What's the title of this TNG-era novel?

[Tracy Trek]

The Enterprise D is investigating a object/structure in space. Other ships that have went near it, the crews went insane.

There is a orphan Andorian girl who is also blind, but wears a sensor net instead of a VISOR. Dr. Selar ends up adopting her. I think it is stated in the story that her mother died when she was a baby and her father was one of the 18 killed during the first encounter with the Borg.

When some of the crew beam over to the structure, they are left in pretty bad shape. Only a female Tellarite doctor is able to withstand it long enough to save the others, but even she has to plug her ears and cover her eyes with gauze before it drives her mad as well.

In the end Data (with his neural pathways temporarily modified) beams over and shuts down the transmissions that it is putting out.

Funny, I can recall a lot of the plot, but not the title.

 

[Christopher]

That's The Eyes of the Beholders by A.C. Crispin, published in 1990.

 

[T'Ressa Dax]

And it was one of my favorites at the time.

 

[Bibliomike]

Sounds very similar to "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" - was there lots of overlap with that episode?

 

[Idran]

Not really much at all from what I remember, beyond the reminder that sensor webs existed before VISORs.

 

[Tracy Trek]

The little girl wore a sensor net/web similar to Dr. Miranda Jones.

The title was perfect for the story because IIRC the structure was like a repository of art and music for an alien race. But their brain patterns/thought processes were so different, that their art and music were discordant to humanoids. Enough to cause insanity. The beauty was in the eye of the beholder.

In a way, that sort of reminds me of the Medusan race. No one could look at them without going mad.

 

[Christopher]

What I find amusing is that there's a TAS episode called "The Eye of the Beholder," a TNG novel called The Eyes of the Beholders, and a TNG episode called "Eye of the Beholder." There are a number of titles that have been used (exactly or approximately) by two different Trek stories, but if there are any others that are used by three different stories, I can't think of them right now.

 

[Tracy Trek]

What I find amusing is that there's a TAS episode called "The Eye of the Beholder," a TNG novel called The Eyes of the Beholders, and a TNG episode called "Eye of the Beholder." There are a number of titles that have been used (exactly or approximately) by two different Trek stories, but if there are any others that are used by three different stories, I can't think of them right now.

Do you remember what the TAS and TNG episodes were about?

 

[Christopher]

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Eye_of_the_Beholder_(episode)

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Eye_of_the_Beholder_(episode)

 

[Therin of Andor]

There is a orphan Andorian girl who is also blind, but wears a sensor net instead of a VISOR. Dr. Selar ends up adopting her. I think it is stated in the story that her mother died when she was a baby and her father was one of the 18 killed during the first encounter with the Borg.

Sadly, the Selar/Thala relationship was never picked up by "New Frontier" when Selar became a regular character of the novel series.


Thala by Ian McLean, on Flickr

This book had some hurdles to jump. Richard Arnold had been insistent that there were "no Andorians among the Enterprise-D crew", and this was specifically stated by Troi in "The Offspring" (March 1990, probably around the time a Sept 1990 novel manuscript would be being critiqued).

So the Andorian diplomat, Thev, killed by the Borg's action (aired May 1989) had to be described as a passenger, not a crewmember (as probably originally planned).


Borg attack, Q Who by Ian McLean, on Flickr

When the Ms Crispin attempted to create a religion for the Andorians for her story, the response from the Star Trek Office was that "Paramount has developed no such culture or religion for the Andorians. Please delete all references to the Andorian culture or religion." [Quote from the old UseNet discussions with the author.]

March 1990's "Metamorphosis" also had Andorian subplots stripped out. Jean Lorrah had intended that her guest alien character, Thralen, be an Andorian, but was requested by the Star Trek Office at Paramount to make the change to a yellow-haired antennaed Theskian, since there were "no Andorians among the Enterprise-D crew". [Quote from the old UseNet discussions with that author.]

 

[Tim Thomason]

When the Ms Crispin attempted to create a religion for the Andorians for her story, the response from the Star Trek Office was that "Paramount has developed no such culture or religion for the Andorians. Please delete all references to the Andorian culture or religion." [Quote from the old UseNet discussions with the author.]

March 1990's "Metamorphosis" also had Andorian subplots stripped out. Jean Lorrah had intended that her guest alien character, Thralen, be an Andorian, but was requested by the Star Trek Office at Paramount to make the change to a yellow-haired antennaed Theskian, since there were "no Andorians among the Enterprise-D crew". [Quote from the old UseNet discussions with that author.]

I wonder why there was such a pushback on the idea of exploring Andorian culture in early TNG literature. Was it a rights issue with The Original Series franchise? Or was the Star Trek Office simply following the original mandate that TNG minimalize its references to the original Star Trek?

 

[Defcon]

I wonder why there was such a pushback on the idea of exploring Andorian culture in early TNG literature. Was it a rights issue with The Original Series franchise? Or was the Star Trek Office simply following the original mandate that TNG minimalize its references to the original Star Trek?

