trek fiction recommendations?

[euphorik]

hey everybody -

i could use some recommendations. i haven't read a trek novel in years and years, but suddenly have the urge again.

my problem is, a lot of the trek literature that's come out over the past several years doesn't appeal to me, ie pointless follow-ups to episodes, and overcontinuity.

i am a fan of all non-abrams series, so TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT - any and all are OK with me. can somebody please recommend to me some novels that are preferably free-standing, non-serialized stories that don't feature characters from one series shoehorned into another? i don't mind a little internal continuity, but seems to me like that's really been overdone lately.

basically, what i would enjoy reading is a low-key story that sort of "sticks to its own era," ie if i am reading a TOS story, i'd prefer not to have curzon dax conspicuously shoehorned in there. basically, trek fiction that reads like a TV episode.

thanks in advance!!!

 

[Kilana2]

Garak´s "A stitch in Time" is quite stand-alone and essentially a Garak biography (DS9)

TOS: Cast No Shadow, featuring Valeris, Elias Vaughn (Litverse character). You get to know more about Valeris background. Granted, Vaughn is a DS9 character, but I would recommend it nonetheless.

TOS: Foul Deeds will rise by Greg Cox. Follows up on "The Conscious of the King", featuring Lenore Karidian.

It is difficult with TNG, DS9 and VOY, as they have their relaunch novels and cameos.

An old TNG novel I can recommend: The Death of Princes.

 

[Claudia]

Shocks of Adversity and Troublesome Minds are stand-alone TOS novels - gripping tales quite reminiscent of the old TOS-feeling.

 

[Enterpriserules]

TOS: Shadows on the Sun, Ex Machina, Prime Directive, From History's Shadow, The Weight of Worlds
The Enterprise relaunch books starting with The Good That Men Do
Department of Temporal Investigations series.
TNG: Immortal Coil
VOY: Kirsten Beyer's books
Also you might find inspiration on Literary Treks dedicated to the books and comics.

I do have to say the TNG, DS9, Titan, VOY novels that have the loose continuity are amazingly rewarding.

 

[Sto-Vo-Kory]

Shocks of Adversity and Troublesome Minds are stand-alone TOS novels - gripping tales quite reminiscent of the old TOS-feeling.

What Claudia wrote.

 

[Kilana2]

Shocks of Adversity and Troublesome Minds are stand-alone TOS novels - gripping tales quite reminiscent of the old TOS-feeling.

While these two novels are not my cup of tea, many TOS fans liked them.

Regarding to TOS I must add DRG III´s Allegiance in Exile with Sulu taking center stage.

Kirsten Beyer´s VOY novels are really must-haves.

 

[tomswift2002]

hey everybody -

i could use some recommendations. i haven't read a trek novel in years and years, but suddenly have the urge again.

my problem is, a lot of the trek literature that's come out over the past several years doesn't appeal to me, ie pointless follow-ups to episodes, and overcontinuity.

i am a fan of all non-abrams series, so TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT - any and all are OK with me. can somebody please recommend to me some novels that are preferably free-standing, non-serialized stories that don't feature characters from one series shoehorned into another? i don't mind a little internal continuity, but seems to me like that's really been overdone lately.

basically, what i would enjoy reading is a low-key story that sort of "sticks to its own era," ie if i am reading a TOS story, i'd prefer not to have curzon dax conspicuously shoehorned in there. basically, trek fiction that reads like a TV episode.

thanks in advance!!!

You should try Star Trek:Titan. It's spun-off from the last scene in "Star Trek: Nemesis" where it's revealed that Riker and Troi are heading to the USS Titan that Riker has just been given command of.

 

[Idran]

Titan isn't really anything like what they want. It's cross-franchise, with main TNG and VOY characters starring, and it's very serialized, not episodic at all.

 

[DS9forever]

DS9's The 34th Rule is great.

 

[Christopher]

Titan isn't really anything like what they want. It's cross-franchise, with main TNG and VOY characters starring, and it's very serialized, not episodic at all.

Huh? Speaking as someone who wrote two Titan novels, I have to wonder what gave you the impression that it's not episodic. Maybe things have changed recently -- I haven't quite caught up -- but at least while I was writing it, Titan was very much episodic, in the same way that TNG was episodic. That is, each installment told a complete and self-contained story about a different subject, but the events of one story were remembered in subsequent stories, and the characters' personalities and relationships were changed by those events. That's not serialization, it's just the absence of a reset button.

