I’m aware of that. However, according to James Blish, the script he was using had Brand Decker and an ending that is more reminiscent of the ending to “The Deadly Years”.
What's the fastest a novel has been contradicted?
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Roddenberry’s files donated to UCLA. You can also read the outline (“The Planet Eater”) via Roddenberry Entertainment (the Mission Log podcast, I think).
Does he say this somewhere? Or is this your interpretation based on the adaptation?
Yeah, is this "Question Harvey Week" or something?
It’s in his prefaces. And in “Star Trek 3” he was making quite the fuss about that book containing 3 Hugo nominated stories (Doomsday one of them) and how he was sticking or trying to incorporate stuff from the Hugo scripts into the scripts used for TV for those particular episodes.
I think you need to double-check the Preface to “Star Trek 3”. Blish does mention three Hugo nominees among its contents, but the comment about combining various drafts in his adaptation is ONLY in regards to “City,” which isn’t even in ST3; it was in ST2 the prior year.
You've sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole on this one, and I've spent the past two mornings reading almost all of Blish's introductions on the way to work (this morning I made it through the author's note for Star Trek 11). They make for interesting bits of context from the period, but @Daddy Todd is right — Blish's comments in Star Trek 3 are only about his attempts to reconcile the two versions of "The City on the Edge of Forever."
In Star Trek 4 he makes similar comments about "The Menagerie" and his decision to adapt the original pilot version rather than the two-parter script. But other than that, he mostly writes about the volume of fan mail (too much for him to respond to).
IIRC, some of the variations are mentioned in Asherman's "Star Trek Compendium". The Andorian thrall is a red alien with a nose flap in Blish's "Gamesters of Triskelion". In "Spock's Brain", Spock is left bedridden on the ship, not zombified. (Nimoy had complained the script gave him nothing to do.)
"Operation: Annihialate" is discussed in Wikipedia. "The script, which was written by Steven W. Carabatsos, was originally titled 'Operation: Destroy'. Aurelan was a Denevan woman in love with a man named Kartan, and it was Kartan who flew the ship into the Denevan sun in the cold open sequence. Aurelan's father was also a major character in the teleplay, and the two colonists were not infected by the 'Denevan neural parasites'. Instead, they helped Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock with the research into how light could destroy the parasites. The script did not originally end with the Enterprise crew using light to destroy the parasites. Instead, the ship learns the location of the aliens' home world, and destroys the central controlling "brain" located there. Author James Blish used this draft of the script when adapting the episode for print, and this ending appears in the chapter 'Operation -- Annihilate!' in the anthology 'Star Trek 2'."
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Also, it got contradicted by real life three years later
And yet, we kind of love it right guys? I bet neither of you needed to check to remember the contradictions.
I really loved it, the realisation for Data having a soul was rather good, and it was very well written. Metamorphosis too comes to mind.
My reread just entered TNG, so it was on my mind - I read it maybe a month and a half ago. Honestly, I don’t particularly care for Diane Carey’s work, especially outside of where she’s clearly comfortable in TOS. I don’t hold Ghost Ship against her, working on near nothing like she was. Her later TNG novels, though...
But that’s off topic. These contradictions stood out for me because they understandably led to characters sounding wrong, which stood out harshly for me. Again, not her fault, but... They really clashed with the characters that they grew into for my taste. Just similar enough to be familiar, but just off enough to feel wrong.
I think it was my first TNG novel, aged all of 8 or 9. It is like a look into a parallel world where TNg went a little different. (And Galoob kept producing the toys XD)
Man, I hope you don't drive to work.
McCoy originally had a line in the first draft of "Day of the Dove" about the Federation dealing with the Klingons for 50 years:
The line didn't survive to the final draft and was never shot AFAIK. But it ended up in Blish's prose adaptation and was referenced in the Okuda Chronology as a possible date of first contact with the Klingons. That was later contradicted by the first episode of Enterprise, of course.
It's not in Blish's adaption. I thought that might have been the case, so I reread it yesterday, but it's not there.
*shakes fist in the air about small universe syndrome and thematically weak worldbuilding long set into canonical stone*
Thanks. I checked online, and there's a site that thinks it was in Blish's adaptation, so I took them at their word. So I guess we can lay this all at the feet of the Okuda Chronology.
Eh, if you're doing a ST prequel set 100 years before Kirk, first contact with the Klingons is an obvious way to go. I probably would've done the same thing in their shoes. I just wish they'd been smooth headed Klingons.
In “Star Trek 12” Blish writes:
‘The scripts that I have to work from are theoretically shooting scripts, or final drafts, and I almost always try to be as faithful to their texts as length permits. Sometimes, however, there seem to have been last-minute changes made that are not reflected in my copies.’
Again, that's still not a note from Blish about "The Doomsday Machine." And, since I've seen all the drafts of the outline and script, it's easy to conclude that the major changes he made to that story were not made because they were found in a draft of the script.
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