Treklit has some great offerings. The Relaunch universe books in particular developed coherent serialized storylines and a group of strong authors. There is also a deep library of standalone books from across all eras of the franchise.
By contrast, serialized Star Trek is struggling onscreen. Of the current era, only Prodigy has excelled in serialized storytelling.
So, why not look to the books? Not just to lift an idea like Control or the end of the Borg, but to actually tell a coherent narrative across a season or season?
On Netflix, Prime and Apple, it’s become established that successful streaming shows are often based on novels and novel series. Those streamers have come to understand that novelists, not scriptwriters, excel in laying out long form storytelling, and resources are often better put in having the screenwriters adapt than create from the whole cloth.
Reading a recent interview with Mick Herron, author of the critically acclaimed and popular Slow Horses on Apple, with a second show based on his other books launching this fall, I was struck by the interviewer’s assertion of this truism.
I thought about several of the non franchise shows I enjoy and how many of them are more or less faithful adaptations of books.
I was also struck by the thought that both Skydance and Paramount are quite capable of producing excellent book adaptations for Netflix and Apple. Murderbot is a very current example.
So, what’s holding back Star Trek from exploiting the Vanguard series or the Starfleet Core of Engineers books?
Why insist on giving showrunners resources to keep retelling franchise stories with legacy characters and tropes?
Why not exploit that IP that Paramount already owns by adapting the best of decades of TrekLit?
Here’s the cynical take. Studios make shows adapted from books not because they’re looking for good ideas, but because they’re looking for good investments. When a studio greenlights a show, they don’t know if they’ll make a return on that investment. But a book series comes with a pre-existing fanbase already disposed to watch whatever gets made. With Star Trek, that audience is trekkies. Adapting the books won’t make the show any more likely to succeed, so it’s probably not going to happen.
I want to get into Trek literature, what are some recommendations?
I really like The Borg, what are some good Borg based recommends?
I’m currently reading “Star Trek: Destiny” and the Borg are the big bad. Enjoying it so far (only about 1/3 into the first book of the trilogy).
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.
Related question based on the image for the original post… Is the Vanguard series good? I grew up reading my dad’s collection of TOS novels and I have always thought that era of Trek translated well to a novel format.
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.
I don’t really have a solid answer, and have only recently gone down the TrekLit rabbit hole, but I’d venture a couple of guesses:
- Many of them utilize existing characters, so that might be problematic given the age of the cast and/or their availability.
- I vaguely recall that existing characters for different series have to pay royalties to the writer who invented the character. I think this was the case for Nick Locarno and why Tom Paris is basically “We have Nick Locarno at home”
- Probably some other IP legalese mucking things up as it is wont to do
When I posted yesterday looking to get some book suggestions, many of them involved existing characters. I think the “The Fall” series is all original characters, so it would probably be a good candidate. There’s probably others, but I’m not familiar enough yet to name any more.
The actor age / availability problem is probably solvable if the series was animated, though.
Honestly it could be something as prohibitive as not having secured film and TV rights from the authors.
I can imagine that doing it after the fact is often quite expensive.
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.
Almost nobody making the shows has read them, absolutely nobody in executive positions has read them, and only a small fraction of the existing fan base that they are tapping into have read them.
Kristen Beyer, who works on many of the NuTrek shows has been a ST novel writer for some time. She did some of the post Voyager relaunch books.
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?
The art directors, actors, writers directors want to tread new ground and tell stories they want to tell, and to show their vision of progress…
Also, they want to keep going with the bullshit pegasus/pale moonlight/section 31/darker and edgier version of the optimisitic utopian tv show.
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.
Directors, actors and art directors seem to be very happy to tread the ground of adaptations.
very fair point.
