Now I’ve been doing a fanfiction series, as you’ve probably noticed. What are the odds that my fanfic is going to be regarded as anything but non-canon junk that’s part of the ocean of similar work the internet is drowning in--at least as far as the establishment is concerned? If you’ve been reading it, you probably don’t care. You’ve also probably noticed that it’s better than junk. So it comes as no small disappointment to me that it won’t make waves in the canon universes of Star Trek or Marvel Comics.
But wait a minute!
I’ve found a way to--eventually--cross my universe over with Star Trek. It’s not going to be 100% canon, but come on…you can’t exactly argue with it either. In this treatise I’m going to share the ways in which authors of non-canon materials and fanfiction can make their work relevant by giving it enough illusions of canonicity that it’s indistinguishable from canon. There are some works I read and I treat them as canon because they might as well be unofficial canon. Here are some of the tricks.
It should be noted that, for a while, there was a Babylon 5 comic book. It was being released during the series, most of which was written by its creator, J. Michael Straczynski. JMS wrote the very first issue of the comic book, so you’d better believe it was totally canon. However, obviously he couldn’t alienate the viewers who don’t read comic books, therefore he had to keep it looking non-canon. How do you reconcile something like that? It’s actually very interesting to a chronology freak like myself to look at it and say “hey, so this is pretty cool--more stories to read and watch in order so that I can get a better picture of the fictional universe and how one event leads to another…” Not to mention clearly there were stories JMS wanted to tell that could be told better in a comic book.
Okay, so what he did for the first issue was to focus on Sinclair after he left to be the ambassador to the Minbari. The actor wasn’t going to be featured in the show anymore. He was fair game--and all the stories were of JMS’ design. So you stick them in where they belong in chronological order, enjoy every single story associated with the series that ever came out, and suddenly you’ve got a fuller picture of the universe you’re dealing with than you would have had by just sticking with the “relevant” stuff. And, although I don’t recall any (and I wouldn’t--I only have issue #1 of the comic so far!), there might have been offhand references to things that happened in the comic, which only serve to make it that much cooler. Things that wouldn’t make a TV audience go “Uh, okay, so like…did I miss something…?” But they’re things which certainly stand out to someone who read the comic. Stuff like Ivanova saying to Sheridan “Oh, like that ship that blew up last week?” And both of them know what she’s talking about, but to a common TV audience, it’s just one of a thousand similar incidents that have probably happened that didn’t affect the main characters or plot directly.
Alright. We all know that’s not the primary thing I’m here to discuss, but it gets our feet wet for the juicy stuff!
Now, the example story I’m going to use here is Star Trek/X-Men which, while a lame idea to some, corny to others, is ideal and might as well be considered canon for how epic it was--because Star Trek never freaking crosses over with ANYTHING and that’s just not cool. For all the Trek fiction out there, Star Trek should have a ton of crossovers. But, like Star Wars, they seem to stubbornly oppose stuff like that. Well, screw ‘em. Star Trek/X-Men was pretty big. We’ll be looking at it from the point of view of Star Trek.
One very big, important tool that Star Trek/X-Men used is that it was self-referential. In other words, there were three installments in total, and each of them happened at different times in Star Trek’s continuity. First they crossed over into the Original Series’ timeline and met Captain Kirk & co. and it was a pretty memorable little adventure in which they fought an amalgam of Proteus and Gary Mitchell. They had been in space at the behest of the Shi’ar Empire and, in fact, arrived along with a Shi’ar vessel. They went back the way they came…
…and then, right after Star Trek: First Contact, as the Enterprise was returning to its own time--100+ years after Kirk met the X-Men during the last couple years of his five-year mission--they got sidetracked by an anomaly and ended up in the X-Men’s universe! Some time has passed for the X-Men, so that now there’s a slightly different team down on the planet, but not nearly as much time as has passed in the Star Trek universe. At any rate, Wolverine and Storm remember meeting Kirk’s crew, though Picard and crew admittedly don’t seem to remember ever reading about the X-Men. Hey--Kirk did a LOT. Nobody living in Picard’s time would be able to remember every historical encounter of Kirk’s. At any rate, they go through time trying to fix holes in the timestream, only to find out that they’re just making things worse, and then they find out that Kang the Conqueror set them up, so they take the fight to him, along with the help of Wesley Crusher and The Traveler! Then the X-Men are returned home…
…only to find themselves getting hijacked back to the Star Trek universe for the third installment of this particular series, and the only novel-based installment. They come back roughly a year from their last encounter, during the height of the Dominion War. They arrive on Starbase 88 and the Enterprise is called in to come get them when they mention that they know Picard. Picard picks them up after receiving Worf from the Defiant for a summit with the Klingons concerning the war. They end up getting sidetracked to help the planet Xhaldia deal with--guess what? A mutant problem! Coincidence? Well, not entirely. It turns out Q had a hand in bringing the X-Men there right on time. This ties a lot of content together and makes the X-Men recurring Star Trek characters over a very long span of time, even if only Wolverine and Storm appeared in all three crossovers. The X-Men’s timeline, story, etc. recurs and impacts Star Trek…although a casual viewer would never have noticed. But each self-referential story lends credence to the last one and to the fact that there is a continuity present here.
