(Re-)CANONIZE THE BOOKS (MOST OF THEM)

PART I: WHAT THE BOOKS DO FOR ME AS A FAN

For almost as long as I have been a Star Trek fan I have been a Star Trek book reader.  I started watching Star Trek in the 4^th grade and it was about two years later that I bought my first Star Trek book. My time collecting them ran from about 1993 to 2005.  I haven’t collected any that have come out in the last fifteen years or so.  After the series went off TV there was nothing to directly connect them with my active fandom and at that time I also started to develop a strong interest in reading actual history books.  However my time collecting them represents an important time my life.  My best friend, Toby, and I had a rivalry over who could collect the most.  I can’t remember who actually won. 

The books were another way I could delve into Star Trek.  In the 1990s there was a lot of Star Trek.  The Next Generation was showing off its re-runs “five nights a week,” Deep Space Nine and Voyager were running simultaneously, a new movie seemed to come out once every two years, and I was collecting the Original Series through a deal with Columbia House.   Yet I couldn’t get enough of it I needed something else to satisfy the craving.  To be fair we didn’t have the on-demand options that we have today where I can literally watch any Star Trek episode in the entire franchise whenever I please.  

The first book I ever bought was “The Disinherited.” This book was #59 on the original series book list and it had some of my favorite authors in Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, and Robert Greenberger.  In the book the Enterprise has to face off against an unknown alien fleet.  The story takes place between seasons 1 and 2 of the Original Series and it tells the tale of Ensign Chekov’s first days as a bridge officer.  In addition to that the book also gives Lt. Uhura a larger role than she ever had in the classic series.  She is temporally assigned to the USS Lexington by Starfleet to help with some difficult translations.  So the audience gets to see her interact with Commodore Bob Wesley from The Ultimate Computer.   

My first Star Trek book 

As I skim through the book that I last read when I was in Middle School, because I am trying to remember why it was Uhura went to the USS Lexington to begin with, I am once again awestruck by some incredibly well written scenes involving the cast.  There is an opening scene where young Ensign Chekov is running to the bridge because he is behind his time.  He runs into Lt. Uhura who gives him a gentle chastisement.  While reading it I actually “hear” the voices of Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nicholas reciting the dialogue.  There is another great scene in this book that I can recall from childhood without going in and re-reading it.  In that scene a conversation between Dr. McCoy and Lt. Sulu about Chekov gets overheard resulting in some great embarrassment for Dr. McCoy.  If I had forgotten how much I love the books these scenes would have quickly reminded me.

The books as far as I can tell give three basic services for fans:

Star Trek Adventures Outside the Limits of Live-Action

A traditional Star Trek episode is an hour long plus commercials.  After the commercials you are left with about forty-five minutes.  This means the story has to be structured and based accordingly with the focus being on one or two of the main characters plus the antagonist for the week.  The authors of the books however don’t have to structure their story around such narrow time frame.   Although some books do often focus on one primary character they have the ability to do justice to all the characters that they are working with.  They are also unrestrained by budgets and technological limitations on graphics that existed in the time any particular episode was produced.

The book I had previously mentioned “The Disinherited” does all those things.  You have a story featuring two Starfleet starships and an alien fleet.  Yet the book allows you to explore the characters of Uhura and Chekov a little more, while at the same time doing justice to the rest of the characters.  

The books also allow for new stories to be told featuring crews from the past without having to worry about re-casting.   I especially appreciated this in the 1990s, the TNG, DS9, and Voyager books were good, but at the time two of those shows were ongoing still and TNG kept producing movies.  Books featuring classical Star Trek with Kirk, Spock, and the old crew were still possible despite the ages and later deaths of members of the cast.  I remember picking up the book “Mudd in Your Eye.”  That came out my freshmen year of High School.  A great book that feature the crew going up against Harry Mudd, after their encounters with him in Mudd’s Women and I, Mudd but before the TAS episode “Mudd’s Passion.”  Nowadays modern readers will feel that way about the first five Star Trek crews. 

An adventure of the classic crew with Harry Mudd written in the 1990s!

Filling in the Gaps

Although I usually presume a week’s time frame between episodes in the same season there is no guarantee of that.  Sometimes an episode will begin by acknowledging that they have been at a particular task for weeks or months.  A good example would be Shore Leave where Kirk notes that the crew had just finished up a mission where they had been working for three months straight.   

There are however larger gaps.  The first pilot, The Cage, took place over ten years before the rest of the series.  (A gap of time that the new series Strange New Worlds would like to fill.)  The second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, has such a different tone in terms of relationships of the characters that it has been speculated that it takes place a full year before its closet episode, The Corbomite Maneuver.  Then there is the fact that for a five year mission we only got three seasons, maybe four if you count The Animated Series.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture takes place about two years after the first five year mission ended.  A great book series that tries to fill that amount of time is “The Lost Years.”  After the movie is over the crew that was reassembled in order to save the galaxy are sitting on the bridge of a USS Enterprise, which had just completed an 18-month refit.  It looks like they are ready to go own new five-year mission, and it seems like that is what they are attending to do.  However when The Wrath of Kahn comes out in 1982, ten years have gone by in their fictional universe and the Enterprise is now the Academy training ship and almost all of her former command crew now serve as instructors.  What about the second five year mission?  There are a number of books that cover this time period.   “Firestrom” by L.A. Graf is a good example.

