Novelverse "facts" you've taken into your head-canon
- Thread starter WarpTenLizard
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I accept pretty much the entire novelverse into my head-canon.
Particularly the Rise of the Federation stuff.
Particularly the Rise of the Federation stuff.
In my other post I mentioned the relaunch stuff, but I realize now that I need to correct that. Everything in the books that isn't outright contradicted by the shows/movies is my headcanon, and even some of the stuff that appears to be contradicted can be worked over a bit until it fits.
As Greg said (better than I did), it's not even about value judgments. It's just about the fundamental difference between something done for recreation and something done as professional work. Even if those two things are the same activity, there's still a massive difference between them, like the difference between singing in the shower and cutting an album in a studio. I'm sure there are plenty of successful, professional singers who sing in the shower, but it's still a whole other beast from the singing they do for an audience or in a recording studio, for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.
Which doesn't mean that "all fiction is fanfic until it's published." Those stories were fan fiction because they were originally written and published as recreation, as something to be shared with friends and fellow fans with no expectation of payment. Their submission to pro anthologies happened after the fact and changed their status. It's not about whether you make the sale, it's about whether you intend to submit a work for payment when you write it. After all, every professional writer writes things that don't get sold. But writing them with the intention to sell makes them work rather than play. Fanfic is play.
Also, of course, something like New Voyages or Strange New Worlds is the exception, not the rule. Most licensed fiction is commissioned before it's written. That's why the idea that you can write something as fanfic and then turn it into a professional sale is almost always misguided. Just in general, it's a basic fact of the profession that you'll write a lot of things you never sell, that your early works are generally going to end up being just practice for the things you do later.
As for New Voyages, I seem to recall reading somewhere that Marshak & Culbreath heavily rewrote the stories they bought for the collections. So I wouldn't be so sure about the "verbatim" thing.
Very true. And I'm starting to see your point of view on the matter of fanfic. At any rate, this is not just true of prose fiction intended for print, but also with screenwriting. Even when a spec script is written with the intention of submission, to a show that accepts spec scripts at all, cases in which such an animal gets bought are rare indeed; more often, when they lead anywhere, they just lead to "pitch sessions," that might lead nowhere, or might lead to a commission that could be totally different from the original spec script (if you read David Gerrold's book on how "The Trouble with Tribbles" made it on the air, then you know that his original spec script was what eventually evolved into his ST novel, The Galactic Whirlpool, and that "Tribbles" evolved out of a premise he pitched (along with other premises like "The Protracted Man" and "Bandi"*)
At any rate, my work-in-not-much-progress novel, about the adventures of a child prodigy organist, is something I started writing basically because it was something I wanted to read, that nobody had written. And unfortunately, taking it to a novel workshop class at a local junior college (after I'd already repeated the short story workshop the maximum number of times) and finding out that the opening chapter was (as I said) a minefield of misread-bait, and that passages I'd intended as "protagonist kisses baby" were being consistently read as "protagonist kicks dog," threw a very heavy wet blanket on my enthusiasm.
My two ST short stories were written not for fanzines (print or online), nor for submission (with or without a contest), nor to be posted in the fanfic section of TrekBBS, but as exercises for the aforementioned short story workshop class (where I was writing too many spinoffs from the novel, and needed to write about something else). There's a catalog of stuff I've written on my web site.
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*I can't imagine it was pure coincidence that "Bandi" was about a creature who leaked emotion telepathically, and the similarly named "Bendii Syndrome" in Peter S. Beagle's TNG episode, "Sarek" was a disease causing Vulcans to leak emotion telepathically; the names are just too similar.
Same thing happens with books. I submitted a proposal for a BUFFY novel to an editor at Pocket Books, who passed on the BUFFY project, but invited me to submit an ALIAS outline instead. (They had all the BUFFY writers they needed, but we're in urgent need of ALIAS books.) Ended up writing three ALIAS novels for Pocket, but never did do a BUFFY book . . . .
