[Off-Topic] Seeking advice and insight...

[Deranged Nasat]

I'll also admit I've never gotten the whole pissing up a wall attitude with fans, the whole "my one's better than your one" schtick.

I'm suddenly reminded of an awesome joke made by another member of this forum with "Ben" in his name - TheGodBen - who after a Babylon Five watch-through once made what I thought was a hilarious post regarding the efforts to build peace between the five major Sci-Fi franchises....

Luckily, I think the whole "Star Trek VS Star Wars" thing, and "Star Trek VS Babylon Five", etc., exists in the present more as a popular joke than as a reality. I think the battle lines between franchises have dissolved somewhat

 

[Thrawn]

I understand why it's a blow, but I guess that as a fan of the Star Trek novel 'verse, I just can't personally see how the EU's "decanonization" ruins anything. That continuity is all still there, it's still as good. It's as official as you want it to be.

"Head Cannon", etc.

You know, there's actually a Star Wars character, D'harhan, whose head really is a giant laser cannon.

...but anyway. I get being pissed about the "decanonization", from the cancellation perspective I mentioned earlier. Like, with Tim Russ's project Star Trek: Renegades, I've thought about the possibility that if that does get picked up, officially, then the novel series I love so much will have to either incorporate that or cease. And I'd be PISSED if it ceased, because I couldn't possibly be less interested in that project, but I love the novels.

So for someone of that perspective on Star Wars, this must feel like their show got cancelled in favor of some other show they hate.

But that isn't quite what these people are saying.

 

[Jedi Ben]

Years ago DN, riffing on a SF collision, with a load of mates in a student bar, we came up with a massive punch-up involving Death Stars, Shadow and Vorlon Planet-killers and Borg Cubes - had Farscape existed then Command Carriers and Scarran Dreadnoughts would have been thrown in for the hell of it. Likely would have thrown in the Galactica too, actually that and BaseStars might have already been involvedm, it was a long time ago.

The solution to this gigantic clusterfrell?

Enterprise turns up, Kirk in ' what the fuck is going on here?' mode, cue much kicking of arse.

 

[Christopher]

Most continuities end sooner or later. Nothing's permanent. Usually a franchise either stops being made or lasts long enough to be rebooted. Even the ones that have supposedly been continuous for decades, like the Marvel Universe, still get sequentially retconned to keep them in the present day and their characters ageless, or have major changes reversed to an earlier status quo. It's only natural, because new generations of audience members and creators are bound to come in eventually and have different tastes and expectations. Okay, Doctor Who today purports to be the same continuity that began over 50 years ago, but that continuity was never very consistent in the first place and the modern show has canonized the idea that the universe's history has been extensively rewritten on an ongoing basis.

So expecting a continuity to remain intact and consistent indefinitely is unrealistic. The only ones that you can be sure will stay unchanged are the ones that are already over. So you enjoy them while you can, and when they end, you enjoy them as relics of the past, like the original Sherlock Holmes canon or the original Battlestar Galactica, say. And maybe whatever new thing comes along to take their place will be enjoyable too in its own right, if you give it a chance. But sooner or later it will end too.

And yes, I fully expect that someday the current Trek novel continuity will come to an end. A new show or movie may blow it out of the water, or Pocket may lose the license, or there may come a time when it doesn't sell as well as standalones or something else, or a new editor may come in with their own new continuity in mind, or something. Everything ends, everything changes. We're well into the second distinct era of novel continuity, and it's a lot more extensive and cohesive than the first one back in the '80s was, but I wouldn't be surprised if someday there is a third -- hopefully not anytime soon, but eventually.

 

[Thrawn]

^ That certainly happened to Dr. Who. Seventh Doctor, then Eighth which eventually started connecting to some parts of the Seventh, and now with the new TV show the Eighth adventures were cancelled too. After this incarnation of Who is over, I'm sure there'll be another novel series with its own new internal continuity as well.

 

[F. King Daniel]

In 100 years time, nobody's going to care which Star Trek or Star Wars novels were canon or not. What matters is the enjoyment you get from them in the present.

Didn't Trek lit already go through something kinda like is currently befalling the Star Wars EU right now, when Enterprise came along in 2001 and "invalidated" a ton of pre-TOS novels?

 

[Christopher]

Didn't Trek lit already go through something kinda like is currently befalling the Star Wars EU right now, when Enterprise came along in 2001 and "invalidated" a ton of pre-TOS novels?

