Weirdest Trek novel
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I don't think anyone said that she could play every instrument -- just that she could play the Vulcan lute and the guitar. Seems logical to me, who can play a number of reed instruments (clarinet, bass clarinet, some saxophone and some oboe).
My father could play most of those, mostly various saxophones (though I don't recall him having a bass clarinet), and he also had a flute and a trombone, and he experimented with an Electronic Wind Instrument when they came out. My sister could play the guitar, and I recall us owning a mandolin. I was required to take piano lessons and made some attempts at dabbling with our guitar, but I never really took to either.
So by that reasoning, you should also be able to play the organ, which is also a reed instrument.
I play the organ, but can't play any of the others you listed.
Agreed to both.
So do I. Not particularly well: if I continue lessons indefinitely, I'll likely remain a ham-handed beginner indefinitely. And that's not a reflection on my teacher (other than that he has the patience to put up with me), but on me alone.
My lessons are usually on a Schlicker practice-room organ installed in the chapel at a local Presbyterian church; it ain't tracker action, but at least it's real pipes, and it's as in-your face as any tracker, which I greatly prefer to playing something that feels like it's somewhere in the next county.
Pieces my teacher can sight-read at concert tempo (the Rawsthorne "Hornpipe Humoresque" and the g-minor from the Bach "Eight Little Preludes and Fugues" have been multi-year projects for me. But it keeps me humble.
But I think we've established that (1) minor things here-and-there from ST novels get promoted to canon, especially when novelists are involved in the production, but (2) they're the exception, rather than the rule, and (3) convergent evolution happens all the time (consider that a head of iceberg lettuce looks like a cabbage, without the two being closely related at all, and that rhubarb looks like pink celery, without those two being closely related, either). Ideas are as common as cowpats, and good ones, unless they're really outside the box, tend to occur to multiple people independently. (Ottmar Mergenthaler wasn't the only person to realize that putting a miniature type foundry into the typesetting machine made more sense than trying to sort type mechanically, and neither was he the only one to realize that if you're casting new type every time, you may as well cast the whole line as a single slug of metal. But he was the first to come up with casting type from freely-circulating matrices that sort themselves with binary-coded notches. Or at least the first to patent the idea.)
I remember one and one thing from the Dark Passions books: A past-tense mention of Intendant Kira leading naked Annika Hansen around Terok Nor by a leash.
11/10 no notes, book of the year.
In this current era of Romantasy fiction being more mainstream (and some of it is pretty explicit stuff), I'd be down for a "Dark Passions"-esque series with more overt adult themes. Granted, there's probably some questionable ethical ground there with the characters having actual real world actors as their image, so maybe that's no bueno.
For weirdish novels, the TNG/X-Men crossover novel deserves a mention I think.
for me the weirdest has to be
Star Trek the Next Generation - The X Men: Planet X
it's a crossover.
it's a crossover that's a sequel to a comic book crossover done in 1998 in the TNG comics.
which was itself a sequel to a crossover to a TOS comic run in 1996.
none of this is established in the narrative, so you basically just have the Xmen arriving on the Enterprise and the Enterprise crew just knowing who they are and greeting them as friends. with the Xmen pulling up a holographic version of Professor X on the holodeck, as if it was a normal thing for the Enterprise to have replicas of a person from another universe on hand in high enough fidelity for the xmen to interact with and seek council from.
add to that the general weirdness you get from having super powered individuals running around the Enterprise, and a world going through a very Xmen like social change involving mutants with super powers..
Star Trek the Next Generation - The X Men: Planet X
it's a crossover.
it's a crossover that's a sequel to a comic book crossover done in 1998 in the TNG comics.
which was itself a sequel to a crossover to a TOS comic run in 1996.
none of this is established in the narrative, so you basically just have the Xmen arriving on the Enterprise and the Enterprise crew just knowing who they are and greeting them as friends. with the Xmen pulling up a holographic version of Professor X on the holodeck, as if it was a normal thing for the Enterprise to have replicas of a person from another universe on hand in high enough fidelity for the xmen to interact with and seek council from.
add to that the general weirdness you get from having super powered individuals running around the Enterprise, and a world going through a very Xmen like social change involving mutants with super powers..
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Quite right. It makes far more assumptions than Barbara Hambly did with Ishmael. (Speaking of which, I still want a canonical appearance by a Drelb!)
No, but it was a bugbear to Richard Arnold, who often tried to quash "new" revelations about characters and species' cultures when vetting the manuscripts. AC Crispin had to remove references to Andorian religion in "TNG: The Eyes of the Beholders".
His response, on Star Trek Office notepaper, said, "Paramount has developed no such culture or religion for the Andorians. Please delete all references to the Andorian culture or religion." Little Thala's father had to be a visiting Andorian ambassador on the Enterprise-D (among the people taken by the Borg in the wedge they cut from the ship) instead of regular crew.
Similarly, in Jean Lorrah's "TNG: Metamorphosis", the author had intended that a Theskian crewmember, Lieutenant Thralen, actually be an Andorian, but she was requested to make a last-minute species change, since there were "no Andorians among the Enterprise-D crew".
Some people: you give them a little authority, and they turn into tyrants.
Basically any pre-TNG novel I find weird, since they were before I was reading and watching Trek. Books like “Pawns & Symbols” and “The Entropy Effect” (I remember having a hard time keeping all the time jumping straight, and being confused). Plus Sulu with a 70’s moustache and long hair, that’s weird!
However “Q-In-Law” is weird and fun with Lwaxana Troi gaining the powers of the Q.
However “Q-In-Law” is weird and fun with Lwaxana Troi gaining the powers of the Q.
My favourite bit in that one was that Klingons can't see the colour red. It appears black to them, IIRC. Which was how one of the Klingon visitors to the Enterprise innocently wandered into an off-limits area, because he couldn't see the black lettering on a red door.
As a red/green colourblind person myself, who can't see orange lettering on a lime background, and vice versa, and sometimes even red lettering on a black screen, I could definitely relate.
Later, there was something in TNG that Klingons could see red.
Heck, that was years earlier in TMP, with the Klingon bridge being lit almost exclusively in red. https://movies.trekcore.com/gallery...picture-DE-bluray/ch02/tmp-de-bluray-0036.jpg
"We cleverly pilot our ships in the pitch black, so any intruders won't be able to see their way around if they board us! Why, it is so dark in here, I imagine you can't see a thing!"
[Kirk looks over to Spock, both bathed in red light] "Do you want to tell them, or shall I?"
IIRC, they couldn’t see red because they were one color shift over from the color spectrum, which meant that while they couldn’t see red, they could see ultraviolet.
As far as the topic is concerned, the one thing that always annoyed me was when an established science fiction novelist was given the opportunity to write a Trek novel, and they inevitably created a story where the cast acts completely out of character in order to serve the plot that has nothing to do with Star Trek, but rather whatever trope that writer is known for. It’s almost as if they never actually saw the show and were just given character bios to work with in an effort to just ‘write what they know’ instead of an actual Star Trek story. Jeter’s Warped and Zebrowski & Pellegrino’s Dyson Sphere immediately come to mind.
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