should PARAMOUNT take over?

[Christopher]

Well, the first two "THIS BOOK 'MATTERS'!" Babylon 5 novels were also the only two reprinted by the second publisher to pick up the license. So they obviously thought that there was a bigger demand for those two than for the other seven novels.

Except that's not quite true. We were initially told that all of the Dell B5 novels would be treated as canonical. That was Straczynski's intent. But as it turned out, his duties running the TV show didn't allow him to oversee the novels as closely as he wanted, and so they were wildly uneven in terms of their compatibility with canon, to the point that JMS ended up treating only #7 and #9 as part of the canon (and he's said that #7 is only about 90% canonical). Since JMS directly oversaw the Del Rey B5 novels and even outlined them himself, I would assume the reason only Dell #7 & 9 were reprinted is because they were the only ones he wanted to be reprinted.

So all the Dell books were supposed to "matter" to the canon, but only two of them ended up doing so. It wasn't feasible for the books to become an integral part of the series canon until the series was no longer in production and JMS was free to oversee the books directly.

And it's easier in a case where a series has one singular creator, like JMS for B5 or Joss Whedon for Buffy. In those cases, if that creator oversees books or comics and calls them canonical, then that's what they are -- assuming, of course, that the creator doesn't decide otherwise when he gets the chance to do more screen material (as George Lucas did). In the case of Star Trek, where the creators of canonical material come and go and can have different opinions of what's canonical, it becomes an even more futile exercise. Jeri Taylor treated her VGR novels as canonical, but her successors did not. As Greg said, any declaration of canonicity is not going to hold up for a second if a future filmmaker decides he or she has a better idea.

Not to mention that canons contradict themselves all the time. Review just about any long-running TV or movie series and you'll find things in the early installments that are retconned or contradicted later on, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. The priority of storytellers is to make the story they're telling now as good as possible, and they usually won't throw out a good idea because it conflicts with something they did years ago.

So it makes zero real-world difference whether you stick the "canon" label on something or not. It won't make it any less likely to be contradicted.

 

[Thrawn]

So it makes zero real-world difference whether you stick the "canon" label on something or not. It won't make it any less likely to be contradicted.

I agree entirely with your whole post, but just to play devil's advocate here for a second...

Since it makes zero real-world difference, why not then go ahead and label the Star Trek books 'canon' anyway? Like in Star Wars, when George Lucas contradicted them at will, just have Star Trek be able to do the same thing. Have 'onscreen canon' and 'novel canon', and have the first supersede the second. Retroactively declare everything since, oh say, 2001 novel canon.

The people that care about this may indeed represent a small amount of the fanbase, but I certainly have personally seen a whole lot of people online say that the Star Wars books are more legitimate. And though we've all argued quite successfully that they aren't, sometimes perception is greater than reality. So what would it hurt?

 

[JD]

Not to mention that canons contradict themselves all the time. Review just about any long-running TV or movie series and you'll find things in the early installments that are retconned or contradicted later on, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. The priority of storytellers is to make the story they're telling now as good as possible, and they usually won't throw out a good idea because it conflicts with something they did years ago.

Yeah, like in M*A*S*H were Hawkeye went from having a mother, father and sister while in Korea, to having been an only child who was raised by his widowed father who never remarries. Then there was also Radar, who lost his verginity like 3 or 4 times.

 

[Greg Cox]

But if "canon" books can be contradicted at any time, what makes them "canon"?

Isn't that basically the situation now? We write the TREK books and Paramount is free to ignore them if they so choose.

Just like George Lucas or Joss Whedon or whomever . . . .

 

[Geoff]

Yeah, like in M*A*S*H were Hawkeye went from having a mother, father and sister while in Korea, to having been an only child who was raised by his widowed father who never remarries. Then there was also Radar, who lost his verginity like 3 or 4 times.

Or the fact that a three-year war was made to last eleven years.

 

[Thrawn]

But if "canon" books can be contradicted at any time, what makes them "canon"?

Isn't that basically the situation now? We write the TREK books and Paramount is free to ignore them if they so choose.

Just like George Lucas or Joss Whedon or whomever . . . .

