StillPaisleyCat

joined 2 years ago

I see that the writers are down in the fine print of the announcement.

Myers just has story credit.

It’s interesting because Mack was originally a NY Film School grad and has two writing credits for DS9. He was picked up from that by Pocketbooks to write Treklit. So, writing a radio play is moving him back towards where he started.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

There’s real news in there!

David Mack and Kirsten Beyer have cocredit for the script of the Star Trek: Khan audio podcast.

This just increased my expectations that this will be a high quality script.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The CBC has done other articles recently on the South Korean bids. It seems more that they are just spreading out the stories as they get ‘exclusives.

Here are two ones from May that CBC linking in the newer article featuring the details on the Norwegian-German subs.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/south-korea-canada-submarines-artillery-defence-1.7523180

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/south-korea-hyundai-heavy-industries-hanwha-ocean-submarine-pitch-1.7527252

I do recall that Enterprise was hyped as a response to the demands from (mostly male) fans who wanted a ‘return to exploration’, less ‘magic technology’ and implicitly ‘men doing stuff.’

The 1990s BBS hate of the women in leadership roles in the early seasons of Voyager was savage.

Again, that’s an issue regarding screenwriting not tie-in fiction.

And on the screenwriting side, it’s an issue Paramount has already taken on with Lower Decks, Picard, and Prodigy’s very numerous references to classic shows and characters. All those Easter eggs were included.

Any characters created by tie-in writers are Paramount’s IP under the standard tie-in writer contract. No credit need be given even.

This has already been established as Prodigy and Lower Decks have brought TrekLit elements into canon.

Even Star Trek Online content is Paramount IP. The vfx team were able to directly convert renders of STO ships for Picard.

I bought it in hardcover and was deeply disappointed.

See my comments above.

There has been no justification for why the IP holders at Paramount insisted that the most crew of the Voyager be miserable once they returned to Earth, but it’s an acknowledged fact at this point.

I found the Voyager books when they return to the Alpha Quadrant very frustrating and disappointing. I DNFd the second one.

It seems like the tie-in auto Christie Golden was required (by the IP holder) to break the Voyager crew up and make them experience a great deal of unhappiness.

In the main series of post Voyager 24th century relaunch timeline novels post Nemesis, longstanding author Peter David was obliged to kill Katherine Janeway off in one of the crossover events!

That said, I did really enjoy Kirsten Beyer’s Full Circle Voyager novels. Beyer was eventually given permission to get the Voyager crew back together for a new exploratory mission to the Delta Quadrant with a group of slipstream ships.

Vanguard is darker even than DS9, so not everyone’s taste.

What it does have is not only Starfleet on-station but also 4 ships that are based there from a scout explorer to a Constitution class. It’s a lot of characters. Plus Tholians and Klingons. The mystery takes a bit to come together but it’s excellent.

The Enterprise and her crew show up occasionally but aren’t the primary characters. There is one Vanguard novel recently add that is Enterprise-focused and is one of the best books since Destiny.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Directors, actors and art directors seem to be very happy to tread the ground of adaptations.

What we really have is some writers that want to tell their own Star Trek stories but aren’t doing a good job of serialization and studio executives who think that rehashing existing stories and characters will buy success.

And yes we have egos like Patrick Stewart’s holding his character hostage to his own reinterpretation of his character to be a reflection of himself.

But as we have seen with the character of Jim Kirk, there can be other actors to carry on the legacy.

That’s not really the point though.

While Slow Horses, Reached or Silo had their print audiences, they are not adapted solely because they are reaching enormous audiences as books. They have become successful shows because someone made the case for adaptation to the studios.

Star Trek has been struggling to make serialized live action shows successfully. Why not go with what works and adapt that?

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Tie-in writers are writers for hire.

They don’t own any of the IP for their creations. All the IP is owned by Paramount.

Star Trek television has directly taken concepts from Treklit for Discovery and Picard without any credit whatsoever to the print authors who created them.

Screenwriters who created guest characters like Locarno are owed some credit and residuals but these are very modest.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

There was a good recent thread on this. Much depends on your own preferences.

I posted the image of the first book of the TOS era series Vanguard because I think it would be excellent to adapt to television. It’s about Starbase 47 serving Starfleet in a region of Federation expansion and colonization. It’s somewhat dark and there’s a mystery at the core. Tholians get extensive treatment which is rare.

If you’re looking for the Alpha and Omega of the Borg, the Destiny trilogy is excellent. It’s basically the best Borg content out there.

If you’re into time travel, Christopher L. Bennett has a series of books about the Bureau of Temporal Investigations.

There was also a great anthology of novellas focused on the Starfleet Corps of Engineers.

There are numerous great standalones too.

 

Amid some speculation about the questionable neutrality of major Hollywood media sources, owned by AMPTP members, CNN reports from “a source familiar” that WGA has been sent a ‘best & final’ offer.

So, stay tuned for the WGA leadership’s assessment.

 

Missed this report from earlier in the week…Paramount+ will be joining major streamer J:COM with a launch date for Japan of December 1, 2023.

For the many fans who’ve been waiting for a legal way to get new Trek in Japan, this is hopefully great news.