Hmm. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Never saw the movie, or the TV series, but it always struck me as an amusingly off-the-wall premise. Used to work with another programmer who was a big Buffy fan. Enough of a fan that whenever he defined a block of memory to be used as a buffer, he would give it the name BUFFY. I picked up that habit from him. (I picked up the habit of using "I Like Spam" as a test message from a fellow in my high school programming class.)
At the risk of going OT, BUFFY the TV show was a great series. Mind you, like any series that runs for seven seasons it has its ups and downs, but it's definitely worth checking out. (In the end, I did manage to sell a couple of BUFFY short stories to the TALES OF THE SLAYERS anthologies, so there's that.)
But, getting back OT, what you pitch and what you end up writing is not necessarily the same thing where tie-in writing as concerned, because it's very much a collaborative process involving the writer, the publisher, and the TV people. You don't just write a STAR TREK story and somehow arrange to get it published.
Yes, I know, having been through the process myself. My TNG spec script never went anywhere because they aired a similar episode just a week or so after I mailed it in. My DS9 spec script just got me a pitch invitation, and I pitched three times without selling anything. I think I heard back then that only something like 1 in 100 spec scripts earned a pitch invitation, and only 1 in 100 pitches got bought. Although one or both of those numbers might've been 1 in 1000 instead.
Plus his original novel Yesterday's Children, plus its expanded version Starhunt, plus the Star Wolf TV premise that he developed after being fired from TNG and eventually got three novels out of.
Never underestimate the likelihood of coincidence. It happens all the time in creative endeavours -- see my above comment about my TNG spec script. Laypeople never understand how hard it is for writers to avoid accidental similarities to other people's work.
As it happens (and yes, I know I'm drifting even further OT), I have a very direct connection with self-publication.
Some here may be aware that I spend my Saturdays docenting at the International Printing Museum. We're a working museum: as much of the graphic arts equipment we exhibit as possible is kept in working order, and is actually used, whether for official Museum projects, or for non-profit personal projects of docents, or for classes.
At any rate, our lead docent (and the docents' representative on the Board) is a retired physician (and a lifelong graphic arts hobbyist). And his late Uncle Ken was a general surgeon. Uncle Ken wrote a book, The Surgeon Factory, which is a fictionalized memoir of surgical residency at the hospital we now call County-USC. At any rate, "Doc" was (as I understand it) in an informal after-hours bull session, wondering how he might get his uncle's book into print. And our director suggested we do it ourselves, as a Museum project, and sell it at our souvenir counter. And so that's exactly what we did: Doc learned how to run a Linotype machine, and assisted our lead Linotype operator at the time (the late Luis Garcia) in casting the Linotype slugs; I cast a line of Ludlow type myself for the half-title page, and we printed the whole book, by letterpress, mainly on a Miehle V-50 "Vertical" cylinder press, over a period of nearly five years (working almost entirely on weekends) In fact, I just now found a YouTube video of it. The fellow in the white t-shirt and jeans is Armand Veronico, a retired job printer who taught me how to run a Heidelberg Windmill press; the fellow in the black shirt is Dan Craig; the fellow in the blue shirt, with long gray hair is Gary Marc Remson, who was our museum manager until he retired; the one in the khaki shirt, with the flat cap and the beard, is Doc himself.
We farmed out the binding to a bindery, and within less time than it took to print the book, we sold out of the entire press run.
That's one way to get into print, when nobody will buy your book, and you want to avoid a known "vanity" imprint.
Some here may be aware that I spend my Saturdays docenting at the International Printing Museum. We're a working museum: as much of the graphic arts equipment we exhibit as possible is kept in working order, and is actually used, whether for official Museum projects, or for non-profit personal projects of docents, or for classes.
