Next Picard novel: Second Self by Una McCormack, coming April 2022

[hbquikcomjamesl]

The bit with Tilly saying frigging was in the episode Light and Shadows, season 2 episode 7. It's near the beginning, Tilly describes the temporal anomaly as "frigging amazing." Saru snaps "Ensign!" at her to which she says "What? You told me to stop using profanity while on duty."

Saru cutting her off as she said "fuh-" is from Far From Home, season 3 episode 2. Georgiou is making snide comments about Tilly, she just about drops an F-Bomb when Saru sternly looks at Tilly with a raised finger.

Thanks.

And for the record, just in case nobody else has mentioned it (going back to the first page of this discussion), Una McCormack has written original fiction. (And so has the one-time "king of novelizations and tie-ins" Alan Dean Foster.) And the whole business of looking down on those who write tie-in fiction smacks of those who used to look down snobbishly on John Williams because he does film scores. (Which he does, magnificently well, in whatever idiom seems to fit the film, but he also writes concert works, and started out as a jazz pianist.)

 

[JJMiller]

To the profanity topic, which I am very late to, I'd say that while I generally don't "work blue," as the stand-up comics say, I match whatever the source material goes with because it's the job. One of my stranger experiences was being instructed by a video game licensor to go back into a comics script and ADD swear words. A long way from the Comics Code days!

 

[Greg Cox]

To the profanity topic, which I am very late to, I'd say that while I generally don't "work blue," as the stand-up comics say, I match whatever the source material goes with because it's the job. One of my stranger experiences was being instructed by a video game licensor to go back into a comics script and ADD swear words. A long way from the Comics Code days!

Similar story: After writing lots of Star Trek and comic-book stuff, I'd started automatically censoring myself, which I didn't even realize until the UNDERWORLD people noted the strictly PG-rated language in my adaption of their R-rated horror movie, so I went back and made the language more R-rated to match the material.

Similarly, the language in my TERMINATOR tie-in was rougher than I'd use in a TOS or SUPERMAN book. Okay, I may have abused the privilege a bit there, once I discovered that I could use the f-word with abandon. I took that license and fucking ran with it.

 

[James Swallow]

Similar story: After writing lots of Star Trek and comic-book stuff, I'd started automatically censoring myself, which I didn't even realize until the UNDERWORLD people noted the strictly PG-rated language in my adaption of their R-rated horror movie, so I went back and made the language more R-rated to match the material.

When I was novelizing the movie The Butterfly Effect from a draft of the original film script, I cut out the particularly egregious use of a certain body-part epithet because I felt it was totally gratuitous, but my editor put it back in because he felt it made things more 'edgy'; when the movie came out that line was (unsurprisingly) cut, so it makes me look like the foul-mouthed one! I mean, I can be a sweary fucker at times, but not in that case...

 

[JJMiller]

I’d also tend to think the odd epithet is probably less jarring than hearing “frak” and “felgercarb,” which I rolled my eyes at at age ten. (The different-names-for-things bit was already a self-conscious attempt to seem alien — as if the giant spaceships and killer robots weren’t enough!)

Speaking of that time, I was attending a Southern Baptist (which we weren’t) grade school when Star Wars came out, and so I do remember raising an eyebrow when Luke’s Uncle Owen said there would be “hell to pay.” He’d have gotten a trip to the office for sure. But seeing Owen’s smoking corpse a bit later cued me in that the PG rating meant PG!

 

[ATimson]

But seeing Owen’s smoking corpse a bit later cued me in that the PG rating meant PG!

I'm still surprised the Special Edition didn't get slapped with a PG-13 (which didn't exist at the time of the original film) because of that scene...

 

[Kilana2]

We have a cover:

Following the explosive events seen in season one of Star Trek: Picard, Raffi Musiker finds herself torn between returning to her old life as a Starfleet Intelligence officer or something a little more tame—teaching at the Academy, perhaps. The decision is made for her though when a message from an old contact—a Romulan spy—is received, asking for immediate aid. With the help of Cristóbal Rios and Dr. Agnes Jurati, and assistance from Jean-Luc Picard, Raffi decides to take on this critical mission—and quickly learns that past sins never stay buried. Finding the truth will be complicated, and deadly…

I've seen it on Amazon.com now, too. The Germans currently have a different cover for the German edition.

http://www.startrekromane.de/romane/star_trek_-_picard/zweites_ich.html

Usually they use the original cover. I prefer this one over the German cover as it features Elnor.