Next tool of the trade? Take an event that clearly happened, or at least that probably happened, or make one up and say “it only happened once--and this is how it went down! You won’t get the story anywhere else!”
Alright. The meeting with the Klingons was something, but it’s not what I’m talking about. Nope. Something more important. Now, the Defiant hauled Worf out to rendevouz with the Enterprise and beam him over. Because, you know, both ships are really freaking busy with the war happening and all that fun stuff. Worf beams over and is treated to a surprise party by the Enterprise crew, because he doesn’t see too much of them since he’s been on the station, right? This is probably the first time he’s seen them since, guess when? First Contact! Anyway, this is also where he talks about his marriage to Jadzia Dax. As those who are familiar with Star Trek know, she was dead by the time Insurrection came out. We don’t know when or if he ever talked to Picard and the rest of his former crewmates about his marriage, since they didn’t get to come to the wedding, unless we’ve read this book and take it as canon. They give him a bit of a ribbing about it and move on, but hey, no other books or comics seem to cover this little bit of material, so if it only happened once and no one ever tried to depict it outside of “Planet X”, that book is the closest thing we have to an authority on the subject! This is similar to what the “Day of Honor” series did. The Day of Honor was made canon by a Voyager episode. It comes once a year for Klingons, and they celebrate with stuff like battle and bloodshed and all that awesome stuff. Okay, so why did we never see Worf celebrating the Day of Honor? Well, there are books that cover that. At least once, we get to see him celebrating it on the Enterprise, and another book shows us what he did on DS9 one year. Clearly, he was somewhere. None of the episode ever explicitly state that it’s the Day of Honor, so we can totally pretend it was canon. It’s like if the writers of Star Trek were actually brave enough to include Christians in their stories…we could ask questions like “What did Captain Sisko get his father for Christmas” and then someone could write the story about his pop, on Earth, opening his gift. Alas…
The third tool is to take places and people who will never, ever be shown on-screen or in real, official canon material. Show them, talk about them, even kill them if you’re confident they’ll never be discussed within solid, official canon stories. Tell us where they were at a particular time, during a particular event. What was going on? What were they doing?
“Planet X” takes us to Starbase 88, a place off the beaten path and certainly out of range of the Dominion War, and that is where the X-Men pretty much randomly appear. It’s on the Enterprise’s route, so they can easily stop by and pick them up. Now, we know there are a lot of Starbases in Starfleet. If we’ve ever heard a number higher than 88, we know there’s a “Starbase 88” out there somewhere, just like there has to be a Deep Space 8. So, now we know some of what Starbase 88 was up to during the Dominion War. Does it help us understand how they affected the outcome of the war? Because of cause and effect and the ripple effect, we know they must have affected it in some way. Yeah, I guess we’ve got some idea now!
And who was in charge of the Starbase? None other than…Captain Picard’s old tactics instructor from the academy?! Well now we have the answer to the question that nobody was asking. “So what’s Picard’s old tactics instructor been up to? What did he do during the Dominion War?” Yeah, no one really cares, do they? But nonetheless, it hasn’t been addressed anywhere else, so it was addressed in this book. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense, though. Why would a man who used to TEACH Starfleet cadets to FIGHT be languishing behind a DESK during a WAR? Alright, well even though common sense contradicts it, canon continuity does not. Therefore, Admiral Kashiwada was commanding Starbase 88 during the Dominion War. I just wonder if his name was a play on words to describe what Michael Jan Friedman received for writing a Star Trek/X-Men crossover--a wad of cash!
