The Destiny and Millennium trilogies are well above most everything I've read when it comes to the "wow" factor that I would want from a movie.
Novels that would make great movies
- Thread starter Damian
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That was an excellent novel. It was something that was always in the back of my mind--what happened to McCoy in that other time period.
Yeah, while there have been some episodes that had some similar themes to some novels (probably not suprising since there are hundreds of books--someone is bound to touch on a similar idea even if unintentionally) I doubt any novel would ever actually be turned into a screenplay. I was curious to see what people thought though about which novels would make great movies. Unless I'm mistaken I don't believe any original novel was ever turned into a screenplay for a Star Trek show (other than someone being inspired by a novel--I know Bob Orci said he read The Eugenics Wars books prior to writing STID, and I'm sure other stories may have been inspired by some novels, but I believe that is as far is ever went).
But I liked The Never Ending Sacrifice as well. The Cardassians have always been an interesting alien race in Star Trek and there is a lot about them there. The Terok Nor novels also had a lot about Cardassians and their history as well.
Dennis Bailey and David Bischoff adapted their original science fiction novel Tin Woodman into the TNG episode "Tin Man." If you include tie-in novels, Diane Duane's TOS novel The Wounded Sky was adapted by Duane and Michael Reaves into TNG: "Where No One Has Gone Before," although the show's producers rewrote it so heavily that almost nothing of Duane and Reaves's work remains.
And of course, Larry Niven adapted his Known Space story "The Soft Weapon" into the TAS episode "The Slaver Weapon," but that's a novelette, not a novel. And he didn't so much adapt the story to fit Star Trek as to drop three Trek characters into a near-verbatim retelling of the Known Space story.
Both Sulu and Uhura’s first names (Hikaru and Nyota) were introduced in the novels first before being heard on screen.
I don’t recall whether Bad Robot acknowledged it, but “Into Darkness” used a plot element from the 1980’s novel “Dreadnought!”.
I don’t recall whether Bad Robot acknowledged it, but “Into Darkness” used a plot element from the 1980’s novel “Dreadnought!”.
What are you referring to? The construction of a Starfleet dreadnought? That idea showed up in the Star Fleet Technical Manual 11 years before Dreadnought! came out. As for the specific idea of a dreadnought being used by an evil conspiracy within Starfleet, that just naturally follows -- if you want to tell a story about a faction of Starfleet that wants to make it more warlike, it makes sense that they'd build (or steal, in the case of the novel) a really big battleship.
Contrary to popular belief, similarity does not prove deliberate emulation. Different storytellers come up with parallel ideas by accident all the time, because stories have a common grammar and structure, and stories on a given subject matter tend to draw on the same pool of ideas. So just "This reminds me of that" is not proof of borrowing, unless there's an actual "Based on" credit.
It's the kind of thing that makes me more at ease with embracing the discrepancies of the cover art showing the crew in TOS uniforms, yet featuring the Enterprise in her movie incarnation.
Even though I've preferred visualizing the movie Enterprise, with the crew in TOS uniforms, I've considered recalibrating my internal visuals to make use of the Phase II Enterprise, which is quite a handy half-way point visual. But I'm strongly attached to the fully refitted movie incarnation. I've considered including the novel Black Fire to my reading list, on the grounds that (in spirit at least) it establishes the Enterprise as moving closer to its movie configuration (conveniently explaining the hybrid-Enterprise for the Duane and other 80's novels).
I like interpreting these books as after the show, and even after the 5-year mission, yet before TMP. I also quite like the idea of the Enterprise continuing for a few years after the 5YM, in the spirit of having a era of storytelling that is open-ended; but I've not necessarily as keen about it being a second 5YM that happens after the first one. I suspect that this open-endedness will collapse a little when I get to JM Dillard's The Lost Years, but for now I'll enjoy the individual books in their more flexible relationship between the series and the movies.
What plot point was that?
See Christopher’s post.
