Then make it every other year. A nice trade off.
These are the voyages of... what? Really? Who??? Who Cares????
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Then make it every other year. A nice trade off.
You can have arcs that matter now that may be destroyed, or standalones that don't matter but are "safe" by dint of their not doing anything interesting.
I know which I'd rather read.
Honestly, you're always going to run that risk anytime you do tie-ins based on a property that is still a going concern. It comes with the territory.
And even if a new movie or TV episode does render some older books apocryphal (as has been known to happen), what does it matter if you already read and enjoyed the books at some point? The books haven't really been "wiped out" because they were never really "canon" to begin with. All that really matters, IMHO, is whether you had an enjoyable experience reading it.
That's just how tie-in books work. They're not graven in stone. A good story is a good story whether it "matters" or not.
(And the same applies to comic books.)
And even if a new movie or TV episode does render some older books apocryphal (as has been known to happen), what does it matter if you already read and enjoyed the books at some point? The books haven't really been "wiped out" because they were never really "canon" to begin with. All that really matters, IMHO, is whether you had an enjoyable experience reading it.
That's just how tie-in books work. They're not graven in stone. A good story is a good story whether it "matters" or not.
(And the same applies to comic books.)
It doesn't wipe it out, but it does preclude seeing further development in unfinished plotlines. It's like having a really great TV series cancelled without a finale due to outside events completely out of the control of and unrelated to the people creating the work or the quality of said work.
Man I miss Journeyman.
It's unlikely but not impossible to see a resolution. It happened with Rihannsu, after all.
Heck, it's how all science fiction works. Every SF story is eventually going to be contradicted by new scientific progress or simply by the calendar catching up to it. And that includes Star Trek canon. We already have to hum and whistle a lot to deal with things like the Eugenics Wars and the first Earth-Saturn probe and the Millennium Gate. We're less than a decade from catching up with "Past Tense," and hopefully we won't actually have Sanctuary Districts by then (though we very well might if Trump wins). And once 2063 rolls around, game over, man. Eventually Trek canon itself will be rendered obsolete and probably replaced with a completely new version of the continuity -- not just an alternate timeline rooted in the same history, like the Abramsverse, but a from-scratch reboot that starts over with a new chronology and a new set of assumptions that are less dated.
If something onscreen 'wipes out' the events in a book I just pretend the book took place in an alternate time line.
There's a big difference between a story being contradicted by reality and a story being interrupted without closure, though. It's that that bugs me (and presumably others), not something no longer being "official" in some sense. I couldn't care less if something was official, I completely agree that a good story holds up whether or not it gets rebooted or retconned or what have you. I just don't want a narrative interrupted before its time.
But most ongoing series are pretty open-ended. There's no clear point where they can be said to be finished. You can do a grand finale, but the characters' lives will continue (usually) and there will always be questions about what happens next; indeed, the modern novel continuity exists because of that curiosity about what happened once the shows ended. So any ending to an ongoing series is going to leave some unresolved threads.
Star Trek history hasn't been the same as our history since 1968, so that particular issue doesn't bother me too much!
Narrative closure doesn't require that every loose end be wrapped up though. Having a good finale doesn't mean resolving literally every plot thread, it means providing a sense of conclusion. It's the difference between SG1 and the aforementioned Journeyman, between Angel and Firefly, between Quantum Leap and Alphas. Even in an open ended series, you can't cut it at literally any point and have it feel equally satisfying. And I can't imagine any reasonable scenario in which the Treklit line would be given the opportunity to compose a satisfying finale should the Prime universe come back to the screen before moving into supporting new events. It might luck into something that could serve as a reasonable finale, but I'd rather the Prime universe just not come back to the screen and not take the chance.
Besides, like I said, from my perspective the books since Stitch in Time have been far better as a collection than screen Trek is as a collection.
Star Trek history hasn't been the same as our history since 1968, so that particular issue doesn't bother me too much!
Oh, since much earlier than that. Let's see...
Velcro was not patented in 1958 by a guy named Mestral from Carbon Creek, but was invented in 1948 by George de Mestral of Switzerland and patented in 1955.
The Roswell incident of 1947 was just a crashed weather balloon that got hyped in the newspapers because of the recent Kenneth Arnold "flying disc" sighting, which prompted a spate of similar sightings. At the time, the concept of flying discs/saucers hadn't yet become identified with alien spacecraft, just with unknown round things in the sky. The whole alien-ship mythology surrounding Roswell didn't get invented until the late '70s and early '80s.
Amelia Earhart was not spying on the Japanese, since US-Japan relations were still friendly when she disappeared. The myth of her being a spy, like the Roswell myth, is a pop-culture invention from years later, in this case from a 1943 movie. Oh, and she probably wasn't abducted by aliens either.
There were no Dixon Hill stories written in the 1930s.
There were plenty of American anti-war movements before Pearl Harbor, so it's unlikely that one more led by Edith Keeler would've kept the US out of WWII.
Mark Twain was in Europe, not San Francisco, in August 1893.