Ohh, heck, we've been through it multiple times. Not only did TNG invalidate the '80s continuity, but the whole time that TNG and its successors were on the air, they were frequently overwriting and contradicting tie-in novels left and right -- sometimes between the time a book's text was finalized and the time it got published!

And of course, before then, the books often contradicted one another quite freely anyway. There was a loose continuity in the '80s, but it was far from all-inclusive, and it was pretty much a given that the various Trek novels represented multiple authors' distinct, individual interpretations of the Trek universe rather than a shared reality. For instance, a year and a half after The Final Reflection was published and established the supposedly "definitive" novel version of the Klingons, Pawns and Symbols came out and offered an entirely separate version.

It should just be taken as a given that any ongoing, active continuity is going to be a moving target that contemporaneous tie-ins will have a hard time keeping up with at best. It's like I said, the only continuities that aren't subject to change are the ones that have already ended. Tie-ins can try to keep to the unexplored gaps in the canon, but new canon may very well fill in those same gaps in a totally contradictory way.

But what I learned from those early years of Trek tie-in discontinuity is that getting different, contradictory interpretations of a universe isn't a bad thing per se. It can be entertaining to see the ways in which different creators' imaginations end up taking the same idea, the alternative approaches they think up. Sometimes getting to play around with various different realities is part of the fun.

 

[DigificWriter]

what I learned from those early years of Trek tie-in discontinuity is that getting different, contradictory interpretations of a universe isn't a bad thing per se.

That's the thing, though. Most of the reactions I've seen have been treating this as very much a bad thing and as somehow dismissive of the time and money that they, as fans, invested in purchasing and reading stories that are more than likely going to be contradicted and overwritten.

 

[zarkon]

Give them a copy of The Final Reflection and tell them you'll shut up about the issue if they didn't like it

 

[Thrawn]

...well, but, it is dismissive. The continuity is literally being dismissed.

I mean, regardless of your opinion of the joy of reading variously contradictory versions of the same thing (something which Trek readers have long known or learned to enjoy), it's TRUE that the SW books were declared one giant, consistent canon, however that worked in practice, and now they aren't anymore.

Is it really so hard to understand why that's annoying? (Again, I'm with you on this, but it's not a hard POV for me to understand.)

 

[zarkon]

Funnily enough it was more of a relief when it came to Star Wars.

Zahn should pitch a SW book that ignores everything after The Last Command

 

[Enterprise is Great]

I just don't see how reading a book you enjoy is wasting time and/or money.

 

[DigificWriter]

Thrawn: I'm going to ask you a question that reframes the issue in a context that is more relevant to these boards:
Was the creation of Star Trek '09 dismissive to the old 'Prime Universe' Star Trek films and television series and all of the people who invested their time and money to follow said films and television series? Did the creation of Star Trek '09 suddenly render all of those films and television series totally value-less?

Because that's essentially the argument being made by a lot of Star Wars fans.

 

[Thrawn]

No, of course not, but if TPTB had decided that the new Trek films meant that all the novels in the prime continuity had to be cancelled, wouldn't you have been a little irritated?

 

[DigificWriter]

^ Not really, no.

 

[BritishSeaPower]

This happens in comics quite a bit. And after a while you get burnt out on "A good story is a good story." How many times must we see Spider-Man's origin retold? Why make each one slightly incompatible with the others? At what point are we not "updating" or "revising" an origin story and just doing a cash grab. Say, something like the recent Age of Ultron event. It took so long to complete the book that it didn't slot into the ongoing narrative. (I believe it came out some 2 years after it was intended to.) So the story that resulted was very distanced from the body of books being put out. Add to it that it was basically a time travel story/alternate timeline and it just became this weird book happening in its own little corner that barely touched anything happening in the vast majority of books. It could have been great, could have been terrible. Many people opted not to read it because "it didn't count." While it had some ramifications for the larger universe, it didn't advance anything, it didn't even seem like an exceptionally well crafted character piece. So it's largely been ignored. Now that's not to say the mentality is right, but after a while, investing $72 + to buy an event book that really doesn't add anything feels like a waste of money.

