Interesting, Star Trek: Crucible - Provenance of Shadows, has him dying in 2366.
The Fates of Kirk and Crew in the Main Novelverse
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Consistency doesn't have to mean soulless homogeneity, and artificial intelligence could be like Data, the Doctor, or Vic Fontaine rather than the Borg (who are, of course, cyborgs rather than AIs). Also, it would be optional.
Hmm... of old age? Memory Beta references that book on McCoy's page but doesn't mention his death.
I can assure you not a single member of Kirk's old crew made it past 2387 in the novelverse
Well, they did, until they didn't...I can assure you not a single member of Kirk's old crew made it past 2387 in the novelverse
It does if pre-existing works of fiction are rewritten to force them to be consistent with each other, rather than allowed to have their own distinct imaginations and voices. It sure as hell does if so-called "AI" is used to plagiaristically mash up copyrighted works and spit out an amalgam of them.
Of course, if it's actual strong artificial intelligence. But the post I responded to was referring to the faddish predictive-text and image-averaging programs that are incorrectly touted as "AI," and to their specific practice of amalgamating pre-existing works into a statistically averaged collage.
It's a metaphor, mate.
The originals would still exist, though, and people could choose to have their purchased ebooks scanned and have their personal copies lightly edited for consistency if desired, while people who prefer no alterations could continue to read the originals. This could range from significant rewrites to as little as changing a few dates.
I know of one example of this being done manually: the official continuity update for the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach, which made minor changes such as having a one-armed soldier salute with his remaining arm instead of his missing one and changing birthdates to align with later stories.
I was thinking of something that would preserve the bulk of the story while identifying and either automatically harmonizing minor inconsistencies or flagging them for human review. The publisher might choose to use human input to create a unified reading experience across a large number of older novels, like the aforementioned Fall of Reach continuity update on a much larger scale.
Or, readers could choose to make their own personal continuity edits based on AI suggestions. Videogames are often continuously tweaked, and movies and shows are often altered during remasters (various minor errors were removed during the Next Generation remaster, for instance, and Kirk's spacewalk in the extended cut of The Motion Picture was completed for the recent 4K release). The novels could be similarly revised, and AI could assist in the process.
Unintelligently amalgamating various texts isn't what I had in mind, and I agree that that would be undesirable.
If the original author chooses to do that, fine. If someone dumps it all into an AI program and tells it to churn out a uniform continuity by mindless algorithms, that is garbage and theft and a betrayal of every author whose work is abused that way. Consent makes all the difference.
This thinking is the end result of modern fandom's unhealthy obsession with continuity as the single overarching priority in fiction. The purpose of telling stories is not to "fit together" or "get it right." It's to exercise the imagination, to explore possibilities. Continuity between stories is an option that authors can choose to employ or not by their own free choice. If you start to think of continuity as something that needs to be mandated or imposed uniformly, then you have completely lost your way.
It couldn't, not in any remotely worthwhile way, and it shouldn't. Only the authors and editors should have the right to modify their work. Anything imposed on it without their consent is an assault.
The Fall of Reach (a fan favorite and one of my own favorite novels, incidentally; I still have my childhood paperback in which my mother pencilled my name) is a licensed novel in the Halo franchise. The decision to create the revised editions was made by the company who contracted Eric Nylund to write it a decade before. They didn't make any thematic changes, just technical ones, but legally, they could have issued a far more substantial revision, as the Stratemeyer Syndicate did with some of the Hardy Boys novels.
From 1959 to 1973, Edward Stratemeyer's daughter Harriet Adams oversaw a modernization of the first 38 books, removing references to "roadsters" and "automats" and other terms considered dated, excising some racial stereotypes, "streamlining" the language (sometimes at the cost of "humor, charm, or believability"), increasing regard for police, making Aunt Gertrude less cantankerous, and cutting the length from 225 to 180 pages. There were four levels of revision ranging from minor edits to the complete replacement of the entire story except for the title:
1) Same story, same text: most of the original text remains intact, with pieces cut or slightly altered here and there (example: The Phantom Freighter).
2) Same story, new text: the basic framework of the plot is the same, but the text has been completely (or almost completely) rewritten (example: The Tower Treasure).
3) New story, old ideas: the book has been completely rewritten, and the plot is not the same, but some elements are retained, such as names, capers, episodes, or locations. (Examples: The Twisted Claw retains many elements, such as the Parrot freighters, the pirate empire, and the Caribbean island. The Sinister Signpost retains the racehorse named Topnotch and Aunt Gertrude's inheritance of a stable of racehorses, but their relevance to the story is completely changed.)
4) Completely new story: the book has been completely rewritten and shares no elements with its predecessor (example: The Flickering Torch Mystery).
