Unless Margaret was trying to walk back her decision to kill Janeway, that's the "wiggle room" I alluded to above -- Lady Q taking Janeway into heaven.
Random Thought: Was Janeway Killed Because She was So Polarizing?
- Thread starter Frontier
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^When it comes to Margaret's extemporaneous public statements, it's best to focus more on the general sense and not try to read too much into specific words. Remember when she said something that seemed to imply that in Destiny, the Borg would destroy all but thirteen Starfleet vessels? Sometimes when she's talking off the cuff, her word choices can be a little... inexact. So just because she said "Janeway's apparent death" on one occasion doesn't mean anythng in particular.
I recall that being more of an issue with the quality of the books rather than the subject matter itself.
I'd also like to again point out that there are just as many that did read Voyager Books, I bought and read all the Christy Golden relaunch books, I even bought and read all of Peter David's New Frontier books and finally the hard back version of "Death in Winter." I did this up to "Before Dishonor," and I will not purchase another Trek book until Janeway is brought back, period.
Say what you all might, in any business and I do mean any, when times get bad, it's the people, be they management or worker, that are not producing that go out the door.
All the glossing over, all the attempts to put a better face on the situation will not cover up the basic fact, Trek books are not producing the revenue they once did.
Brit
You have to read a book to judge its quality. If you didn't like a 1987 Star Trek novel by Wilfrid P. Abernathy, that's no basis for judging last month's Trek novel by Philomena Wilberforce. Some of the posts in that go-round were no more informed than that.
Would love to see an attempt to tie that to the death of Janeway, and it being unpopular! Seems the quality of books have been very high lately, though, so it's not crappy books, and it certainly hasn't been boring storylines.
There WAS that big 'recession' thing, with people losing jobs, income, etc, might have played into it.
No one is going to convince you, especially when you took that stand without even "finishing" the part of the series that killed off Janeway (Full Circle, for example, would have been a good place to read up until, if you were going to quit over Janeway).
Personally, I'm finding the current Voyager offerings interesting, and will continue to buy them. To each his own, I guess.
i bought FC to spite the 'i wuv Janeway and won't buy books til she's back' crowd and was glad i did because i loved it. i've since bought Unworthy and will read it one i finish re-reading Lost Souls...
I read Unworthy recently and liked it a lot. Despite the fact that I thought the story was tied up in a very goody-goody fashion,which I suspect a lot of Voyager fans, militant or not, would like. I am definitely excited to see what the next adventures of the Voyager fleet are going to be, but I'm chagrined to see that there isn't going to be one for sometime.
Of course Trek books aren't producing the revenue they once did. Maybe you haven't noticed the massive recession for the last year or so? No, clearly it's because they killed Janeway.
People are still crying over this. Exactly what role would Janeway occupy in the Voyager fleet these days? Chakotay has earned his right to the center seat and Eden is performing quite nicely as fleet commander. I shudder to think what the Bun of Steel would do if Lady Q brought her back.
In all fairness to Brit, that's completely beside the point. She hasn't read these books and isn't going to. It doesn't matter that Janeway has no place in the current story; in fact, that's exactly the reason the current story annoys her. And it's completely her right to disagree so strongly with the editorial decision to kill her favorite character that she stops buying the books. I think it's rather pointless for any of us to try to argue that, at this point; at best, it's sort of patronizing.
That said, she still hasn't produced any evidence other than her own personal story that sales are noticeably hurt on the aggregate by Janeway's death, and absent any evidence one way or the other, I think that argument is a completely inane one to have. I mean, I love the new developments, and where I hadn't previously been reading Voyager, I now am. So that cancels out Brit right there, rendering both of us rather silly in trying to push the point.
But it does lead to a larger fact, which is that it's absolutely impossible to please all the various fanbases. "If you don't mind Janeway being gone, Voyager is the best it's ever been" doesn't strike me as all that different from "if you don't mind the Borg featuring in their fourth major consecutive appearance, Destiny is stunning". There's all kinds of things about modern TrekLit that will be dealbreakers for someone. But that was true 10 years ago, too, when TrekLit was a completely different place.
It just seems like there are a few Janeway fans who seem to think that this being their dealbreaker somehow makes it more significant. And it's pretty tiresome.
Thrawn--the difference between modern Treklit and the old kind, back in the days of the numbered novel, was that if you didn't like one author's continuity, you could jump into another one entirely. ESPECIALLY with the TOS novels this was true. These days, if the continuity veers a direction you don't like, the extreme interconnectedness means it's hard to find pieces that aren't touched by the things that you didn't like. Brit may well have a point: perhaps sales ARE dropping because of this decision to connect EVERYTHING. Where before if, say, I didn't like the Marshak/Culbreath take on Trek, I could get other books that were TOTALLY unrelated to theirs (say, Diane Duane's), and be perfectly happy. These days, though, if M/C were to have written something, every other subsequent book would be impacted, so once the series takes a bad turn, ALL books are affected. And it's more likely that people will simply give up in disgust instead of trying another.
I used to think, many years ago, when the DS9-R was first starting, that the interconnected continuity was great. Now--I am really feeling like it was a mistake...not just as a matter of taste, but one that may be costing Pocket Books on the business side of things, too.
I used to think, many years ago, when the DS9-R was first starting, that the interconnected continuity was great. Now--I am really feeling like it was a mistake...not just as a matter of taste, but one that may be costing Pocket Books on the business side of things, too.
Even Playboy is feeling the recession crunch. Hence the Marge Simpson gimmick...
Of course Trek books aren't producing the revenue they once did. Maybe you haven't noticed the massive recession for the last year or so? No, clearly it's because they killed Janeway.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/TV/10/12/marge.simpson.playboy/index.html
I all but stopped buying Trek books in the late '80s and early 90s because of the lack of continuity, and will stop again without hesitation if they get rid of it now, so it's obviously a double-edged sword thingee.
I ran a club that grew to 1000 people in the 80s and early 90s, and very few members seemed to read the novels (and comics) regularly. However, some stated it was the lack of self-reference to each other that stopped them reading more novels.
But just as many stated it was cost, lack of room, that they "didn't count" (ie. pre the adopting of the term "canon"), or that they preferred fanfic. Or hard SF.
Others resisted because they saw ST as a visual medium, and some ST fans simply don't read for pleasure.
Those who say it's the interconnectivity that makes them shy away probably haven't tried any recent novels. Most are quite self-contained. If they didn't know that some characters had other lives and adventures outside of that one novel, they probably wouldn't be able to guess.
"Everything" is NOT connected. We've just had a crossover mini-series, sure - intended to (partly) celebrate the new movie's arrival, IIRC - but there have been plenty of books in recent years that are totally standalone.
Except that we, as fans, don't have access to Pocket's sales info, so we have no way of knowing ("feeling" doesn't count) how the books are selling. The only data I have is from Locus's bestseller lists, and after years of Trek books being overshadowed by Star Wars and Halo novels, Trek books are showing up regularly in the top-selling media tie-ins again. Now, if book sales are down across the board, that may not mean all that much -- but then, if that's the case, the increased continuity between books wouldn't be the reason why everything was selling less.
Maybe we should have a thread here for Locus's bestseller lists, I think many of the people here don't even know such a list exist, let alone how to find those data. It would be interesting to see how Trek is doing comparing with other tie-in books.
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