I seem to remember that in some dialog recently--I forget where now...
Star Trek Federation: The First 150 Years
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
I seem to remember that in some dialog recently--I forget where now...
This seems like a lot of hair-splitting. My point is, that CBS was as involved as Becker/Mayer was in making this book. The expression "do the book" implied to me a creative involvement, not just a production involvement - CBS didn't just sign over the rights and say do whatever you want. Christopher is right as well that CBS is involved with all their products that they've licensed. So when Therin says CBS didn't "Do the book" that is maybe technically accurate from a production point of view but in fact not the reality of the situation. It was the head of licensing for CBS consumer products that said he considered my book canon, but my feeling is, canon is what is filmed, and when we write books or other stories while we're trying to make our work fit into canon, we have to be prepared for months of our sweat to be supplanted by one line of dialogue written by Kurtzman and Orci.
^The thing that's odd to me about the head of licensing saying he considered your book canonical, David, is that I haven't been instructed to keep my Rise of the Federation novels consistent with it. Instead I'm continuing the version of post-ENT continuity that was established in the preceding four novels in the series and that interprets a number of things differently than you did. As a rule, we're not allowed to contradict canon, and if something in the book continuity is overwritten by later canon, then later books are expected to conform to the new information. (E.g. The Lost Era: The Sundered posited a scorpionlike appearance for the Tholians, but books that came out after "In a Mirror, Darkly" used the Tholian appearance seen there.) So if the licensing folks thought your book was canonical, they would presumably have asked me to be consistent with it, but they haven't.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that. There's a long history of Trek tie-ins offering alternative versions of the same event, like the Pocket and DC versions of Kirk's first mission on the Enterprise that came out within a year of each other -- and the five other incompatible versions of same that have come out from Pocket, DC, and IDW in the years since.)
(Not that there's anything wrong with that. There's a long history of Trek tie-ins offering alternative versions of the same event, like the Pocket and DC versions of Kirk's first mission on the Enterprise that came out within a year of each other -- and the five other incompatible versions of same that have come out from Pocket, DC, and IDW in the years since.)
I was simply quoting Enterpriserules. Not my choice of words.
That applies to everything Trek that they license.
I've got a bad feeling about this........
"Annihilation, Jim. Total, complete, absolute annihilation."
"Of everything that exists, everywhere."
"Of everything that exists, everywhere."
Last year for my birthday my mom gave me a card with that quote from Spock referring to the amount of candles I had.
Real live authors arguing in a fan forum about each other's work. Now I've seen everything.
I thought we were discussing, not arguing.
I didn't say you were arguing with each other. It looked more like two authors arguing in defense of their own/each other's works against those who would nitpick.
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I guess he said it more from a sales point of view for the book itself ("This is canon! Buy it!") rather than a point of view that lets make all the licensed products fall in line with it - and really, at the end of the day, when you get down to the nitty gritty details of Star Trek, the individual fan decides what canon is, since there's NO WAY to logically resolve the inconsistencies in even the filmed adventures (to wit, Kirk and spock have VERY CLEARLY never even heard of the idea of an invisible ship in "Balance of Terror," yet Archer encounters one on his first day on the job - and that's just one example). I did my best to write my book so that it didn't contradict anything that would bug me as a fan, but I made decisions (as I'm sure you did in your work, which I will now read) that people might have an argument with since it isn't the decision they would make.
I hope you like my version. I haven't had the opportunity to get my hands on yours yet -- it's kinda pricey -- but I'm curious to see how you've approached it.
And since you actually worked on the show, it's fair to say that your book is closer to being canonical than mine... although canon isn't horseshoes or hand grenades, so closeness doesn't really count. Maybe that's what the sales people meant -- that it's the work of someone who contributed to the canon.
Oh, yeah, that. I always thought that was the least imaginative take on Tholian bodies I'd ever seen, and was kind of silly-looking. Although the Worlds of the Federation version where they're just floating rhomboidal crystals with, I guess, telekinetic powers was pretty hard to swallow.
The novel The Lost Years: Recovery had an interesting take: that the Tholians were actually more fleshy and organic and that the "face" we saw in the episode was just a helmet.
They're realeasing a cheaper version in the fall without the fancy stand.
^ But unfortunately not in a Kindle version. 
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