I know, but other series do it and people seem to think that makes them more legitimate, so if labeling them 'canon' in the same way Star Wars did would make those people happy and change nothing else, why not do it?

 

[Therin of Andor]

I know, but other series do it and people seem to think that makes them more legitimate, so if labeling them 'canon' in the same way Star Wars did would make those people happy and change nothing else, why not do it?

So, like... lie to the readers?

 

[SeerSGB]

Star Wars Canon Explained

Star Wars: five canons. Bad.

Star Trek: one canon. Good.

So how come it's ST canon that gets all the flak?

The irony in that being that Lucas (the man) doesn't consider the EU canon, only Lucasfilm Marketing is worried about making the EU fit.

There are two worlds here, explained Lucas. “There’s my world, which is the movies, and there’s this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe – the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They don’t intrude on my world, which is a select period of time[but] they do intrude in between the movies. I don’t get too involved in the parallel universe.”"

- ]George Lucas, Flannelled One, July 2002 - as reported on the Cinescape site, from Cinescape Magazine
​

I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions.

Linkage

 

[Thrawn]

I know, but other series do it and people seem to think that makes them more legitimate, so if labeling them 'canon' in the same way Star Wars did would make those people happy and change nothing else, why not do it?

So, like... lie to the readers?

I think it was Christopher, but I could be wrong, who said that people don't know what they're talking about, that when they see "canon" they think "continuity". So advertising publicly that the novels are their own canon would be an easy way for people used to Star Wars to understand what that means. It would also allow the novels that fall outside the standard continuity, like Crucible, to be denoted as such.

 

[William Leisner]

Just for shits and grins... what makes you think this? What's your empirical evidence, or your ancedotal evidence, or even your semi-relevant bit of data, that could possibly convince you (let alone someone who actually makes a living thinking about these things) that saying "THIS BOOK 'MATTERS'!" will do jack shit in the marketplace?

Well, the first two "THIS BOOK 'MATTERS'!" Babylon 5 novels were also the only two reprinted by the second publisher to pick up the license. So they obviously thought that there was a bigger demand for those two than for the other seven novels.

"Obviously"? Really? Is it obvious that decision was made by the publishers, rather than by JMS because he felt the other seven weren't up to snuff?

 

[Christopher]

Since it makes zero real-world difference, why not then go ahead and label the Star Trek books 'canon' anyway? Like in Star Wars, when George Lucas contradicted them at will, just have Star Trek be able to do the same thing. Have 'onscreen canon' and 'novel canon', and have the first supersede the second. Retroactively declare everything since, oh say, 2001 novel canon.

You're asking why we should do something that serves no legitimate purpose? Doesn't that question answer itself? Why don't we just go ahead and label all the ST books as swordfish while we're at it?

Or perhaps a more analogous question would be, why don't we label them as DVDs? You're proposing that we apply a label that is not only meaningless in this context, but that would require directly contradicting what the word actually does mean. Writers frown on abusing language in that way.

The people that care about this may indeed represent a small amount of the fanbase, but I certainly have personally seen a whole lot of people online say that the Star Wars books are more legitimate. And though we've all argued quite successfully that they aren't, sometimes perception is greater than reality. So what would it hurt?

"A whole lot of people online" translates to an infinitesimal fraction of the buying public. If you actually counted up all those people, it would probably add up to only a few dozen at most.

So "what would it hurt?" isn't the question. "Why bother?" is the question. Sure, there's a faction online that makes a lot of noise about this subject as though it meant anything, but there's also a faction online that makes a whole lot of noise about how Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy should be making sweet love together. But Rowling didn't obey their wishes, and quite rightly. There's no sense in co-opting a whole line of literature to conform to such a narrow clique's priorities.

I know, but other series do it and people seem to think that makes them more legitimate, so if labeling them 'canon' in the same way Star Wars did would make those people happy and change nothing else, why not do it?

Well, in addition to all the other excellent reasons, there's this: why would we want the Star Trek novel line to imitate what the Star Wars novel line does? Isn't it better for us to assert our own identity rather than copying their conceits? Heck, we were here first. ST existed over a decade before SW, and ST prose fiction was a going concern long before SW novels became a regular thing. And our books profoundly outnumber theirs. So why the heck should we follow their lead?

