Underappreciated TrekLit

[Greg Cox]

[pedantry]Depending on when and how she actually wrote it, it could have been a file - in WordStar, Apple Writer, AtariWriter, or maybe Paperclip. Don't know if the publishers would have taken it that way, though.[/pedantry]

Good grief I'm an old nerd.

Edit: Looking at a history of prepress that I found, it looks the first typesetting computer was introduced in 1963. So it very likely *would* have been a file, at least at the publishers - probably on 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch floppy. No idea whether van Hise give them a disk or a typed submission to kick things off, though. But the publishers apparently even had decent OCR at that point, if the latter!

When I first started working in publishing, around 1987 or so, most everything was still done on paper. Authors delivered hard-copy manuscripts, which were edited with red pencils and Post-It notes, before finally being transmitted from Editorial to Production to be typeset. And nobody in Editorial had a computer in their office or cubicle with which to read "files." We were all still using electric typewriters back then.

Not sure how the actual typesetting was done. That was another department . . . ..

You'd certainly know better than I. But here's the site I was looking at:

http://www.prepressure.com/prepress/history/events-1950-1959

Like I said, I have no idea how the actual typesetting was done, but the authors weren't delivering files on disks and Editorial wasn't transmitting disks to Production. When I passed a book onto Production, I gave them a physical manuscript with editorial marks scribbled onto it in pencil, while keeping a photocopy for myself.

Gotta say, I don't miss all that xeroxing . . ..

 

[JD]

Am I the only one bothered by the overuse of the title "Year One" in various franchises for any and every story dealing with the beginning of something?

With "Batman: Year One," the phrase was associated with something great and unique. But now "Year One" has become a generic catchphrase for all prequels.

Kor

It does kind of bug me too. I can understand when other DC stories do it, since they're in the same universe, but when others do it, it does feel like they're just trying to copy DC.

 

[Christopher]

The phrase "year one" did exist before Frank Miller used it, of course. Looking at my library catalog, I find a 1953 book of poems called The Year One, a 1973 play called Year One of the Empire, a 1972 New Age "spiritual directory" called Year One Catalog... and that's just on the first page.

 

[Idran]

Contextually, though, those aren't quite the same as the specific subtitle.

 

[Christopher]

^Like I said, those were just the entries on the first page of the library's catalog. It's not a universally exhaustive listing.

Most of the time, if you assume that something familiar was invented within your recent memory, you're going to be wrong. That's a belief you should always, always be skeptical of.

 

[Stevil2001]

Yeah, Kor was specifically referring to the practice of subtitling prequels "Year One." Obviously the phrase "year one" has been around a long time, probably as long as years have been numbered, and I don't think anyone was claiming Frank Miller invented it as a general term, just the [Franchise Title]: Year One snowclone.

 

[Christopher]

Still, it's hard to prove a negative. Does anyone really know for a fact that nobody before Miller ever used the "Thingie: Year One" format? A lot of the time, the people we give credit for "inventing" things were actually borrowing them from something earlier. We have an egocentric tendency to assume that the earliest instance we're personally aware of is the earliest one that ever existed, and that's usually a very unsafe assumption.

 

[Idran]

He doesn't have to be the literal first to have brought it into the common consciousness, though. People aren't saying he was necessarily the first to ever use it, just that he started the trend.

 

[Stevil2001]

I feel pretty confident in asserting that, yes. The kind and style of media franchise storytelling that would permit such an approach just didn't really exist before the 1980s.

Also this negative is not hard to prove. Searching Worldcat reveals exactly seven works of fiction published between 1900 and 1987 with "Year One" in the title, none of which are prequels, only one of which uses the [Title]: Year One snowclone (Nambé: Year One, a 1976 novel about New Mexican gypsies).

By contrast, between 1987 and 2015, the phrase is used in 80 titles, most of which are prequels in media franchises: Batman: Year One, Scarecrow: Year One, Nightwing: Year One, JLA: Year One, Starfleet: Year One, Robin: Year One, Batgirl: Year One, Batman/Scarecrow: Year One, Batman/R'as al Ghul: Year One, Spider-Man: Year One: Doctor Octopus, Metamorpho: Year One, Teen Titans: Year One, Green Arrow: Year One, Zorro: Year One, Black Lightning: Year One, Huntress: Year One, The Punisher: Year One, Die Hard: Year One, Wildcats: Year One, The Green Hornet: Year One, Sherlock Holmes: Year One, Voltron: Year One, Judge Dredd: Year One, The Shadow: Year One.

Those are almost entirely comic books, and I listed them in (rough) publication order, so it seems pretty clear that it's a practice that slowly creeps outward from Batman: Year One; first other DC comics, then into other media franchises.

I should note that it's also used as a series indicator sometimes (i.e., The Dumari Chronicles, a series of books that look self-published to me, use "Year One," "Year Two," &c. on individual volumes), but again, that entirely postdates Batman: Year One, and that wasn't really the question here.

 

[Christopher]

^Okay, then. As long as it's based on actual evidence rather than just jumping to conclusions. I wasn't wrong to be skeptical of the claim, because skepticism is the beginning of investigation, and investigation is what supports or refutes a claim.

 

[Stevil2001]

Yes, even when you're wrong, you're still right.

 

[Christopher]

^That's uncalled for. I never said it wasn't true, I just raised questions about the assumption. It is never wrong to ask questions and to challenge unexamined assumptions. I asked for support for the claim, you provided support, and I accepted the conclusion. There is nothing wrong with that process. It's how it's supposed to work. If I'd just blindly accepted the claim without applying skeptical reasoning to it, that would have been wrong.

 

[Nathan]

Stevil2001 says, "Yes, even when you're wrong, you're still right. "

Stevil, you must know my wife!!!!

Can't tell you how many times I've uttered those words to her!!!!

 

[Kor]

Of course, the phrase "Year One" as a proper noun goes back at least to the French Revolution.

I didn't mean to imply that Frank Miller invented the term himself... I was just referring to its overuse as a subtitle for prequel/origin/whatever stories in popular media in recent years (and I would also say that a lot of the DC titles aren't as good as "Batman: Year One").

Kor

 

[Eav'oqative]

I'm new, so I don't have anything resembling a pulse on what is generally accepted to be either good OR bad, but how is Dark Mirror generally regarded?

 

[Therin of Andor]

I'm new, so I don't have anything resembling a pulse on what is generally accepted to be either good OR bad, but how is Dark Mirror generally regarded?

Diane Duane's "Dark Mirror" is compelling! Unfortunately, the DS9 "Mirror" episodes take the history of the alternate universe in a different direction. But don't let that stop you. Mirror Troi is deadly!

 

[borgboy]

I do really like Dark Mirror too. It's still a good read despite DS9 going in a different direction with the MU. I just always figured in an infinite multiverse there are branching timelines of the MU.

 

[DS9forever]

Am I the only one bothered by the overuse of the title "Year One" in various franchises for any and every story dealing with the beginning of something?

With "Batman: Year One," the phrase was associated with something great and unique. But now "Year One" has become a generic catchphrase for all prequels.

Kor

And an awful film.

 

[Christopher]

But now "Year One" has become a generic catchphrase for all prequels.

And an awful film.

Oh, you must mean the Harold Ramis film Year One. For a moment I thought you were talking about the animated Batman: Year One adaptation, which is actually pretty good.

 

[Kor]

Heh, I usually reserve the word "film" for something of quality.
Something like that Roman caveman comedy (or whatever it was supposed to be) "Year One" is just a "movie" to me.

Kor