They just pulled a TMP. Mileage will vary.
When did canon become such a hot-button issue?
- Thread starter Amasov
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No, it looks like it's made post-TNG. The makers of TOS never wanted us to believe that 23rd-century technology would look like it was made in the 1960s. That was just the best approximation they could manage using the resources they had; given the means, they would've happily upgraded it to look more futuristic, and that's exactly what they did do in ST:TMP.
The Making of Star Trek, the 1968 behind-the-scenes book, said that the Enterprise had holographic rec rooms and communication booths. They just never got around to showing them onscreen. The tech was always meant to be more advanced than what we got to see.
It's only a "downfall" in the minds of people who mistakenly think that TV is about set and costume design rather than story and character. I'm of two minds -- I do wish DSC had been less dependent on reused TOS continuity, but at the same time, their most dramatically effective work has been their deep dives into the Sarek family dynamic, and how revisiting it from Burnham's perspective has added new depth and context to the relationships we knew about from TOS. Letting us see more of Pike and Number One has been a strength as well, and it doesn't matter that the actors and their costumes look different.
Nicholas Meyer wasn't a fan of Star Trek when he made Wrath of Khan which is probably the best Trek movie. Nolan and Burton weren't Batman fans yet made the best Batman movies.
My point exactly. Listening to the fans is a fool’s errand. Make what you think is best and put it out there. Let the chips fall where they may.
It seems to me that time travel works in many different ways in Trek depending on how it is done. While it is possible to erase the timeline you also sometimes have time travel that creates brached universes and for some reason whatever Future Guy was using would only allow his hologram to go back in time. Basically it works however the writer wants it to. I do wish the Kelvinverse had been a little more clear about it but I figure most fans most have already known going in. Some though I guess missed it. I do think many casual fans missed it and don't even care at all.
Jason
That's what fan fiction is for. Don't like the new stuff? Make your own continuity!
As a writer, would you incorporate elements into a TOS novel seen in DSC like the R2D2 repair robots, the depiction of the Klingons, Section 31 etc. or would it seem incongruous?
I was hanging around a different Star Trek website at the time, but my earliest recollection of the word 'canon' in reference to Star Trek is probably the early 2000's when everyone was mad that the NX-01 looked more advanced than the Enterprise and the Klingons had their ridges. "All of this has happened before..."
Indeed.
You know, I'm suddenly remembering a book I read back in the seventies that argued strongly that the old Universal monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s were "classics," but that that new Hammer Films versions were utter garbage aimed at the lowest common dominator and clueless modern audiences that couldn't appreciate a "real" Frankenstein movie . . . .
Sound familiar? None of this started with Star Trek, let along with ENTERPRISE.
And, honestly, what's wrong with deconstructing classic characters and stories and subverting expectations? There's a reason that approach often yields interesting results . . . because it's fresh and provocative and different. When it works, you can get fascinating book and movies and TV shows . . . as with, for example, Robin and Marian (1976), Man Friday (a revisionist take on Robinson Crusoe), Wide Sargasso Sea (which turns "Jane Eyre" upside-down), etc.
Nothing is sacred or set in stone. Or should be.
Sound familiar? None of this started with Star Trek, let along with ENTERPRISE.
And, honestly, what's wrong with deconstructing classic characters and stories and subverting expectations? There's a reason that approach often yields interesting results . . . because it's fresh and provocative and different. When it works, you can get fascinating book and movies and TV shows . . . as with, for example, Robin and Marian (1976), Man Friday (a revisionist take on Robinson Crusoe), Wide Sargasso Sea (which turns "Jane Eyre" upside-down), etc.
Nothing is sacred or set in stone. Or should be.
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...and it will happen again.
Yes! Please do that! I do not understand the reticence to having a "Big Tent" perspective regarding Star Trek, of involving multiple perspectives on the stories being told. As @Greg Cox likes to put it TOS was a variety platform, telling many different types of stories.
If Star Trek is working for me in in its current iteration (I suspect the Picard show will be that for me) then I can go and write and create and design. I enjoy fan art, and the like a lot of times, and many of the stories I loved in TOS get a second life in fan creation and novels.
