What pet peeves do you have about trek books?
- Thread starter Garm Bel Iblis
- Start date
^Huh?
That's a poor analogy. Most African-Americans use surnames adopted by their ancestors upon emancipation from slavery, which tend to be of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, or otherwise European derivation. "Edward" is an English name and "Murphy" an Irish name. But historically speaking, there's no reason to assume a half-Asian person with such an unambiguously Japanese surname as Kadohata wouldn't have at least some Japanese ancestry.
Plus, I'm fairly sure Keith mentioned as much introducing her in Q & A.
Oh ok, I didn't realize that.
Sure. I just forgot about her when I was making the list.
Not confined to Trek, but I hate it when books spend ages and ages going on “after the point”. Case in point: Federation. A great book, but I was bored to death afterward when Picard and Kirk exchanged love letters and loads of other uninteresting stuff (I’ve thankfully forgotten about and don’t have the book handy) happened.
I love it when novels get all their plot threads to end all at once. Epilogues should be limited by law to 5 pages or less.
I also hate the constant referencing to prior events in novels like (the Enterprise novel) Kobayashi Maru. I’m sure at least a third of that book was copy+paste synopsis of season 4 episodes. That’s not to say I dislike references to prior stuff, I just don’t like it when it’s done badly.
It also annoys me when the novels blatently contradict each other on trivial (not important ot the plot) matters, or make characters appear to be douchebags (Spock not contacting Scotty post the latter's TNG-era resurrection in Before Dishonor? Watch how glad Nimoy Spock was to see Simon Pegg's Young Scotty in STXI. He cares! He wouldn't give him the cold shoulder!)
I love it when novels get all their plot threads to end all at once. Epilogues should be limited by law to 5 pages or less.
I also hate the constant referencing to prior events in novels like (the Enterprise novel) Kobayashi Maru. I’m sure at least a third of that book was copy+paste synopsis of season 4 episodes. That’s not to say I dislike references to prior stuff, I just don’t like it when it’s done badly.
It also annoys me when the novels blatently contradict each other on trivial (not important ot the plot) matters, or make characters appear to be douchebags (Spock not contacting Scotty post the latter's TNG-era resurrection in Before Dishonor? Watch how glad Nimoy Spock was to see Simon Pegg's Young Scotty in STXI. He cares! He wouldn't give him the cold shoulder!)
This annoyed me as well. I guess PAD just decided to ignore MJF's 1995 novel Crossover where Spock and Scotty (and McCoy) did in fact meet up...
Don't forget Scotty and Spock in "Vulcan's Soul: Exiles", which is definitely part of the mainstream continuity "Before Dishonor" is implicitly a part of. It irritates me too when the continuity blips are not relevant to plot- we all know that, quite rightly, authors have the freedom to disregard other books as they choose, based on what tells a good story, but, I personally dislike it where there are contradictions that have nothing to do with the story and are in the details, which could easily be changed without damage to the author's vision.
My pet peeve about ST books? That I own a lot more unread books, that I plan on reading some day, than I do read books. I also have too many ST books on my Amazon WishList. Basically, I'm a slow reader who is easily distracted. (And the internet does not help.)
I have bought the entire Titan series and not read a single one of them.
I feel compelled to buy stuff because if I wait until I get around to it many are impossible to find.
My personal peeve on this note is in Resistance, when it's noted Worf has never met Admiral Janeway. He met her on the Enterprise in the book immediately preceding book, Death in Winter. So inconsequential but it drove me loopy at the time as I read the two books in quick succession.
I caught that one too. Yes, I frowned most disapprovingly over that one (you know what I'm like!).
I'll confess, a lot of mine are DS9-R books--everything up to and including Unity, except The Left Hand of Destiny Book Two (read: all the "used-only" books, plus a couple new books). And I've only just started to watch Season 6 of the TV series.
I have bought the entire Titan series and not read a single one of them.
I feel compelled to buy stuff because if I wait until I get around to it many are impossible to find.
(I just checked today at the local bookstore about TLHoD:B2, because it still hasn't come in yet. They said they would check with the publisher tomorrow. [I honestly wonder if they ordered Book One by mistake.])
It's begun starting to bug me that books are often used to 'explain' things that already happened in the show, or the books will take a throwaway line on the show and spin that out into a whole story. I should clarify that both of these things can be done well, or done poorly, and it only bugs me when it's done poorly. I'll try and think of some examples here:
There was one book (My Brother's Keeper) where they tried to explain why Kirk's gravestone had 'James R. Kirk' on it in 'Where No Man has Gone Before'. However the explanation, such as it was, just said 'it was an old joke between Kirk and Mitchell'. No explanation of the joke, just a crappy cover-up. And the worst part is, you kind of got the sense that crappy cover up was the only reason the story existed at all. This is an example of it done badly.
