Star Trek: Coda

December 5, 2021 10:56 PM

Author James Swallow: “It’s been twenty years since Star Trek fiction took a gigantic leap of faith, out from the universe established by the TV shows and movies, and into the new, ongoing continuity that avid readers nicknamed ‘the litverse.’ ... But nothing lasts forever.”

With the resurgence of Star Trek visual media, twenty years of character development and change was forced to end. Trek books can’t conflict with anything seen on the screen, and what’s on the screen now has little or nothing to do with two decades of novels.

Wishing to avoid the guillotine-like end of the Star Wars literary universe after Disney purchased the franchise, authors Dayton Ward, Swallow, and David Mack joined forces to create a trilogy that would give a proper Coda to the Trek litverse. Ward’s was released in October, Swallow’s in November, and Mack’s is newly released.

If you’re curious about where the litverse went during its lifetime, this article provides an overview.

posted by bryon (30 comments total)

Just about every comics publisher has had a Star Trek series at one time or another, some of which ran for quite a while. Here's a list.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:53 PM on December 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

I think the only Star Trek book I've read was How Much for Just the Planet?. Looks like there's been a lot of impressive, ambitious work since then.
posted by one for the books at 12:19 AM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

I appreciate that there's been a lot of work put into the Litverse by its creators, and this wouldn't even be the first time that official Trek canon has superseded the books; my vote for the best Trek novel ever would be The Final Reflection by the late John M. Ford, also author of How Much for Just the Planet?; it's a book set in the Klingon Empire of TOS, which underwent a significant revision (not just in the Klingons' appearance) in the movies and later in TNG. It's still a good book, you just have to remember that that's just not the way that the main continuity went. I'm pretty sure that there are some other older novels that were also superseded by canon.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:44 AM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

Thanks for the heads-up, bryon! I've recently gotten into Una McCormack because of a recommendation I saw for her excellent Cardassia-centric novel The Never-Ending Sacrifice; good to recognize and understand how the Litverse is changing.

Shout-out to Diane Duane for her awesome tie-in novels especially concerning Vulcan culture!
posted by brainwane at 4:46 AM on December 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

Much like the Star Wars EU what I don’t like about this is that I got the impression that the authors were granted some degree of canonicity in exchange for some oversight and coordination of plot lines from the publisher. Now that has been effectively revoked, and all these books are just fan fiction.

That’s okay but if it was just going to be paid fanfiction we probably could have had way better stories if the writers had been free from oversight in the first place.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 5:21 AM on December 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

In 2013 I read a David Mack tie-in novel -- "The Cold Equations: Silent Weapons" -- and a few things bothered me. One issue in particular: The author described nearly every woman (but nearly no men) in terms of their physical attractiveness. Does he still do that? If not then I'll be more interested in reading more of his work. I see in the Tor.com comments that a lot of people really love his tie-in novels, and I see he wrote a third of the Coda trilogy.
posted by brainwane at 5:34 AM on December 6, 2021

I would also like to note that there have been some instances of the different series taking terms and concepts from the non-canon novels; the latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery introduced the term arie'mnu , which is from one of Duane's novels.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:34 AM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

Growing up, my Star Trek canon was TOS, the TOS movie series, and just as important: the Pocket Books, of which I still have my entire collection and which I typically purchased off the shelves of my local small town library (the librarian told me I was the only one who had checked them out in years. I will be forever grateful to her for her friendship and kindness).

The adventures held within those pages sustained my love of Trek throughout the late 80s and early 90s when TOS was in its swan song. I didn't understand terms like 'canon' at that age, so to me what I read on those pages was real, 100 percent unabashed Star Trek. If I'm being honest, those adventures written by the likes of Carment Carter, Diane Duane, Barbara Paul, Janet Kagan, J M Dillard, Brad Ferguson, and especially Diane Carey, still are my head canon for the Trek universe.
posted by jordantwodelta at 6:42 AM on December 6, 2021 [16 favorites]

In a world where even the movies have more than one timeline, it seems weirdly unnecessary to worry about whether the books are still "canon" or not.

Is the issue that they're afraid ViacomCBS will at some point refuse to allow writers to publish new stories that don't match the current TV shows and movies? Is that what Disney did with Star Wars that they're afraid of? Splinter of the Mind's Eye is still in print.
posted by straight at 8:12 AM on December 6, 2021 [7 favorites]

Is the issue that they're afraid ViacomCBS will at some point refuse to allow writers to publish new stories that don't match the current TV shows and movies?

Hopefully not, although trusting them to do the right thing--such as, say, not announcing, a few days before the season premiere of their current flagship Trek show, that it will be (legally) unavailable to most of the world--isn't always what the smart money is on.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:43 AM on December 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

It looks like there haven't been any new novels continuing the Star Wars Expanded Universe (now re-branded Star Wars Legends) since The Force Awakens came out, but it's not clear whether that's because Disney forbids it or because authors/readers lost interest in the EU when it could no longer fit into the same story as all the films.