Of course I would. I've been doing the equivalent for more than a decade already. Part of the fun of Trek Lit is taking the bits and pieces from separate shows and movies and putting them together, building connections between them that the canon productions failed to do, and thereby building more of a sense of a unified world rather than a bunch of separate productions. Heck, as my readers know, one of my trademarks as a Trek author is creating grand unification theories about things that were treated disparately by screen productions, like the ecosystem of spacegoing life forms in Titan: Orion's Hounds, the physics and history of time travel in Department of Temporal Investigations, or the various portrayals of Rigellians in Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel. And authors before me have been reconciling conflicting versions of the Klingons since at least John M. Ford's The Final Reflection in 1984, so why would I be reluctant to continue building on that 35-year precedent?
In fact, I've already incorporated some elements from Discovery into my TOS novel The Captain's Oath which comes out next month. I was asked to be circumspect about direct references, which I guess is understandable now that we've seen how season 2 played out, but I drew on some of its worldbuilding like the use of cyborg prosthetics to treat injuries.
And robots in the TOS era? Hell, yes. I love it that that's finally canon. They should've been there all along. Look at all the Roombas and drones and things we have now, the self-driving cars that are only years away, and it's absurd to think there won't be lots of robots in the future. It's always been a strange omission in Trek that it doesn't have robots aside from the occasional android, and I've long wanted to believe that they were there in the background all along when we weren't looking. So I was thrilled when that was finally made explicit. Anything that lets me portray the 23rd century in a way that feels more plausibly futuristic rather than a relic of the 1960s is a good thing.
I'm sort of 2 minds on that. From a continuity perspective, yeah, the way they did Discovery I kind of wish it was in the 25th century or something. You sort of get the best of both worlds, you can redesign things to your hearts delight and simply handwave it as being a century post Nemesis. Part of me wishes they did that for another reason though. And that's just because I would have liked something 'new'. In a sense, one flaw of Discovery is we know a number of pieces have to be put back in place to realign it with the original series, at least from a story perspective (like the spore drive). And we know how this story is going to end up at in a lot of ways. It's one of the reasons Orci said they created an alternate universe for their movies, because otherwise you know how the story ends.
One thing that was nice about TNG-DS9-Voyager was it was forward moving. There was always a certain sense of jeopardy and risk with what our characters did. I'm not saying there's none of that with Discovery, just that since we 'know' the future it takes some of that mystique away. I also always like to be moving forward in time in general. It's probably why I'd much prefer a 'sequel' to a 'reboot' or 'reimaging'. And frankly I'm tiring of all the 'remakes' out their today. How many different ways can we do an origin story or remake the same thing? Can't anyone 'create' things anymore?
Sorry, starting to rant again.
I recollect back in the newsgroup days, circa '96 or'97, an argument about the class of DS9's Defiant being Valiant because of the Art of Star Trek book and how the book wasn't "canon" so what it said about the Defiant wasn't official.
Ahh, here's a link to google groups from 1997:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!s...20class/alt.startrek/TB1t2OFac-0/K3tmdcRUE9AJ
That's one of the things I love about novels. I frankly don't understand when people complain about that. In a sense that's a literal definition of a tie-in, to tie things together. I personally find it makes watching the shows more enjoyable. When I watch TWOK, it's more enjoyable in some ways because of reading "To Reign in Hell'. Watching TMP I felt was improved by reading the "Lost Era" books and "Ex Machina". I can watch "These are the Voyagers' without throwing something at my TV because of "The Good that Men Do" (I still don't care for TATV, but I can at least view it in a different light).
One of my general rules of thumb when writing TOS is that if we can do it today, in 2019, they can do it in the 23rd century. So, yeah, they can have multiple windows open on the view screen, send each other text messages, conduct DNA tests, have women captains and security officers, etc. Otherwise you're writing a period piece, not SF.
Granted, this is a balancing act to a degree. You want to keep the feel of classic TOS without making it feel too retro . . . ..
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That reminds me of an argument I had with someone online on the IMDb boards (when they still had them) about TSFS, but in reverse. This guy kept insisting the Enterprise was already decommissioned as of TWOK because of some reference book he read. I was trying to argue that accoding to TSFS Admiral Kirk said "She's too be decommissioned". But he was insisting the book was canon and I was arguing only what was on screen is canon (personally I always thought he misread something because I don't recall ever seeing anything saying the Enterprise was already decommissioned). He was pretty adamant and I finally gave up. That was probably my first 'canon' debate with someone, years before I even found trekmovie.com. I want to say it was prior to Enterprise even coming out.
