How did you get into reading Trek novels?

[DimesDan]

I picked up Vendetta years ago in WHSmith Bath because I liked the cover. I read a few books over the years (including New Earth as the first in that series was free with the then Star Trek Monthly that I collected) but didn't really read many until The Millennium Trilogy and I've not really looked back since.

 

[RonG]

My first novel (much like Dimesdan's) is Vendetta.

I was starting junior high and had to write a book report. The used bookstore, which had carried the comics I had been collecting, one day had a copy of a Star Trek novel, and I had to have it (I was watching TNG and TOS for a couple of years by then).

Thing is, by that time only seasons 1-2 had been broadcast in Israel, and here was a novel that was a sequel to an episode I had yet to see (upon purchase, I thought it was a sequel to Q Who ). I loved the story (still have the original worn out copy), and it made me wait for the broadcast of The Best of Both Worlds and made me a TrekLit fan for life..

 

[Therin of Andor]

Everything converged upon me at once. I had managed to miss TOS in first run (and it didn't get a repeat in Sydney until about ten episodes to promote the arrival of colour TV in 1975). Even Saturday morning TAS was in b/w!

The Sydney premiere of TMP was two nights before my 21st birthday party and a school friend was at the gala premiere (sadly, he passed away just after his 60th birthday, and he had been so looking forward to the return of "Discovery". Our plans for watch parties of episodes together won't happen.) His TMP review was very enthusiastic, but he was also surprised that most of the audience was wearing Starfleet uniforms, my first inkling that a fan collective existed. Then the film didn't open to the general public for another week, by which time my fascination had grown and grown. The evening newspaper serialised a set visit by Aussie journalist, Jim Oram, across the week, and my local supermarket had the Futura Australia novelization on a rack at the checkout! The novelization had captioned colour plates in the middle (as did the UK edition). I also used a birthday gift voucher to buy the soundtrack LP. I read the whole book in a weekend, intending to stop about 2/3 through. I went (by myself; everyone else turned down my invitations to join me) to see TMP on 24th December and was blown away.


TMP colour plates 2 and 3 by Ian McLean, on Flickr

That afternoon, I found used, original novels and TOS & TAS episode adaptations in second hand bookshops (back then the city centre had about ten in close proximity), and a few unused titles in the regular bookshops. It took me a while to realise the Corgi editions were British reprints of Bantam and Ballantine titles, and that the cover design variations belonged to different reprinting. One store also had "Mission to Horatius" for about $70 - and I realised my younger brother already owned it (I had received "I Spy" in the same Whitman series), and that I had read it once, on my sick bed, years before. I raced home and found it, forgotten but fairly pristine, in a toy box.

Every weekend - for the next few years - would find me roaming the suburbs to complete my collection. "Starlog" magazine, "Star Trek Lives!", "The Making of the Trek Conventions" and the "Starlog Communications Handbook" were very influential in my seeking out of fandom.

All of my Pocket Books are first editions.

 

[Kilana2]

My first novel (much like Dimesdan's) is Vendetta.

I was starting junior high and had to write a book report. The used bookstore, which had carried the comics I had been collecting, one day had a copy of a Star Trek novel, and I had to have it (I was watching TNG and TOS for a couple of years by then).

Thing is, by that time only seasons 1-2 had been broadcast in Israel, and here was a novel that was a sequel to an episode I had yet to see (upon purchase, I thought it was a sequel to Q Who ). I loved the story (still have the original worn out copy), and it made me wait for the broadcast of The Best of Both Worlds and made me a TrekLit fan for life..

I didn't know that Vendetta could be an entry point. Quite interesting.

One of my first DS9 novels was Fallen Heroes. I haven't seen many DS9 episode, but this one was hilarious. It made me want to see more of DS9. I was disappointed when the German publisher Heyne stopped the DS9 novels.

My personal treasure troves were rummage tables with return or used books..... I loved to rifle through it with a Ferengi like greed.....

 

[Desert Kris]

When I was very young, I was introduced to TOS, and was taken to the theater for TSFS. My dad had paperback copies of Enterprise: The First Adventure and the novelization of TMP. At some point in my life I was destined to read at least one Star Trek novel, I feel sure.

