Morgan Bateson

[Amaris]

^Oh no, J. Allen likes Bateson so much, he's trapped himself in a repeating time loop!

Quick! Decompress the shuttle bay!

 

[NSTrekfan]

^The whole idea behind Elias Vaughn was to create a character with so much life experience behind him that it was plausible that he could've met so many different people. If a character who was only 22 years old were portrayed as crossing over with every established series in the course of a year, that would be contrived and unlikely. But if a man who's been in Starfleet for over 80 years is shown interacting with characters from multiple series over the entire span of that career, with years or even decades between such encounters, that's far more believable.

However, he's been shown to be on quite friendly terms with many established character. It would be more believeable if he were shown as a background or parallel character rather than a good friend to so many established characters.

Imagine the size of the U.S. Armed Forces. Expand that to cover an area the size of the Federation. Now, have a career spanning 80 years. The character may be known to many people, if for no other reason than his length of service. Making him on a first name basis with so many established characters tested my suspension of disbelief.

Don't get me wrong, I love the character. It just seems that he pops up far too often in the historical record, especially where established characters are concerned.

Using him to give a different viewpoint of an historical event without having him meet or interact with the characters would be far more believeable, at least to me.

Getting back to Morgan Bateson, am I the only person who expected his crew to respons with "Yo-Ho" when he gave an order?

 

[Trelane]

I'd love to see more Morgan Bateson fics here at TrekBBS myself, C.O. of a human-alien blended crew, (of course!)

To the O.P., why not get started on your ideal fanon story and set an example for the rest of the writers.

 

[Christopher]

To the O.P., why not get started on your ideal fanon story and set an example for the rest of the writers.

Because professional Trek writers can't read Trek fanfiction.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

To the O.P., why not get started on your ideal fanon story and set an example for the rest of the writers.

Because professional Trek writers can't read Trek fanfiction.

You used the wrong verb, Christopher. It's true that professional writers shouldn't read fanfic set in the same franchise they work in to protect themselves from potential plagiarism, but that doesn't mean that they can't read fanfic. You and I both know of professional writers who do, in fact, read fanfic on occasion, so "can't" is clearly incorrect.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Besides, "can't" implies a lack of capability, i.e., you can read these posts, you can read the newspaper, you can read professionally written materials, but when it comes to fanfic, you suddenly become illiterate.

 

[captcalhoun]

nah, it's some of the fan-fic writers who're illiterate.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Separate issue.

 

[Idran]

nah, it's some of the fan-fic writers who're illiterate.

Wrong thread, I think you want the Borders one.

 

[captcalhoun]

???

 

[Destructor]

Pointing out that a book is inconsistent with canon is not even remotely the same thing as saying that it's a bad book.

The worst inconsistency in SotL, in my opinion, is when Picard (speaking to Gul Madred) places the events of 'Chains of Command prior to 'The Best of Both Worlds'. I'd been feeling a bit iffy about the book before, but at that point I threw it down in disgust- clearly neither the author nor the editor had even a basic grasp of Picard's personal history, yet they deemed to tell me what the Picard character was thinking and feeling. What an insult, I wanted my money back.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Inconsistency with canon may not automatically indicate a lousy book, but it's certainly a big fat red flag. It either indicates a sloppiness/laziness in basic research, or some incredible arrogance, that the author doesn't think some very basic rules of storytelling don't apply to them and their incredibly brilliant story.

I've yet to hear of a story that was so good that it was worth the canon violation.

 

[ICW]

Inconsistency with canon may not automatically indicate a lousy book, but it's certainly a big fat red flag. It either indicates a sloppiness/laziness in basic research, or some incredible arrogance, that the author doesn't think some very basic rules of storytelling don't apply to them and their incredibly brilliant story.

I've yet to hear of a story that was so good that it was worth the canon violation.

That's how I feel. I understand that the novels are not officially deemed to be "canon"; however, there HAS been a timelime established and I HATE it when a book comes out and contridicts prior events (like Blind Man's Bluff).

 

[JD]

For me it depends on the severity of the mistake. If it's just a brief passing reference, I can deal with it, but if it's a big part of the story, then yeah it really drives me nuts and ruins the book for me.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I use the same standards as the TV/film writers. If "The Q and the Grey" can coexist in the same continuity as "True Q", and "Balance of Terror" with "Minefield", and even "The Immunity Syndrome" with "Where Silence Has Lease" (which I'm convinced was intended as a joke but was played far too seriously), then Captain Bateson could have come straight from a space battle or Kirk's Enterprise could have visited a Dyson Sphere or Robert April and George Kirk could have met Romulans on a secret mission despite the pre-TOS tech in Final Frontier being different to that in ENT.

Like it or not, Trek's a vague mythology, not the strict canon fans (and even some writers) like to think.

(that said, I'll be seriously pissed if nuTrek novels feature whole planets full of Vulcans)

 

[Christopher]

That's how I feel. I understand that the novels are not officially deemed to be "canon"; however, there HAS been a timelime established and I HATE it when a book comes out and contridicts prior events (like Blind Man's Bluff).

No "however" about it. The tie-ins' non-canonical status means they're free to contradict each other and that canon works are free to ignore them; but it also means they aren't allowed to contradict canonical information. If a book is inconsistent with onscreen canon, that's an oversight, plain and simple. (Unless the canon is inconsistent within itself, which happens all the time. But then the books are generally obligated to follow the more current version of things.)

 

[Therin of Andor]

however, there HAS been a timelime established and I HATE it when a book comes out and contridicts prior events...

I'm sure there are just as many people who hate the ST novels being so closely interconnected and prefer standalones, or they are who don't read every novel anyway, so don't notice contradictions with other novels.

In any case, Peter David's "New Frontier" line has never gone out of its way to be consistent with other ST novels. PAD also has a tendency to correct past errors, or when his extrapolations were undermined by new canon. For example, the Repulse's captain was the wrong gender, so he wrote a scene where the past captain was a sibling of the new captain. He had NF's Shelby hearing about another Shelby getting an (onscreen) promotion (after Paramount told he they wouldn't be referencing Shelby again), and he had Robin Lefler explaining a weird, temporary, rank reduction.

 

[Idran]

however, there HAS been a timelime established and I HATE it when a book comes out and contridicts prior events...

I'm sure there are just as many people who hate the ST novels being so closely interconnected and prefer standalones, or they are who don't read every novel anyway, so don't notice contradictions with other novels.

The events they're talking about are what order two TNG episodes happened in. Not events in other novels.

 

[David cgc]

PAD also has a tendency to correct past errors, or when his extrapolations were undermined by new canon.

My personal favorite was in his Babylon 5 novels. In the first Centauri Prime book, the section headings make it out that that last four regular episodes of the show took place over something like three or four years. If you ignored them, the narrative itself (with no explicit mentions of time passing) made the extra time seem more like three or four months, tops, which is a reasonable expansion. Either way, in the following book, there was a footnote at one point mentioning that the Centauri year was different than the Earth year, and that this english translation would adjust the dates so things like anniversaries would take place on the same Earth date for the reader's benefit, even though historically, they wouldn't have been (since it was a Centauri anniversary).

It doesn't quite explain the discrepancy of years, but it was a decent patch, and the passive-aggressive tone of the footnote made me think more than one person had been as rude about pointing out the error to PAD as this guy on Amazon, who one-starred the book because of a continuity error in the section headings. Which I didn't even look at the first time, and thus failed to notice entirely.

 

[Therin of Andor]

The events they're talking about are what order two TNG episodes happened in. Not events in other novels.

So what was "Blind Man's Bluff"'s canon crime?