The first two novels, Taking Wing and The Red King by Andy Mangels and Mike Martin, formed a loose 2-parter with certain continuing threads, but they were also separate stories, with TW dealing with a Romulan crisis and TRK dealing with a new story in another galaxy altogether. Then I came along with Orion's Hounds and began an entirely new story of my own; indeed, since the previous two books were somewhat about wrapping up lingering threads from Nemesis, I intentionally approached OH as a "second pilot," the beginning of Titan's exploration mission proper, which could be accessible without having read the previous books.

And here's an illustration of how not serialized TTN was: In OH, I deliberately set up the Gum Nebula interior as a region that could potentially sustain multiple novels, introducing various regional powers that I thought might be picked up on by subsequent writers and developed more fully. And yet the very next book, Sword of Damocles by Geoffrey Thorne, pretty much left the Gum Nebula behind, jumping the narrative forward three months and moving the ship into a different region of space.

Then Destiny jumped things forward another eight months and told its own separate story set in yet another region of space. Then I returned for Over a Torrent Sea, which from a character standpoint was about exploring the aftermath of Destiny, but whose main plot was an entirely episodic, self-contained story. Then James Swallow did Synthesis, which was set only a few weeks after OaTS, but nonetheless told its own story about an entirely separate set of entities and issues.

And then Martin came back for Seize the Fire, which was published under the Typhon Pact banner and jumped the TTN narrative forward an entire year to tell a story unconnected to any previous TTN novel. That seemed to be the beginning of a new phase where TTN was following the lead of what was going on in the TNG and DS9 novels, and maybe that's what you're thinking of. But that's a change from the original conception of Titan. It was always intended to be a series of episodic, self-contained exploration stories that were independent of the other series. That's why it had so many different authors, and why we were left pretty much free to take the stories in whatever direction we wanted. I think that when I set up the Gum Nebula as a recurring environment, I was expecting something with more DS9-style interconnectedness than TTN actually had.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And if you liked Dulmur and Lucsly, you'll love the DTI books.

 

[Idran]

Titan isn't really anything like what they want. It's cross-franchise, with main TNG and VOY characters starring, and it's very serialized, not episodic at all.

Huh? Speaking as someone who wrote two Titan novels, I have to wonder what gave you the impression that it's not episodic. Maybe things have changed recently -- I haven't quite caught up -- but at least while I was writing it, Titan was very much episodic, in the same way that TNG was episodic. That is, each installment told a complete and self-contained story about a different subject, but the events of one story were remembered in subsequent stories, and the characters' personalities and relationships were changed by those events. That's not serialization, it's just the absence of a reset button.

The first two novels, Taking Wing and The Red King by Andy Mangels and Mike Martin, formed a loose 2-parter with certain continuing threads, but they were also separate stories, with TW dealing with a Romulan crisis and TRK dealing with a new story in another galaxy altogether. Then I came along with Orion's Hounds and began an entirely new story of my own; indeed, since the previous two books were somewhat about wrapping up lingering threads from Nemesis, I intentionally approached OH as a "second pilot," the beginning of Titan's exploration mission proper, which could be accessible without having read the previous books.

And here's an illustration of how not serialized TTN was: In OH, I deliberately set up the Gum Nebula interior as a region that could potentially sustain multiple novels, introducing various regional powers that I thought might be picked up on by subsequent writers and developed more fully. And yet the very next book, Sword of Damocles by Geoffrey Thorne, pretty much left the Gum Nebula behind, jumping the narrative forward three months and moving the ship into a different region of space.

Then Destiny jumped things forward another eight months and told its own separate story set in yet another region of space. Then I returned for Over a Torrent Sea, which from a character standpoint was about exploring the aftermath of Destiny, but whose main plot was an entirely episodic, self-contained story. Then James Swallow did Synthesis, which was set only a few weeks after OaTS, but nonetheless told its own story about an entirely separate set of entities and issues.