A book, despite the uniforms on the cover, take place after The Motion Picture. 

There is also a time gap between The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country.  At the end of The Voyage Home the crew as their “punishment” gets sent to the new USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A.  In The Final Frontier Scotty and Uhura are getting the new ship ready for their first mission when Sybok’s action forces them out early.  Then when The Undiscovered Country they’re all quite a bit older and are heading to retirement instead of a new mission.  So what happened to the five year mission with the Enterprise-A?  For answers we get books like “Probe” by Margret Wander Bonanno.

A great story taking place in between Star Trek V and VI

               Of course that biggest gap of all is the time period between The Undiscovered Country and the beginning on Star Trek: The Next Generation that is over eighty years.  In this time we have two more starships named Enterprise, Sulu’s continued captaincy of the Excelsior, and of course Picard’s adventures on the Stargazer.    The books provide a number of fill-ins for this era.  One of my favorites is “Captain’s Daughter” by Peter David that deals with both Captain Sulu on the Excelsior, and his daughter serving under Captain Harriman on the Enterprise-B. 

A great story from the lost era!

New Meanings on Old Episodes

The final thing that I think the books do extremely well is the give new or better meaning to older and, in some cases, not as good episodes.  A good example is the episode Elaan of Troyius.  I never really cared for this episode, I didn’t hate, just didn’t care.  However after reading L.A. Graf’s book “Firestorm” that revisits the Elasian culture I came to appreciate this episode more.  In my reviews I did not rank Assignment Earth very high.  When I read the book "Assignment Eternity” by Greg Cox I started to enjoy the episode more.  Even though I always loved the episode The Squire of Gothos, I began to enjoy it much more after reading Peter David’s book “Q-Squared.”  

A good way to make a so-so episode good.

  

THE QUESTION OF CANON

In the last ten or fifteen years it has become common to refer to the books as “beta canon” or more dismissively “non-canon.”  If I have to choose I would choose the first one because the second is just insulting.  You see this commonly on any threads in social media about Star Trek.  Ex. Person A: Is Trelane a Q?  Person B: Well he was established as so in Q-Squared.  Person A: Books aren’t canon. 

Referring to them as Beta or secondary makes more sense to me and it is in line with how they were almost always viewed.  When reading an interview with one of the producers—I forget who it was—for the old magazine Star Trek Communicator, he responded to a question about the books status by explaining that all the books were official but their canonical status was subservient to the live-action shows.  In other words you could take what the books said as events that actually happened but if the show later conflicted with it the show’s version prevailed.  There is actually quite a bit of evidence that the show’s producers and handlers of the franchise put a lot of thought into what elements of the franchise were allowed into the books.     

I also have some inside information on this.   Back in 1999 I brought a book about my all-time second favorite character of the franchise and high school crush Seven of Nine.  The book was written by Christie Golden and was titled simply “Seven of Nine.” I enjoyed it however not only because it featured my favorite former Borg, but how it presented the Borg in general.  In the last few seasons of Voyager I started to become disgruntled with the direction of the series.  It had gotten so bad that it seemed the only reason I was even watching the show anymore was because my continued infatuation with Seven.   One of the main reasons I was upset was how the writers had seemed to turn the Borg from the menacing almost unstoppable force into some pathetic villains of the week. 

A book featuring an all time favorite. 

I think the Voyager writers were jealous of Deep Space Nine’s Gul Dukat and that character’s relationship with Captain Sisko that they wanted a villain like that for Janeway.  Thus they took the Borg Queen—already a controversial concept for me—and tried to make her Janeway’s archnemesis. The Borg Queen turned into a mustache twirling bad guy who would occasionally flirt with Janeway over the view screen.   This book however showed how the Borg were meant to presented.  Funny thing was the Borg are only in the story in flashbacks.  The main villain that the crew of Voyager had to face was some evil Emperor named Beytek who rules the Lhiaarian Empire.

So after reading this book and really loving it I decided to email Ms. Golden.  In the email I told her how much I loved her book, especially how much I enjoyed her writing on the Borg.  I explained to her how I thought that everything that she was doing was completely superior to what they were doing on the show particularly my annoyance with the Borg Queen concept.   

To my surprise she wrote back.  I wish I had a copy of this email it was on my old college email address, which I stopped using fifteen years ago.  However having read it almost a millions times I can still sum it up.  She started by thanking for buying and reading her book.  She appreciated the compliments, and that she agreed the Borg should be written as scary.  Ms. Golden did defend the TV writers a bit with the Borg Queen/Insect Queen analogy.  Then she laid down a bombshell.  Writers for the Star Trek franchise books had to get them cleared with the company.  That part was no surprise it is what she wrote next that was.  She told me that direct stories that featured the Borg were off limits to the writers.  The decision makers at Paramount did not want there to be conflicting Borg narratives out there.   Now if it were a given that the books held no canon status then why would they care about that.

