count out those dreams of Picard's), so is Lal. Apparently androids were still fighting for equality by the time of the attack (contradicting AotF)... otherwise it would have been difficult to strip them of their rights... What happened to androids (and presumably holograms and other artificial lifeforms) after the attack? Were they all dismantled or only those similar to Data?
We don't know any details surrounding the supernova - what led to it? When did the preparations start, how long before was it known it would happen (the books don't mention it after all and they're pretty close to the supernova happening, meaning end of 2386 or beginning of 2387)? What about the political situation before the supernova (was there an effort to preserve the alliance after the end of DS9? Or what happened after NEM?) The resistance of the Federation against helping Romulus... what about Spock? When exactly did the UP shipyards get destroyed (the 2 years before the supernova wasn't established in the pilot episode)?
I think that STP left things pretty vague so far, so that at least local events could have happened in broad strokes as established by the books (esp surrounding DS9 and Cardassia). I wouldn't even count Destiny out so far because just because there's a Borg cube doesn't mean there are Borg... could have been something they found etc (albeit Picard's dreams, this sort of collective memory, could also lead back to the Borg, who knows as of yet).
But assuming the relaunch books are history, I'd have loved to see them go out with a scripted ending, so to speak, not sizzle out with several cliffhangers... (And I'd have loved to see one last book by Una McCormack about Garak, Cardassia and Bashir...)
Based purely on the first episode:
Picard is not married
Picard has no children
Picard leaves the Enterprise well in advance of 2386 (the museum says 2381)
Without getting into spoilers - the next couple of episodes will continue to take a hammer to the literverse.
As for the borg - be real - they are not going to have they going to have a really convoluted almost fannish backstory like that be part of the show.
Nope. At the end of Destiny, not only the Borg but every trace of their technology went away. There were no derelict cubes, Seven no longer had Borg implants, all of it was gone. (Also, I killed Hugh off in Greater Than the Sum, but he's still alive in Picard.)
Do we know for certain that Hugh features in the present and not in dreams or flashbacks?
I’ve not watched the first episode yet. Will only do so when all the episodes are available.
Yes, that's pretty obvious from the shots we've seen of a considerably older Hugh with most of his implants gone, in what appears to be one of the settings from the new show.
Of course, retconning character deaths to bring them back to life is a common fictional trope, and one that Trek Lit has used before. But the fact that any Borg tech still exists at all means that Picard's continuity is incompatible with Destiny, and Greater Than the Sum is the prologue to Destiny.
Really, I don't see the point in even trying to pretend that the show and the Novelverse (at least post-NEM) can be reconciled. After all, the novels are just one of multiple tie-in continuities, alongside Star Trek Online, Star Trek Adventures, the IDW comics (which have had various sub-continuities), and the David Goodman biography/'nonfiction" books. The show has no reason to favor one over the others. We might see the occasional isolated concept borrowed from a novel or from an STO scenario, but they'd be put into the new context of the show's continuity, so it would still be distinct from the tie-in continuities.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Trek tie-ins have always existed in multiple incompatible continuities. They've always expressed a range of alternative possibilities. I see that as a feature, not a bug. It's interesting to explore different visions of the same future.
I appreciate the clarification on this. I'd assumed (incorrectly) that the closer coordination between the DSC producers and the tie-in novels was to try and make the books a little closer to "canon" but still with the asterisk that the series can contradict them at any time if they really wanted to. Foolish of me to assume that the series' writers would ever want to be beholden to something that was established in any tie-in fiction. As an example, the 2009 Countdown comics that had feedback and collaboration from the Orci & Kurtzman has been contradicted by PIC, so they will change things as they choose.
This actually makes me more cautious about jumping into any of the DSC novels (I haven't done it yet as I've focused on the 24th century relaunch) or the upcoming PIC novel. Up until this point, we weren't sure we'd ever see the 24th century on-screen again so it made the novels fun to read because it was the only continuity we had. It also makes me wonder if any decision to finally release Kelvin-verse stories is because that continuity's future on screen is in limbo. After negotiations broke down with Pine and Hemsworth over the 4th film, directors have come and gone, and the latest news of Noah Hawley coming aboard with a fresh take makes me wonder if the Kelvinverse will be seen again. Also, now that CBS and Viacom have re-merged, the Trek film and TV universes can come together again. There may be no interest in keeping their film and TV properties in different continuities. Novels may be the only way to keep that timeline going for those who are interested.
I had never heard the term used in reference to Shakespeare, or to the ancient Greek playwrights; I stand corrected. Thank you for expanding my knowledge.
But at the same time, while there are certainly references to Shakespeare plays in other Shakespeare plays (how could "If it should come to pass/That any man turn ass" in As You Like It be anything other than an allusion to Nick Bottom's transformation in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which had come out only a few years earlier?), and even the occasional outright sequel, neither Shakespeare nor the ancient Greek playwrights had a whole lot in the way of an overall continuity; whereas the Holmes stories did, as a whole, share a common milieu with continuity.
Why "cautious?" These aren't study materials for a history test. You won't suffer if you get the "wrong" information. They're all just speculations, canon included. Fiction is about exploring imaginary possibilities. How many dozens of versions of Robin Hood's archery contest or Sherlock Holmes's fate at Reichenbach Falls or Spider-Man's origin story are there by this point? None of them are invalidated by the existence of differing accounts of the story. Because they're just alternative ways of imagining something unreal.
No, as I just said, it wasn't. There was also Star Trek Online, and Elite Force II, and IDW's Hive and Countdown, and maybe others. Even in the novels, there was more than one post-NEM continuity; the last couple of Shatnerverse novels were post-NEM and in a different continuity than the other novels, though they did borrow some characters from the Titan series.
Yes, that's the point. "Canon" has a broader meaning than just "a unified fictional continuity." It refers to any comprehensive body of works in a given category. The canon of Shakespeare's plays. The canon of Western literature. The canon of film noir. A canon is the complete list of essential or definitive works that constitute a unified creative entity. Sometimes the unifying element is a shared continuity, but sometimes it's a single creator or a single genre. The term is a metaphor anyway, so it doesn't have a single restrictive definition. "Shared continuity" is just one usage of the term, not the only possible one.
Probably the biggest thing in the show is that Picard made Admiral, while in the books he's stuck at Captain with a court ruling preventing him ever making Admiral.
According to the information provided at Comic Con, Picard left the Enterprise and was promoted to Admiral in 2381, which according to the show he did specifically to spearhead the evacuation of Romulus, so clearly the supernova was known about at least that early. Behind the scenes information says the attack on Mars was in 2384.
According to people who have seen the first three episodes, Hugh is very much involved in the present.
I gather that the comic prequel places it in 2385.
Well, Kurtzman himself said 2384, so there's that.
Similar threads
