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Janice Rand in Trek Lit.- Possible Spoilers

Speaking of that episode, how does one justify Spock's creepy response to Rand about the impostor's "interesting qualities"? The idea of Spock glibly referencing a sexual assault to the victim was repulsive.

I just try to pretend he never said that. In recent years, I've taken increasing comfort in Roddenberry's view that Star Trek was actually a dramatization of the "actual" adventures of the Enterprise and thus occasionally portrayed things inaccurately.
 
^Chris says, "I just try to pretend he never said that."

Hmmm....I know you tend to rub people the wrong way Chris, I can't imagine if I disagreed with something a character said and you took the opposite position and I replied, "I just try to pretend he never said that." I don't think would fly with you!

Not trying to flame you Chris, but just keep that in mind.
 
^Chris says, "I just try to pretend he never said that."

Hmmm....I know you tend to rub people the wrong way Chris, I can't imagine if I disagreed with something a character said and you took the opposite position and I replied, "I just try to pretend he never said that." I don't think would fly with you!

Not trying to flame you Chris, but just keep that in mind.

Also not relevant to this thread. If you want to have a private conversation with Christopher about his posting style, that's what PMs are for.

If you want to find out why Christopher feels that way about this statement - that you can discuss here.
 
I don't understand the response. There are plenty of things in Trek that we try to ignore, whether it's the sexist and ethnocentric elements in TOS or the various continuity errors or special-effects fails. We choose to ignore "James R. Kirk" and "lithium crystals" and all the times Data used contractions before he suddenly couldn't. So we're just as free to ignore Spock being so hideously sexist that he'd taunt Rand about nearly being raped. That's the sort of thing it's best just to retcon out of existence, and I would wholeheartedly agree with anyone else who said so.
 
Repeating my question for Christopher, as I think you might have missed it before:

In Ex Machina, I referred back to Rand's pregnancy but tried to make it clear that it was not Kirk, because that just makes no sense.

I'm curious, Christopher -- If you were so against the idea of Kirk impregnating Rand (which I agree with, BTW), why acknowledge Rand's daughter at all? It just seems strange to me to use part of another author's idea just to discount the other part.
 
The reference in the Captain's Daughter was intentionally ambiguous and in my view should remain so. Ex Machina is one of my favourite Trek novels but I did feel that expressly closing down the possibility of it being Kirk was attempting to superimpose a personal, even if entirely justifiable, viewpoint in triplicate on everybody else. Let people who think Kirk and Rand might have lapsed while on some unseen adventure continue to think that if that floats their boat.

I did reference Rand's daughter in a dream sequence in a Youtube comic as part of an ongoing character arc. I get quite frustrated that the character isn't better utilised in any of the novels. She's a lot of fun IMO.
 
Ex Machina is one of my favourite Trek novels but I did feel that expressly closing down the possibility of it being Kirk was attempting to superimpose a personal, even if entirely justifiable, viewpoint in triplicate on everybody else.

That's literally what fiction is. Especially licensed novels. Every single Trek novel is an author superimposing their personal viewpoint on events "off-camera" in the Trek universe, closing off every alternate possibility for the events around a given set of characters or location at a given point in time in the context of their work in favor of the one they present.
 
Ex Machina is one of my favourite Trek novels but I did feel that expressly closing down the possibility of it being Kirk was attempting to superimpose a personal, even if entirely justifiable, viewpoint in triplicate on everybody else.

That's literally what fiction is. Especially licensed novels. Every single Trek novel is an author superimposing their personal viewpoint on events "off-camera" in the Trek universe, closing off every alternate possibility for the events around a given set of characters or location at a given point in time in the context of their work in favor of the one they present.

Oh very true - I'm sure many fans disapprove of how certain characters sound in their heads when penned by different writers or how they act. I'm really not a fan of NuScotty at all because the core of the original seems to be entirely missing, unlike the other Nucharacters.

I 'resurrected' Decker and Ilia for my comic story and who knows if they bear any resemblance to the originals in other people's heads.

