Peter David and the art of the tie-in novel

Novelist and comic book writer Peter David died this past weekend. His work had been a part of my life since I was in grade school and any eulogy seems inadequate at conveying the breadth of his work and the impact it had on thousands, if not millions of fans. In seeing other tributes, I've noted that alongside some obvious overlaps, every fan of Peter seemed to have their own distinct favorites among his giant body of work.

Having already championed his brilliant work on the DC comic YOUNG JUSTICE in this Bluesky thread, I want to take a few paragraphs and talk about how he helped bring respectability to a somewhat misunderstood and maligned area of writing - the tie-in novels.

Many of the most popular film and TV franchises have a series of novels set in their respective continuities. STAR TREK and STAR WARS almost certainly account for the largest of these, but over the years, plenty of novels have been set in the worlds of ALIEN, THE X-FILES, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, QUANTUM LEAP, UNDERWORLD, TERMINATOR, even TRANSFORMERS. For a long time these had a reputation as quickly churned out product intended to capitalize on the franchise's popularity. The impression I have is that it wasn't cool in writers' circles to say "I write BUFFY and STAR TREK novels." To a serious author, it sounded like the work of fan fiction.

Flashback to the early 90s, when the STAR TREK books were coming out at a pace of about one a month via Pocket Books and occupied multiple shelves of a bookcase at the local Waldenbooks. I had just gotten into STAR TREK and was becoming aware of these books. It was an era when the books were operating on a tighter set of guidelines from Roddenberry's office. Some of these handcuffs have passed into legend among fans, but the gist of it is, writers weren't allowed to write stories that made sweeping changes to the world or the characters.

This isn't unusual for licensed tie-ins for a simple reason - no matter how they market it, no matter what they tell you, THE BOOKS ARE NOT CANON. A novel can't reveal that Uhura is in a secret marriage because that contradicts what we know of her on-screen, and the on-screen canon viewed by millions will never be held hostage by the books that have about 1% of that audience. Strong writers can tell compelling stories within this but during a time when it was hard to get approval for anything that brushed near the lines, the books tended to stick to safe and soft premises. There were a lot of planet-of-the-week stories, middle of the road stuff that would have resembled "filler" eps of the TV show.

That changed for me when I visited the book store at some point in the Summer of 1991 to find a STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION novel called VENDETTA. Seeing Picard and Guinan flanking a Borg on the cover got my attention immediately.

A sequel to The Best of Both Worlds? This wasn't just another novel about the Enterprise running across a new alien species with strange beliefs. This was the kind of story the fans WANTED to see. And that was the kind of story Peter soon had a reputation for. In IMZADI, he told us the backstory of Riker and Troi's courtship. In Q-IN-LAW, he gave us a meeting between TNG's most popular recurring characters - the omnipotent Q and the irrepressible Lwaxana Troi. (Legend has it that Roddenberry's assistant denied approval for that novel and so Peter slipped a copy to Majel Barrett Roddenberry (i.e. both Mrs. Troi and Mrs. Roddenberry), who loved it so much she insisted it be published.

Those high concept premises led to his critics sometimes undervaluing him as a "fannish" writer. And yes, a number of the premises can sound like fan fiction to an uncharitable cynic, but Peter executed these stories at the highest level, while displaying a great love and understanding of the characters. He knew his continuity forwards and backwards too, using it to tie together unrelated pieces of the lore so deftly that it felt like those connections were always intended.

And he was funny. Few STAR TREK works have made me laugh as deeply as a Peter David work. And in his best moments, the humor all came from character, such as when an elderly Spock and McCoy are reunited in the TNG timeframe on the Enterprise-D and immediately resume their friendly bickering in THE MODALA IMPERATIVE. A more satisfying meeting of the generations than the TNG episode "Unification" (released just months later) was, Peter envisioned Spock and Data challenging each other to a chess match... with the boards existing only in their minds!

It was clear these books were never a "paycheck" job to Peter. They were a labor of love. His works were popular enough that he got to push some of the boundaries, and he had the good fortune to be a golden boy in the Trek office as many of the restrictions were relaxed and rescinded. 