The revised editions contain no mention of the originals, and very few people who have read the "original" Hardy Boys novels in the past half century are aware of the true originals' existence, which I think is unfortunate; I'd prefer to see revisions always noted.
An official revision can be garbage, like George Lucas' bad CGI additions to his original trilogy, and an unofficial revision can be excellent, like The Phantom Edit, which was praised by Kevin Smith, Salon, The Chicago Tribune, and many others as a masterful improvement upon the original. Or, the Extended Mall Hours cut of Dawn of the Dead which combines all unique footage from the three official cuts to create the longest possible experience; this cut became so legendary that it was eventually recreated as an officially licensed cut (but without director George A. Romero's permission since he could not be contacted from beyond the grave). That these were made without the original filmmakers' consent is immaterial to the fact that they are transformative works which many prefer over their originals.
This goes back to Shakespeare's unlicensed reworking of Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet into Romeo and Juliet and long, long before.
I certainly don't consider it the "single overarching priority," but there's a world of difference between substantial alternate continuities such as the Rihannsuverse and stories which can fit together perfectly except for a few extremely minor discrepancies in dating which can be harmonized without changing the narrative at all (or, again, correcting objective internal inconsistencies within a single text).
It's really both. Some amount of continuity is mandated in licensed fiction, and no series can sustain itself without some continuity...
In the case of licensed works, this right often belongs to the license holder, and in the case of public domain works (where all works eventually end up), this right belongs to everyone. Furthermore, some unofficial revisions of works still in copyright are protected under fair use as transformative works. There's also no law against crossing out passages one doesn't like, writing in the margins, or using whiteout to insert new lines in a copy of a book one owns, nor deleting and adding bits in an ebook for personal consumption.
Ultimately, we'll reach a point at which any novel can be instantly adapted into a holonovel à la "Qpid."
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But there are still human beings making those choices, and just as importantly, getting paid for their work. It's grotesque to talk about AI as remotely equivalent to that. AI is something that executives want to use because they imagine it will let them get out of paying human beings.
But if the differences are that minor, then they don't need to be changed. Hell, anyone with a functioning imagination can choose in their own minds to paper over the discrepancies. Wanting a machine to do it for you is pathetically lazy.
Licensed tie-ins are mandated to be consistent with the series they tie into. They are not obligated to be consistent with each other. That's where individual interpretation comes in.
When I was growing up reading Trek lit in the '70s and '80s, the books offered a wide range of different continuities and interpretations of the Trek universe, some of them so idiosyncratic that they were hard to reconcile even with screen canon. But that was the fun of it! There was so much freedom for authors to be creative, to make the universe their own. I feel sorry for people today who are obsessed with continuity and consistency and don't realize how liberating it can be to reinvent a work of fiction in different ways. Look at all the different versions of Batman or Sherlock Holmes or Godzilla out there. Other franchises get it, so I don't understand why fans of Star Trek, a franchise that explicitly celebrates diversity in combination, are so hostile to the idea of alternative continuities.
Which does mean the result will be any good. It takes artistic skill and judgment to adapt a story effectively. Only people who don't understand creativity believe it could be automated.
Even in Trek, it's been established that holonovels are usually created by living author/programmers, such as Dr. Bashir's friend Felix.
Yes, for now, AI is primitive, which is why I suggested using a simple AI agent as a tool to help humans find minor descrepancies and possibly suggest fixes but leave the final decision to the human editors.
However, AI will continue to grow in sophistication and will eventually meet and even exceed humanity. ChatGPT (which is much better than Google Translate, which is now very good) can already produce virtually flawless translations even of medical texts. I know an experienced multilingual former translator who recently told me that ChatGPT can now match professional translations, and that he's used it to translate ebooks he's bought to read which don't have human translations available. Since I hadn't tried ChatGPT myself as I'd assumed it wouldn't be any better than Google Translate, I didn't believe this was possible until he used it to translate a medical paper from German to English. It was flawless, and I was stunned.
Yes, but it's also being used to create art like this. Like any tool, its application is up to the wielder.
One could say the same about minor errors discovered before publication; why edit them out for the "pathetically lazy?" Let them use their minds to paper over the discrepancies. Ha!
The Fall of Reach instantly became one of my favorite novels when I read it in its original release, and if it had never been revised, that would have been fine, but the minor revisions which were made for the reissue made it just a bit more polished and consistent both with itself and later canon without taking anything away.
In many franchises, continuity between licensed novels is certainly required and planned to various extents (although discrepancies do slip through and retcons occur). Halo and Star Wars do it, and, as you know, what became known as the First Splinter continuity did, as well, with a couple decades of novels intentionally envisioned as being consistent not just with the screen but also with each other, including character and event crossovers with proper timing. Many people prefer a sprawling continuity, and I'm one of them...
