Weirdest Trek novel

[Christopher]

Wolkoff & Horgan were the writers credited with the episode. Although right after writing that, I learned that it was the showrunners' idea to do a musical. I still wonder if How Much . . . was part of the inspiration.

No, they were pretty open about their inspirations and made no mention of the novel. It was partly Buffy's "Once More With Feeling," partly the producers realizing that a lot of their cast were excellent singers who deserved a showcase, partly Akiva Goldsman being a musical fan, partly Christina Chong campaigning for a musical episode.

As a rule, it's always safest to assume that Trek producers have never, ever heard of any given Trek novel, because Trek novels are an obscure corner of the franchise with a tiny audience compared to the screen productions, and people who make TV shows are generally far too busy for recreational reading. People always default to thinking that any resemblance must be evidence of deliberate inspiration or imitation, but realistically, it's immensely more likely to be a coincidence, so you should default to assuming that unless there's specific evidence to the contrary.

And just because nobody has ever seen Uhura play a guitar outside of one very early novel doesn't mean there's any reason to assume she can't play one. It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative hypothesis.

She can canonically play a Vulcan lute. A guitar's probably a lot easier.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

It's more likely that the features the book and that episode share are ubiquitous to musicals in general.

As for Uhura, maybe she's a string instrument virtuoso.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Are novelists forbidden to add new skills to a character's backstory?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Conan Doyle's close paraphrase of Ecclesiastes:

There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.

 

[Charles Phipps]

As a rule, it's always safest to assume that Trek producers have never, ever heard of any given Trek novel, because Trek novels are an obscure corner of the franchise with a tiny audience compared to the screen productions, and people who make TV shows are generally far too busy for recreational reading.

I know but it'd be nice if they could get some adaptations and proper credit. Doctor Who adopted quite a few bits of inspiration from the audiobooks and, of course, "The Family of Blood."

 

[Timewalker]

And just because nobody has ever seen Uhura play a guitar outside of one very early novel doesn't mean there's any reason to assume she can't play one. It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative hypothesis.

Okay. So Uhura can play anything, then, like every instrument ever invented in the history of humanity and the rest of the Federation to boot. After all, they didn't say she couldn't, right? Oh, except for the harpsichord.

Seriously, while I get that novelists explore the Trek setting in their own ways, people do raise eyebrows when they go too far off course. Mack Reynolds wrote a lot of short stories, and for some reason ended up writing a Trek novel aimed at young readers. It took me awhile to track it down, and I remember raising an eyebrow (okay, both, since I can't do the single eyebrow raise) when the guitar thing came around.

It seems obvious that Reynolds didn't know much about Star Trek, and when authors deviate too much it gives me the impression that the novel was originally fanfiction given a quick edit, or else it was someone who did it for a quick paycheque.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

It seems obvious that Reynolds didn't know much about Star Trek

Ya got that right. By all accounts, it was far worse before Roddenberry & co. ripped him a new defecatory orifice over the most offensive errors.

 

[Christopher]

I know but it'd be nice if they could get some adaptations and proper credit.

A book doesn't need to be adapted to film or television to have value. Any adaptation would have to be radically transformed to fit the screen anyway -- compare The Wounded Sky to "Where No One Has Gone Before" or the non-Trek novel Tin Woodman to its TNG adaptation "Tin Man" -- so it wouldn't be the same experience as the book, and there's no guarantee that a fan of the book would even like how it was changed for the screen. In my experience, the majority of film adaptations of books are lesser creations than the originals; even if they're good in their own way, they have to leave out a great deal of the content that made the books worthwhile. So if you love a book, doesn't it make more sense just to enjoy it as a book?

If something were an actual adaptation, then proper credit would be a given, because nobody wants to get sued for plagiarism. TOS paid Fredric Brown for the rights to "Arena" because Gene Coon just suspected that he might have been unconsciously influenced by Brown's story. But if the resemblance is coincidental, as it usually is, then credit is a non-issue.

 

[E-DUB]

Well, there was David Gerrold reaching out to Robert Heinlein over the similarities between Tribbles and Flat Cats. And in addition to the Trek episode Arena there was also an Outer Limits episode called Fun and Games for which Brown got no credit. Outer Limits also ripped off a story by Edmond Hamilton called "The Man Who Evolved". No credit given.

