Life, Writing, Weirdness

James Blish and J.A. Lawrence (although Lawrence’s participation wasn’t well known at the time and it was Blish who got cover credit) adapted the original teleplays for Star Trek into short stories. The original teleplays, as in before they were produced, edited, or even filmed. And they’re fun, if just slightly different and a little on the short side for each episode.

They’re also protected by copyright under Canadian copyright law until the pass into public domain in 2046 (it should have been 2026, but the corporate thumb was on the scale again in 2022). Actually, the 2046 date is a bit fuzzy as Lawrence is still alive, so it may depend on how things are legally registered for each book.

If it’s 2046, though, this is fine, more or less. But note I say Canadian copyright law, which isn’t quite as ridiculous as American. Although I personally think 75 years post-mortem is too high (then becoming PD on January 1^st the following year), which is the Canadian limit, I believe 95 years (the American version) is obscene.

That said, there’s nothing stopping anyone from writing in a universe they love but didn’t create (local laws are likely to stop that person from profiting directly from it, though). If that thing isn’t in the public domain yet, the writing is called fanfiction. And fan fiction can be fun. I’ve written some of the Star Trek variety and I’ve dabbled a bit in the 1979-1981 Buck Rogers universe, although no one’s seen any of that yet.

Back to the point, because there’s at least one. Under Canadian law, the television episodes (which during the first season at least, tended to air in certain major Canadian markets two days before in the US, so the very first broadcast episode was actually on 06 September 1966—that doesn’t actually affect the Public Domain date, I just wanted to point it out) will start to enter the Public Domain on 01 January 2042, twenty years sooner than in the US.

Assuming civilization hasn’t completely collapsed by then, of course, I’ll be able to release my own adaptations of the episodes, at least in Canada (and in jurisdictions that follow the rule of the shorter term). Not the teleplays, as per Blish and Lawrence, but the episodes themselves. Take the dialogue, fill in the bits between by watching the episodes, and voila, adaptations.

And because they’ll be PD, I’d be able to make tiny tweaks and adjustments to satisfy my own head canon. Technically, I’d be able to do whatever I want to the stories, adding scenes and adjusting lines to make original Star Trek everything I see it to be. There were a few moments here and there that shouldn’t have hit well in the 1960s, never mind in the decades that followed.

The original Blish/Lawrence adaptations took 4-5,000-word scripts and produced 5-6,000-word short stories. (I came to this number with some back-of-the-envelope level math: rough average page count per story in the published volumes multiplied by rough average word count per typed page.) Teleplays of the era apparently tended to be a bit shorter than the episodes that resulted, and the adaptations tended to condense things so that you got the story in its most streamlined form with a minimum of background and character development. That’s not how I work, and it’s certainly not how I’d work for Star Trek. I know from converting some of my own work that was originally envisioned as an audio drama that going from script to prose usually results in something that’s two to two-and-a-half times the word count of the script. Which means I’d likely be producing 10-12,000-word novelettes to be faithful to the original episodes.

And I would be faithful in the essentials, but don’t forget those little tweaks I mentioned. Things like Kirk mentally noting that Gary got his middle initial wrong on the tombstone, or Spock’s last line in “The Enemy Within” actually being entirely in Rand’s head while because there’s some PTSD coming out of the assault she survived from the “evil” Kirk, just to pick a couple of small items from the batch of stories that would release first if I were to do a set of adaptations of my own.

Then there would be the added benefit of adding to the celebration of 75 years of Star Trek since, based on what they’re doing for the 60^th anniversary and the nothing they did for the 50^th, I’m not expecting Paramount to do much for the intellectual property that has, essentially, given the corporation everything that it is.

So, I could do it. Over the next ten years or fifteen, I could adapt the original series and then write my own stories, setting things up to release on the relevant Public Domain Day. Then I could build my own stories that take place in the same time period, making use of each new batch of canon as it gets released on January 1^st for the three years that follow.

But will I? That’s a whole different question.

Especially since I think there are better uses for Public Domain properties. Or, more to the point, better Public Domain properties to be considered in this way.

There are plenty of characters and settings genuinely loved by people, but maybe only by a few people so they didn’t find wide acclaim, things that have essentially been forgotten by humanity at large. A lot of characters and settings deserve a revival or a chance at the recognition they should have had but that circumstances came together to deny. Even some earlier work that was once very popular is almost gone from public memory, and here I’m thinking of things like Smith’s Lensman series or Burrough’s Venus quintet, both of which I read repeatedly in the early 1980s, could be welcomed back into the spotlight to find a new audience.

And then there’s the critically important lesson that major film and television makers seemed to have almost forgotten. We need to be told new stories. It’s not sufficient just to keep repackaging things we’ve already shown that we like. Part of the problem there is that when film and television creators do try to bring new stories to the public, the new stories they’re bringing are filled with tropes and ideas that are old in printed media. The movie crowd may not have seen them, but the bibliophiles are often less impressed, and there’s a lot of crossover between the two audiences for.

Which diverges a bit from the point.

Copyright law is corporately driven and whether we’re talking about 70 or 95 years after the death of the creator before work becomes public domain, it’s kind of a ridiculous number that’s designed to let corporations continue to profit from creative work long after they deserve to. Under the American version of copyright, a traditional publisher I choose to go with will get to keep making money from my work, until the great-grandchildren I won’t have for several decades are very old, assuming it would keep selling. And if it doesn’t keep selling, it just sits in cold storage until the copyright expires. Who knows how much out of print stuff is actually locked in a trunk or a vault somewhere?

Hence fan fiction. It’s a wonderful outlet to tell stories you wish had been told with your favourite characters. Fan fiction when you’re using public domain property is still fan fiction, you’re just not allowed to charge for it. And there’s nothing wrong with it at all, either way. Write what you love. Create what you love. Consume what you love.

Just be okay that other people may love different stuff and you may be making greedy corporate types irritable. I’m personally good with both of those things.

Be well, everyone.