What's the worst non-canon decision in the history of Trek?

[Zarm]

That was a problem introduced by the shows' writers. I mean, TNG: "Heart of Glory" established that the Klingons who still clung to the old warrior ways were considered outcasts and criminals by the Empire, and pretty strongly implied that the Klingons were actually UFP members. But then Ron Moore and other writers came along and played up the whole "samurai Viking" approach to the Klingons and treated them as basically still warriors and conquerors, making it incongruous that the Federation was allied with them.

By the end of DS9, the Klingons definitely came off as volatile, restless enemies who chafed under peacetime and might easily break faith. I didn't get the sense that they were still active conquerors before the Dominion plants stirred things up against the Cardassians...

But in some ways, the idea that the Federation would ally with them in spite of being more of a warrior culture kind of extends The Undiscovered Country's themes, doesn't it? "Do we have to lose our cultural identity in order to have peace with you? Will you only accept those who are just like you? Or is there room for us to exists side-by-side- and even fight back-to-back if threatened by an outside power- even if we remain true to our culture and very different from yours?"

It seems to me that the idea that the alliance is a compromise- prolonged (and perhaps excruciating to them) peacetime on the Klingons' behalf, accepting these unruly allies in spite of their less-egalitarian, more combat-oriented society- that doesn't require conformity but still exists in their ideologically-different diversity, seems like a very Star Trek-y one, to me.

(If they were actively conquering other star systems, that... yeah, that would be different... but when that started happening with the Cardassians, it did lead to hostilities with the Federation, which suggests to me that nothing like that was supposed to be going on beforehand.)

 

[Charles Phipps]

Yeah, I don't feel like arguing with @Christopher as I established they were going very deliberately for what they were.

I just didn't jive with the fact imperialist states were getting such a sympathetic treatment when they're running on broken promises and lies in RL so much. A perhaps un-Federation sentiment that like the Cardassians, Romulans, or Klingons they won't willingly get better unless something forces them to.

It was a fantastic work but I just had issues on an emotional level.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

I do find that very interesting, in terms of how people interpret Endgame. I saw the pathogen and destruction of the unicomplex as a significant, possibly mortal blow to the Collective. Sure, they'd lost the Queen before, but this was something disrupting the entire Collective, much like what the Federation originally planned in I, Borg, but more sudden and violent. (Perhaps akin to the Daleks' 'final end' in Doctor Who's Evil of the Daleks- perhaps not the end of them for good, but the last we'd be seeing of them for a long time.

Yet, I was surprised to find that a number of people disagreed, and saw it only as a minor victory over a small portion of the Collective. And the Trek authors seemed to agree, going with that direction on into the Destiny trilogy (indeed, with two Borg trilogies back-to-back then a follow-up Voyager ongoing series based on mistrust that they were really gone, things seemed Borg-heavier than ever!)

So then, I was surprised again when Picard/Prodigy seemed to disagree with my approach and interpret Endgame the way I originally had, which I had come to think of as the 'minority' view. (The irony being that we ended up Borg-heavier than ever there, too, since each season chose to deal with them in a different way).

The general attitude I approach the Borg with and any “defeat” they suffer is that they’re much like ants - it’s the difference of destroying MUCH of the hive and destroying the ENTIRE hive. If the Borg have that inch they can recover from, they will.

And, out of universe, the Borg have historically been a major THING for Star Trek, one of the most memorable villains of the franchise. It’s not surprising to see them be chosen for more focus, and in the case of Picard, the Borg in particular left a massive scar on his psyche because of his assimilation, so digging in to that trauma is a natural topic for Picard as a series.

 

[Christopher]

I just didn't jive with the fact imperialist states were getting such a sympathetic treatment when they're running on broken promises and lies in RL so much. A perhaps un-Federation sentiment that like the Cardassians, Romulans, or Klingons they won't willingly get better unless something forces them to.

It's not about being "sympathetic," it's about exploring alien cultures, fleshing them out as more than just one-dimensional baddies. Just because a work of fiction explores a character or culture in depth doesn't mean the audience is supposed to approve of them -- see Macbeth, Richard III, Tony Soprano, or Walter White, for example.

And the whole point of the Prime Directive is that societies can't be "forced" to change for the better. Anything imposed from outside is just going to spark resistance and make things worse in the long run. Societies only change for the better when the impetus for change comes from within, when the people want it and are ready to embrace it. The Typhon Pact was a small first step in that direction -- hostile or insular cultures admitting that there was value in cooperation with others, in being willing to coexist with those who had different beliefs and ways of life. The thrust of the series was the tension between those factions within the Pact who recognized that and were willing to work toward it vs. those who were still committed to hostility and intolerance and were just using the Pact to advance their own harmful agendas.

