What pet peeves do you have about trek books?

[Thestral]

Just check out New Frontier. The "heroic captain" is a quasi-Kirk/Alexander The Great analogue named M'K'N'zy of Calhoun (Mackenzie Calhoun is the anglosized version). He's Xenexian

Also DS9:R with Kira and Aventine with Dax.

Kira, Dax and Calhoun are not really aliens. They are humanoids, and their characters are very close to humans, to us (and even Calhoun was anglosized. Why not keep his original name, why would he need to change it?). I mean aliens that are really alien to us viewers/readers, both in appearance and behavior.

To quote Ezri... "Did I forget to put my spots on this morning?"

Fair enough, but you should specify.

 

[Geoff Thorne]

What I meant was the idea of using the word here on a Trek BB and all that seemed pretentious to me. .

Nothing personal. Your comment just triggered one of my pet peeves: which is the idea that using the right word in the right context is somehow "pretentious." Believe it or not, a friend of mine was recently scolded by her boss because her big vocabulary was making her co-workers uncomfortable. I'm sorry. That's just wrong.

Oh, the stories I could tell.

But won't.

 

[D Man]

One of my pet peeves would be the phrase "His/her hands danced across the console like a concert pianist." I believe it was in Federation where the Reeves-Stevenses used that gem to describe Worf launching weapons or something like that.

 

[Therin of Andor]

One of my pet peeves would be the phrase "His/her hands danced across the console like a concert pianist." I believe it was in Federation where the Reeves-Stevenses used that gem to describe Worf launching weapons or something like that.

"Nice concert. Fine piano."

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I just remembered a pet peeve.. for a while there every Star Trek book I read had the word "limned" in it. A word I had never heard of prior to reading Star Trek books. There were also a few other words used in Star Trek books that I had no recollection of ever reading before and which read like pretentious decorations considering the fairly bland vocabulary of the rest of the book.

I could picture the authors with a thesaurus at hand and a directive from editors to expand their vocabulary..

 

[Daddy Todd]

My pet peeve is that I can't seem to find enough time to read all the Trek books on my shelves. I took a half-dozen with me on my last vacation to the beach, and only got through about half of them.

 

[ronny]

There were also a few other words used in Star Trek books that I had no recollection of ever reading before and which read like pretentious decorations considering the fairly bland vocabulary of the rest of the book.

How are the authors supposed to know what words are "pretentious decorations"? You don't like limnid, another guy didn't like stygian awhile back. Is there a list list of non Star Trek approved words or something?

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

There were also a few other words used in Star Trek books that I had no recollection of ever reading before and which read like pretentious decorations considering the fairly bland vocabulary of the rest of the book.

How are the authors supposed to know what words are "pretentious decorations"? You don't like limnid, another guy didn't like stygian awhile back. Is there a list list of non Star Trek approved words or something?

If I'm reading Nabokov I don't find words that are completely out of the common usage pretentious.

If I'm reading a fairly pedestrian tale that doesn't aspire to be literature I find them to be pretentious decoration.

 

[Thrawn]

^ You remind me of the old TV commercials for Tropicana Twister, drinks that combined different flavors. There were commercials featuring old, hyper-traditional-looking people saying "We like our juices one fruit at a time."

I think your post is pretty much that level of ridiculous.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

^ You remind me of the old TV commercials for Tropicana Twister, drinks that combined different flavors. There were commercials featuring old, hyper-traditional-looking people saying "We like our juices one fruit at a time."

I think your post is pretty much that level of ridiculous.

Good thing this thread is about pet peeves then!

 

[Greg Cox]

If I'm reading Nabokov I don't find words that are completely out of the common usage pretentious.

If I'm reading a fairly pedestrian tale that doesn't aspire to be literature I find them to be pretentious decoration.

So fancy words are only for Literature, not pulp science fiction?

 

[Therin of Andor]

If I'm reading a fairly pedestrian tale that doesn't aspire to be literature I find them to be pretentious decoration.

Isn't that an insult, though, suggesting that ST authors are not aspiring to create a piece of literature when they write a ST novel? And that their writing is "pedestrian"? (I find very little SF is "pedestrian", because it usually tries to make me expand my horizons.)

Maybe a few ST authors have a wider vocab than the average reader, and they are providing you with a service: not only new SF ideas, and a furthering of character development, but a widened vocabulary as well.

