I’m about a third into The Final Nexus (loving it!), and something’s winding me up a bit: Clearly the Starfleet admiral in the story is Admiral Nogura (as mentioned in TMP, and featured in The Lost Years and other novels). Then WTF did someone rename him “Noguchi”? What harm could possibly come from it being Nogura? This reeks of one of those crazy nonsensical Roddenberry/Arnold edits.
Actually Admiral Kimitake Noguchi debuted in Vonda McIntyre's
Enterprise: The First Adventure in 1986 and is also referenced in
Bloodthirst by J. M. Dillard as well as
The Final Nexus (I thought there were others too, but those are the only three I can find on Google Book Search -- though there's a 24th-century Admiral Noguchi in DS9:
Objective: Bajor). Since it's a character introduced in one novel being referenced in other novels, I doubt Arnold had a hand in it, since that's exactly the sort of thing he was opposed to. E:TFA came out in a time when continuity among the books was still fairly strong, before the Arnold crackdown started in earnest. Also, I don't see why Arnold would've objected to the use of a canonical character.
I always figured McIntyre either misremembered Nogura's name or created a separate character with a coincidentally similar name. Or maybe it was meant to be Nogura but changed for some editorial reason.
My guess is that it might have had something to do with the storyline in Diane Carey's
Dreadnought!/Battlestations!. Those books depicted a Starfleet Command that was rife with corruption at high levels, and had no mention of an Admiral Nogura. Later, 1989's
The Lost Years asserted that Nogura had come out of retirement just before the end of Kirk's 5-year mission in order to clean up Starfleet after the scandal in Carey's books. Now, that was three years after Admiral Noguchi made his debut, but Carey's books came out before it, so maybe the editor at the time already had the idea in mind that Nogura couldn't have been in charge at the time of E:TFA. That's something of a stretch, but I think it's possible. In any case, I doubt Richard Arnold was behind it.
