Just thinking, with reading The Wounded Sky, which is number 13 in the TOS numbered series, what everyone's favorite book 13 is from the numbered series.
Very tricky! I really loved "The Wounded Sky", but Dr Selar adopting a blind Andorian girl, Thala, was so sweet. Sadly, but understandably, a plot thread ignored by Peter David when Selar became part of "New Frontier".
Thala in AC Crispin's "The Eyes of the Beholders" by Ian McLean, on Flickr
Thala in AC Crispin's "The Eyes of the Beholders" by Ian McLean, on Flickr
I wonder sometimes if John Ordover told PAD that he needed to use a few familiar TNG characters in New Frontier to draw an audience and PAD just said, okay, sure, without having ever seen Selar, Shelby, Jellico, or Lefler in an episode. He didn't get any of them right.
What got me was his portrayal of young K'Ehleyr in his young-adult Starfleet Academy Worf trilogy. Onscreen, K'Ehleyr was basically a prototype of B'Elanna Torres, a human-Klingon hybrid who hated her Klingon side and rejected and denigrated everything about Klingon culture. But the K'Ehleyr in the SA books was the exact opposite of that, a generic Klingon warrior character who IIRC had a low opinion of humans.
I got the impression that PAD was enamoured by those actors, not necessarily their characters. I thought I remembered the he got to choose to use them.
That... doesn't make a lot of sense. He wasn't casting a movie, he was writing novels. You don't write a TOS novel about a Captain Kirk who looks like William Shatner but has nothing in common with how Shatner played Kirk.
The Wounded Sky is one of the better books period.
If you really wanted to be thorough you should have also included, Excalibur: Restoration (New Frontier #11, but it's actually the 13th book since we also had the Double Helix and Captains' Tables books), No Surrender (SCEB #13), Worlds of DS9: Volume One (the 13th DS9 Relaunch book), The Light Fantastic (the 13th TNG Relaunch book), and A Pocket Full of Lies (the 13th VOY Relaunch book).
I often got the feeling that PAD was very visual in his writing, probably from his work in comics. I recall him saying how much he enjoyed the work of Suzie Plakson, Elizabeth Dennehy and Ashley Judd, and was very pleased that their characters were available for his use. He always put a PAD twist on things, such as making Arex a Triexian (three, get it?) rather than an Edoan/Edosian.
I always found that very silly, though I have to admit it's no worse than calling cat aliens Caitians.
The worst case of that kind of naming was Kathleen Sky's novel Death's Angel.
Agree!
I assume that PAD went back to Bjo Trimble's "Star Trek Concordance". She has unaired information about Caitians that came from the TAS Writers' Guide (a brief update of the TOS Guides), but nothing at all on Arex's species. It seems that there was a M'Ress-centred TAS script that went unused? The TAS Guide even has a sketched map of the Lynx constellation. There is one production number missing in the sequence of TAS episodes, which is probably why the last episode was sometimes incorrectly given as Episode 23. I have never seen any descriptions of the storyline of that unfilmed episode.
Both aliens were developed in the "Star Trek Logs" adaptations by Alan Dean Foster, and he seemed to use (or maybe wrote?) the brief biographies of Arex and M'Ress as sold by Lincoln Enterprises. But PAD seemingly did not access them.
Agree. Even as a brand new Trek fan at the time, those aliens that seem-inspired-by-and-named for Earth animals was annoying.
Referring to Arex as a Triexian was not because Peter made that choice, there were issues with whether or not they had the right to use "Edoan." There are a lot of weird rights issues with stuff from the animated series, which I think is more settled now, but wasn't 25 years ago.
Oh, I see. I never knew that, thanks.
Except, in the words of Hermes Conrad, "That just raises further questions!" One, the first canonical use of the variant "Edosian" was in DS9 in 1996, the year before New Frontier began. So why couldn't NF just use that instead of "Edoan?" And two, why was "Caitian" cleared for use if "Edoan" wasn't?
Which I assumed at the time might have been to avoid confusion with TNG's Edo. I recall a lot of fan commentary back in the day calling the Edo "Edoans".
Similarly, those Power Records comic/audio productions had to redraw their M'Ress the Caitian as more humanoid, but could keep the species name, but their Arex had to be redrawn and renamed as human Mr Connors, but he was still allowed to have an Edoan musical instrument in his cabin.
Edoan Elisiar instrument by Ian McLean, on Flickr
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