As a teacher librarian, we are always getting kids to read, read, read, as a way of expanding their vocab.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

The words stand out to me because the vocabulary of the rest of the book IS pedestrian. That doesn't mean it wasn't a great story, with great characterizations. Nor does it mean I regret buying or reading it.

And no I don't think of ST books as literature. I'd imagine people have different definitions of that word though so if you consider them literature I'm certainly not going to argue.

All I'm saying here is that for me the use of an archaic or rarely used word in a book with a pedestrian vocabulary leaps off the page at me and lodges itself in my pet peeve maker until it ferments into a pet peeve. A pet peeve I would NOT have brought up on this forum (which I consider the tetchiest of all Trek topic forums on Trekbbs) except that I was seemingly invited to express my pet peeves in this thread by the title.

You can all return discussing what is wrong with the names of the characters now.

 

[pookha]

I guess this is a pet peeve, but I don't like the TNG books going farther and farther into the future. I mean that they are trying to be realistic (as it has been 7 years real-time since Nemesis came out) but I wish for more books set during their original 7 years on the Enterprise D with Data and Riker and everyone else where they 'belong'.

iam with this too.
while the titan books are my favorites at the moment i would really like to read tng books et back when the gang were all still together.

 

[Nardpuncher]

I guess this is a pet peeve, but I don't like the TNG books going farther and farther into the future. I mean that they are trying to be realistic (as it has been 7 years real-time since Nemesis came out) but I wish for more books set during their original 7 years on the Enterprise D with Data and Riker and everyone else where they 'belong'.

iam with this too.
while the titan books are my favorites at the moment i would really like to read tng books et back when the gang were all still together.

It's part nostalgia for me...when I think of season 3's events, for example, I think of myself, in my parent's house when I was in grade 11...ah memories!
But of course it's just a good time to use because the crew is together. The fact that the Enterprise E is still out there even though the TNG movies ended sort of feels like someone staying at a night club until 4 AM and the lights are getting turned on and everything looks bad and all the fun people have already gone home. That's just me though.

 

[Count Zero]

And then you go to the next club where there's still a party going...


My personal pet peeve is the small universe syndrom some Trek books suffer from. I find it highly unlikely that in such a big universe we'd get so many people we've seen in the shows converge in the same place.
It also prevents people like Uhura and McCoy from enjoying their well deserved retirement.
Another aspect of this is the naming of Starfleet Academy buildings. Years ago, a lot of these buildings were named for members of the TOS crew (if I remember correctly), now seemingly all the buildings mentioned are named for ENT characters. So, in between those two crews no noteworthy people emerged something could be named after? I'm a huge Enterprise fan but it seems a bit ridiculous to me.
(I also feel sorry for Archer because in the series he seemed to be very uncomfortable with all the stuff named after him.)

 

[Fer]

^ Wasn't that why Star Trek used to have the "rule of three" when citing historical figures... two we knew, and one we didn't? "The great tyrants of Earth, such as Gengis Khan, Adolf Hitler and Colonel Green..."

 

[Myasishchev]

The words stand out to me because the vocabulary of the rest of the book IS pedestrian. That doesn't mean it wasn't a great story, with great characterizations. Nor does it mean I regret buying or reading it.

And no I don't think of ST books as literature. I'd imagine people have different definitions of that word though so if you consider them literature I'm certainly not going to argue.

All I'm saying here is that for me the use of an archaic or rarely used word in a book with a pedestrian vocabulary leaps off the page at me and lodges itself in my pet peeve maker until it ferments into a pet peeve. A pet peeve I would NOT have brought up on this forum (which I consider the tetchiest of all Trek topic forums on Trekbbs) except that I was seemingly invited to express my pet peeves in this thread by the title.

If it makes you feel better, when Mack referred to a Borg cube as a "hexahedron," I thought it was a bit overmuch. Firstly, "hexahedron" is not synonymous with cube, and secondly, "cube" is actually more specific. I forget if he said "regular hexahedron," which would be synonymous, but in a way that would be kind of worse.

That said, I don't ordinarily mind weird words, but I see your point (and this is hardly limited to ST or sci-fi in general) about a run-of-the-mill vocabularly suddenly being supplemented with an archaic, rare, or otherwise incongruous word whose use seems designed purely to justify the purchase of a thesaurus.

Also, there are other rivers in hell.

 

[captcalhoun]

yeah, but they're not all black.

 

[Myasishchev]

Acheron has been historically undervalued in the darkness market.