 

[KRAD]

(The different-names-for-things bit was already a self-conscious attempt to seem alien — as if the giant spaceships and killer robots weren’t enough!)

It wasn't just that, it was a way to be able to have the characters use profanity without offending the sensibilities of Broadcast Standards & Practices. You couldn't say "fuck" on network TV in 1979 or on basic commercial cable in 2005, but you could say "frak" all you wanted....

 

[Christopher]

It wasn't just that, it was a way to be able to have the characters use profanity without offending the sensibilities of Broadcast Standards & Practices. You couldn't say "fuck" on network TV in 1979 or on basic commercial cable in 2005, but you could say "frak" all you wanted....

Oh, but "frak" and "felgercarb" barely scratched the surface of the original Galactica's "alien" nomenclature. You had yahrens for years, sectons for weeks, centons for minutes, etc. You had metrons, sectars, and hectars as distance measurements. You had "fumarellos" for cigars, "life station" for sickbay, "bureautician" for a bureaucrat/politician, "oviner" for rancher. And then there was its bizarrely lazy habit of alienizing words by sticking "-on" at the end -- a crawlon was a spider, a furlon was a furlough, a leisuron was shore leave, voltons were volts, and wavelons were wavelengths. I am not kidding.

 

[Jinn]

Oh, but "frak" and "felgercarb" barely scratched the surface of the original Galactica's "alien" nomenclature. You had yahrens for years, sectons for weeks, centons for minutes, etc. You had metrons, sectars, and hectars as distance measurements. You had "fumarellos" for cigars, "life station" for sickbay, "bureautician" for a bureaucrat/politician, "oviner" for rancher. And then there was its bizarrely lazy habit of alienizing words by sticking "-on" at the end -- a crawlon was a spider, a furlon was a furlough, a leisuron was shore leave, voltons were volts, and wavelons were wavelengths. I am not kidding.

Half of these sound like pokemon

 

[captainmkb]

don't forget "socialator" for sex workers. that one's pretty special

 

[Christopher]

don't forget "socialator" for sex workers. that one's pretty special

Well, that's a little unclear. That's what I always thought it meant too, but apparently Glen Larson has said that socialators were meant to be more like geishas, skilled entertainers/hostesses rather than sex workers. It would've been pretty daring for 1978 to portray prostitution as a legalized and respected profession; even with just the implication, the censors forced them to gloss over the idea right away and turn Cassiopeia into a nurse. We had to wait until Firefly and the BSG reboot (and Caprica, IIRC) to see the idea realized.

 

[captainmkb]

Profanity has been pretty common in Trek Lit for awhile now, since the early 2000s at least.

I can’t remember if the first time I saw “shit” in print was the TMP novelization or TekWar, but either way, Trek!

Diane Carey's 1988 "Final Frontier" has an early occurrence of George Kirk saying "Shit"

As to the TMP novelization, i missed any profanity because i was too distracted by Gene's description of Ilia's "hard tipped" parts

 

[captainmkb]

Well, that's a little unclear. That's what I always thought it meant too, but apparently Glen Larson has said that socialators were meant to be more like geishas, skilled entertainers/hostesses rather than sex workers. It would've been pretty daring for 1978 to portray prostitution as a legalized and respected profession; even with just the implication, the censors forced them to gloss over the idea right away and turn Cassiopeia into a nurse. We had to wait until Firefly and the BSG reboot (and Caprica, IIRC) to see the idea realized.

i didn't say "prostitute" i said "sex worker" - a distinction i made specifically because it was vague in the original what kind of performance or "hostessing" was being performed. thanks for explaining so much about what i had already tried to abstract

 

[Christopher]

i didn't say "prostitute" i said "sex worker" - a distinction i made specifically because it was vague in the original what kind of performance or "hostessing" was being performed.

Which doesn't contradict what I said, which was that Glen Larson asserted that socialators weren't meant to be any kind of sex worker, prostitute or otherwise, but rather were meant to be geisha-like entertainers and hostesses. Westerners often mistake geishas for sex workers, but that's a misunderstanding.

 

[JD]

I've seen it on Amazon.com now, too. The Germans currently have a different cover for the German edition.

http://www.startrekromane.de/romane/star_trek_-_picard/zweites_ich.html

Usually they use the original cover. I prefer this one over the German cover as it features Elnor.

