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"Live Action" - Character Interpretation

Mr Silver

Commodore
Newbie
In many Trek novels, the authors have an excellent grasp of the essence of a live action character, and they write for them with their established characterisation as a guide. This makes it so much easier to imagine things like a character's voice, movements and expressions. In many cases, you can actually imagine an unaired episode in your head.

For me, the easiest character to imagine is Picard. Every Trek novel I've read that features Picard, has been written by an author who has captured the specific elements that make up the character.

It can be an extremely difficult to take a character from live action media and transfer them to written media. Fortunately, with TrekLit we have authors who've spent years mastering the art, and I believe it to be one of the reasons why Star Trek tie-in novels are so successful.

Thoughts?
 
It's one of those things that I tend to not notice unless it's done badly.

The character I think authors have had the most trouble with over the years is Spock. Some of the early Bantam novels (although the names escape me now) portrayed him as too alien and too emotionless. Even as recently as Inception, where Spock's truly incapable of returning Leila's affections, stuck me as not being true to the guy we saw on TOS, who (IMO, and the way Zachary Quinto and Bad Robot interpreted the character) feels everything but usually hides it and bullshits everyone in earshot.

I couldn't relate the Spock in Vulcan's Heart to any TV/film version we ever saw. Pon Farr or no, his speech patterns and mannerisms were totally wrong to me. It (along with the Saavik thing) ruined the book.

Most recently, the Spock in Rough Beasts of Empire seemed to be the one from TNG's "Unification" and not the mellower, grandfatherly figure in STXI. I'm not saying that's wrong, just that I noticed it.
 
Agreed,

It's more noticeable when a character is done badly although I can't think of any examples at the moment. In my opinion, Kirk is the hardest person to imagine in a novel context. It also seems like he's a very hard character to write for.
 
In "A Choice of Catastrophes," a detail that I picked up on that was very present in the original series but became much less prominent in later years was Spock's speech patterns. The idea had been that he spoke very formally (and occasionally pronounced things oddly, like "deflec-TORS" and "sen-SORS") because english was his second language, and that was also exhibited by his extremely good manners. In that novel, "please" and "thank you" were practically the quotation marks around his dialogue.
 
Agreed,

It's more noticeable when a character is done badly although I can't think of any examples at the moment. In my opinion, Kirk is the hardest person to imagine in a novel context. It also seems like he's a very hard character to write for.
Different authors certianly have their own ideas about Kirk. But rather than seeing them as "wrong" vs. the TV version, I see them as differing interpretations. I can usually see Shatner (or Pine, in the case of Shatner's Collision Course) in the role without trouble.

I'm not quite sure why I hold Spock to a different standard - I think it's because he's an alien with such unique characteristics which define him.
 
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