When I read it, I was struck by how much the first two JJ Abram's movies seemed to echo Dreadnought! Both movies distilled in the the storyline of a single novel. I didn't make any assumptions that the movies copied or plagiarized; although I thought I recalled reading somewhere that Diane Carey had taken note of many strong comparable similarities and felt flattered. I don't know why I forgot about Dreadnought!, but in a spiritual sense we do have something of an adaptation of that novel with ST 2009 and STiD. For fun I like to imagine that Dreadnought! tells the story of the Prime timeline version of "the Dreadnought Incident" that we never saw for TOS, but do see in ID. The participants and the circumstances that lead into and out of it are different, but like Kirk or Spock dying in the engine room to save the ship, echoes of the same event occur in one or more timeline.
She shouldn't feel flattered; Dreadnought! was a crappy novel and the movie was a crappy movie. But then there's not one Star Trek book she ever wrote that I don't consider a tragic waste of trees.
I was thinking of original Star Trek novels (I should have been more specific). I had forgotten that "Where No One Has Gone Before" was adapted from The Wounded Sky (inspired might be a better word since as you noted, other than the major plot point of the Enterprise being stranded outside the galaxy very little of it is the same).
The Slaver Weapon was one of my favorite episodes of TAS. I had heard that had Enterprise continued we may have seen the Kzinti. I would have loved to seem them in a live action show, I wonder if they would have been in pink suits there as well (maybe a future book can feature them in a prominent role
--though I guess a credit would have to be given to Larry Niven, I'm not sure how that would work). I know Bob Orci has mentioned he's read a number of novels. In particular he cited The Eugenics Wars (of course), Prime Directive and I believe Spock's World. He never said anything about Dreadnought! that I'm aware of. He had noted that he saw some value in the novels so I would say it's possible he got some inspiration from some of those stories if he read them. It's been years since I read Dreadnought! and thinking back there may be a few similarities as far as the warship idea goes, but I don't think there's much else. At the same time, there's so many Star Trek books, and episodes, and even movies, that you are bound to see similarities to different works out there. It's almost unavoidable at this point. Some things may be similar because the screenwriter was inspired by that other work, but it's equally possible in many cases that it's just coincidence.
Yeah, the covers could be confusing. TMP Enterprise with the crew in original series uniforms. And the novels from that period didn't specify their time frame (I supposed because maybe they didn't know really--I think TWOK was really the first novel to actually give a year, and that was Romulan Ale reference---before that I don't recall any year ever being given---TMP noted over 300 years since the Voyager 6 was launched--which is probably too many years, esp. since it's 2018 and there have only been 2 Voyagers so far....ok, just kidding). The more I think about it, the more I wonder if they were considering a 2nd five year mission BEFORE TMP. That initially they thought TMP was much later 2278 maybe instead of what, 2272 I think it's been placed now. And maybe they were placing their novels in a Phase II type universe---in that show their would have been a refit Enterprise (though a more intermediate stage) and they were supposedly going to wear the same uniforms as the original series, if the test screenings were any indication. Then when TMP was placed in 2272 it was generally considered a 2nd 5 year mission occurred after TMP, not before, and some of those novels were reconsidered to take place at that point. But maybe initially that's why the novel covers featured the discontinuity of a refit Enterprise with old uniforms.
Well, the broad plot outline is similar. An alien specialist comes aboard and uses their special insight of physics to modify the warp drive in a way that flings the ship to distant galaxies and ultimately to a region where thought becomes reality. It had enough in common that I easily recognized the source when I first saw the episode. But the specifics and the dialogue were massively changed from Duane and Reaves's draft.
In 2009, he and Alex Kurtzman listed their favorite novels as Best Destiny, Prime Directive, Spock's World, and, I'm flattered to say, Ex Machina: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/star-trek-screenwriters-pick-their-fave-trek-novels/
I don't know if the "of course" works there, because Orci was the one who didn't want the villain in STID to be Khan. It was Damon Lindelof who insisted on it. But Best Destiny was an obvious influence on ST '09 -- it featured a young, rebellious Jim Kirk learning to become a responsible adult through a dangerous mission aboard the Enterprise with Captain April and George Kirk.