My family had borrowed a VHS from another family, which had Space Seed, the television broadcast premier of TWoK, and TSFS. I was puzzled for a while about why the Star Trek movies started with Star Trek II, almost as if there was a first movie that never existed, but eventually I figured out that my dad had the novelization of that unknowable first movie. Since E:TFA was way too long for me, especially with it's small font size, I decided to try TMP novelization. I remember reading it while riding with my family during the early hours of the morning, and gasping and laughing when Kirk exclaims a vulgar word! I was shocked, because ST had never been so profane (TVH hadn't arrived yet), but this was also the first adult-ish novel I had ever attempted to read. My parents took this in stride, and reassured me that they wouldn't take the book away and encouraged me to be mature about reading to that level with something like "You're old enough." I wonder if my dad actually read it, since there is adult content in there that isn't just swearing. Anyway, I read it on the way to a party that my parents took us to, where the book was unfortunately lost. I only managed to get a few chapters in. Years later I got a replacement copy for myself and finally read it all the way through.

When I saw Diane Carey's Final Frontier in the supermarket one day, I begged my parents to get it. This was my second ST book, and I still have it. I didn't read it properly the first time, skipping past "boring" bits that I could stay concentrated on, as well as sequences which featured the Romulan characters. Eventually I read that book properly, years later.

I tried Carmen Carter's TNG novel The Children of Hamlin, but again it wasn't a proper read. I was interested in it because I flipped through it and found that it featured the saucer section separation again, so I was curious about that. I'm saving this one for a proper read, sometime in the middle future. The problem persisted with TNG Metamorphosis, too; I read the sequence where Data helps a woman on a quest. The quest was such a fun sequence, very action packed and gave a sense of Data's capabilities as an android. And I read and enjoyed his acclimating to becoming human, but after a certain point my attention drifted again.

Vendetta is the novel were it finally worked, I read it properly, without skipping anything, or getting bored and setting it aside. Well, I mean The Best of Both Worlds was this extraordinary story, and here was an epic length novel that held the promise of a re-match.

As I was growing up, periodically we would go to the library for books, too. On some occasions family members would actually rent a book for me, thinking that they would be up my alley. I think they had good instincts for my likes, too, I just wasn't reading the books effectively. I remember one occasion where my brother chose a copy of Strangers From the Sky for me, it was a beautiful new copy that hadn't been trashed by someone else's reading of it. Even though I didn't read SFtS then, I've been determined to read it eventually, and happily it falls on my current reading list of ST novels. I myself checked out Alan Dean Foster's Log Four and Log Six repeatedly because those volumes had novelizations of animated episodes that we were able to see while visiting an aunt and grandma in New England, and those novelizations were the only evidence I had at the time that those stories were real in some way.

I've tended to dabble mostly, over the years. Gone for event novels, such as Federation, Best Destiny, Prime Directive, or Probe. Vendetta was such a massive success, so I continued to keep my eye out for other ST novels by Peter David.

It's only in the last 4-5 years or so that I've gotten into any kind of groove reading them more semi-regularly, because of my curiosity about the 80's TOS novels. I thought I would have ended up reading TNG novels more, since that's the show that I grew up with, even though I already knew and like TOS very much. And I do plan to get into some of TNG novels more as well, down the road.

 

[Timewalker]

I turned it off and popped in a Betamax home video of Dudley Moore's "Wholly Moses."

That's a fun movie. It makes more sense than what it was based on.

Every weekend - for the next few years - would find me roaming the suburbs to complete my collection. "Starlog" magazine, "Star Trek Lives!", "The Making of the Trek Conventions" and the "Starlog Communications Handbook" were very influential in my seeking out of fandom.

That's how I spent my junior high and high school years - every Saturday I'd make the rounds of every place in town that sold books.

My first two ST novels were Spock Must Die! and Spock, Messiah! (my mother was appalled that I'd shell out a whole $1.75 for that, especially given that books had to come out of my babysitting money and I made a whopping 50 cents/hour).

 

[Steve Roby]

We've had variations on this topic a few times over the years, but it's always fun.

I have a vague memory of seeing an episode of Star Trek somewhere between 1969 and 1972 and being interested, but for some reason didn't see it again for years. Around Christmas 1971 and a birthday or two, my parents gave me Whitman TV books (kids' hardcover novels) based on The Invaders, Hawaii Five-O, Rat Patrol, Mission: Impossible, and... Star Trek: Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds. Oddly, that did not change my life. I was more excited about the Hawaii Five-O and Rat Patrol books. In 1972, we moved to another city (still no Star Trek reruns) where I discovered a great used bookstore. Within a year or two I moved out of the kids' section and looked at the science fiction racks, where James Blish's Star Trek 3 caught my eye. That time it clicked. I bought every Star Trek book I could find, and before long a local channel started carrying Trek reruns, and we could dimly receive an American channel showing the animated series.