The literal definition of a tie-in is a licensed work which capitalizes on interest in the parent production. I don’t read ST novels regularly, but when I do I expect them to match the look and feel of the main production: characters should sound the way they would be acted onscreen, production design (as I imagine it) should match the established style and best of all would be if I knew that what I read would not be ignored by the parent production, that it is something that will matter in the long run (Desperate Hours is rickety after S2, which gives no indication whatsoever that Burnham, Spock and Pike had a shared adventure only a few years earlier).
My point is that it’s not as simple as expecting everyone to treat TV like theater as the right answer here, or at the other end of the scale, not recognize that sure, unlike in Star Wars, there is a history of independent productions changing visual elements as well as showing reverence (as in the case of the TNG era towards TOS). I can also see if fans of different generations have different takes on the subject, but then again, Doug Drexler is a first-generation fan and firmly in the camp of TOS as a period piece, which echoes his involvement in the earliest technical publications that were also about digging deep into production design as an indelible part of the stories.
I also think I know when canon emerged as regular discussion fodder: when we started getting more and more live-action Star Trek in addition to licensed materials, meaning the TNG era. Before the regular juxtaposition with the shows, it was easier to pretend that a novel could be just as valid, especially if it was being taken into account by other novels. But after a while, if readers keep seeing contradictions with live action, they may stop reading if the original purpose was to find more stories set in that world, rather than follow a great author necessarily. Ideally tie-ins should be read for the same reason as any good book, but it would be illusory to assume that a part of it isn’t about the world or that some average releases don’t survive because of the tie-in aspect. So what happens when a novel is written by a production writer? There may be still be unavoidable contradictions, but also added value due to proximity with production.
Whatever word you’d want to use, it really is about real-world hierarchies as they manifest commercially. Canon is irrelevant only when few or none can be perceived.
My point is that it’s not as simple as expecting everyone to treat TV like theater as the right answer here, or at the other end of the scale, not recognize that sure, unlike in Star Wars, there is a history of independent productions changing visual elements as well as showing reverence (as in the case of the TNG era towards TOS). I can also see if fans of different generations have different takes on the subject, but then again, Doug Drexler is a first-generation fan and firmly in the camp of TOS as a period piece, which echoes his involvement in the earliest technical publications that were also about digging deep into production design as an indelible part of the stories.
I also think I know when canon emerged as regular discussion fodder: when we started getting more and more live-action Star Trek in addition to licensed materials, meaning the TNG era. Before the regular juxtaposition with the shows, it was easier to pretend that a novel could be just as valid, especially if it was being taken into account by other novels. But after a while, if readers keep seeing contradictions with live action, they may stop reading if the original purpose was to find more stories set in that world, rather than follow a great author necessarily. Ideally tie-ins should be read for the same reason as any good book, but it would be illusory to assume that a part of it isn’t about the world or that some average releases don’t survive because of the tie-in aspect. So what happens when a novel is written by a production writer? There may be still be unavoidable contradictions, but also added value due to proximity with production.
Whatever word you’d want to use, it really is about real-world hierarchies as they manifest commercially. Canon is irrelevant only when few or none can be perceived.
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But on the other hand, there's something to be said for going back and redoing something -- revising it based on what you've learned in the interim. As I said, TOS's technology was never meant to look like it came from the 1960s. It was just an approximation, a suggestion of the future within the confines of the tech and budget they had. They would've gladly made it look more futuristic if they could have. So if we go back and do that now, it's being true to the spirit of what they intended. It's honoring the substance rather than just the surface.
Granted, if it had been up to me, it wouldn't have diverged quite so much from the aesthetics of the original. Something like the Kelvin bridge or the DSC Enterprise bridge strikes a better balance of old and new than the respective hero-ship set designs. But that's my own preference, and different creators are entitled to make different choices.
Was Leonardo not creative because he used a live model for the Mona Lisa? Was Shakespeare not creative because he based his plays on earlier plays, myths, and historical events? Was Haydn or Liszt not creative because he based his compositions on the melodies of traditional folk songs?
Creativity has never been about where an idea came from. It's about where you take it next.
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