Canon?

[Cheryl]

So, I have read that since Roddenberry wrote The Motion Picture, that's canon. But is there a way to find out what other books, especially early ones, are canon? Doing research on a case-by-case basis is both time-consuming and subject to contradictory information.

Particularly w/ Prometheus Design, the authors wrote it after The Motion Picture, and referred to a lot of the original TV shows, and clearly wanted their book to establish some canonical concepts. For example Vulcan Command Mode... but that concept (and others) don't seem familiar to me, as if they didn't make it into the "bible"....

Or, am I wrong to equate 'canon' and 'bible' and 'writer's reference guidelines' - ?

[Brandon]

To save you some time, none of the books are canon. The creators of the shows and movies may take inspiration from them occasionally, but they are not beholden to them in any way.

Writers of the tie-in books and comics are required to stay consistent with what the TV series and movies have established.

A series "bible" is information for how the creators of the show intend for its characters and settings to be, and it is shared with the various departments for pre-production and production. As the show actually gets made, vast changes to those original concepts and ideas may occur.

[Jason]

Basically, if it appears on screen it's Canon. Certain "deleted scenes" make into the film novelisations, such as the young cadet Peter Preston being Scotty's nephew in The Wrath of Khan, but it's not canon if it's not on screen.
(The Motion Picture novel was ghost written by Alan Dean Foster, who also ghost wrote Star Wars for George Lucas.)

A lot of the very early ST novels had the quirk of having footnotes linking them to episodes, and other novels.

The authors of the Promethus design were gate keepers of early fan writing, and the worst writers I've ever read - and I've read a lot of books. At least TPD was under the new publisher Pocket Books that took on the licence at the time of the Motion Picture, and they had to tone down the subtext of gay S&M torture and rape in their seventies Bantam novels.
I've heard that the fan fiction they wrote before being officially published was much more explicit.
Being a completist, I picked up a battered copy of one of their Bantam short story collections a few weeks ago at a charity book sale. I'm almost afraid to open it!

[Cheryl]

Wow. Ok then this is all very useful and enlightening information. I would not have guessed. I will share it with my brother, too. Thank you both so very much!!

[Jason]

I wouldn't get too worried about canon - I've read a few hundred of the Trek novels, and perhaps the best was The Final Reflection, a fairly early entry in the Eighties run, and almost everything about it is contradicted by later canon.