And the Star Wars EU is a slightly different beast. Until 1999, their continuity was fairly tight with each other. Characters hopped between video games, books, comics and young reader books. (Galaxy of Fear and the Jedi Prince books being two of the few exceptions to the continuity!) And it was marketed in that way to appeal to fans, both hardcore and casual. Almost every Star Wars novel has that handy-dandy chronology chart at the front now. And the prequels conflicted with some of that, sure, and some of the earliest books were incompatible. But they worked at it. Heck, some things in the prequels only exist because of the Expanded Universe. (Lucas was rather fond of it, too, and encouraged the expansion, to a degree. Apparently he bought the first collection of the Dark Empire comic miniseries for every LucasFilm in employee in 1993/4 because he loved it so much.) There was very much an idea that outside of a few exceptions, everything "counted" in the Star Wars EU. I remember there being a bit of an outcry when they tried to "decanonize" Coruscant Nights. A fourth book was written a few years later that then bridged the issues of CN with the wider universe. (Like the unfortunate case of "Indistinguishable..." If you're going to publish it only to basically say "Hey, that never happened" a year later, it begs the question of why publish it in the first place?)

Why do the latest Trek movies go out of their way to take place in another timeline, when it would be just as easy to not acknowledge it? They didn't want to write off the other material as "not counting." It's silly, but I think we all have these biases about what we want to read and what it should mean. I really can't stand the majority of "between the episodes" Trek books. I could frame that by saying "because they don't count" or I only "read the ones that do count." But, in all honesty, I just hate the "toys back in the box" mentality. I like forward momentum, I like the freedom to change that the Post-2001 Trek novels have embraced. As well, you could say I that I have no interest in the Star Trek online novel because it "doesn't count" toward the current slate of novels. But, really, I'm not playing the game. I'm not the audience for it. It doesn't have any relevance. May be a good story, but I have to draw a line somewhere. And if that line is "It really doesn't play into what I'd like to read and doesn't count toward the continuity the other books I'm read take place in, I can save $7."

And, as Thrawn says, it's not that hard to see why someone would be annoyed that books that many of these readers grew up reading and, have been reinforced through coy marketing, that are all interrelated, are suddenly deemed incompatible. Just last year, they released a giant book that detailed every piece of fiction put out in the EU and explained how they linked or didn't link together. It's a nice tome. But it reinforces the idea of there being a cohesive universe in which these things place. Marketing or not, people bought into it.

 

[Thrawn]

^ Not really, no.

I would be, precisely because I DO hold these novels to have value. I like them and I'd like to keep reading more of them. It wouldn't have made any of the earlier ones less good, but it would've been frustrating nonetheless.

I mean, basically, what's happening here is they're saying "the movies are so much more profitable than the books that the number of fans we piss off by cancelling the books is negligible". I think fans are mostly annoyed because they're being told THEY don't count, and most of the rest is rationalization.

Which I still find pretty easy to understand.

 

[Christopher]

I mean, regardless of your opinion of the joy of reading variously contradictory versions of the same thing (something which Trek readers have long known or learned to enjoy), it's TRUE that the SW books were declared one giant, consistent canon, however that worked in practice, and now they aren't anymore.

Is it really so hard to understand why that's annoying? (Again, I'm with you on this, but it's not a hard POV for me to understand.)

No, but that just underlies how dishonest it was of Lucasfilm's licensing department to call the books canon in the first place -- especially when they've contradicted them on several occasions already, like when the prequels came along and when The Clone Wars came along. Really, the surprising thing to me is that SW fans are reacting as if this is some kind of a new and sudden thing. That's just denial.

The point is that you should think for yourself. Enjoyment of fiction isn't about waiting for some higher authority to tell you what to think or feel. After all, they aren't paying you, so why should you feel compelled to follow their instructions? Use your own imagination and tastes and preferences. Decide for yourself what to count and what to like. I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for people who consider it an intolerable burden to exercise their own judgment rather than passively obey a higher authority.

 

[DigificWriter]

Thrawn: As far as I know, nothing has been said about novels in the current EU being discontinued, merely that the contents of the current EU are no longer considered Canon, so the issue is purely about whether or not the EU has any value without the label of Canon attached to it.

 

[Jedi Ben]

Thrawn's nailed the reasons for why it's an annoying mess.

People under-rate greatly how a smart a move Abrams' Trek made, it was perfectly suited to Trek but wouldn't work on anything else. New Trek is literally built on Old Trek and how many timelines does Old Trek have? Answer's loads so what's one more? Also, you can easily play the temporal physics card of the Old Trek timeline continuing as it's separate. Easy.

As to Doc Who, that's the masterclass in having your cake and eat it - timey-wimey you understand? I think that might be why in part it took ages to take off in the US - it was just too anarchic!

Superhero comics? That continuity is built with numerous plot escape hatches and everyone knows it. Which is arguably the main focal of this whole discussion: On what conditions does a company engage with fans and in what ways is it permitted to change those conditions? How should franchise products be marketed to fans?