And if Lucasfilm Marketing jumped off a bridge, would you follow them?

Then there's what SeerSGB posted. Lucas's view on the books is, quite explicitly, that they are not part of the film canon, or indeed any canon. So by labelling them as "canon" of any sort, Lucasfilm Marketing is directly contradicting Lucas's own wishes. They're the ones getting it wrong, not us.

 

[Thrawn]

Like I said, I was just playing devil's advocate. I'm convinced, and after that post I don't see how anyone wouldn't be

I just have one last question, honest curiosity. I know you've mentioned a lot how various comics have multiple continuities going on at the same time, but I think most of those separate continuities are labeled or identifiable (am I wrong about that?) So I'm wondering if there's a real problem with confusion for people just approaching the ST novel line, hearing that most of the novels are in a mutual continuity, but some of them aren't, and not having an easy way to determine how all that fits together. The answer "you decide what's in your personal continuity" isn't very helpful for someone just joining in. Do you think it'd be worthwhile to have some kind of resource that explained which novels were, to a reasonable degree, within mutual continuity and which weren't? It seems like something like that would be helpful to new people, and hell even I've been wanting something like that every once in a while.

Or is there one, and I'm just ignorant?

 

[Greg Cox]

Likewise, Joss Whedon has stated that he considers his own BUFFY comics canon--but only to a point. According to him, if an opportunity to make a new BUFFY tv show or movie came along, he'd trash the comics continuity in a heartbeat.

And he actually wrote some of those comics . . . .

 

[JD]

^Ahh, I've been wondering about that actually.

 

[ATimson]

It's good marketing sense to start with your potentially strongest sellers.

If you have no interest in ever growing the line, and are instead trying to just make a quick buck, sure. If you're trying to create a long-term source of income, though, that's not necessarily the way to go about things.

Which means that the scriptwriters will have to invest significant time and effort - which will grow expotentially between each sequel, as new books are published and plotted - to avoid quashing a novel, or future novel still in manuscript stage, that will only ever be read by a tiny minority of the viewing audience.

I'm not denying that. But that's not the point you were trying to make.

 

[Christopher]

I just have one last question, honest curiosity. I know you've mentioned a lot how various comics have multiple continuities going on at the same time, but I think most of those separate continuities are labeled or identifiable (am I wrong about that?) So I'm wondering if there's a real problem with confusion for people just approaching the ST novel line, hearing that most of the novels are in a mutual continuity, but some of them aren't, and not having an easy way to determine how all that fits together. The answer "you decide what's in your personal continuity" isn't very helpful for someone just joining in. Do you think it'd be worthwhile to have some kind of resource that explained which novels were, to a reasonable degree, within mutual continuity and which weren't? It seems like something like that would be helpful to new people, and hell even I've been wanting something like that every once in a while.

If I were in charge of the Trek novel line, I might do just that. But the folks who are in charge see it differently, and I can understand where they're coming from. I think they just don't want to intimidate people by making it a big issue. And I think they rightly want to put the story first and continuity second. Most of the books are compatible with each other, and even the ones that have subtle differences (like Crucible) are still close enough in broad strokes, as well as springing from a common source. The goal in Crucible wasn't to split off a separate universe, it was simply to do a trilogy that was based on TOS and accessible to TOS audiences, rather than being dependent on continuity from outside TOS. Sticking on a label saying "This is in a different continuity from the rest of the books!" would've been a needless distraction in something that was meant to be just about TOS. So it's really a question of priorities.

Besides, readers are pretty good at reconciling contradictions if they want to. There are plenty of older books that I consider totally incompatible with modern canon, but other fans find ways to gloss over the inconsistencies and count them anyway. There are probably readers who do the same with Crucible and the Shatnerverse. So why should we dictate to the fans how continuity is defined when they can sort out their own definitions that might not agree with ours?

Likewise, Joss Whedon has stated that he considers his own BUFFY comics canon--but only to a point. According to him, if an opportunity to make a new BUFFY tv show or movie came along, he'd trash the comics continuity in a heartbeat.

And he actually wrote some of those comics . . . .

Not surprising, considering how many times he trashed elements of his own shows' onscreen continuity. He made rewriting history a key plot point at least twice (Dawn; Connor), moved Sunnydale from the coast to the desert when it was convenient, inconsistently portrayed how the whole vampire/soul thing worked, and so on.