...but I also like this aspect, as well! I'd just prefer to see a clear delineation between parallel universes. I love that distinct parallel universes exist.
Conversely, smoothing out minor inconsistencies or mistakes within a single text discovered after publication, or between texts which clearly aren't set in distinctively different continuities, while not strictly necessary, is enjoyable for some as a sort of "Great Game" for Trekkers.
Conversely, Data and other artificial lifeforms are depicted as becoming every bit as genuinely emotional and creative as biological beings. In the distant future, AGI will inevitably exceed humanity in every way. It will also be able to analyze our habits and read our minds so quickly that it will know and understand exactly what we want before we even know we want it. Nothing in the laws of physics prevents the eventual development of a constructed consciousness capable of producing literature as fine as Shakespeare or music as fine as Mozart.
It's not about how sophisticated it is, it's about the very premise being invalid. Tie-ins do not need to be rewritten to fit together, because imagining different possibilities is a feature of non-canonical literature, not a bug. And AI, no matter how advanced, is intended as a device to shut artists out of the process of creating art and deprive them of income. If you want to make the kind of decisions you're suggesting, HIRE A HUMAN BEING TO DO THEM AND PAY THAT HUMAN BEING A DECENT WAGE. This is NOT, NOT, NOT a technical issue.
And that's my last word on the subject. I apologize for my part in letting the thread get dragged so far off-topic.
There are four completely incompatible versions of the Tzenkethi species in various Star Trek tie-ins. If an AI was tasked with creating one consistent Star Trek universe, it would have to pick one version and dismiss the others. This would result in the stories being rewritten so much they would be completely unrecognizable. For example, if the Novelverse Tzenkethi were chosen, the IDW comics featuring the Tzenkethi just wouldn't work. The AI would have to essentially create entirely new comics with the Novelverse Tzenkethi to take their place.
IIRC, Nichelle, George and Walter were in a panel at a LA Trek convention with DC Fontana and David Gerrold, when the first names were being discussed. The “Walter Sulu” in-joke had started when people at the convention kept calling George and Walter by the wrong names (it was still happening during the filming of TMP; I am sure Walter Koenig’s “Chekov’s Enterprise” references him being called George).
“Uhuru” was actually the title of the hardcover book that Nichelle was reading while she was waiting to audition for a role in Trek, for which she was given Spock scenes to read. Roddenberry used it as inspiration.
The panel (and several zine writers in the audience) that I mentioned above brainstormed “Penda” for Uhura, and it met with Nichelle’s approval, and was taken up by numerous zines, not “Upenda” as some later fanfic (and the “USS Enterprise Officers Manual”) rendered it.
“Walter” Sulu came from the same panel (also getting George’s approval) and I think DC retold the story of her randomly hitting typewriter keys to create the family name for Spock (the one Amanda says she had to learn to pronounce properly). It, too, went into the “Officers Manual”. This panel, as reported in an article in one of “The Best of Trek” paperback books, was probably also the same panel where David Gerrold mooted “Tiberius” as Kirk’s middle name for the first time, and he and DC Fontana were able to slip it into a TAS episode script.
And yes, “Nyota” was coined for “Star Trek II Biographies”, again with Nichelle’s approval. The author was a friend of Bjo Trimble, who organized phone calls for Bill Rotsler with Nichelle and GR.
The final line was "And then he closed his eyes for the last time."
I didn't get the feeling he was sick, just age finally caught up to him.
I'd have the AI maintain distinct parallel universes and harmonize only works which contained minor discrepancies which don't affect the plot.
I'm glad the other story depicts him still active at 154, as dying of old age at the young age of 139 isn't realistic for the late 24th century. That's only seventeen years longer than Jeanne Calment lived with 20th century medicine.
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Why can't they be a multi-species organisation, similar to the Xindi? Or the Gnalish?
The IDW Tzenkethi alone are a multi-species organization. There are Tzenkethi that look like Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops. The problem with expanding that to include the Novelverse Tzenkethi, the Star Trek Online Tzenkethi and the Infinite Bureaucracy Tzenkethi is that they have entirely different cultures, naming conventions and systems of government, while all claiming to be the Tzenkethi Coalition. The IDW Tzenkethi are a theocracy that worships a god named Tzenketh that they believe lives at the centre of their planet. The Novelverse Tzenkethi are some sort of caste-based meritocracy. The STO Tzenkethi might be an oligarchy, given that they have a nobility. And they've never been seen together, unlike the Xindi.
Perhaps in the same way that there are two Koreas and two Chinas?
Could they be divergent populations hostile to each other, like the Vulcans and Romulans?
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