Because, wow did the Star Wars people care about that. Lucas Licensing has a (secret! because it sometimes has info about unreleased works) Holocron continuity database that labels the canonicity not just of stories but of every character, planet, spaceship, and lightsaber in every Star Wars book, video game, toy, or comic book. And it's not just yes or no, but an entire rating system for how canonical something is from "G" for George Lucas did it to "C" for it was just in old comic books, to "N" for no, this has been contradicted by recent movies.

But according to Memory Alpha, Paramount never considered the licensed Star Trek novels to be canon in the same way that the Star Wars Extended Universe stuff was. So I don't think I understand what is prompting this need to end the Star Trek litverse, since the movies diverged to a new timeline back in 2009.
posted by straight at 11:12 AM on December 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

A second shout-out for Diane Duane's excellent Romulan (Rihannsu) series, and for John M. Ford's utterly delightful How Much for Just the Planet.
posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 11:57 AM on December 6, 2021 [4 favorites]

The ST franchise novels have never been canon, but there's "not canon but the original show is out of production, so as long as you stay within the IP holder's parameters you can go for broke" and "not canon, and boy howdy Picard just blew up two decades of franchise fic into smithereens smaller than ex-Romulus."
posted by thomas j wise at 12:18 PM on December 6, 2021

"Dark Mirror" remains one of my favorite science fiction books of all time. It's built like a TNG episode, it's inconceivably difficult to represent visually, it adheres to canon as it was at the time, and it has the ridiculously great blend of technobabble and self-aware humor and high-tension moments that I adored from TNG.

It involves the mirror universe, but I'm not going to say anything else about it, because there are so many moments of joy hiding in it, that could never be easily shown. I know the time for Trek fiction is past us, and I'm simply grateful that all of that old content is still available to us in books.

(Also: "Vendetta" hit hard and I still remember so much of it so clearly; it's been a decade since I last read it; it would make a very dark, very epic movie, but not a very good episode.)
posted by Callisto Prime at 1:48 PM on December 6, 2021 [6 favorites]

Callisto Prime, the ending of "Vendetta" chilled me immeasurably when I read it! I bet it was in my early teens and it hit me so hard. A Trek book going THERE!?!
posted by brainwane at 1:57 PM on December 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yeah, in this modern day, I would have expected that to be fanfic, just because it was decades ahead of the curve at representation of those themes in approved works. I still can't believe it exists of that era. I should re-read it now that it's been the past decade, but I think we've certainly arrived at a culture where such themes are welcome (or at least more common) in media. Hooray for that.
posted by Callisto Prime at 2:05 PM on December 6, 2021

Bryce, Konom, Fouton, and Blaise were written out of the DC Comics series at best of Roddenberry and/or his overzealous lawyer in order to keep the spinoffs from straying too far from the company line back in the day. Konom totally stole Worf's thunder on that whole 'first Klingon in starfleet' thing. Ah well.

What the soulless corporate overlords say is 'official' this week be damned. Official canonicity is essentially the exercise of the quarterly earnings call over the imagination.

Shout out to Pocket Books 'Final Frontier' by Diane Carey, massively contradicted by later media but I've played the audio version read by Doohan(and a bit of Nimoy) endlessly.
posted by StarkRoads at 3:06 PM on December 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

Official canonicity is essentially the exercise of the quarterly earnings call over the imagination.

I think there's far more to it and that it is artistically important. Asking what is "canon" means, "When I read this book, who are these characters? What is their history? What are their relationships? Did this event happened to that person?"

"What is canon?" means "What is the story of which this work is a part?"
posted by straight at 3:55 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

"What is canon?" means "What is the story of which this work is a part?"

Who has the power to decide that for others is the real question though. It was true when the term 'canon' was being applied primarily to ancient wisdom books, it's equally to contemporary fiction. No enforcement mechanism, no canon.
posted by StarkRoads at 4:20 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

I love how it's obviously that literally theo nly reason the notoriously Trek-protective NBC/Universe signed off on this is because they were told that if they didn't they'd look like (turns off lights and shines flashlight under face as inexplicable thunder happens) DISNEY.

To be honest, Disney's actually been a lot better lately - allowing Live Action Toy Story (and undoing a takedown on request!), explaining that they had to C&D a Star Wars fangame because of their agreement with EA and that they'd have allowed it otherwise - and I think I know why.

They'd become so infamous that there was little point in dialing it back - every little slip-up would have had going 'classic Disney - or should I say HITLERSNEY'. The only way they could get away with it was if another company got big enough to get away with doing worse.