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Richard_Arnold

 

[Therin of Andor]

... was the Star Trek Office simply following the original mandate that TNG minimalize its references to the original Star Trek?

Nothing to do with rights. Roddenberry had suggested very early on that TNG should steer clear of most known TOS aliens - "Encounter at Farpoint" originally suggested a long term mission without frequent returns to Federation space, and Rick Berman took this to heart every time someone suggested using a past alien race. He particularly felt that Andorian antennae were "hokey" and too reminiscent of 50s and 60s alien makeups. When Tracey Tormé suggested using an Andorian captain in TNG, the Bolians were born, ie. they were blue, but no antennae.

 

[Sto-Vo-Kory]

Therin, you have really provided some fascinating Trek lore here. Thanks for sharing it with us.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Therin, you have really provided some fascinating Trek lore here. Thanks for sharing it with us.

My pleasure. It was a turbulent time on UseNet and GEnie. Several authors were seemingly at war with the Star Trek Office (or at least Richard Arnold), and the attempt to firm up exactly what licensees and their writers could draw upon in 1989-91, which of course continued to affect novels and comics long after GR died, and RA had departed Paramount.

At first, a friend used to print out huge piles of discussion in case there was news for our Trek club newsletter. Prior to those early e-sharing facilities, several of the novelists - Crispin, Ferguson, Lorrah, and others - would send messages to, or answer fan questions in, the US letterzines of the day, which stayed in collectors' hands, but I realized that I needed to nab the above quotes before all that early e-material vanished into the ether, as it now seems to have. (In the late 90s, Newsgroups' material could be selected in a Google search.)

I remember when the writing was first on the wall for tighter control over the novels. RA told an Australian convention that a US convention had invited Diane Duane to talk about "The Romulan Way", and the flier called her "the creator of the Rihannsu". Someone sent the flier to Gene Roddenberry and this wording (no fault of Diane Duane's!) supposedly angered GR, who was already smarting from changes he perceived that had been made to the Trek premise by the semi-licensed Star Fleet Battles "war game" materials (based more on Franz Joseph's "Star Fleet Technical Manual" than TOS), as they tried to make a Trek-related board game that used lots of starship battles rather than space exploration. Contractually, neither GR nor Paramount could influence the flavour of those games, although the term "role-play games" seemed to be coined around that time (to appease them?).

In the hiatus between Seasons 1 and 2 of TNG, all tie-in licenses had to be re-contested. DC Comics and Pocket signed new (tighter) agreements, but other companies, such as FASA, lost theirs. The Star Trek Office had greater influence.

Peter David's (hilarious/bittersweet/triumphant) opinions on the matter are preserved in "But I Digress...", a trade paperback collection of reprints of his regular column in a comics newsletter of the day.

 

[publiusr]

I thought FASA just dropped trek because all the Battletech stuff became all the rage.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I thought FASA just dropped trek because all the Battletech stuff became all the rage.

No. FASA supposedly got themselves into hot water with the Star Trek Office because they speculated way too much about characters and events from TNG in their first guidebooks that used 24th century material.

IIRC, they did a "Season One Sourcebook" (which had some weird misunderstandings, such as the writer or editor thinking that the planet Haven was actually Betazed), and they reacted badly to being told they should have made the corrections that were advised. I was told that FASA then tried to circumvent vetting by the Star Trek Office for the TNG "Officer's Manual". In that book, someone attempted to draw Data's internal mechanisms (and gave him no toes), made up many details about his discovery on the outpost shown in "Datalore", and invented several interim Starfleet uniform designs between ST IV and TNG (which I actually thought were great, but the series later showed were completely from the imagination of someone at FASA).

It was just too early to be seemingly pre-empting onscreen canon that was still being created. That kind of stuff usually only works when the parent show is no longer in production.

 

[Christopher]

IIRC, they did a "Season One Sourcebook" (which had some weird misunderstandings, such as the writer or editor thinking that the planet Haven was actually Betazed)

Or rather, thinking that Haven was the Betazoids' home planet, without realizing there was such a thing as Betazed. No doubt it's because we first met Lwaxana in "Haven," so the writer thought she was from there rather than just arriving there to meet the Enterprise.

I recall there were quite a few other groaners, but the only other one I remember is one that only a science nerd like me would notice -- they totally underestimated the explosive yield of antimatter, asserting that a photon torpedo's warhead (or that of a smaller photon grenade, which was apparently supposed to be the things they fired at the Gorn in "Arena") contained a rather ridiculously large amount of antimatter, so that the payload they posited for a "small" grenade would be sufficient to wipe a whole city off the map and then some. It's not that hard to calculate mass to energy conversion -- it's E = mc^2, after all, probably the most famous equation in history -- so I call that a basic case of Did Not Do the Research.