Apollo and the Greek gods were not being worshipped anywhere near 5,000 years ago. The Greek pantheon as we know it emerged no earlier than the 7th or 8th century BCE, though some of its gods -- not including Apollo, Athena, or Aphrodite -- were worshipped in the earlier Mycenean civilization dating from c. 1600-1100 BCE.
And ancient proto-humans most likely never interbred with alien "Sky Spirits."
Also, I'll worry about that when it looks like there's an actual nonzero chance of more Prime universe on screen.
Exactly. The whole issue of a new TV show "wiping out" a book is kinda academic at this point . . . .
We can cross that hypothetical starbridge if and when it becomes an issue.
I think the ship has sailed on this one--enough people care about continuing to think of stories as "real" that even story creators come up with ways to make the apocryphal still count. That's why comic books are actually a terrible example to use--most major comic properties, from DC and Marvel to TMNT and The Transformers, now have in-universe explanations allowing all of their continuities to co-exist.
Fandom is only going more in this direction, not less. Today's audiences seem to prefer thinking of stories as open-ended in worlds which still exist after we stop watching/reading about them, paving the way for followups even years down the line from where they left off.
It's not strictly a genre thing, either, or we wouldn't have Fuller House and Girl Meets World, amongst others...
I'm not sure fans of a given property today actually want closure--they want their favourite stories to just keep going.
Not nearly enough. Granted, it was terribly polite of Paramount and Bad Robot to shift their Star Trek reboot to an alternate universe at the last minute, but it was hardly necessary. Nor was it mandated by CBS, for fear their back catalog of Trek would no longer be "real".
Additionally, we won't be seeing the Star Wars EU restored to canon. Or sub-canon. Or alternate canon. The number of people displeased by it's "erasure" is a tiny percentage of overall Star Wars consumers.
Huh? Where are you getting that from? They were talking to Nimoy about appearing in the film as early as late 2006. The whole plot of the film is premised on the idea of characters from the 24th century going back in time and splitting off a new timeline. It seems clear that their intention from the beginning was to make it an alternate universe.
I mean, doing a Prime-timeline prequel to TOS would never have been a realistic option, because it would've tied their hands too much going forward. An alternate version was the only possibility from the start. So it would've been a choice between using time travel to create an alternate that still tied into the original history, or just doing a wholesale, from-scratch reboot. Neither one of those would've "endangered" the existing book continuity.
So don't worry about it. I've long since stopped trying to catch every little crossover, because that's like trying to keep up with every appearance of Iron Man in every comic published by Marvel each month; it's a Sisyphusean task, and it's not necessary to enjoy the books you've got.
Ezri switched to the command track in the very first DS9 Relaunch novel, Avatar (2001). Destiny: Gods of Night (2008) was set in 2381 and it was the first book to feature her in command of the USS Aventine (not Adventure). At the time Gods of Night was set, the DS9 books hadn't gotten past early 2377 yet. So the idea was that Ezri had transferred to the Aventine between the DS9 books and the start of the Destiny trilogy. The story of how she ended up in command of the Aventine was told in the Destiny trilogy.
Because Destiny was the first to feature Ezri on the Aventine, and used her as its DS9 character so as to avoid spoiling what had happened at Deep Space 9 between 2377 and 2381. At the time, it was thought that the DS9 novels would continue from 2377 to the Destiny period.
Instead, editor Marco Palmieri (who was in charge of the DS9 novels) was laid off in late 2008 as a result of the economic crash, and the subsequent editors of the DS9 book line decided to jump into the post-Destiny era rather than to keep the DS9 books in 2377.
Some fans were upset at the decision to jump time frames. However, author David R. George III is finally getting the chance to flash back and show us what happened between 2377 and 2381 in his upcoming DS9 book Ascension.
I don't think there's a market for it. A few fans on the Internet doesn't mean there's enough interest for Yet Another Planet Of the Week Story Where Data Learns A Valuable Lesson About Humanity.
The continuing story on TNG, DS9, TTN, and VOY are far more interesting than yet another series-era story. I mean, damn, we got 176 episodes each of TNG, DS9, and VOY. There just isn't that much new territory you can cover in those timeframes.
This is not about reasonably thinking a series-era book is gonna be more interesting. This is about you just not liking the direction the post-series books have taken. If it were about the former rather than the latter, you would want more ENT series-era books, too.
But that wasn't the concept. That was a minor in-joke reference to "Encounter at Farpoint." When A Time for War, A Time for Peace was published, it was already known that the post-NEM TNG books would be going in a different direction than that.
The Typhon Pact is not another evil empire. Characterizing it as such means you are not engaging with the material or paying attention to the stories being told.
Thank goodness. Static characters who never change are boring.
We'll live.
"Past Tense" was disturbingly prescient about the broad historical trends the West faces in the early 21st Century.
Eh -- there'll just be a new Trek continuity where the broad datapoints are pushed back a few decades. It's really no different from DC Comics having to deal with 70 years of Superman always being 'round about 30 years old.