Trek Lit Universe

[theonering]

Hey y'all, sorry if this has already been addressed in a prior thread... I used to enjoy reading the various extended universe novels back in the day. I read pretty consistently up until a couple years after the destiny trilogy.

I would like to pick it back up but was curious what happened to the extended trek universe after they started publishing tie in novels to discovery and picard. Did the old books go away like legends in the star wars canon? If so I may just skip since I would be frustrated with a story line that ends on a cliffhanger. I couldn't really tell when I tried to look it up. Thanks in advance!

 

[Thrawn]

The flowchart in my signature has all of the books so far published in the LitVerse. Output has definitely dropped off lately. But there is some kind of project that David Mack and a few other authors are working on that's going to give some closure to the LitVerse; a couple authors have hinted about this in various ways, and in an interview Kirsten Beyer mentioned a plot thread in the last Voyager novel being related to it. Not officially announced yet, though, so no real details to report.

 

[theonering]

The flowchart in my signature has all of the books so far published in the LitVerse. Output has definitely dropped off lately. But there is some kind of project that David Mack and a few other authors are working on that's going to give some closure to the LitVerse; a couple authors have hinted about this in various ways, and in an interview Kirsten Beyer mentioned a plot thread in the last Voyager novel being related to it. Not officially announced yet, though, so no real details to report.

Awesome! Thanks for the info! Are the newer novels any good at least?

 

[Christopher]

Did the old books go away like legends in the star wars canon?

Not really, since Trek novels were never claimed to be "canonical" the way Star Wars tie-ins were; they were just one possibility out of multiple conflicting tie-in continuities, also including Star Trek Online and the IDW comics. They didn't "go away" since they were never really "there" to begin with. Naturally new books have to stay consistent with screen continuity, but that's always been the case, and the books have adjusted to accommodate new continuity before, e.g. when the scorpion-like description of Tholians in The Sundered was replaced with the design introduced in ENT while other aspects of Tholian worldbuilding from that novel were kept.

Anyway, the new screen continuity we have so far only contradicts the novel continuity from about 2380-81 onward. There's been no formal announcement of how future novels will cope with that. But it doesn't seem to have had any effect on pre-2380 novels such as my TOS books.

 

[theonering]

Not really, since Trek novels were never claimed to be "canonical" the way Star Wars tie-ins were; they were just one possibility out of multiple conflicting tie-in continuities, also including Star Trek Online and the IDW comics. They didn't "go away" since they were never really "there" to begin with. Naturally new books have to stay consistent with screen continuity, but that's always been the case, and the books have adjusted to accommodate new continuity before, e.g. when the scorpion-like description of Tholians in The Sundered was replaced with the design introduced in ENT while other aspects of Tholian worldbuilding from that novel were kept.

Anyway, the new screen continuity we have so far only contradicts the novel continuity from about 2380-81 onward. There's been no formal announcement of how future novels will cope with that. But it doesn't seem to have had any effect on pre-2380 novels such as my TOS books.

Thanks for the reply Christopher! I do remember reading some of your contributions to trek and enjoying them. IIRC you were the author that introduced T'Ryssa Chen? For me she was definitely one of the stand out book characters that were introduced over the years.

 

[Christopher]

Thanks for the reply Christopher! I do remember reading some of your contributions to trek and enjoying them. IIRC you were the author that introduced T'Ryssa Chen? For me she was definitely one of the stand out book characters that were introduced over the years.

Thanks! Yep, she's one of mine, though other authors like Bill Leisner and Dayton Ward have done good things with her since.

 

[ryan123450]

This thread...
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/a-l...we-know-spoilers-for-entire-lit-verse.306200/

and my website www.startreklitverse.com may be of interest to you also.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Not really, since Trek novels were never claimed to be "canonical" the way Star Wars tie-ins were; they were just one possibility out of multiple conflicting tie-in continuities, also including Star Trek Online and the IDW comics. They didn't "go away" since they were never really "there" to begin with. Naturally new books have to stay consistent with screen continuity, but that's always been the case, and the books have adjusted to accommodate new continuity before, e.g. when the scorpion-like description of Tholians in The Sundered was replaced with the design introduced in ENT while other aspects of Tholian worldbuilding from that novel were kept.