 

[Christopher]

And in addition to the Trek episode Arena there was also an Outer Limits episode called Fun and Games for which Brown got no credit.

There's no evidence that Robert Specht's script was inspired by Brown's story. In the case of "Arena," a script researcher noticed the similarity and brought it to the attention of ST's producers, leading them to secure the rights from Brown as a precaution. The Outer Limits no doubt had script readers and a studio legal department too, so the fact that they didn't feel it necessary to give Brown credit suggests that the episode wasn't based on Brown's story to begin with. (The Blake's 7 episode "Duel" is another entry in the same subgenre as "Arena" and "Fun and Games," but again, there's no evidence it was directly based on them rather than just happening ot cover similar ground.)

Laypeople have this bizarrely mean-spirited need to assume the worst and accuse writers of plagiarism at the drop of a hat, but any sensible writer or producer will take great care to avoid any risk of a plagiarism suit, because they're very expensive to fight off even when they're unfounded, as they usually are. If no credit was given, it's safe to assume no credit needed to be given.

There are only so many ways to put a story together, so there will always be stories that cover similar ground by accident rather than design. Indeed, one of the most common reasons that stories pitched to TV series or fiction magazines get rejected is "We're already doing a story like that." So it's foolish in the extreme to assume that any similarity between two stories is evidence of deliberate imitation. More often than not, it's evidence that the writers were unaware of the similarity, or else they would've changed it.

As for "The Man Who Evolved," from what I can find, the Outer Limits producers changed the original ending of "The Sixth Finger" so that it wouldn't be a copy of the Hamilton story. That suggests it was a coincidental similarity that they learned about, and that they changed the story so it wouldn't be as similar. If it had been intentionally based on the story, then obviously they would've paid for the rights, because that is how this business works.

 

[E-DUB]

Well, there is James Cameron and Terminator, which pinged Harlan's "You're ripping me off" radar. I think that one was probably over the top. I don't know if Poul Anderson (or his estate) went after Cameron over similarities between Avatar and "Call me Joe". I mentioned Heinlein earlier and him waving off the possibility of there being any plagiarism as regard to "Tribbles", but he did go after the producers of a film called "The Brain Stealers" due to similarity to "The Puppet Masters". (Ironically, one of the actors in that film was a young Leonard Nimoy.)

 

[Christopher]

Well, there is James Cameron and Terminator, which pinged Harlan's "You're ripping me off" radar. I think that one was probably over the top. I don't know if Poul Anderson (or his estate) went after Cameron over similarities between Avatar and "Call me Joe". I mentioned Heinlein earlier and him waving off the possibility of there being any plagiarism as regard to "Tribbles", but he did go after the producers of a film called "The Brain Stealers" due to similarity to "The Puppet Masters". (Ironically, one of the actors in that film was a young Leonard Nimoy.)

But laypeople are far too quick to latch onto those few exceptions and assume they're the rule, that everyone out there is eagerly looking for an excuse to plagiarize at the drop of a hat, which is really insulting and mean-spirited toward a lot of people who don't deserve it. The vast, vast majority of similarities are accidental, so it's deeply unfair to default to the assumption that they're intentional.

I mean, the very fact that those creators did sue should be all the evidence you need that it's dangerous to plagiarize, that people who try it will face consequences. Studios have to spend a lot of money fighting off nuisance plagiarism suits from bad actors who are just trying to score a quick buck off a superficial similarity; even if the nuisance suits are dismissed, the court costs are still heavy for the studio. Committing actual plagiarism would probably be a lot more costly, and if you cost a studio a lot of money, you may have a hard time getting work again. That's why it's rare enough that it's a memorable news event in those cases where it does happen. If it were routine, it wouldn't make the news, would it?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And that, of course, is why we have the "No Story Ideas" rule here, and why, if there's even the slightest possibility of something being construed as a story idea, even if we don't intend it as such, we at least spoiler-tag it. And we're cautious even about casual remarks like "I'd like to see another Drelb character show up somewhere." Not because any author who's mature enough to understand the concept of plagiarism would steal it, but because even if an author had independently arrived at something similar, he or she might have to abandon it, in order to avoid the risk of even a nuisance plagiarism suit.