It's far more likely to be the latter, because such coincidences are a constant hazard. There is such a thing as homage, of course, but that's different from a direct adaptation, which is something that requires paying for permission and crediting the original author.
At first, all the covers were TMP-era, because that was the big new production and it made sense to tie into it. The lines started blurring later on, presumably as the cover artists began searching for new photo references to guide them -- and of course the only references outside of TMP were TOS-era.
You could usually tell if it was pre- or post-TMP by the ranks of Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov. And Chekov was supposed to be security chief in the TMP era, though some writers forgot that.
Yes, that's what I was getting at earlier in the thread. They assumed either a second 5YM or just an open-ended mission. (If you think about it, the length of the mission was never actually referenced in the episodes themselves, only in the opening narration, and later in TMP and Voyager: "Q2." So some writers may have just ignored the narration.)
Oh, the idea of a new mission following TMP was there from the start, of course. It's pretty much implied by the ending of TMP itself, since they did intend to do sequels and didn't know that there'd be a revamp and a time jump between movies. A number of the earliest Pocket novels were clearly set in an ongoing mission post-TMP, as were the 1979 newspaper comic strip and the 1980 Marvel Comics series.
Calendar years had nothing to do with any of this, since these books were coming out in the early '80s, and the first firm statement of a current calendar year in a Trek installment didn't come until TNG: "The Neutral Zone" in 1988. The 2272 date for TMP was retroactively calculated from that when the Star Trek Chronology came out in 1993. So none of that had any influence at all on the people writing the first 10-12 years' worth of Pocket TOS novels. Indeed, several of the novelists based their works on the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology, which put TOS and TMP some 60 years earlier than the STC ultimately did. Most others, though, didn't bother with calendar years.
No, that had nothing to do with it. The cover artists probably wouldn't have known enough about Star Trek continuity to know the difference between the TV and movie eras or to be aware of any intermediate state between them. Like I said, it was probably just a matter of what photo references they had avaialble. And there's generally no correlation between the era of the cover elements and the contents of the books. The first 6 original novels have purely TMP-based covers, but only two, The Covenant of the Crown and The Prometheus Design, are set post-TMP. The first hybrid cover is Triangle (TOS ship and TMP uniforms), but inside it's explicitly and purely post-TMP. The Wounded Sky and My Enemy, My Ally have pure TOS-style renderings of Kirk and Spock even though they're the most "hybridized" of the novels. And so on.
I read the Wounded Sky years after I saw the episode and at the time just chalked up the similarities to coincidence (I later found out it was indeed based on the book).
I wish Orci had won that argument. There was a lot of STID I liked. The Section 31 tie in was great---their actions in the movie I thought fit perfectly with their paranoia. Cumberbatch is a great actor in his own right. I liked that they addressed some of the complaints about Star Trek (2009) like the rapid fire promotions, some of the set design issues and so forth (Bob Orci had noted on trekmovie.com's website that they did take some of that into account when writing--not every little thing of course, but where there seemed to be a consensus--like the rapid fire promotions). But Khan, and a whitewashed Khan at that? Cumberbatch was a great actor and could have been John Harrison, and only John Harrison, and it would have been a great character with him playing it. And the magic blood
That's good to know about the covers. Sometimes I was thinking to myself, do they even pay attention to what they are putting on the covers (which was why I was trying to think of an alternative reason)? The first time I remember hearing any time frame for Star Trek's placement I guess was probably during the original series. I'm trying to remember but was it "Tomorrow is Yesterday" where 200 years is mentioned? I think when Kirk is being questioned by the guard and the guard says he will be in prison for 200 years and Kirk says that sounds just about right (but of course it wasn't exact). Then TMP mentioned 300 years, but that was obviously too many years. In TWOK I remember the Romulan Ale vintage being 2283 (I assumed that was Earth's year, and it did fit with what we know now). And of course, "The Neutral Zone" finally gave us THE definitive year, and I think it was indicated Encounter at Farpoint was 78 years after TVH (I believe 78--I remember reading something at the time that said TNG began 78 years after TVH which was released just a year prior). I guess once they finally gave us the year in "The Neutral Zone" everything else finally fell into place.