By 1997, Pocket Books was publishing two new STAR TREK novels a month, spanning the 4 extant series. They were ready to try an experiment - a book-only STAR TREK series under the control of a single author. Naturally, they turned to one of their most popular novelists, Peter David, to conceive of this. The result was STAR TREK: NEW FRONTIER, set aboard a Federation starship assigned to a previously unrevealed region of space, with a new captain and several members of the crew who had been introduced in TNG episodes. The idea was to tell stories where everything didn't have to be reset at the end, where characters could change, die, get promoted and get replaced in ways that the other novels were prohibited from.

NEW FRONTIER ultimately accounts for the majority of Peter's TREK novels, 23 in all. It came of age as TNG, DS9, and VOYAGER were all winding down their onscreen journeys. With no new on-screen canon to restrict the authors, Pocket Books was free to commission novels set after those series and loosen most of the few remaining constraints on canon. This made NEW FRONTIER feel a little less special, but the benefit was the entire novel line felt fresh and a far cry from the "assembly line" it sometimes had been accused of being.

What I learned from Peter David's work (and the work of a number of others) is that these licensed product jobs are what you make of them. Good, even great work can be done in these universes, even with the most fanfiction-y of premises. None of these would be mistaken for the works of a hack, and they were a joy to reread many times over the years. He was an unabashed fan of the worlds he wrote in. He took them seriously and the characters equally seriously, even when plunging them into excessive flights of whimsy.

I can't believe there will never be another new Peter David Star Trek story. Farewell, Peter. You'll be missed.

Peter David on why writers are hard to entertain

I've long been a fan of writer Peter David, whose work spans Star Trek novels, many comic book franchises, episodes of several TV shows, including Babylon 5, Ben 10, Young Justice and Space Cases.  A regular feature on his blog is the reprinting of old columns of his, and more often than not, the archives feel incredibly timely, despite being 15 years old.

In this particular column, Peter responds to a reader who thinks he's too hard on the movies he occasionally dissects:

Is it possible that when you watch a movie for the second time on television, you are simply less obsessed with finding fault? Under such circumstances, you just might sit back, watch and enjoy. I suspect that you feel that you get a more entertaining column out of trashing a movie–something I’ve found disconcerting when it’s a movie I’ve seen and enjoyed. In fact, I can remember only one movie that you actually enjoyed although I believe you lamented its obvious failure at the box office.


Dare I suggest that you are overly critical of any piece of writing that is not your own?


I don’t think that a script needs to be technically perfect to be entertaining, an opinion you don’t seem to share; and I think it sad that you spend so much time fining fault that you can’t really let yourself enjoy any movie the first time you view it.

I don't often get emails like this, but now and then I've gotten similar reactions from critiques I've written.  As much as I understand where that reader is coming from, I usually find that point of view collapses under scrutiny.  Leave it to Peter David to come up with a better response than I could:


In point of fact, no one is harder to entertain than a writer. Why? Because, like a roomful of magicians watching a David Copperfield performance, we already know how the trick is done, or we’re busy trying to figure it out. Seeing a magician requires the audience to suspend disbelief.


“Look! The woman is floating in the air!” No, she’s not. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s impossible. People just can’t float unaided. But you marvel at the illusion. Same thing with telling a story, and the storyteller has to work that much hard to bamboozle a fellow writer, just as the magician does to snow his peers.


Meaning that if a writer producers a screenplay that can entertain me, I applaud his talent and eagerly look forward to what else he has to produce.


So when Michael says, “I think; it is sad that you spend so much time finding fault; you can’t really let yourself enjoy any movie the first time you view it,” I humbly submit that it is his interpretation… to say nothing of being a sweeping and wholly inaccurate conclusion.

Yes!  Precisely!  Why are readers (and writers) so critical?  Because we know all the tricks!  We know what makes that woman float and we can tell when the illusion is poorly disguised.  If someone took short-cuts in your line of work, I'm sure you'd spot it too.  If you sell furniture for a living, you'll spot sub-standard sofas and coffee tables a mile away.  A professional plumber might notice a hasty patch job, and so on, and so on.

So when a writer earns the respect of fellow writers, it means one thing - he or she is doing something very, very right.