A more common example of canon status is the company’s desire to add Historian’s Notes to various books.  These historian notes allowed the reader to know exactly when the book they were about to read took place and fit in with the rest of the franchise.  If the books were not even intended as canon then that is an odd thing to do.  

A traditional Historians note from the previously mentioned Probe

In addition the traditional Historian's Notes in the book “Federation” by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens since it covers what had then been the two parts of the Franchise: ToS and TNG, it had a ‘historian’s timeline.’  In addition they also had a disclaimer in the Acknowledgments section.  

“Though we have drawn on established STAR TREK lore for many of the events in this book, we must add that much of the early history of the Federation, and Cochrane’s adventures prior to and after inventing the warp drive, are extrapolations solely of our own creation and thus could be superseded by official adventures in the years to come.  Until then, we hope the audience will enjoy reading this one possible STAR TREK adventure as much as we enjoyed writing it.”  

Again this is a rather odd thing to have to put if the books aren’t part of the official lore anyway.

Was careful to acknowledge that some things might later conflict. 

                 However there is an even more interesting case.  One of the very best Star Trek books I ever read was Peter David’s “Vendetta.”  It involved two deadly threats.  One of these was the Borg coming back for a rematch after The Best of Both Worlds.  It also saw a more advanced model of the Doomsday Machine arrive.  The novel sets off a three-way conflict between the Enterprise, the Borg, and the new Doomsday device.  However the powers at be were a little upset about certain elements about the book, but it was too late as they had already advertised for it.  So they decided to include this disclaimer warning how this book might conflict with what Gene Roddenberry wanted and therefore were to be taken down just as the author’s interpretation and not part of the actual Star Trek universe.   

A story some producers had issues!

If the Star Trek books were never to be interpreted as canon then would such a disclaimer have ever been necessary?  I would say no and yet here we are.  

Vendetta's disclaimer!

HOW TO SOLVE CONTINUNITY ISSUES

One of the legitimate issues with canonizing most of the books is there would be some continuity conflicts with the show.  As a result they can’t all be canon.  I do acknowledge this is true with some books but I think most can be saved. In my first post I made on this blog, I discussed my view with some of the conflicting continuity of the various shows and how it can be interpreted.   To summarize when you take into account all the various time travel instances that occur in the series there are numerous possibilities for butterfly effects to emerge. 

A good example of such butterfly effects is with Star Trek: Enterprise, despite the fact that every time later Star Trek series referred to the NCC-1701 it was always called the “original Enterprise” this show featured an Enterprise a hundred years before it.   Not to mention that Archer’s ship never made it on the wall of the Enterprise-D in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  When you factor in the time travel adventure of Star Trek: First Contact these errors start to make some sense.  Cochrane having been saved by the crew of the Enterprise decides to call his first ship that. In the unaltered timeline Johnathan Archer and his crew probably still existed but their ship may have called the Horizon, Phoenix II, or some other thing.  Also the Temporal Cold War that we get introduced to could also be used to explain a lot of inconsistencies from that series as it relates to others.  Such as why Picard’s tale of the first Federation/Klingon encounter in the episode First Contact is not what we get in the opening episode Broken Bow. 

Now let’s take a look at the book “Sarek” by A.C. Crispin.  It is billed on the cover as “The incredible story behind one of Star Trek’s best loved characters.”  This book was published in 1994 so for a modern reader this may have to appear as non-canon as nowhere in the book is there a Michael Burnham.  However in Discovery we learn of the time traveling “red angels” and that one of these (since this is a recent series I am trying to keep spoilers to a minimum) made it so that Burnham would come into the custody of Spock’s parents and join his family.  In this light we can view Crispin’s novel as Serek’s life pre-red angel temporal intervention.  The same can then be said for the previously mentioned “Federation.” Reeves-Stevens’s timeline is the one that was later altered by the Temporal Wars. 

Some modern continuity issues that can easily be worked out. 

GREAT STAR TREK BOOKS THAT NEED TO BE CANON

Spock’s World by Daine Duane

This is a book that spent eight weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List in 1988.

The Lost Years series by J.M. Dullard and other authors.

These books are a great bridge between the end of the series and the start of the movies.

The New Frontier Series by Peter David

This features a Star Trek crew that is entirely from the book series and not the live action shows. 

Q-Squared by Peter David

Heck let’s just say anything by Peter David by this point.

Invasion series by various authors

A great four-way crossover back when there were only four Star Trek series  

The Ashes of Eden by William Shatner and the for mentioned Judith and Garfield Reeves-Sevens

I don’t know if the entire Shaterverse can be made canon but this book explains what Kirk was doing before his fated trip on the Enterprise –B and the final fate of the Enterprise-A!

All of the books that I mention earlier in this post should also be included.

In closing I would just repeat that I think the Star Trek universe is a lot richer with the books in them.