So there you have it. The Star Trek/X-Men trilogy is so close to canon that it might as well be. And the whole New Frontier series uses these tools to great effect as well, so I recommend it. Not to mention it crosses over with other things, like the cross-series Double Helix storyline and the DS9 relaunch. All of these books are self-referential at the very least, which is absolutely excellent. Can I recommend them? Hell yes. And do I think stories should be judged by whether or not they are “officially” considered canon. No freaking way!
Before I forget it, there’s one final tool I’d like to talk about briefly. Not used in Star Trek/X-Men, it is nonetheless an effective and excellent tool. Gumping. Yes. You know what it is, and I’m pretty sure we all know what it is. DS9 did it with “Trials and Tribble-ations”, even though that story is official canon anyway. The DS9 crew walk around on the Enterprise during an Original Series episode and don’t change anything major, even though they’ve got a pretty cool little adventure of their own happening all around Kirk and his crew, who are none the wiser. Good thing the Defiant can cloak!
Gumping was also used in comic books. Deadpool is also…well, he’s technically canon, although sometimes he doesn’t seem like he’s any more canon than, say, Howard the Duck. But he went back in time along with Blind Al and was drawn into an old Amazing Spider-Man comic, where he holographically disguises himself as Peter Parker, and sends Peter on a wild goose chase to New Jersey while he masquerades as him, fooling around in the poor guy’s life, fighting Kraven in his place, as Deadpool--and discovering that his buddy Weasel went to the same high school as Peter! Now, was this adventure ever mentioned anywhere, ever? Did the timeline change at all? Nope! There was even a series coming out at the time called “Untold Tales of Spider-Man”, which told stories about Spidey’s early adventures, and covered stories leading up to that point, but it never addressed any changes to the timeline. Whatever. Cool way of making waves anyway.
So there are lots of things you can use to your advantage, lots of “excuses” you can use, and ways to enjoy fanfiction without feeling like it’s nothing but empty calories. Get out there, pick up more content and enjoy! And write!!
But wait a minute!
I’ve found a way to--eventually--cross my universe over with Star Trek. It’s not going to be 100% canon, but come on…you can’t exactly argue with it either. In this treatise I’m going to share the ways in which authors of non-canon materials and fanfiction can make their work relevant by giving it enough illusions of canonicity that it’s indistinguishable from canon. There are some works I read and I treat them as canon because they might as well be unofficial canon. Here are some of the tricks.
It should be noted that, for a while, there was a Babylon 5 comic book. It was being released during the series, most of which was written by its creator, J. Michael Straczynski. JMS wrote the very first issue of the comic book, so you’d better believe it was totally canon. However, obviously he couldn’t alienate the viewers who don’t read comic books, therefore he had to keep it looking non-canon. How do you reconcile something like that? It’s actually very interesting to a chronology freak like myself to look at it and say “hey, so this is pretty cool--more stories to read and watch in order so that I can get a better picture of the fictional universe and how one event leads to another…” Not to mention clearly there were stories JMS wanted to tell that could be told better in a comic book.
Okay, so what he did for the first issue was to focus on Sinclair after he left to be the ambassador to the Minbari. The actor wasn’t going to be featured in the show anymore. He was fair game--and all the stories were of JMS’ design. So you stick them in where they belong in chronological order, enjoy every single story associated with the series that ever came out, and suddenly you’ve got a fuller picture of the universe you’re dealing with than you would have had by just sticking with the “relevant” stuff. And, although I don’t recall any (and I wouldn’t--I only have issue #1 of the comic so far!), there might have been offhand references to things that happened in the comic, which only serve to make it that much cooler. Things that wouldn’t make a TV audience go “Uh, okay, so like…did I miss something…?” But they’re things which certainly stand out to someone who read the comic. Stuff like Ivanova saying to Sheridan “Oh, like that ship that blew up last week?” And both of them know what she’s talking about, but to a common TV audience, it’s just one of a thousand similar incidents that have probably happened that didn’t affect the main characters or plot directly.