Anyway, the new screen continuity we have so far only contradicts the novel continuity from about 2380-81 onward. There's been no formal announcement of how future novels will cope with that. But it doesn't seem to have had any effect on pre-2380 novels such as my TOS books.

Yes there are multiple continuities from Trek versus one from Wars, and Trek never pretended their tie-ins were canon, but otherwise it's exactly the same? New tie-ins are being made to adhere to the new TV continuity and the novelverse (after the much talked-about "plan" to reconcile everything in some way) will be exactly where Star Wars Legends resides: Obsolete.

 

[Christopher]

Yes there are multiple continuities from Trek versus one from Wars, and Trek never pretended their tie-ins were canon, but otherwise it's exactly the same? New tie-ins are being made to adhere to the new TV continuity and the novelverse (after the much talked-about "plan" to reconcile everything in some way) will be exactly where Star Wars Legends resides: Obsolete.

No, because SW "Legends" was thrown out wholesale. That hasn't happened here. Like I said, my post-TMP novel continuity is part of the overall novelverse, and it's still ongoing. I haven't been required to abandon it. So there's no reason to assume that anything else pre-2381 has been affected (or maybe pre-2380 where TNG is concerned, since it seems Picard and Crusher never got together). There's still a ton of novelverse stuff that hasn't been contradicted in any way: Post-series ENT and Rise of the Federation, TOS and movie-era stuff, The Lost Era, String Theory, The Genesis Wave, DS9 from Avatar to The Soul Key, S.C.E., IKS Gorkon, the Christie Golden post-VGR novels, A Time to..., Articles of the Federation, Titan up through Sword of Damocles.

So this is not like the Star Wars situation. Or rather, it's more like the Star Wars situation back when the Prequel Trilogy and The Clone Wars came out -- the tie-ins that were contradicted by new screen canon got ignored or rationalized away while the rest kept going as it had been.

 

[Enterprise1701]

No, because SW "Legends" was thrown out wholesale.

Except for the special case of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

 

[Christopher]

In any case, I really wish people would stop assuming that just because Star Wars did something, that automatically means Star Trek has to work exactly the same way. Star Wars does not dictate the rules for everyone else. And Trek was here first.

 

[JD]

Star Wars is the exception, not the rule, the vast majority of franchises with tie-ins treat them as non-canon.

 

[Christopher]

Star Wars is the exception, not the rule, the vast majority of franchises with tie-ins treat them as non-canon.

Yes. What needs to be understood is that canon consistency is not about some arbitrary policy declaration, it's about practicality. An outsider trying to emulate a fictional canon can never get it quite as right as the canon's own author/showrunner can, especially if it's an ongoing series whose continuity is a moving target so that a tie-in can be rendered obsolete before it even comes out. So generally the only canonical tie-ins are those written or directly overseen by the creators themselves, e.g. the Del Rey Babylon 5 novels, the post-series Buffy and Firefly comics, the Avatar/Korra sequel comics, etc. In short, canon is about authorship. The creator's own creation is the most authentic version; anyone else's is just an imitation, an approximation. And that's why tie-ins are usually only canonical if they come out after the series ends, because while the series is underway, the showrunner is too busy making the actual series to be in direct charge of the tie-ins.

What's pretty much unique about Star Wars is that they have, not just a single showrunner, but a whole "Story Group" dedicated to keeping track of every screen production and tie-in and keeping it consistent -- which is something Disney is able to do because it's a gimongous corporate juggernaut. Pretty much nobody else operates on that kind of scale. And even in that case, new screen productions are free to ignore and contradict what's in the tie-ins, as has already happened with a few elements in the Disney SW continuity.