Godspeed, my friend. Is CaptainMike still in charge over there?.Memory Beta, which aims for treating all content as in-continuity, is gonna get messy. I’ll be right in the thick of it.
Spoilers New Picard TV Series and Litverse Continuity (may contain TV show spoilers)
- Thread starter chrinFinity
- Start date
I doubt it will happen, but once the new shows are up and running it would be nice if we got an official timeline showing which parts of the novelverse are still 'in', particularly the relaunch survivors.
Mind you, we'll probably do it on here anyway. Possibly with input from the authors.
Mind you, we'll probably do it on here anyway. Possibly with input from the authors.
Large and in charge.
I can't speak for all authors, but, honestly, this is an occupational hazard. We go into this business knowing that the actual movies and TV shows are always going to trump the tie-in novels, regardless of what franchise you're talking about it. Comes with the territory.
Hell, I once wrote a UNDERWORLD novelization that contradicted one of my own previous UNDERWORLD novels, just because that's how it works sometimes.
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I'm not sure how much longer that'll apply in the long run. Streaming services don't give out many numbers, but it's almost certain that Discovery's first season was watched by fewer people than Enterprise's last, and it was regarded as a massive commercial success. They've probably overtaken ENT's final, dead-man-walking numbers in season two, but TV Trek has become a much more niche product than it was twenty years ago, and the people in charge seem to be acting like it judging by this new batch of publicity. "Lower Decks" reminds me of any number of parody fanfics, comic strips, and ongoing improvised podcasts, the Picard trailer closed with two stingers featuring surprise returns of fan-favorite characters (remember back when Paramount was so scared of seeming to be for-nerds-only that the ST09 trailer that ended with Spock Prime instead of Nero was an online exclusive? Or maybe leak? International cut? I can't remember, and Google has a terrible recency bias), and the Short Trek trailers opened with a "shouting Spock" reference.
I can't quite tell if they're aiming at the TrekBBS/Tumblr-fan crowd, or if they're trying to repackage the diehard fan experience from places like this for the less engaged audience who'd enjoy it if they knew about it. The Picard trailer didn't really "work" on me (because of the pandering; up until the Borg I was on-board, and the closing cameos put me off completely), but listening to the people it did work for, it seems like part of the reason is just because people miss TNG. I can't get that, since for me, thanks to the novelverse, Star Trek never stopped. In my heart, if not in fact, the Trek universe has been primarily a book-based franchise since Avatar. So I don't grok the nostalgia, and it's weird to me that the version of the story where TNG just kept going feels more forward-looking than the TV shows do. CBSAA keeps going further and further into being Star Trek that's about Star Trek. All sizzle, no steak.
(I know there are also many people for whom reading a story feels less real than watching it portrayed by familiar actors, but between some characters being on their third or fourth recast, and Seven not sounding very Seven-like in the trailer (yes, small sample, but Data's line didn't sound like Brent Spiner shooting the shit on a con panel), I don't know that that can be a driving factor for much longer with the form the franchise is taking.)
I digressed a bit. Where I'm going is that, while the numerical argument was valid, even self-evident, in the earlier eras of the franchise, I think the numbers involved, the narrowing focus on fans of existing Star Trek (either overtly with reunion stories or revisiting old characters, or more subtly by taking cues for a small and content-starved fan culture and aiming them at a wider audience), and precedent from other franchises (yes, I'm back on my bullshit about that) means the Trek franchise is heading to a place where it flips the priority from casual fans to diehards, like Star Wars, various video games, and, to a degree, the MCU.
I think it's mostly inertia that Trek isn't already in a space where there are a million YouTube videos summing up books, video games, and old episodes so you can fully get a throwaway line in the latest episode or movie, or Vox runs an article explaining the post-credits scenes in every single movie, even when there's no deep lore involved and it's just a dumb joke about the movie you just saw, because people expect to be confused by the most popular pop-culture franchises as a matter of course.
What an unflattering way to call something that really doesn't deserve the word.
Without getting into how niche the current Trek TV series are in intended or actual audiences (though I would note in passing that the emphasis of a trailer made for release at SDCC is not necessarily reflective of Picard’s overall approach), the audience for even a niche TV series is still much larger than that for a line of tie-in novels. A science fiction franchise in particular would cease to be economically viable long before it reached the point where its tie-in audience became a non-trivial portion of its total audience.
Well it is created by the guy who wrote the TNG Season 8 parody twitter account, and later the book.
To me it just means it is ending - I have read and enjoyed many many of the books and they will not disappear from my bookshop.
(mind you I largely hated the last five years or so).
Honestly, my big concern is going to be shelving. Post-Nemesis works are going to be a nightmare this way, since I’ve aimed for chronological, and now there’s gonna be two incompatible lines sharing the original source...
But yeah, I don’t see this as a tragedy, just an opportunity. Now there’s a new period of time to explore all over again! How did we get here from there? Opportunity abounds!
But yeah, I don’t see this as a tragedy, just an opportunity. Now there’s a new period of time to explore all over again! How did we get here from there? Opportunity abounds!
It's what I did with my star wars books. The Legends stuff is all on one shelf. The new canon stuff on another. It's what I've been doing with the trek stuff.
Alternatively, there's Dayton Ward's approach, just going by when the book takes place and letting God sort it out.
Owning mostly German Trek novels I love seeing the spines of the English editions. They're so... different!
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TNG Season 8 is now beta canon.
I'm not sure if you are serious or not but there are people who are definitely serious about this so just in case here's a reality check: There won't be an explanation, the current litverse continuity is just done.