I think this is the first time the German cover has been a lot worse than the US one.

 

[Arpy]

I also don’t like the profanity but understood the use of it for this series — tv and book. In both, I’m usually rolling my eyes at it. The lack of it was always a nice subtle thing that gave the impression of a different world from our own. The formal language felt like a placeholder for whatever they were actually using in-universe.

I really don’t give a flying fuck about the words themselves, and I enjoy peppering my day-to-day language with colorful metaphors, but I like to think that, yes, the Federation is better than that. I know I know your eyes are rolling up so high they could touch the Enterprise, but I mean it. Not because they’re immoral words (again, fuck that) but because the language patterns not employing these words (words of exasperation or easy and often cheap “edginess”) suggest a more sophisticated people. Their technology has become more sophisticated. Their ability to solve problems certainly seems beyond ours. Why not have them be more even tempered, have them show more chill, in their speaking patterns? It “speaks” to their different psychology from our own.

Part of the problem with using them is also that they’re our colorful metaphors. Yes, fuck has been around a long time, but other words have come and gone, the way they and fuck have been used has changed. And yet here we are in the 24th century very sparingly using very specific 21st century words in a specific way and hold our breaths and see how the censors or public will react to it. Yaw-awn. I’m a goddamned adult. It’s not cool.

I can understand writers being thrilled at being allowed to use contemporary lingo. It helps them hone their craft and not all stories are set in the 24th Century of Star Trek. But I’m here to read the 24th Century of Star Trek. Not a fucking Terminator novel.

I love PIC and I accept it for all it is, including the fucks. It’s not TNG, and that’s okay. And I did admire the use of the expletives in Last Best Hope — they went where you imagine they might; loved the Maddox/waiter scene.

But yeah, if you’re going to include these, I’d appreciate a lot more blue language coming out of a lot more characters where appropriate and how appropriate. Alien baddies (and teenagers) should use more alien ones, freight crews more than Starfleeters, and in perhaps future-y ways…how might fuck be employed in the distant future m’fuh’s?

 

[Una McCormack]

I must say I don't know what to make of the fact that this thread is predominantly profanity and prostitutes. Mama Mac would surely be horrified.

 

[F. King Daniel]

We're all forgetting that Treklit has been using alien F-words for years. "Frinx" in Ferengi and "Khest" in Klingon. When you know what the word means, it might as well be "fuck"

 

[Koric]

I didn’t know if this should be posted here or another thread where I had contact with Dr. @Una McCormack.

So forgive me while I post this twice since this concerns Picard: Last Best Hope and my initial review of the book back in February 2020.

My review on Amazon was pulled and deleted by Amazon for being too specific as to the SHUCKS AND FUDGES in the book Picard Last Best Hope and since it was in the first 24 hours of the ebook being released, I was trying to be as vague and unspoilerific as possible. I will continue to support Trek writers by purchasing ebooks, but I WILL NEVER review anything again, much less on Amazon PERIOD. I have better things to do than waste my time to have someone arbitrarily complain, and delete my review after 18 months later in September 2021. 210 people thought it was helpful and I believed I was doing the right thing by letting Trek readers know what they were getting into. My goal was to inform, not to harm, or censor at all. It was dirty, rotten, and unfair.

Either way I was glad to set the record straight and talk to Dr. McCormack about her choices with the book. I thought the matter was finished and settled, until this had happened. I wanted to share this with others on the forum because, I felt it was important.

I also have the intention to seek the opinions of other Trek writers on here @Christopher @James Swallow @Greg Cox @KRAD @David Mack because to me this is something I have struggled with, and was 100 percent honest with Dr. McCormack and everyone else on this thread. I realize that Amazon is it’s own entity, and can do what it wishes. But, honestly this has affected me negatively, and I don’t want to speculate as who is responsible, between the corporation and or the individual who may be responsible. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and I believed my right to express It without causing harm or damage, and was FACTUAL. The language was in the book and I was told not to say the words, as it was censored as it was, in my review as per Amazon’s request. But, it was in the book, and so I’m quoting what was printed in the book. I hope you understand my dismay, disappointment and disillusionment concerning all of this. I support the right of an author to use any words possible, but apparently I could not do the same, a consumer or a reader.

Again, with much respect to all of Trek writers on here. Many thanks in advance for your thoughts or opinions, I would greatly appreciate your thoughts or insights.
-Koric