Alright. We all know that’s not the primary thing I’m here to discuss, but it gets our feet wet for the juicy stuff!
Now, the example story I’m going to use here is Star Trek/X-Men which, while a lame idea to some, corny to others, is ideal and might as well be considered canon for how epic it was--because Star Trek never freaking crosses over with ANYTHING and that’s just not cool. For all the Trek fiction out there, Star Trek should have a ton of crossovers. But, like Star Wars, they seem to stubbornly oppose stuff like that. Well, screw ‘em. Star Trek/X-Men was pretty big. We’ll be looking at it from the point of view of Star Trek.
One very big, important tool that Star Trek/X-Men used is that it was self-referential. In other words, there were three installments in total, and each of them happened at different times in Star Trek’s continuity. First they crossed over into the Original Series’ timeline and met Captain Kirk & co. and it was a pretty memorable little adventure in which they fought an amalgam of Proteus and Gary Mitchell. They had been in space at the behest of the Shi’ar Empire and, in fact, arrived along with a Shi’ar vessel. They went back the way they came…
…and then, right after Star Trek: First Contact, as the Enterprise was returning to its own time--100+ years after Kirk met the X-Men during the last couple years of his five-year mission--they got sidetracked by an anomaly and ended up in the X-Men’s universe! Some time has passed for the X-Men, so that now there’s a slightly different team down on the planet, but not nearly as much time as has passed in the Star Trek universe. At any rate, Wolverine and Storm remember meeting Kirk’s crew, though Picard and crew admittedly don’t seem to remember ever reading about the X-Men. Hey--Kirk did a LOT. Nobody living in Picard’s time would be able to remember every historical encounter of Kirk’s. At any rate, they go through time trying to fix holes in the timestream, only to find out that they’re just making things worse, and then they find out that Kang the Conqueror set them up, so they take the fight to him, along with the help of Wesley Crusher and The Traveler! Then the X-Men are returned home…
…only to find themselves getting hijacked back to the Star Trek universe for the third installment of this particular series, and the only novel-based installment. They come back roughly a year from their last encounter, during the height of the Dominion War. They arrive on Starbase 88 and the Enterprise is called in to come get them when they mention that they know Picard. Picard picks them up after receiving Worf from the Defiant for a summit with the Klingons concerning the war. They end up getting sidetracked to help the planet Xhaldia deal with--guess what? A mutant problem! Coincidence? Well, not entirely. It turns out Q had a hand in bringing the X-Men there right on time. This ties a lot of content together and makes the X-Men recurring Star Trek characters over a very long span of time, even if only Wolverine and Storm appeared in all three crossovers. The X-Men’s timeline, story, etc. recurs and impacts Star Trek…although a casual viewer would never have noticed. But each self-referential story lends credence to the last one and to the fact that there is a continuity present here.
Next tool of the trade? Take an event that clearly happened, or at least that probably happened, or make one up and say “it only happened once--and this is how it went down! You won’t get the story anywhere else!”
Alright. The meeting with the Klingons was something, but it’s not what I’m talking about. Nope. Something more important. Now, the Defiant hauled Worf out to rendevouz with the Enterprise and beam him over. Because, you know, both ships are really freaking busy with the war happening and all that fun stuff. Worf beams over and is treated to a surprise party by the Enterprise crew, because he doesn’t see too much of them since he’s been on the station, right? This is probably the first time he’s seen them since, guess when? First Contact! Anyway, this is also where he talks about his marriage to Jadzia Dax. As those who are familiar with Star Trek know, she was dead by the time Insurrection came out. We don’t know when or if he ever talked to Picard and the rest of his former crewmates about his marriage, since they didn’t get to come to the wedding, unless we’ve read this book and take it as canon. They give him a bit of a ribbing about it and move on, but hey, no other books or comics seem to cover this little bit of material, so if it only happened once and no one ever tried to depict it outside of “Planet X”, that book is the closest thing we have to an authority on the subject! This is similar to what the “Day of Honor” series did. The Day of Honor was made canon by a Voyager episode. It comes once a year for Klingons, and they celebrate with stuff like battle and bloodshed and all that awesome stuff. Okay, so why did we never see Worf celebrating the Day of Honor? Well, there are books that cover that. At least once, we get to see him celebrating it on the Enterprise, and another book shows us what he did on DS9 one year. Clearly, he was somewhere. None of the episode ever explicitly state that it’s the Day of Honor, so we can totally pretend it was canon. It’s like if the writers of Star Trek were actually brave enough to include Christians in their stories…we could ask questions like “What did Captain Sisko get his father for Christmas” and then someone could write the story about his pop, on Earth, opening his gift. Alas…
The third tool is to take places and people who will never, ever be shown on-screen or in real, official canon material. Show them, talk about them, even kill them if you’re confident they’ll never be discussed within solid, official canon stories. Tell us where they were at a particular time, during a particular event. What was going on? What were they doing?