And then Martin came back for Seize the Fire, which was published under the Typhon Pact banner and jumped the TTN narrative forward an entire year to tell a story unconnected to any previous TTN novel. That seemed to be the beginning of a new phase where TTN was following the lead of what was going on in the TNG and DS9 novels, and maybe that's what you're thinking of. But that's a change from the original conception of Titan. It was always intended to be a series of episodic, self-contained exploration stories that were independent of the other series. That's why it had so many different authors, and why we were left pretty much free to take the stories in whatever direction we wanted. I think that when I set up the Gum Nebula as a recurring environment, I was expecting something with more DS9-style interconnectedness than TTN actually had.

That's fair (though I'm not sure it needed five paragraphs ); I guess we define episodic/serialized differently. Compared to any of the on-screen series besides maybe DS9 (and even it falls short to me), Titan had much heavier character development, and that made it feel more continuous than discrete to me. It's not purely about plot to me, but about having a through-line of any sort, whether that be plot or character or anything that provides a stronger impression of being an interval as opposed to a set.

 

[Christopher]

But that's not serialization, just continuity. People too often use the former to mean the latter. Serialization means a single ongoing plot spread across multiple installments. Like a soap opera, or like the way Charles Dickens novels were originally published. A succession of different plots is episodic, even if the characters and situations evolve from plot to plot.

Of course, the big mistake people always seem to make is treating "episodic" and "serial" as if they were mutually exclusive. The overwhelming majority of ongoing series have both episodic and serial elements in different proportions. That's certainly true of all the 24th-century Trek Lit series. But at least while I was writing it, Titan was designed to be the 24th-century series that was closest to the episodic end of the spectrum.

 

[Greg Cox]

Meanwhile, the TOS books are still pretty darn episodic, if that's what the OP is looking for.

 

[Idran]

But that's not serialization, just continuity. People too often use the former to mean the latter. Serialization means a single ongoing plot spread across multiple installments. Like a soap opera, or like the way Charles Dickens novels were originally published. A succession of different plots is episodic, even if the characters and situations evolve from plot to plot.

Of course, the big mistake people always seem to make is treating "episodic" and "serial" as if they were mutually exclusive. The overwhelming majority of ongoing series have both episodic and serial elements in different proportions. That's certainly true of all the 24th-century Trek Lit series. But at least while I was writing it, Titan was designed to be the 24th-century series that was closest to the episodic end of the spectrum.

Oh yeah, it's certainly more of a spectrum than two mutually exclusive states. And you make a good point about where the term originally came from, I suppose for me my connotation of the term came from what I'd consider the go-to examples of episodic television not holding much of either. Getting out of Star Trek, if you asked me to name off examples of episodic television, the first examples that come to mind for me would be things like I Love Lucy, Seinfeld, Law and Order. Things where, while there may be minor examples of character development or a departure from the status quo, without knowing the show extremely well, if you were given a random episode you couldn't tell where in the run it fell. But then again, taking the definition you present (since you're certainly the expert here between the two of us and it's only fair for me to do so) you've got shows like Bones or Castle which are certainly episodic but in which the characters do significantly evolve over time, where a first season episode is noticeably distinguishable from a most recent season episode.

Is it just that having strong character development in episodic television is a more recent development? Most of the examples I can think of are certainly on average newer than the examples I can think of with neither. It feels like there ought to be (and maybe there is) a term that distinguishes between episodic fiction with strong character development and fiction that has neither significant plot development nor character development from episode to episode, yet isn't anthological.

 

[Christopher]

Is it just that having strong character development in episodic television is a more recent development? Most of the examples I can think of are certainly on average newer than the examples I can think of with neither.

That depends on how you define "recent." It was certainly commonplace by the mid-80s when TNG came along -- there are probably people reading this who weren't even born yet at that point. As I've said, the model for Titan was TNG's episodic-with-growth format, which was fairly typical for its era.

It feels like there ought to be (and maybe there is) a term that distinguishes between episodic fiction with strong character development and fiction that has neither significant plot development nor character development from episode to episode, yet isn't anthological.

I don't think there needs to be a term for the latter, because it's pretty much a straw man if you're talking about anything more recent than the 1970s. Practically nobody has made shows like that for quite a long time. So it's really fundamentally in error to assume that the word "episodic" is meant to exclude character development and continuity. It simply refers to a structure in which each installment of a series contains a complete plot arc from beginning to end, as opposed to serialization, which refers to a structure in which a plot arc is told in segments across multiple episodes.

