Berman on Canon

A hat tip to Wayne Poe, who managed to only slightly misquote Star Trek Communicator #154 . . . a vast improvement over his normal misquotations!

Check out the quote here. (Wayne's version was only different for its artificial paragraph breaking.)

ST Canon Updates

Wow . . . Star Trek novel authors get really pissed off about canon. It's amusing, really. Whereas Karen Traviss and other SW authors have been polite (if strained) even in the face of SD.Net flamefests and blog comment invasions against them, Trek authors seemingly aren't so well-behaved.

I started asking the proverbial 'too many questions' in the Star Trek Lit forum at TrekBBS in response to a claim that those two of Taylor's novels said to be canon in fact weren't, and that furthermore StarTrek.com wasn't a valid source of Trek information. Specifically, I asked for sources, and pointed out links to my sources so as to explain the reason I was asking.

And then I was surprised to find myself set upon, being flamed like a newbie Trekkie after his first SD.Net post. (They were slightly more well-behaved, but only insofar as language was concerned. Check it out here.)

In any case, as a result of the exchanges I've thus gotten some material for my Trek canon page, and have updated it a bit and added new quotes to the quotes page. The main update to the Trek canon page appears here.

UPDATE: Not all of them in that thread are bad. One of them PM'ed me and we had a manly-hug sort of moment, so don't think too harshly of the whole lot.

TVG Lucas Quote - Minor Modification

One of the canon policy quotes was a few words off, as discovered thanks to my recent eBay activities.

The variant most frequently quoted (the origins of which seem to be lost to history):

"TVGuide: Yet novelists have written "Star Wars" sequels using the same characters and extending their stories.

George Lucas: Oh, sure. They're done outside my little universe. "Star Wars" has had a lot of different lives that have been worked on by a lot of different people. It works without me."

The Actual Version (extended to aid in understanding the context):

"What would it take for you to do a third trilogy, with episodes VII, VIII and IX?
Each time I do a trilogy it's 10 years out of my life. I'll finish ”Episode III” and I'll be 60. And the next 20 years after that I want to spend doing something other than ”Star Wars.” If at 80 I'm still lively and having a good time and think I can work hard for another 10 years between 80 and 90, I might consider it. But don't count on it. There's nothing written, and it's not like I'm completing something. I'd have to start from scratch. [The idea of episodes VII, VIII, and IX] was more of a media thing than it was me.
Do you know how many fans would be willing to feed you Cream of Wheat and wheel you around in your chair if you did?
I don't think that's going to happen. Time catches up with you.
Yet novelists have written "Star Wars" sequels using the same characters and extending their stories.
Oh, sure. They're done outside of my little universe. ”Star Wars” has had a lot of different lives that have been worked on by a lot of other people. It works without me."

The wording changes are minor . . . "outside my little universe" versus "outside of my little universe", and "different people" versus "other people". However, the addition of contextual evidence locks the concept up a bit more tightly.

The TV Guide quote still isn't a devastator on par with the canon quotes from Starlog #337 or Cinescape. However, not only does it remain another confirmation, but it's a wee bit stronger now.

Acquisitions

I have Star Trek Communicator #154 and the TV Guide with Lucas from 2001 inbound.

I wouldn't have bothered with the TV Guide, but given the difference between the Galvaron rendition of the Starlog #337 quote and the actual quote itself, I figure it might be best to go ahead and have the real deal in front of me.

As for the Communicator, Poe reported a quote on canon out of it that no one else seems to have heard of. When Poe is one's only source the chances of a 'factual problem' rise dramatically, so I'm going to get one and check.

Googlism

Well, crap. It just occurred to me that I'm about to lose a little feather that's been in my cap. See, typing in 'Star Trek canon' on Google had me coming up first. My Trek canon page has been holding on to the #1 spot for quite some time, in fact.

I have a feeling that's about to change.

See, at one point this year my incomplete Star Wars canon page was in the #2 spot behind Saxton's ancient, erroneous, and never-updated version . . . I assumed that upon completion it would eventually surpass all others. Instead, when Google's bots finally caught the update a few days ago the Google system shuffled it down to the bottom of their sixth page! As of this writing it's back up to the second page, but still.

I'm not an expert on the innards of Google so I can't really say what the cause was . . . I figured actually that there was simply so much 'Star Wars canon' there that it got flagged as one of those 'faker' pages you find online that just have the same word over and over in an effort to boost rank. 'Cause otherwise, I'd have to assume that Google was run by EU Completists. ;)

But, returning to the matter at hand . . . now that I've updated the Trek canon page, I'm waiting to see what happens when Google catches the update. How many pages will it plummet?