On canon and 'lazy writing'
By sb2004

First, while the term canon has been in use for many years, it was Trek fans that began to use it with regards to the continuity of a pop culture franchise. Before that it was used to describe a set of works - Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, etc. - but Trek fans put a Biblical context behind the term. (Don't believe in the Biblical comparison? Check out how many posts here and at TrekBBS and elsewhere made reference to Enterprise being sacrilgious and in the Star Trek Chronology there's reference to certain storylines being considered apocryphal).

The comment accusing the prequel writers of "lazy writing, not wanting to do the research" is quite offensive. First off, the canon of Star Trek has become so damn top-heavy and convoluted that in my opinion it is no longer possible to write an original storyline that doesn't in some way violate "canon" -- at least not a storyline that the general public will give a damn about enough to pay their $13 to buy a movie ticket. So by doing a prequel they're avoiding coming up with something that may violate 40 years of continuity (at least in terms of TV and movies). Of course as the writers of Enterprise discovered to their peril, being a prequel doesn't mean you won't get bitch-slapped by the fans anyway.

But the Trek XI writers are correct - nowhere in the "official canon" as set by Paramount, meaning the movies and TV shows, has it ever been established how the original crew met. Vonda McIntyre wrote a (very poor) novel giving her take, but it doesn't count. Nor does Gold Key Comics' take. I think Marvel did one too. And anything else that comes up is just fanon, which is an even more insidious cousin of canon because it's all suppositions and speculation that have morphed into fact by some fans. Prime example: that Spock was the first Vulcan to serve in Starfleet. When the issue of T'Pol arose several fans over at TrekBBS watched the entire run of TOS and the movies and found no such reference anywhere. Which means it was a piece of fanon that had either evolved out of a book reference or a comic, or just from supposition and rumor.

Another piece of fanon that keeps kicking around is the issue of whether Uhura has a first name. Roddenberry said she didn't, because her name alone was supposed to mean Freedom. A few years later the fanzine Trek suggested Penda as her first name. And then some of the novels started calling her Nyota which got picked up by some of the fansites. Will Trek XI address this? Who knows.

And then of course there's the Robert April issue, but that's a whole other kettle of fish...

Al