"I gave Mr. Sulu a first name."

TV With Doctor Who's relatively open door policy in regards to mythology, it's easy for us fans of the best franchise to forget how restrictive it is in other areas. At some point in the late eighties, Gene Roddenbury decided that only the live action Star Trek material was considered "canon" (and the flashback sequences about Spock's childhood in the Animated episode Yesteryear) which rather left the authors of the spin-off fiction rather rudderless.

But it wasn't always so. Star Trek was a franchise fiction pioneer and one of the first examples produced by licensee Pocket Books was The Entropy Effect by Nebula and Hugo award winning author Vonda M McIntyre. At this earlier stage, in general, anything went and when for story reasons, McIntyre needed to give Sulu a christian name (which hadn't already been established in the tv series). So she did:

"... I couldn't figure out how to write a love scene where the protagonists called each other by their surnames. So I gave Mr. Sulu a first name, "Hikaru," which is from The Tale of Genji. I was blissfully unaware of the glitch till long after the fact; someone at Paramount objected to the idea of the character's having a given name, for reasons unclear to me. David had the good idea of asking Gene Roddenberry and George Takei their opinion, and both of them said "Go for it" or words to that effect. And so Mr. Sulu has a first name."

McIntyre would go on to give Saavik and David Marcus a health sex life in the Star Trek movie adaptations. Where did I leave my copy of Star Trek IV?