Garamet gets snubbed by Trek scriptwriters

So you've finally run out of material and had to resurrect a four-year-old thread.

And I was so looking forward to Flashy's Life Is So Meaningless His Only Joy Is Trolling garamet, Issue #13...

QFT

JJs Memorial Day BBQ

Interesting

Diane Carey was often criticized by some in the Star Trek franchise for writing "overly militaristic" material. And she openly said she considered Starfleet a military organization and wrote her Star Trek material as "America centric" or something to that effect. She is a great enthusiast of American & military history.

Diane Duane (who IIRC was a protege of David Gerrold back in the late 1970s) does the best space battle writing in all of Star Trek lit. Just look at novels like "The Wounded Sky" or "My Enemy, My Ally".

^Thus emphasizing the point that different readers have different tastes, and each writer brings his or her own "voice" to the franchise.

No argument there

I always found Diane Duane's books to be dreadfully boring and she focuses too much on newly created characters rather than the existing ones. I haven't read any of these books since the 80's/early 90's. I should revisit these as I enjoyed them the first time around.

That's because authors can exercise more creative control over original characters they create as opposed to established characters. It also has to do with whether you can spin those characters off into other things because you own that intellectual property. It's why Garamet's version of Probe was axed, although she'll never admit it.

I wouldn't mind a movie series built
around the Lost Era novels.

Unfortunately it never works that way.

"The Wounded Sky" definitely fit this for me. Although focusing on new characters isn't automatically a problem -- Diane Carey's "Final Frontier" is one of my favorite Trek books, and focused almost entirely on new characters. (Yes, I know Robert April and George Kirk weren't her creations, but they might as well have been, given the amount of development she gave them. And I found T'Cael and Idrys very compelling.)

garamet, was the Jandra/Dajan subplot yours? That's another pair of one-shot novel characters I liked. (Maybe Romulans lend themselves well to that?)

Ah c'mon now. There's no need for that type of cheap shot. Say what you want about her career,she's still a published author which is by no means an easy feat.You try it sometime.

Thanks. Take a look at the thread start date, though. Flashy's started at least a dozen threads about me. He's my Biggest Fan. Has a little shrine to me in the room behind the video store where he works and everything.

Yes, one of the few things that survived between PROBE and Music of the Spheres. I figured twins would be a fairly common occurrence among Romulans (this was well before Nemesis and TPTB's concept of Remans). I'd had Sulu infiltrate the Romulan Empire in Dwellers in the Crucible and find himself fitting in to the culture, so I figured a friendship with Dajan would be a natural offshoot of that.

(Music is still available via my site, if you want to drop me an email and compare the original with the "official version.")

I'll admit that the only thing I found the least bit tolerable about "Dwellers in the Crucible" was the idea of a space station along the neutral zone, one half of it Federation and the other half Romulan with the two sides connected by tubed passageways where each side could break away and flee to their own side if they wanted.

A "Checkpoint Charlie" in space (as Sulu himself thinks of it).

That sounds fucking terrible

I've never read it. Cant find a nicely formatted torrent of it. The formats all jacked up on the ones I have found.

I'm not knocking the creation of new characters. I understand how they can spice up the action. It's when Kirk and Spock's appearances in the novel are reduced to glorified cameos that I draw the line. Some of Duane's novels are almost like back door pilots. But I do remember a couple that I liked.

My Dad and I used to trade those old Pocket books back and forth so I wrote a story for him as a Xmas gift. He really liked it and thought I should publish it but I figured he was just being nice. I should dust it off and send it in. To this date, the only novel I've actually finished.

There are really only a few novels where the main characters are reduced to cameos.

Diane Carey
Dreadnought & Battlestations-she introduced her own set of new characters. Basically new, fresh out of the academy officers.

John M. Ford
The Final Reflection- a novel about the Klingons told within the Trek universe. Kirk and company appear only as a framing device though a young Spock has a very brief cameo in the story along with his mother. Leonard McCoy as an infant is referenced.

Margaret Wander Bonanno
Dwellers in the Crucible- Kirk, Spock (and Sulu) are only tangentially involved in the story. Most of it is about two characters who serve as female analogues for Kirk and Spock in captivity on a deserted planet.

Pawns and Symbols (can't remember the author)
Story is largely about a young female botanist (and agent) of the Federation who is taken as a prisoner by Kang (Day of the Dove) and the evolution of her relationship with him (including as his lover). Kirk and company make a real appearance only at the very beginning and at the end.

All in all, I think fans largely enjoyed most of these novels. Fans being much more willing to accept expansions of the Trek universe than the control obsessed Paramount.

^^Maybe my memory is hazy then. It has been almost 20 years since I've read any of these.

That's basically the situation with "Final Frontier." There are bookends around each part consisting of Kirk and McCoy talking while Kirk reads old letters, but the entire actual story is Robert April and George Kirk 20-odd years in the past.

John M. Ford's "How Much for Just the Planet" is similar, though it's a pretty big departure from the norm in other ways too...

Orci no longer behind the camera on nu-Trek III, but it's being written by the douchebag that plays Scotty. You know, the one who thinks that if a flick isn't The Deer Hunter or Ordinary People it isn't "serious" cinema.

And no "Music of the Spheres?"

Maybe if they'd picked something written by DeCandidio and given him a little free publicity, he wouldn't have had to panhandle for rent money.

Wow. In his desperate need for attention, NecroFlashy is resurrecting a 6.5-year-old thread.

And he still doesn't understand the difference between a novelist and a scriptwriter.

Who ties his shoes and boots up his computer in the morning? Whoever they are, they deserve an award.

Are you fancying yourself a "novelist?" Because when I think of novels, I think of Moby Dick, Pride & Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird. Not cosmic jellyfish.

A novelist is someone who writes novels. Your opinion does not affect the definition one iota.

When are you going to resurrect the other six stalking threads?

Fleshie has an unhealthy obsession.

Yes, in the most technical sense. But when you describe yourself as a "novelist," you do so in such as way as to suggest you have a higher opinion of yourself than your work merits.

YA THINK!?!?!?!?!!?

No. It's a statement of fact. There are no qualifiers. A novelist is someone who writes novels. I write novels. That's indisputable, no matter how unhappy it makes you.

The only question is why it makes you so unhappy.

You're tuned to WRDF and this is All-Request Thursday. Here's a classic oldy going out to M from her devoted servant F...

And if you write adaptations you're called Alan Dean Foster..........

Good one! Seriously!