And that's why you can thank Nintendo for Disney being less terrible.
posted by BiggerJ at 7:09 PM on December 6, 2021 [2 favorites]

Who has the power to decide that for others is the real question though. It was true when the term 'canon' was being applied primarily to ancient wisdom books, it's equally to contemporary fiction. No enforcement mechanism, no canon.

Whoever is making the story has 100% of the power to decide which other stories are canonical for that story. I can write a sequel today to the first Avengers movie that ignores all the subsequent MCU movies and publish it on AO3.

I probably can't get Disney to give me $200 million to film it, but that's not because I didn't stick to the right canon. My chances wouldn't measurably improve if I wrote a 'canonical' story and also Disney has already given various other people money to film divergent stories for their "What If..." series.

In this case, Paramount seems to have not cared much whether the Trek Litverse novels matched the TV shows and the movies, so I'm asking what the impetus is for this ending.

Has ViacomCBS said or hinted that they won't license any more Litverse novels? Do the authors think there's no audience for books that don't match up with the current TV shows? Are the authors themselves less interested in the Litverse because of the conflicting TV shows? Why now rather than back when Abrams changed everything?
posted by straight at 10:52 PM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

Well, I'm sorry, I missed the Dayton Ward link before I posted all that, which answers my questions somewhat.
posted by straight at 10:56 PM on December 6, 2021

Whoever is making the story has 100% of the power to decide which other stories are canonical for that story. I can write a sequel today to the first Avengers movie that ignores all the subsequent MCU movies and publish it on AO3.

Conscious deviation from the body of, so to speak, official works, is in itself recognition that such a body exists. The corporate owners of which can can(and have!) modified that body of official works in order to try to better respond to the stock price signal. If this particular hypothetical AO3 story was famous/infamous enough to impact that stock price signal then All The Lawyers would soon be involved. That's the imposition I'm talking about.

Being meta-narratively aware that they're changing the thing you liked in a hedge fundy way for hedge fundy reasons always kinda sucks.
posted by StarkRoads at 1:29 AM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

But now you're just talking about IP rather than canon. Whether those lawyers bust me or not has nothing to do with whether my story is canon or not.
posted by straight at 12:55 PM on December 7, 2021

But you're right about how a story is inescapably written and read in the light of all the other stories a writer or reader is aware of, whether canon or not. When Into Darkness has a scene with Kirk dying on the other side of a glass door from Spock, Abrams is unquestionably making reference to Wrath of Khan even though Wrath of Khan is not canon for the characters in his story.

I think people generally get how that works, so it seems like authors could continue the Litverse if they wanted to, but I guess that Dayton Ward article thinks that authors and readers aren't really interested in Star Trek books that no longer connect with the stories on TV:

Books, comics, and other means of extending the brand into other storytelling realms have always walked alongside those adventures we’ve watched on our TVs and movie screens. They’re created in service to those tales, co-existing with Star Trek even as it adapts and evolves for new generations of viewers.

posted by straight at 1:20 PM on December 7, 2021

We're kinda talking about two different things, which is why I laid off the 'c' word in the above comment. There's canon as maybe 'internal story logic' or 'selected works on the personal scale' in which we get to make idiosyncratic distinctions about whether story A contradicts story B and whether story C is part of story B without explicitly referencing it, and all that fun stuff. The Abrahms Trek movies, incidentally, do go out of their way to state that the original canon as 'internal story logic' still happened, via that whole business with the original Spock showing up there.

That's not the only, or original, definition of canon. The canonical canon? Anyway. There's a 'received/enforced/official body of work' as canon, which is much easier to achieve if you happen to have a few billion dollars laying around these days. You can buy Star Wars, the whole thing, and decide for everyone that the official story includes this, and doesn't include that. This doesn't mean those works aren't good, or don't have 'internal story logic'. You ain't getting any more of them though.
posted by StarkRoads at 4:27 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Sure, but it seems like the issue here is not "ViacomCBS is cracking down and refusing to license Star Trek books that contradict the current TV shows" but "Authors and readers aren't interested in continuing the Litverse anymore because the current TV shows ignore and contradict it."
posted by straight at 5:06 PM on December 7, 2021

Right, the business modified the set of official works and the user preference changed accordingly. They don't have to literally ban the previous works.
posted by StarkRoads at 6:14 PM on December 7, 2021

The Abrams-trek movies are canonical as movies made within the mainline trek continuity shortly before TNG begins. By a group of shadowy Martian dissidents with vast amounts of dark money, possibly Romulan. They are regarded as vicious and degrading portrayals of beloved historical figures and current allies - destroying Vulcan is felt to be particularly nasty. No-one in the show is seen talking about them because even admitting having seen them is a Federation court martial offence.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:35 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

You know that and I know that but does Elias Giger know that?
posted by StarkRoads at 7:25 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]