Nope. I like them, but I consider them part of the '80s novel continuity, which I treat as a distinct entity from the modern continuity.
Yesterday's Son, Time for Yesterday
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Nope. I like them, but I consider them part of the '80s novel continuity, which I treat as a distinct entity from the modern continuity.
A couple of points of clarification:
1) 55,000 words is not just short. It's extremely short. 90,000 words is more typical these days.
2) Marco didn't inherit all of John Ordover's projects. Ed Schlesinger took over some of them, too, including my third Khan book and the UNDERWORLD novels. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were farmed out to Margaret Clark and/or Jen Heddle as well. I doubt that they dumped everything on Marco.
(Typically, when an editor leaves at Tor, their orphaned projects tend to get doled out to various other editors, rather than piling everything on one person.)
3) Fans of Ann's work should note that her last big project was an epic PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN novel she wrote for Disney. This was a mammoth undertaking that consumed much of her time and energy in her final years. (She told me once that the outline alone ran about 100 pages or so.)
4) And, yes, I briefly referenced Zar and the Yesterday books in NO TIME LIKE THE PAST. My way of tipping the hat to Ann shortly after she passed away.
1) 55,000 words is not just short. It's extremely short. 90,000 words is more typical these days.
2) Marco didn't inherit all of John Ordover's projects. Ed Schlesinger took over some of them, too, including my third Khan book and the UNDERWORLD novels. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were farmed out to Margaret Clark and/or Jen Heddle as well. I doubt that they dumped everything on Marco.
(Typically, when an editor leaves at Tor, their orphaned projects tend to get doled out to various other editors, rather than piling everything on one person.)
3) Fans of Ann's work should note that her last big project was an epic PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN novel she wrote for Disney. This was a mammoth undertaking that consumed much of her time and energy in her final years. (She told me once that the outline alone ran about 100 pages or so.)
4) And, yes, I briefly referenced Zar and the Yesterday books in NO TIME LIKE THE PAST. My way of tipping the hat to Ann shortly after she passed away.
Hmm. Although much of the talk of transferring entropy from uptime to downtime, and of long-distance time travel being deemed safer than short-distance (at least in terms of wiping out one's own existence), reminds me of Vonda McIntyre's The Entropy Effect. Which is about as "80s continuity" as one can get.
As it happens, speaking of time travel fiction, I just recently (right after the Cubs won the World Series) re-watched the second and third Back to the Future movies (after all, the Cubs were only a year and a few days behind the prediction of the second movie). Great Scott!
Nope, no relationship there. Entropy is a real phenomenon in physics, so it's no more a reference than, say, talking about gravity would be a reference to the Alfonzo Cuaron movie. (Although The Entropy Effect was the book that first introduced me to the concept of entropy back when I was 12 or 13. I was actually a bit surprised when I later learned it was a real thing.) And the relative impact of time travel was something I was discussing on the scale of millions of years, in terms of the rise and fall of entire civilizations or species. A change that might radically alter the future of an entire civilization would still have little impact on civilizations that arise millions of years after it dies out anyway. That's completely unrelated to the thing from The Entropy Effect, which posited that altering history got progressively harder as you went back further on a scale of mere weeks or years (something I never understood, because it seems to be getting it backward).
Dare I admit that I first encountered the term in an old MAN-THING comic book by Steve Gerber, about a cult that worshiped entropy.
"Entropy . . . entropy . . . . all winds down . . . ."
Hmm. By that time, even though I was barely out of high school, I'd long since been exposed to entropy just from reading books on physics (including an excellent trilogy by Asimov, Understanding Physics). I also took a lot of physics in college (enough that I was never constipated).
Everything I know about entropy I learned from Doctor Who: Logopolis.
"The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart, and that's the essence of the second law of thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken."
"The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart, and that's the essence of the second law of thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken."
Or as Murphy's Laws of Thermodynamics frame it:
1. You can't win
2. You can't break even
3. You can't even quit the game.
(Every philosophical, economic, or religious system that attempts to make life meaningful is based on a denial of at least one of those laws: capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win; communism is based on the assumption that you can break even; mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the game.)
1. You can't win
2. You can't break even
3. You can't even quit the game.
(Every philosophical, economic, or religious system that attempts to make life meaningful is based on a denial of at least one of those laws: capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win; communism is based on the assumption that you can break even; mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the game.)
But those only apply to a closed system and the sort of mysticism you're talking about necessarily assumes the universe to be an open one.
I was just looking at the Pirates novel on Google Books t, after catching around the first half-hour of Stanger Tides on TV yesterday, and was surprised when I saw it was almost 700 pages. Most of those kind of tie-ins seem to rarely every break 400 pages. Even as complex as they can get, only a handful of Star Trek and Star Wars books have been that long.
I recall Ann saying (the memorable con breakfast I mentioned upthread) that working on the Pirates novel was one of her most pleasant tie-in experiences. Disney was letting her do all sorts of things with Jack Sparrow and his backstory that she never thought they'd allow. More, they were actually encouraging her to develop a history of the character. She seemed to really enjoy working on that book.
I thought a mammoth undertaking was a funeral for a prehistoric relative of the elephant.
What I remember from the book is they had the internal physiology and blood chemistry of Vulcans. But since the planet Sarpedion had a thicker, cooler atmosphere they had rounded ears like humans.
Does anyone recall also hearing that one of the editors at Pocket Books decided at the time that they were not going to use original characters (such a Zar) in subsequent books? The policy was changed later or else you couldn't have the continuity between books in more recent years.
I believe something about Zar was alluded to in the novel Sarek. Didn't Crispin write that as well?
I think you're talking about the policy put in place by Gene Roddenberry's assistant Richard Arnold, who was in charge of approving the tie-ins during the first few years of TNG. He worked for Paramount and for Roddenberry personally, not for Pocket; his policy against continuing guest characters and story arcs was imposed on DC's comics as well as Pocket's novels. But I think Arnold's tenure was over well before the Zar trilogy was being written.
Crispin wrote the Sarek novel, but I haven't read that one yet. I think it was a book that came later, after continuity between books was being clamped down on by Richard Arnold, however this is a speculative statement on my part. Having not read it, I can't really make any guesses about references to Zar, though. Maybe Crispin and others were able to sneak things past the editors and censors. I'm only at the beginning of reading through 80's novels, after which I plan to read other books after that loose "continuity" was killed, at which point I will be able to see for myself if the authors were successful in slipping references under the radar.
This is what I'm referring to:
If you've read the 2 Yesterday novels, remember that Zar painted. I seem to recall that in the novel Sarek, there was a picture in Sarek and Amanda's home of the red giant sun of Beta Niobe setting over the icy landscape of Sarpeidon. I believe Zar painted it while he was on board the Enterprise before he returned to his own time. And Spock gave the picture to his parents. I don't think they mentioned Zar specifically. But people who had read Time for Yesterday would get the reference.
Sarek was published in early 1994, well after Richard Arnold's departure, so it very likely fell outside the purview of his policies, depending on how far back it was written.
EDIT: ...Or, what TracyTrek just said.
Seriously what was the reason for this ban on the reuse of original characters? I heard that another TOS novel, Uhura's Song which had another well loved original character (Evan Wilson, AKA Tail-Kinker to Ennien) was supposed to get a sequel as well. But it didn't get published either. Was that during Richard Arnold's time or was there something else going on? I read this on Wikipedia, so it might not be accurate.
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