 

[Enterprise1701]

The general attitude I approach the Borg with and any “defeat” they suffer is that they’re much like ants - it’s the difference of destroying MUCH of the hive and destroying the ENTIRE hive. If the Borg have that inch they can recover from, they will.

And, out of universe, the Borg have historically been a major THING for Star Trek, one of the most memorable villains of the franchise. It’s not surprising to see them be chosen for more focus, and in the case of Picard, the Borg in particular left a massive scar on his psyche because of his assimilation, so digging in to that trauma is a natural topic for Picard as a series.

I just wish they hadn't did the worst main character asspull with Jurati being the only person to ever befriend a Queen and then ignored Jurati's Borg in the face of Earth coming under threat of annihilation, but all that belongs in a different forum.

 

[Charles Phipps]

I just wish they hadn't did the worst main character asspull with Jurati being the only person to ever befriend a Queen and then ignored Jurati's Borg in the face of Earth coming under threat of annihilation, but all that belongs in a different forum.

That would imply they acknowledged anything between seasons.

 

[Tuskin38]

That would imply they acknowledged anything between seasons.

Seasons 3 acknowledged things from the first 2 seasons.

And season 2 acknowledged things from Season 1 as well.

Terry wanted a scene between Soji and Data but there just wasn't room for it.

I just wish they hadn't did the worst main character asspull with Jurati being the only person to ever befriend a Queen and then ignored Jurati's Borg in the face of Earth coming under threat of annihilation, but all that belongs in a different forum.

Terry said they did have ideas planned/written to explain that but were cut for time.

The transwarp conduit from the end of Season 2 was going to be explained as distraction to keep the New Borg away IIRC.

 

[ClayinCA]

The book of Peter's that read to me like he was mad at life was 2007's Before Dishonor. But I didn't know Peter well enough to know what might have been going on in his life at that time that led to, well, that.

I felt the same way about that book. Wasn't that book also the first of his Trek books to be somewhat less than popular? At least that's how I remember it from the time. (I know he was very unhappy with the reaction to that one.)

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Wasn't that book also the first of his Trek books to be somewhat less than popular? At least that's how I remember it from the time.

I hadn't thought of it that way, but in retrospect, that feels accurate.

(I know he was very unhappy with the reaction to that one.)

Yeah, I remember him throwing Margaret Clark under the bus for some the criticisms he was getting, like characterization of Kadohata and Leybenzon.

 

[Steve Roby]

If he was in a bad state when he wrote Before Dishonor, I can only imagine what kind of state of mind he was in when he wrote that ebook trilogy The Returned. I'd gone off New Frontier before then, but The Returned made me wonder why the hell anyone thought publishing it, even as ebooks only, was a good idea.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Contractual obligation, maybe? Which could be why it was an ebook-only series, Pocket was burning it off.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Yeah, I remember him throwing Margaret Clark under the bus for some the criticisms he was getting, like characterization of Kadohata and Leybenzon.

As someone who only got into Trek novels in the next decade, I was just confused who thought Peter David was the correct choice of sub-genre writer to follow someone else's creations in a structured post-TNG line. But how did Peter David not read Death in Winter and Resistance? Whose fault was that, really?

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

As someone who only got into Trek novels in the next decade, I was just confused who thought Peter David was the correct choice of sub-genre writer to follow someone else's creations in a structured post-TNG line. But how did Peter David not read Death in Winter and Resistance? Whose fault was that, really?

Timing, mostly - the books were put together right around the same time, for TNG’s 20th, and were scheduled to be released, I believe, coming out in consecutive months (back when we got books roughly one per month). So while there could be communication between authors, the finer details weren’t something passed along, and it didn’t really offer enough time for the full books to be passed along between authors. At most, an outline might have been passed along, but definitely not the full novel.

 

[Christopher]

As someone who only got into Trek novels in the next decade, I was just confused who thought Peter David was the correct choice of sub-genre writer to follow someone else's creations in a structured post-TNG line.

Peter worked in comics for a long time, so he was no stranger to adjusting his stories to fit a larger continuity. I kind of felt sorry for him when I read his Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man comic which came out during the time when Marvel was doing big worldshaking annual crossover events including Civil War, since modern comics are decompressed so that you only get 2-3 storylines per year, so you could see how Peter kept having to adapt to the constant swerves in Spider-Man's status quo while still trying to tell his own ongoing storylines. He certainly didn't ignore the other storylines; if anything, he was better at balancing his own stories with the wider continuity than some other Spidey authors I read, acknowledging other writers' story threads that had fallen by the wayside elsewhere.