 

Many WGA veterans urged caution at getting hopes too high for what may come out of the AMPTP negotiating room later today, after a third day of talks between labor and management that involved four CEOs.

Notably, Paramount Global’s Bob Baklish is not among the CEO’s sitting in.

 

This ScienceOf.org interview with Professor of Genetics/Evolution (& Star Trek biological science advisor) Mohammed Noor on the biology, especially the r-selection reproduction, of the Gorn in SNW is marvellous.

Just the kind of uncomfortable but great biological thinking I was hoping we’d get into here at Daystrom Institute.

e.g. Can we think of the Gorn in viral terms?

Treating Gorn like this, each infected person could infect four more people, so the R0 for Gorn would be 4. Not wildly big, but large enough to do the job. Of course, the hatchlings would also be going after one another, so the analogy’s not perfect.

But if you want to think of the Gorn as intelligent, viral space dinosaurs, that does get the idea across.

 

It seems that with long hiatuses in new onscreen Trek ahead, genre coverage is starting to profile Trek novels again.

This set of ten weird but readable books isn’t necessarily the trippiest, but it does put the first of the Shatnerverse books at the top.

(Perhaps @ValueSubtracted@startrek.website there’s yet hope for Shatner’s wild imaginings to make it into S&S monthly Star Trek ebook deals promotional rotation.)

 

Bleeding Cool previews behind the scenes commentary from Hageman Brothers from prerelease of DVD-BlueRay bonus content.

CBS Entertainment is keeping the profile up on Prodigy merchandising. A bright spot amidst Paramount’s erasure of Prodigy in Star Trek Day content.

 

/ Film is continuing to report and opine on key points in the oral history book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams," edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross.

For those of us who haven’t (yet) invested in the book, these extracts and reflections can prompt some interesting discussion.

In this case, it sounds like Nimoy’s hesitation led to a much less action-oriented integration of Spock’s presence. An interesting thought experiment.

Also, it sounds like tapping nostalgia and interlinking shows has been a constant pressure from senior executives at the IP holder. It’s well known that Roddenberry resisted close callbacks to TOS, and was determined for TNG to stand on its own in its own era. Even five seasons into TNG, Paramount senior executives though still weren’t convinced it didn’t need a TOS-connection boost.

Considering the amount of callback mining and IP nostalgia mining in the current era shows, it seems as though Kurtzman’s got a hard road to convince Paramount to give new characters and eras a chance to stand on their own.

 

This was included in the Star Trek Day content, but released separately a couple of days ago.

It’s nice to see Discovery getting a lot of love in this. It also really shows how great so many of Discovery’s vfx heavy scenes have been.

 

Leaving aside bias towards the American market and critics, this latest criticism of Rotten Tomatoes influence comes from this September 6th piece from Vulture. The report provides new evidence of PR firms paying critics and persuading them to keep negative reviews off of Rotten Tomatoes tracking.

The Bunker 15 employee replied that of course journalists are free to write whatever they like but that “super nice ones (and there are more critics like this than I expected)” often agreed not to publish bad reviews on their usual websites but to instead quarantine them on “a smaller blog that RT never sees. I think it’s a very cool thing to do.” If done right, the trick would help ensure that Rotten Tomatoes logged positive reviews but not negative ones.

Collider has its own overview and retrospective on previous examples of corruption in reviewing, headlined “Rotten Tomatoes has always been mouldy at its core.’ It notes the inherent vulnerability of RT as it is owned by NBC Universal and Warner Brothers. Collider summarizes the recent criticism and analysis of RT as follows.

THE BIG PICTURE

Rotten Tomatoes' binary system oversimplifies complex works of art and diminishes the role of nuanced film critics.

The recent controversy surrounding Rotten Tomatoes reveals the site's susceptibility to manipulation by PR companies.

The dominance of Rotten Tomatoes in film discourse has led to a diminished appreciation for the human element and individuality in film criticism.

 

Because it’s the weekend and Star Trek’s new Moopsy is possibly the most frighteningly inspired adaptation/extrapolation of Pokémons to hit the screen.

 

It appears that this is a promotional feature in Smithsonian Magazine for a a new book Reality Ahead of Schedule: how science fiction inspires science fact.

This seems a good fit for Daystrom Institute, but happy to relocate if it’s a better fit for another community.

 

Earlier this week Disney announced (whinged) that it expected a $ 300 million revenue loss attributable to the strike.

Today, The Hollywood Reporter says sources are reporting cost-cutting at Warner Brothers Television Group.

the studio has suspended a number of overall deals for its top creatives including J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot (Duster), Greg Berlanti (Superman & Lois), Chuck Lorre (Bob Hearts Abishola), Bill Lawrence (Shrinking), John Wells (Maid), Mindy Kaling (Sex Lives of College Girls). Sources say Lorre’s multiyear pact with his decades-long studio was quietly suspended in May, a week into the strike, with Wells’ deal a month later.

Deadline has a similar report but interprets the news as more likely ‘suspend and extend’ arrangements.

One has to wonder why the major content producers are continuing side with Netflix, Amazon and Apple which are primarily streamers.

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