And of course I suppose Rand could have been lying about the father of her child, although I have a hazy memory that some of the explanation might have been via internal monologue which would close down much ambiguity. I would not object to skewing the inference in favour of a preferred paternity I just didn't approve of an attempt to remove the ambiguity entirely, if that makes sense.
 
I don't think it's a personal viewpoint, I think it's following the evidence. The idea of Kirk as an inveterate skirt chaser is a pop-culture caricature. If you look at the actual text, especially during the time when Rand was part of the series, Kirk was written as extremely disciplined, serious, repressed, and determined to avoid looking at female crewmembers as anything other than crewmembers. In "Mudd's Women," he was the only human male on the ship who was completely unaffected by the women. In "The Man Trap," when Nancy first appeared, he was the only one who saw her in a neutral and unalluring form. In "Miri," Rand had to beg him to notice her legs. The only times he showed any sexual interest in members of his crew were when he was in an altered mental state -- split in two in "The Enemy Within," disinhibited by the virus in "The Naked Time," brainwashed to think he loved Helen Noel in "Dagger of the Mind." He only flirted with women like Lenore Karidian when he had a deeper, colder motive. Areel Shaw was an old flame from quite a few years back. And when he did finally fall in love, with Edith Keeler, it was a deep and devoted connection. Reading first-season Kirk as a womanizer, let alone one who would engage in inappropriate relations with a subordinate crew member, is a profound misunderstanding of the text, resulting from years of pop-culture mythology tainting our perceptions of the character. If it's a personal preference to write James T. Kirk as he was actually written rather than as we've exaggerated and mythologized him after the fact, then I'll cop to that preference. But I don't see how it's any different from the other ways in which I've tried to be canon-accurate in my Trek writing, or scientifically accurate in all my writing. It's simply a matter of researching the evidence and basing my conclusions on it instead of secondhand interpretations of it.
 
I don't think it's a personal viewpoint, I think it's following the evidence. The idea of Kirk as an inveterate skirt chaser is a pop-culture caricature. If you look at the actual text, especially during the time when Rand was part of the series, Kirk was written as extremely disciplined, serious, repressed, and determined to avoid looking at female crewmembers as anything other than crewmembers. In "Mudd's Women," he was the only human male on the ship who was completely unaffected by the women. In "The Man Trap," when Nancy first appeared, he was the only one who saw her in a neutral and unalluring form. In "Miri," Rand had to beg him to notice her legs. The only times he showed any sexual interest in members of his crew were when he was in an altered mental state -- split in two in "The Enemy Within," disinhibited by the virus in "The Naked Time," brainwashed to think he loved Helen Noel in "Dagger of the Mind." He only flirted with women like Lenore Karidian when he had a deeper, colder motive. Areel Shaw was an old flame from quite a few years back. And when he did finally fall in love, with Edith Keeler, it was a deep and devoted connection. Reading first-season Kirk as a womanizer, let alone one who would engage in inappropriate relations with a subordinate crew member, is a profound misunderstanding of the text, resulting from years of pop-culture mythology tainting our perceptions of the character. If it's a personal preference to write James T. Kirk as he was actually written rather than as we've exaggerated and mythologized him after the fact, then I'll cop to that preference. But I don't see how it's any different from the other ways in which I've tried to be canon-accurate in my Trek writing, or scientifically accurate in all my writing. It's simply a matter of researching the evidence and basing my conclusions on it instead of secondhand interpretations of it.

Yes I fully agree with the analysis of their history, and your attention to detail is what makes your books so great to read. IMO the show's failure to move on from the tiresome, overplayed, sexual tension is what hamstrung Rand as a character. However, you have applied pre-conceptions to your conclusions.

None of those pre-conceptions preclude there being an 'incident' linked to an adventure that we have not seen. The reasons why they might have ended up having sex are endless (and we've seen many possibilities for out-of-character behaviour in the series) unless you close down those possibilities definitively.

Kirk is very unlikely to be the father for so many reasons that there isn't any real need to close down that speculation to those in the know and then those that are not as invested in the character history can still speculate and feel clever. Thus my preference for a wider interpretation remains. :)

And I suppose the fact that somebody started a thread to discuss the issue supports that point!
 
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