Timing, mostly - the books were put together right around the same time, for TNG’s 20th, and were scheduled to be released, I believe, coming out in consecutive months (back when we got books roughly one per month). So while there could be communication between authors, the finer details weren’t something passed along, and it didn’t really offer enough time for the full books to be passed along between authors. At most, an outline might have been passed along, but definitely not the full novel.

The fact that two books come out in consecutive months does not mean there isn't time for the books to be passed between authors, because there's generally a year to a year and a half between the initiation of a project and its publication, and typically something like 4-8 months between manuscript delivery and publication. There's plenty of time for authors to share their outlines and manuscripts with each other during the writing and revision process.

When Margaret Clark asked me in June 2007 (over a month before Resistance came out) to do a TNG novel following up on Resistance, Q&A, and Before Dishonor and setting up the Destiny trilogy, she promptly sent me the manuscripts of all three books, as well as Dave Mack's outline for Destiny. Over the ensuing months, I corresponded frequently with Keith and Dave when I had questions, and Dave and I drew on each other's outlines and manuscripts as we wrote and made revisions to our manuscripts as needed. So I was able to stay consistent even with books that came out after mine. On Mere Anarchy, with six novellas released in consecutive months, we seven authors and one editor (Keith) were able to coordinate closely throughout the process, from the original development to the manuscript revisions.

So in theory, there was no reason that Before Dishonor couldn't have been more consistent with the books that preceded it. Peter could have coordinated details with Keith as easily as I did, and he had more experience at doing so than I did. Why he didn't in that case is still a mystery to me. Maybe he was too busy working on something else and it slipped by him. He was certainly a lot more in demand than I was.

 

[David cgc]

When Margaret Clark asked me in June 2007 (over a month before Resistance came out) to do a TNG novel following up on Resistance, Q&A, and Before Dishonor and setting up the Destiny trilogy, she promptly sent me the manuscripts of all three books, as well as Dave Mack's outline for Destiny. Over the ensuing months, I corresponded frequently with Keith and Dave when I had questions, and Dave and I drew on each other's outlines and manuscripts as we wrote and made revisions to our manuscripts as needed. So I was able to stay consistent even with books that came out after mine.

It was pretty amazing how you reconciled the wildly shifting casts, characterizations, and status quos of the previous three novels and managed to realign to a new normal that sustained for quite a while (give or take a Miranda Kadohata). The post-NEM era had been really unstable and scattershot compared to the tightness of the early post-finale DS9 books, but Greater Than the Sum managed to not only stabilize the milieu, it reconciled and contextualized the shifts in the prior stories enough to make them seem cohesive in hindsight, like that had been the story arc that was intended, that after fifteen years of stasis, the Enterprise crew wouldn't immediately gel with the first batch of successors who came along for everyone who'd left.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Timing, mostly - the books were put together right around the same time, for TNG’s 20th, and were scheduled to be released, I believe, coming out in consecutive months (back when we got books roughly one per month). So while there could be communication between authors, the finer details weren’t something passed along, and it didn’t really offer enough time for the full books to be passed along between authors. At most, an outline might have been passed along, but definitely not the full novel.

Oh, huh. I thought someone was about to give me the answer of Great Recession bedlam, but this was the TNG anniversary which happened just before that great bedlam, when Trek novel output may have been at a zenith!

 

[nightwind1]

By contrast, I think KRAD should be declared the only canon for Klingons!

All Klingons must conform to KRAD interpretations like those Romulan fans of the books.

Nothing else counts!

No. John M. Ford's Klingons are superior to KRAD's!

(I like KRAD's just fine, but I've got a long-standing fondness for Ford's.)

 

[Nyotarules]

Any woman Worf had an interest in or was interested in him was killed off. Poor Worf!

 

[KRAD]

No. John M. Ford's Klingons are superior to KRAD's!

(I like KRAD's just fine, but I've got a long-standing fondness for Ford's.)

I won't argue with you. Heck, I tried to put in Final Reflection references where possible in my Klingon books. (Most notably making G'joth a fan of Battlecruiser Vengeance.)

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Most notably making G'joth a fan of Battlecruiser Vengeance.

The Vengeance Flies at Morning! (I've always wondered if JMF intended the lyrics to scan to Jerry Goldsmith's Klingon theme, from TMP.)

It's been years since I've read your Klingon novels, KRAD, but I do remember the reference to may'Duj BortaS.

Or as Koth would say,

HoD Qotlh jIH. Qotlh BortaS. je Dujvam tevwI maj.