At any rate, our lead docent (and the docents' representative on the Board) is a retired physician (and a lifelong graphic arts hobbyist). And his late Uncle Ken was a general surgeon. Uncle Ken wrote a book, The Surgeon Factory, which is a fictionalized memoir of surgical residency at the hospital we now call County-USC. At any rate, "Doc" was (as I understand it) in an informal after-hours bull session, wondering how he might get his uncle's book into print. And our director suggested we do it ourselves, as a Museum project, and sell it at our souvenir counter. And so that's exactly what we did: Doc learned how to run a Linotype machine, and assisted our lead Linotype operator at the time (the late Luis Garcia) in casting the Linotype slugs; I cast a line of Ludlow type myself for the half-title page, and we printed the whole book, by letterpress, mainly on a Miehle V-50 "Vertical" cylinder press, over a period of nearly five years (working almost entirely on weekends) In fact, I just now found a YouTube video of it. The fellow in the white t-shirt and jeans is Armand Veronico, a retired job printer who taught me how to run a Heidelberg Windmill press; the fellow in the black shirt is Dan Craig; the fellow in the blue shirt, with long gray hair is Gary Marc Remson, who was our museum manager until he retired; the one in the khaki shirt, with the flat cap and the beard, is Doc himself.
We farmed out the binding to a bindery, and within less time than it took to print the book, we sold out of the entire press run.
That's one way to get into print, when nobody will buy your book, and you want to avoid a known "vanity" imprint.
Oh, I understand fully. That's why copyright law covers an expression of an idea, not the idea itself (which is what patent law covers), and why a copyright is very easy to get, but getting a patent requires you to prove that the idea is novel and non-trivial. At any rate, this is hardly the only case of a ST story involving telepathic emotion leakage (indeed, the whole "Selelvian" subplot of the NF series involves intentional emotional leakage). But the similarity of the name (and the fact that it was occasionally pronounced "ban-dee") suggests that Beagle recognized the similarity (or that somebody on the production staff noticed it and pointed it out), and that the name of the disorder was a deliberate tip of the hat.
Ezri having her own command, but I wouldn’t have had it happen so quickly. I also would have kept her and Bashir together.
The Typhon Pact is a neat idea. I could see that collapsing when the Hobus Star goes nova.
While a different continuity I would also keep all the Iconian material and the following Time War stuff with the Sphere Builders made proper canon. I liked the it was part of the Federation fault that they came to be.
The Typhon Pact is a neat idea. I could see that collapsing when the Hobus Star goes nova.
While a different continuity I would also keep all the Iconian material and the following Time War stuff with the Sphere Builders made proper canon. I liked the it was part of the Federation fault that they came to be.
Again, no. That's a common misconception of laypeople who don't understand how frequently such similarities happen by pure accident. Similarity by itself does not prove a damn thing except that human language and culture are finite and patterns are bound to recur. (How many Talarians/Tellerians/Terrellians/etc. are there in Trek? And I really doubt that the creators of Voyager were paying homage to the Delta Quadrant Defense Station in a 1980 Buck Rogers episode.) There has to be some additional evidence of direct knowledge or intent.
Besides, the script to "Sarek" explicitly says the syndrome's name is pronounced "BEN-die," so Perrin's one isolated use of "BAN-dee" was Joanna Miles's mistake, not the writer's intention.
Novel stuff in my headcanon:
- Spock's service record in D.C. Fontana's Vulcan's Glory, which has him serving on several other ships before the Enterprise (I just find it a more realistic career progression)
- The concept that the "James R. Kirk" headstone was a private joke between Mitchell & Kirk from Michael Friedman's My Brother's Keeper... It was Mitchell twisting the knife to his old friend.
- The Vulcan/Human first contact from Margaret Wander Bonanno's Strangers From The Sky.
- Zefram Cohrane's personal history from Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens' Federation.
- Some of the Klingon history from John Ford's The Final Reflection.
- Christopher Pike's history from Margaret Wander Bonanno's Burning Dreams.