For instance, Babylon 5 is considered to be a pioneer in serialization, but in fact its structure was strongly episodic. It had a lot of continuity and growth from one episode to the next, but each discrete story arc was begun and ended within a single episode (unless it was a 2-parter), and the following episode told another story arc. One episode told plot A, the next told plot B, the next told plot C, and so on. They added up to a larger whole, but they were told one piece at a time, and whatever distinct event began in one episode was concluded by the end of that same episode. By contrast, in a fully serialized show like LOST, say, you'd get bits of plots A, B, and C all side-by-side within a single episode, and then the next would advance all the plots a bit more, and so on.

 

[Idran]

It feels like there ought to be (and maybe there is) a term that distinguishes between episodic fiction with strong character development and fiction that has neither significant plot development nor character development from episode to episode, yet isn't anthological.

I don't think there needs to be a term for the latter, because it's pretty much a straw man if you're talking about anything more recent than the 1970s.

Two of the examples I gave were from more recent than the 70s, Seinfeld and Law and Order. Outside the most recent season, Louie barely had continuity from episode to episode (purposefully so; CK gave no attention whatsoever to keeping continuity, he even had his ex-wife played by two actresses of different races because it didn't matter to the show). Curb Your Enthusiasm might be considered to qualify, another purposeful example (for similar reasons to Seinfeld, Larry David doesn't really care about character development in his comedy work), though it's kind of an odd duck in that it does have plot development in the sense of Larry's situation changing from season to season as events move forward, even if as characters he and his supporting cast are relatively static; it's the flipside of the usual way. (Actually, Curb's largely-improvisational nature might be another contributor? I'd think that character development would be more difficult in improv than in scripted television, even if slightly.)

 

[Sto-Vo-Kory]

I think Curb and Seinfeld both lack character development, but plot development would stretch across entire seasons for both shows.

Consider: George's employment woes (unemployment, new jobs, his position at the Yankees) would unfold over the course of multiple episodes or even seasons. His relationship with Susan, Elaine's relationship with Puddy, or Jerry and George pitching a show to NBC were all very serialized.

Curb had entire seasons devoted to a single storyline. The Seinfeld reunion, Larry on Broadway, pitching shows for Louis-Dreyfuss or Jason Alexander, etc. And while Larry stayed pretty static, his cohorts certainly changed. His wife left him in the most recent season, for example. That's a drastic change for any show's status quo.

***

As for the serial nature of Lost, I have to somewhat disagree. The island portions of the series were designed to be highly serialized, with threads traveling from episode to episode; but the flashbacks were largely complete stories, told from beginning to end in each episode, focusing on a different character. That is, until the third season, when the show's structure got wonky with flash-forwards, parallel narratives, and that old monkey-wrench, time travel.

So, there was an effort (sometimes minimal) to include a complete story in each episode of Lost, but often the weird island story arc would over-shadow a character's individual story in a given installment.

 

[Christopher]

^Sure, and that's the most common pattern for TV shows over the past quarter-century or more: a mix of episodic crisis-of-the-week plots and serialized character/mythology arcs going on at the same time. Which is why I find it so odd that people still try to talk about episodic and serial approaches as if a show could only be one or the other.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Hmm. I once saw an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I had none to curb.

B5 (and I'm pretty sure this was by design) started out very episodic, but as more and more pieces of the overall "Shadow War" arc fell into place, the overall arc became increasingly dominant, until by the final seasons, isolated episodes had all but vanished, and everything was invested in the Shadow War. Then again, JMS essentially intended B5 to be the longest miniseries ever produced.

(Speaking of which, kind of a pity we never got closure on Crusade. An abrupt "The Drakh Plague was cured, and Humanity and its allies lived happily ever after" is kind of unsatisfying.)

But yes, even sitcoms can have overall series arcs. Get Smart's 4th season started with a 9-episode arc that began with Max proposing to 99 in "The Impossible Mission," and marrying her in "With Love and Twitches." And even The Beverly Hillbillies had its multi-episode arcs, like the one in which Granny thinks Elly May's new boyfriend (a Naval Frogman) is a frog from the navel down, or the one in which Jethro does some utterly impractical alternate-energy conversions on the truck (like an electric conversion that has a maximum range of however long your longest extension cord is), or the one in which Granny thinks a grunion is an invader from the "Island of Grun." And of course, Mork and Mindy kind of jumped the shark when Jonathan Winters hatched from an egg as their son.