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I guess you didn't remember the onscreen writing credit for Diane Duane, then.
Khan was always whitewashed. Ricardo Montalban was a white Mexican actor who wore brownface makeup to play Khan in "Space Seed" -- and then reprised him in TWOK with his natural skin tone. I don't get why people think that whitewashing was okay but the other one wasn't. Neither one of them was okay.
Although, strictly speaking, Khan was never unambiguously said to be Indian. He was called a Sikh, but Sikhism is a religion, not an ethnicity. And his name is a complete linguistic jumble, a product of the ignorant tendency of '60s TV writers to treat all of Asia as interchangeable -- his first name is a common Muslim surname, his middle name is evidently a rare Chinese name, and only his last name is typical of Sikhs. Given that he's supposedly the product of a genetic engineering program, he could easily have a mixed ethnic heritage.
That episode and "Space Seed" both suggested it was 200 years from the late 20th century, but "The Squire of Gothos" was supposedly 900 years in the future of the early 1800s, which comes out to the 28th century. By the second season, we had "Metamorphosis" saying that the inventor of warp drive had vanished 150 years earlier at age 85, which suggested something well over 200 years in the future, closer to 300.
The first mention of the 23rd century as a setting was in James Blish's "Space Seed" adaptation, even though he also mentioned the "200 years" line and didn't reconcile them. The next mention was in The Making of Star Trek, which was written during the second season, suggesting the producers had implicitly settled on that time frame by then. The 23rd century was then mentioned in the Orson Welles-narrated trailers to TMP and in the opening caption of TWOK.
The "78 years" figure was never stated in the show; it comes from the early publicity materials for TNG.
I missed that initially. In my early years as a Trekkie (in 1987 I was only a year old Trekkie), I wasn't that familiar with all the names associated with Star Trek.
I thought with Khan they should have either picked a Hispanic actor (to at least match the actor--I know Benicio Del Toro was in the running and he would have been good), or an Indian actor to match the character. Picking a British guy matched nothing. ---although to be completely honest I don't think they should have done Khan at all. When I heard the rumors before the movie came out I kept thinking, please, no, anything but that. I'm really hoping the next film drops the old revenge trope. Lets be honest, Nemesis, Star Trek (2009), STID and Beyond all went to the TWOK well for the overall plot and other significant elements (you could argue Insurrection too, but the story was different enough in other ways I can look past it). I'd love a Star Trek film without a firm villain. TMP is my favorite film, and there wasn't really a villain, at least not in a conventional sense. Ditto for TVH, a popular film with the masses. It'd be nice to have a similar movie without a firm villain. HOWEVER, I do understand in this day and age, villains sell, esp. when it comes to Sci-Fi/Action films. And they want a movie to interest the masses. But even villains can have different motivations.If we have to have a villain, they're motivation can be something other than revenge. That's what I'd challenge the Abrams team for the 14th film.
Re; the 78 years, that's what I remember. I read it in the TV guide I think it was. I figured it was reliable since they appeared to be quoting the showrunners. It seems the year given in "The Neutral Zone" plus the 78 years given in the publicity info (along with knowing TWOK was 15 years after Space Seed and TMP apparently was 2 1/2 years after the end of the 5 year mission) was enough to allow people to extrapolate when everything else took place.
The issue is that Marla should never have looked at the clean-shaven, wax-chested, turban-less Khan in his cryopod and thought he was "probably a Sikh". It's like she earned her posting on the Enterprise be collecting enough cereal box tokens.Plus, haven't you read The Eugenics Wars. It explains right there why Khan doesn't look like a typical Sikh
Khan was an Indian Sikh as imagined by writers with no clue what they were talking about.
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