Tribbles and Flat Cats were both retellings of the historic "Rabbits in Australia" situation, and so was "Pigs is Pigs," which even has its own Wikipedia article. And yet the legal department at Desilu still flagged the script as a potential problem, and insisted that "The Trouble with Tribbles" be cleared with Heinlein.

 

[JD]

We might not have gotten any full on adaptations since Where No One has gone before, but we have still seen some elements of the novels make it into onscreen Trek, like a Brikar in Prodigy, and I think Mariner's Andorian girlfriend's last name fits the naming system introduced in the DS9 Relaunch. I think there was at least one other in one of the Paramount+ series, but I can't remember it now.
So even if they aren't adapting the books the people working on the shows are obviously aware, especially now that we have Kirsten Beyer as a writer and producer, and I believe @Dayton Ward and possibly @David Mack have worked as consultants of some kind.

 

[KRAD]

The first names of Uhura, Sulu, and Number One all came from tie-in fiction (Nyota, Hikaru, and Una, respectively). Nyota originated in fanzines, and started being used in novels in the 1980s. Hikaru came from The Entropy Effect by Vonda N. McIntyre. Una came from the Legacies trilogy by Mssrs. Cox, Ward, Dilmore, and Mack.

In addition to a Brikar in Prodigy, there's also chimerium, which comes from SCE: Invincible. Both of those are a direct result of David Mack being a consultant on Prodigy's first season. For that matter, the U.S.S. Titan that we saw on Lower Decks was Sean Tourangeau's design from the novels, which was also thanks to the good Mr. Mack being a consultant on LD's first season. (Alas, they went with a different, lesser design for the Titan-A on Picard season 3, which still annoys me.)

Besides her first name, the name of Number One's species comes from the tie-in fiction: she was established as Illyrian in D.C. Fontana's Vulcan's Glory.

 

[Christopher]

Una came from the Legacies trilogy by Mssrs. Cox, Ward, Dilmore, and Mack.

I could swear I saw it suggested somewhere in fanfic or tie-ins many years before then, but I can't remember where.

Besides her first name, the name of Number One's species comes from the tie-in fiction: she was established as Illyrian in D.C. Fontana's Vulcan's Glory.

It was spelled Ilyrian there, and Fontana was probably referencing Ilyria VI from TAS: "Mudd's Passion." SNW conflated that with the two-L Illyrians from Enterprise: "Damage," although it's only viewscreen graphics that confirm they're the same species despite their differences in appearance (due to genetic engineering).


Two bits of terminology I introduced to Trek Lit have been used in Discovery: "cosmozoan" for space-dwelling life forms and "[first] contact specialist" as a Starfleet job title. I presume I have Kirsten Beyer to thank for that.

Prodigy has the Doctor use a phase discriminator to build the device that shields Gwyn from timeline alterations. That may have been borrowed from my Department of Temporal Investigations novels, but I borrowed it from William Leisner's "Gods, Fate, and Fractals" in the Strange New Worlds II anthology. And that was just a variation on its use in TNG: "Timescape" to protect against time dilation/acceleration shifts, and in TNG: "Time's Arrow" and VGR: "Deadlock" to shift between dimensional phases. So it's possible that Prodigy arrived at the idea independently of the prose.

 

[Stevil2001]

I could swear I saw it suggested somewhere in fanfic or tie-ins many years before then, but I can't remember where.

According to Greg himself, it was the coinage of the Legacies writers.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I could swear I saw it suggested somewhere in fanfic or tie-ins many years before then, but I can't remember where.

Leslie Fish's The Weight, among the names of Pike's deceased crew. From the late 70's.

 

[Christopher]

Leslie Fish's The Weight, among the names of Pike's deceased crew. From the late 70's.

Hmm, I never read Trek fanfic (aside from the Bantam New Voyages anthologies), but I must have read about it somewhere (maybe in a Best of Trek volume?), or some other published work may have borrowed it from Fish.

 

[Greg Cox]

Leslie Fish's The Weight, among the names of Pike's deceased crew. From the late 70's.

Can't say we were aware of that when Dave Mack proposed the name "Una" when we were plotting the Legacies trilogy.

Guess it's not too surprising, though, that different people independently came up with "Number One" = "Una."

It's not as though we all randomly decided to name her "Esmerelda" or something.