- Bits of McCoy's history & future from David R. George III's The Provenance of Shadows.
- McCoy's ex-wife being named "Jocelyn" from Mike Friedman's Shadows on the Sun (though pretty much nothing else from the book).
- Bits of Kirk's history from Robert Goodman's The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (I love the concept of
- Mirror Spock discovering things about the Prime Universe from his mind-meld with McCoy at the end of "Mirror Mirror" from David Mack's Sorrows of the Empire.
- Bits & pieces from the Lost Years saga (I like the description of the Enterprise refit and some of the career paths the crew took in L.A. Graf's Traitor Winds)
- Sam Cogley having an office in the Bradbury Building in Isabella & Ingersoll's The Case of the Colonist's Corpse... Just perfect.
Probably some other bits I'm forgetting, too. Certain stories and ideas from the comics are in my headcanon, too (Like Number One becoming the Commander of the Yorktown and the history of the Klingon/Romulan alliance in John Byrne's comics).
- Spock's service record in D.C. Fontana's Vulcan's Glory, which has him serving on several other ships before the Enterprise (I just find it a more realistic career progression)
- The concept that the "James R. Kirk" headstone was a private joke between Mitchell & Kirk from Michael Friedman's My Brother's Keeper... It was Mitchell twisting the knife to his old friend.
- The Vulcan/Human first contact from Margaret Wander Bonanno's Strangers From The Sky.
- Zefram Cohrane's personal history from Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens' Federation.
(The explanation for the shape of the Starfleet Delta was too cool)
- Christopher Pike's history from Margaret Wander Bonanno's Burning Dreams.
- Bits of McCoy's history & future from David R. George III's The Provenance of Shadows.
(Specifically, Bones ultimately marrying Tonia Barrows & Natira being a double of his "wife" from the alternate timeline of COTEOF.)
- Bits of Kirk's history from Robert Goodman's The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (I love the concept of
Mitchell rescuing Kirk during the shuttecraft accident that killed five cadets during the Kolvoord Starburst Maneuver at Starfleet Academy)
- Bits & pieces from the Lost Years saga (I like the description of the Enterprise refit and some of the career paths the crew took in L.A. Graf's Traitor Winds)
- Sam Cogley having an office in the Bradbury Building in Isabella & Ingersoll's The Case of the Colonist's Corpse... Just perfect.
Probably some other bits I'm forgetting, too. Certain stories and ideas from the comics are in my headcanon, too (Like Number One becoming the Commander of the Yorktown and the history of the Klingon/Romulan alliance in John Byrne's comics).
Oh, and one more from a Strange New Worlds story I've never read ("A Test of Character" maybe?) The concept that
That seems more in keeping with Kirk's character to me. As soon as I heard that concept, it just felt right to me.
Kirk reprogrammed the Kobayashi Maru test to only make it possible to win, not a guaranteed win, the way most people interpret it.
Agreed. I also prefer Dianne Duane's take on the Vulcans (as in the novel Spock's World).
It would seem that Diane Carey isn't a fan of Voyager.
There is a lot of professionally published Star Trek fiction that is drivel (in my opinion, of course, given that some people actually like Diane Carey's novels).
My head canon includes Federation, by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. If that novel could have been adapted as a movie, it would have taken the place of both Generations and First Contact. And the ending would be the perfect jumping-off point for a post-Nemesis TV series.
Every licensed Star Trek story is part of my personal canon. I either ignore contradictions or assume the stories take place in parallel universes. Every franchise that is connected to Star Trek by crossovers is also part of my personal canon.
As for the other discussion, does this count as fanfic or profic? It's unlicensed but it's obviously been written with the intent to sell.
As for the other discussion, does this count as fanfic or profic? It's unlicensed but it's obviously been written with the intent to sell.
It's just some guy trying to profit off of someone else's property. It's thus the worst kind of fan fiction.
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