Another example is a throwaway line from Data about Andorians having 4-part bonding groups. This was cleverly spun into an entire subplot in the DS9 relaunch. This is an example of doing it well.
I can't think of any more right now, but I've come across them often.
There was one book (My Brother's Keeper) where they tried to explain why Kirk's gravestone had 'James R. Kirk' on it in 'Where No Man has Gone Before'. However the explanation, such as it was, just said 'it was an old joke between Kirk and Mitchell'. No explanation of the joke, just a crappy cover-up. And the worst part is, you kind of got the sense that crappy cover up was the only reason the story existed at all. This is an example of it done badly.
Another example is a throwaway line from Data about Andorians having 4-part bonding groups. This was cleverly spun into an entire subplot in the DS9 relaunch. This is an example of doing it well.
I can't think of any more right now, but I've come across them often.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (and the Dominion War therein) ended over ten years ago. Hardly "following so closely."
ETA:
Those names are only "common" or "simple" in Anglo-Saxon-descended cultures. They're not "simple" or "common" to people from other cultures today -- the world's most common name is not "John," but "Muhammad." And they certainly wouldn't be "simple" or "common" in a United Federation comprised of hundreds of worlds, each with dozens or hundreds of their own cultures. There's no reason at all to think that Anglo-Saxon-descended names would make up anything other than a small minority of names in the Federation.
So your complaint here basically boils down to there being too many characters with non-Anglo-Saxon-sounding names.
* * *
I'll second contradictions that are casual and not important to the story. I can take the contradiction between, say, Crucible: McCoy - Provenance of Shadows, where McCoy dies in the 2360s, and the novels where McCoy is alive into the 2370s, because it's important to the story.
But, for instance, the new ENT novel features a casual contradiction: In the previous ENT novel, T'Pau held an office called First Minister of the Confederacy of Vulcan, but in Beneath the Raptor's Wing, her office is that of Administrator (presumably also of the Confederacy of Vulcan). Now, ultimately, it's not particularly important which she's called, only that she be the person in charge of Vulcan. But it's such a simple, basic piece of information -- "What office does she hold?" -- that it's frustrating when a contradiction shines through. It's like having a story where Nan Bacco is Federation President in one novel and then Federation Prime Minister in another.
I also dislike it when novels (and this applies to the canon as well) make the Federation too Earth-centric. I disliked the idea of having United Earth ships have the "USS" prefix in BtRW, and having the United Earth Prime Minister have an office at the same Place de la Concorde where the Palais will later be established. And I disliked it when ENT's first episode revealed that the main characters worked for an organization called Starfleet and that the NX-01 looked like it was a direct ancestor of the NCC-1701. I would have greatly preferred Archer and Co. working for an organization with a different name -- say, the UESPA, or the United Earth Star Service, or whatever -- and having the NX-01 look like it was only one ingredient in the ancestry of the NCC-1701, and seeing Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellarite ships that all look like they have design elements that later combined to create the Federation Starfleet's ships.
Last edited:
Nardpuncher
Rear Admiral
How so? It's not that hard to read Frontier's post as saying that Star Trek should be full of people with his ethnic background, and that anyone else is there just to serve some political/philosophical point about diversity. That may not be what he meant, but he hasn't posted any follow-ups to the responses to his post, so who knows?
Hmh? That book was a trilogy - and in the course of the three books, we got explanations aplenty for the R thing. In every book, Kirk used the phrase "* is my middle name", where * stood for some innocent word that began with the letter R. "Racquetball is my middle name"; "Reliable is my middle name". It was an annoying habit of Kirk's, and it's no wonder Mitchell would remember him by it...
I tend to put all of MD Friedman's Trek writing in the "done badly" category, but this particular rationalization didn't irk me at all. It was pretty clever in the end, and what's more, it was never flaunted as an explanation, in the sense of "Suddenly Jim remembered how Gary had always teased him about his annoying habit of using R words".
Timo Saloniemi
Nardpuncher
Rear Admiral
Look, I don't know who Frontier is...maybe he/she's one of those who posts about too many gay people or Titan's crew being too diverse...if he/she does that then I withdraw my defense.
Until then it just seems like some people were being too harsh and trying to beat others with their knwoledge on common surnames around the world.