“Planet X” takes us to Starbase 88, a place off the beaten path and certainly out of range of the Dominion War, and that is where the X-Men pretty much randomly appear. It’s on the Enterprise’s route, so they can easily stop by and pick them up. Now, we know there are a lot of Starbases in Starfleet. If we’ve ever heard a number higher than 88, we know there’s a “Starbase 88” out there somewhere, just like there has to be a Deep Space 8. So, now we know some of what Starbase 88 was up to during the Dominion War. Does it help us understand how they affected the outcome of the war? Because of cause and effect and the ripple effect, we know they must have affected it in some way. Yeah, I guess we’ve got some idea now!
And who was in charge of the Starbase? None other than…Captain Picard’s old tactics instructor from the academy?! Well now we have the answer to the question that nobody was asking. “So what’s Picard’s old tactics instructor been up to? What did he do during the Dominion War?” Yeah, no one really cares, do they? But nonetheless, it hasn’t been addressed anywhere else, so it was addressed in this book. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense, though. Why would a man who used to TEACH Starfleet cadets to FIGHT be languishing behind a DESK during a WAR? Alright, well even though common sense contradicts it, canon continuity does not. Therefore, Admiral Kashiwada was commanding Starbase 88 during the Dominion War. I just wonder if his name was a play on words to describe what Michael Jan Friedman received for writing a Star Trek/X-Men crossover--a wad of cash!
So there you have it. The Star Trek/X-Men trilogy is so close to canon that it might as well be. And the whole New Frontier series uses these tools to great effect as well, so I recommend it. Not to mention it crosses over with other things, like the cross-series Double Helix storyline and the DS9 relaunch. All of these books are self-referential at the very least, which is absolutely excellent. Can I recommend them? Hell yes. And do I think stories should be judged by whether or not they are “officially” considered canon. No freaking way!
Before I forget it, there’s one final tool I’d like to talk about briefly. Not used in Star Trek/X-Men, it is nonetheless an effective and excellent tool. Gumping. Yes. You know what it is, and I’m pretty sure we all know what it is. DS9 did it with “Trials and Tribble-ations”, even though that story is official canon anyway. The DS9 crew walk around on the Enterprise during an Original Series episode and don’t change anything major, even though they’ve got a pretty cool little adventure of their own happening all around Kirk and his crew, who are none the wiser. Good thing the Defiant can cloak!
Gumping was also used in comic books. Deadpool is also…well, he’s technically canon, although sometimes he doesn’t seem like he’s any more canon than, say, Howard the Duck. But he went back in time along with Blind Al and was drawn into an old Amazing Spider-Man comic, where he holographically disguises himself as Peter Parker, and sends Peter on a wild goose chase to New Jersey while he masquerades as him, fooling around in the poor guy’s life, fighting Kraven in his place, as Deadpool--and discovering that his buddy Weasel went to the same high school as Peter! Now, was this adventure ever mentioned anywhere, ever? Did the timeline change at all? Nope! There was even a series coming out at the time called “Untold Tales of Spider-Man”, which told stories about Spidey’s early adventures, and covered stories leading up to that point, but it never addressed any changes to the timeline. Whatever. Cool way of making waves anyway.
So there are lots of things you can use to your advantage, lots of “excuses” you can use, and ways to enjoy fanfiction without feeling like it’s nothing but empty calories. Get out there, pick up more content and enjoy! And write!!