 

[KRAD]

Yeah, like in M*A*S*H were Hawkeye went from having a mother, father and sister while in Korea, to having been an only child who was raised by his widowed father who never remarries. Then there was also Radar, who lost his verginity like 3 or 4 times.

Or the fact that a three-year war was made to last eleven years.

Or the fact that Potter went from having a son to only having a daughter and no sons.

 

[ATimson]

Except that's not quite true. We were initially told that all of the Dell B5 novels would be treated as canonical. That was Straczynski's intent. But as it turned out, his duties running the TV show didn't allow him to oversee the novels as closely as he wanted, and so they were wildly uneven in terms of their compatibility with canon, to the point that JMS ended up treating only #7 and #9 as part of the canon (and he's said that #7 is only about 90% canonical).

Having come into B5 fandom shortly before Casting Shadows was published, I missed whatever JMS had said at the time; I never knew that that was his intent.

As for #7, he's also simply said that "The story of the Icarus as presented in this book is considered canon." (I'd forgotten about the 90% figure, in lieu of that quote--though I suppose that they both work if the 10% is part of the non-Icarus storyline.)

It wasn't feasible for the books to become an integral part of the series canon until the series was no longer in production and JMS was free to oversee the books directly.

Not quite; he would've still been working on Season 5 and Crusade when the first two, possibly more, novels were being written.

The priority of storytellers is to make the story they're telling now as good as possible, and they usually won't throw out a good idea because it conflicts with something they did years ago.

But the better storytellers find a way to make that idea work without disavowing their earlier work.

 

[ATimson]

"Obviously"? Really? Is it obvious that decision was made by the publishers, rather than by JMS because he felt the other seven weren't up to snuff?

It seemed so when I posted that, especially since JMS was the executive producer, and not the licensor we generally hear about publishers interacting with. But given how involved he was with the Del Rey books, that's certainly a possibility that I hadn't considered.

 

[Thrawn]

If I were in charge of the Trek novel line, I might do just that. But the folks who are in charge see it differently, and I can understand where they're coming from. I think they just don't want to intimidate people by making it a big issue. And I think they rightly want to put the story first and continuity second. Most of the books are compatible with each other, and even the ones that have subtle differences (like Crucible) are still close enough in broad strokes, as well as springing from a common source. The goal in Crucible wasn't to split off a separate universe, it was simply to do a trilogy that was based on TOS and accessible to TOS audiences, rather than being dependent on continuity from outside TOS. Sticking on a label saying "This is in a different continuity from the rest of the books!" would've been a needless distraction in something that was meant to be just about TOS. So it's really a question of priorities.

Besides, readers are pretty good at reconciling contradictions if they want to. There are plenty of older books that I consider totally incompatible with modern canon, but other fans find ways to gloss over the inconsistencies and count them anyway. There are probably readers who do the same with Crucible and the Shatnerverse. So why should we dictate to the fans how continuity is defined when they can sort out their own definitions that might not agree with ours?

That's a fair point, but I do think they run the risk of being more confusing than flexible sometimes. And I don't mean anything on the cover of a book, or anything like that, but just a website that's advertised inside each of the books that would provide information like that. There's a lot of that information floating around, on fansites and wikis and such, but sometimes it seems like I have to do a fair amount of independent research to figure out questions like this. And that's probably what some people mean when they complain that the ST novels aren't canon; it's a definitions problem, to be sure, but there is a reasonably confusing aspect to Trek lit these days.

Not surprising, considering how many times he trashed elements of his own shows' onscreen continuity. He made rewriting history a key plot point at least twice (Dawn; Connor), moved Sunnydale from the coast to the desert when it was convenient, inconsistently portrayed how the whole vampire/soul thing worked, and so on.

In all fairness, the Dawn thing was explained in-universe, there's a large amount of SoCal within effective walking distance of both the shore and the desert, and the soul thing wasn't so much inconsistently portrayed as it just was ignored by the main characters in making their moral judgments. And I don't remember how history was rewritten around Connor... But I do see your point. If nothing else, Buffy had a *ton* of retcons.