Which Trek novels are in your personal headcanon?

I would say various Pocket Books TOS novels from the eighties, and everything in the "John Byrne Collection."

Since my personal headcanon basically only includes the 23rd century, it's just fine if novels and comics disregard TNG and the other spinoffs, which Byrne does unashamedly in his TOS work.

Kor

 

Not The Autobiography of James T. Kirk.

Probably not Spock Must Die! nor Spock: Messiah.
Probably nothing involving Sondra Marshak or Myrna Culbreath.
Neither The Starless World, nor World Without End, nor Perry's Planet, nor the ever-popular Devil World.

Hey! I thought this board allowed colored text!

But anything else that can be reasonably retconned in. And I still prefer my own Borg origin story (it involves V'GER, and Jackson Roykirk) to the one with the Caeliar.

 

Not when you're using dial-up to log in.

 

I honestly still don't understand how to get "device that can create a cloud multiple AU wide and can literally digitize entire planets into pure information" out of the Borg. V'Ger is eons beyond anything the Borg have ever accomplished.

Unless you're not talking about the old theory that the "machine world" was the Borg home planet, but some other kind of connection between the Borg and V'Ger?

 

For me, the relaunch ENT novels are head canon

Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch Books
STE: The Good that Men Do (2007)
STE: Kobayashi Maru (2008)
STE: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor’s Wing (2009)
STE: The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm (2011)

Christoper Bennett's contributions to the STE relaunch books
STE: Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures (2013)
STE: Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel (2014)
STE: Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic (2015)
STE: Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code (2016)

 

Anything by Diane Duane, the Vanguard and Seekers series.

 

None of them really. The only thing I apply to my own headcanon is the fact Andorians have four sexes, a complicated mating process, and are slowly dying out.

 

Shatnerverse
Stop looking at me like that. I want Kirk alive and kicking ass.

Except Collision Course. Instead the unmade Starfleet Academy Script fills that headcannon of mine.

http://www.starfleet-museum.org/index.htm is my romulan war headcanon.

'Rogue Saucer' fills the headcanon on why the Bridge was different in Generations.

'Captain's Daughter' about Sulu's life.

 

Ditto! All the ENT relaunch novels are head canon for me as well! Except for maybe the two Daedelus books. They kinda made my head hurt.

 

Is he outright disregarding them, or just not really referring to them? I don't think that CBS/Paramount would allow much of anything that blatantly contradicts the later Trek shows.

I really liked that one (I just finished my second reading of it, actually), so a lot of it is in my headcanon now. I liked its versions of Kirk at Tarsus IV, getting into Starfleet, the Ben Finney incident, serving with Captain Garrovick on the Republic and the Farragut, and others. I thought that Goodman made a lot of logical assumptions about Kirk's history from the references and hints we were given (more logical than some of the ones in the Okuda chronology, at least).

 

Well, it's not so much that he's out to contradict them on purpose. It's more like he's ignoring them, as he has said he doesn't care much for later Trek.

One example is that he depicts Klingons having an emperor, whereas in TNG it was stated that the Klingon Empire hasn't actually had an emperor in centuries. I'll have to give some of these comics a re-read soon to see if anything else in particular stands out along those lines.

Kor

 

I think it may be the result of my having read the entire run of the old Gold Key series (and eventually realized how utterly stupid most of it was), but I tend to completely disregard comics by default, with the only exception that comes readily to mind being the "Abramsverse Backstory" piece from a few years ago.

Then again, my taste in comic books (in the usual sense of the term) tended to run more towards "SuperGoof" and "Uncle $crooge," and that in my own library, by both volume count and page count, the overwhelming majority of comics in book form are paperbacks of newspaper comic reprints (especially Beetle Bailey and The Wizard of Id)

 

Gold Key was in a bizarre little world of its own.

John Byrne is an acclaimed and award-winning comic writer and artist. I would suggest giving his work a try, starting from the beginning with Star Trek: Romulans - The Hollow Crown.

Kor

 

They also have 320p hardcover that collects all Byrne's Assignment: Earth, Romulans, Crew, and Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor series.

 

Yes, that's the book I mentioned earlier. I got a used copy for practically a steal on Amazon.

Kor

 

Well, they did well enough with Disney properties, and Warner Bros. Animation properties, and DePatie-Freleng's Pink Panther. They just weren't equipped to take Star Trek as seriously as they should have (and even so, they did have their moments).

 

This is a little belated, but this thread inspired me to contemplate my own headcanon: http://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2016/07/truth-and-nontruth-in-star-trek-canon.html

In short, it includes:
- a factoid from Greg Bear's Corona
- Jeri Taylor's Mosaic
- how awesome the Borg were in The Return
- a concept from Invasion!: Time's Enemy that was contradicted by the show

Not sure what else.

 

Also, don't forget Greg's establishment of a "Federation News Service" (for which Jake Sisko would later be a field-correspondent on DS9).

(And yes, before anyone brings it up, I realize that this is very likely an example of parallel independent creation; a "Federation News Service" is a name that multiple writers might come up with separately from one another, etc.)

 

I guess the simplest way to describe it is, until I've read and decide otherwise, they matter. In my opinion. On a case by case basis, I may read a book and decide it's kind of far from what I think Trek is, but I still might make allowances for the author conveying what they saw as ST. I don't try to group them into a single continuity. So the novels dwell in their own narrative space, and play to their strengths, and the comics have their own realm to innovate as they do. I know that the writers and artists are required to stick within certain parameters, but I don't hold them accountable to the same standard, they still count. I respect the chances that DC Volume 1 took, at the risk of getting themselves into narrative tangles. I'm sure the writers and artists put a lot of hard work into it, even if it doesn't always come across as well as we the audience might hope. I've tried writing stories, it's exhausting!

Someone else compared all these fictional realms to legends. The authors may be required to give the TV series (or movies) greater weight, at the risk that their books could become as fragile as a house of cards, but when I'm reading the book, in that moment, it has as much weight. The continuity details, especially when they diverge from each other, are endless fascinating to me. The novel Federation and the First Contact movie have equal weight to me, it's neat to have vastly different interpretation of the same basic story.

 

My personal "Head Canon" doesn't tend to include Trek lit anymore - I tend to focus just on filmed stories - whatever was on camera, that's official - but my "head cannon" does include these tie-in written works:

The Autobiography of James T. Kirk
Federation: The First 150 Years

These two books concisely fill in a lot of backstory in TOS ST lore for me in two quick reads (eg The Romulan War, Tarsus, Kirk's career pre-Enterprise, etc) that enhance my enjoyment of key TOS and original Trek movies when I re-watch them, so I consider those two books "official" in my "head canon".