What Enterprise is the better design part 2 ?

Discussion in 'General Trek Discussion' started by Stardate, Jan 10, 2008.

  1. trevanian

    trevanian Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 14, 2004
    Not to dispute you on this point, but you shouldn't take THE ART OF ST as gospel, it is riddled with errors. Probert went to the trouble of sending them his artwork numbered in sequence so they would present it properly, and still they screwed it up (I think he prefers the STARLOG SFX v5 coverage, that isn't so caption-impaired.)

    I'd give you another 40 or 50 screwups from the book, but I threw mine away so long ago that the memory is thankfully starting to fade a little. Biggest missed opportunity in the history of ST nonfic, for me anyway.
     
  2. Kegek

    Kegek Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Mar 23, 2007
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    Somewhere You're Not
    Well, one obvious error in The Art of Star Trek which comes to mind is the identification of the Defiant as a Valiant class. I had the book, trevanian's assesment is pretty accurate, though it has a very nice selection of sketches and props from all the shows and movies up to Generations. I used to pour over that book constantly, I have fond memories of it...
     
  3. trevanian

    trevanian Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 14, 2004
    I have more personal reasons for hating it; I spent several months late in 91 and early in 92 working on a huge proposal for THE ART OF STAR TREK: Visualizing the 23rd Century for Film & TV (still have the mockup, I send it out as a writing and organizational sample on occasion), which I then pitched to Pocket's Kevin Ryan, who wanted to see it, saying he hadn't heard that pitch before. I had a hard time believing THAT, but sent it anyway.

    Never heard another word, even though I'd phone and mail every four months or so ... at least up until somebody told me Pocket was doing the book with other folks. Couldn't get anybody except John Ordover on the phone after that (he inherited Ryan's office, I think.)

    Mine was a totally different concept, structured a lot differently, and focused exclusively on the 23rd century stuff.

    I probably had nearly as many pieces of artwork in the proposal as are in the whole damn wretched book, but the signficant difference was that rather than doing a semi-elaborate caption-writing job, which to me is what the text is like, I wanted to interview the designers and builders while they were still around, and create the go-to source for the immediate future.

    As is, you need to buy a bunch of unauthorized books, several ST THE MAGs, plus a bunch of CINEFANTASTIQUES and a few other volumes, just to get some idea of who did what and WHY, and it is still very confusing, with lots of spin in many of these tomes.

    I'd even contacted STARLOG about getting quotes from the late Mike Minor, so the few folks who at that point had already died would be represented, but the big deal was that MOST of these folks were still kicking and functional.

    I pitched the thing as a multi-tier project, with a coffee table book that could be (if pocket chose) amplified with S&S multimedia, like a cd-rom or (my preference) a laserdisk, but I didn't really think they'd bite on that. But I never thought they'd just ignore the whole thing and pretend it never came in.

    So some of this is sour grapes on my part, but I really believe they squandered an opportunity to do something significant (even on the PHASE II book, which has worthwhile stuff, there are tremendous errors (mixing up companies on miniatures, misidentifying vger artwork), which leads me to think that while the Reeves-Stevens are among my alltime favorite trek novelists, they are for shit at nonfiction ... even the DS9 book has some goofs.)