The books have always been a core part of the Star Trek experience for me, just as important as the filmed version. At least half of TOS and most of TAS I encountered first as adaptations in books. I don't buy all the nonfiction books these days, but I still buy all the fiction. My collection is probably at least 1200 (I counted over a thousand several years ago).

 

[StefanM]

Were you introduced by friends?
Did you buy the novels on your own initiative?

Considering the new upcoming Picard show: is it still possible to win new readers over for the existing novels (TNG, DS9, Voyager)? Or will new readers only be interested in books of current shows like Discovery?

I was introduced in TOS and the movies by a friend. I was a TNG fan at that time. The friend (with the nickname T'Pesh, a Vulcan fan) introduced me to the novels, at that time published by Heyne in Germany. I didn't read the novels in English at that time.
I never saw DS9, only a few episodes. I started to read DS9 novels without knowing the show. Characters like Kira fascinated me. I bought the DVDs and really got into DS9. Followed with the DS9 Relaunch, the best decision in my life.
Voyager was always more present on German TV than DS9. I started reading English novels when Heyne stopped publishing Trek novels. Sometimes later on German Publisher Cross Cult translated and published Trek novels again. Alas there are so many untranslated novels, they can't catch up on everything.
Something like the A time to.... series will remain untranslated, they don't have slots for it and it is economically risky. Sales numbers are low. The first two Seekers novels were published, but didn't sell well enough for the other two books to be translated.

Like Kilana, I'm also from Germany, so I (only) read the german translations of the novels.
Here: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/star-trek-novels-in-germany.294700/
you can find a list of novels, published in Germany.
Heyne published 256 books between 1982 & 2007, Goldman reprinted the 70ies stories in 38 books between 1985 & 1995, and since 2008, CrossCult has published about 150 novels plus a lot of ebooks.
I finished school in 1996 (our "Abitur" takes 13 years ["Realschule" 10 / "Hauptschule" 9 years]. It must have been in 11th or 12th grade (1994/1995), when our class visited a museum in Gießen, we went there by train, and at the train station, there was a big book store. I guess, that was the first time, I saw a Star Trek novel, or rather lots of them. And I wanted to read one of them, currently watching TNG and had seen TOS.
In 1994, there already were about 85 Heyne-novels, so there was a lot to choose. I don't know why, but I decided to buy "Prime Directive" by J.&G. Reeves-Stevens. And I really loved it
It was late in this year (1994 or 1995), not far until christmas, so my christmas-wishes were Star-Trek-books
I remember, when my parents were in Gießen the next time, I told my mother, where to get the books. She bought 6 of them, and I got them for christmas from my parents, grandparents and others. Among these 6 books were novels like "The Final Reflection" or "Strike Zone", one of the first TNG-books.
So, until finishing school, I read some of the book, maybe 1-2 per month.
Summer 1996 to summer 1997 I had to do my "Zivildienst" (civil services, as an alternative to military) in a retirement home. There was always some time to read, and nothing to learn for school, so more time to read.
In 1997, I started studying at the university in Gießen. In the city were many book stores with book with reduced prices, so I got more and more of them very cheap.

In the next years, I also read other things, had a lot to do with studies, later job, family, children.... so I finally finished the last of 256 Heyne-Star-Trek-novels (plus 10 Goldmann) in early 2015. Since then, I've read 62 CrossCult-novels. Still, there are about 100 unread german Star Trek books, and more and more coming. So I will have enough to read for many years....

 

[Kilana2]

Yes, I totally forgot about the Goldmann books. I have two books (I have lost track of single novels/books in my collection due to lack of space). One book is a huge tome with TOS short stories.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Yes, I totally forgot about the Goldmann books. I have two books (I have lost track of single novels/books in my collection due to lack of space). One book is a huge tome with TOS short stories.

Memory Beta has some gaps here!

https://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Goldmann

 

[StefanM]

Memory Beta has some gaps here!
https://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Goldmann

Oh, yes, I see.
Therin, are you a member of the team of memory-beta?
I listed all the Goldmann-books here: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/star-trek-novels-in-germany.294700/
Maybe you (or someone else) can add them on memory-beta.

 

[DrCorby]

My story echoes that of a few others here. I dimly remember seeing some episodes of Star Trek when it aired in the 60s, plus I have a board game and a model of a Klingon battlecruiser my dad helped me build, both from that time period, so I must have latched onto the show early. I regularly watched TOS reruns, then a friend gave me one of the Blish episode adaptations (Star Trek 4, to be exact), which I hadn't known existed. I scoured the town for the rest of the books that had been published up to that point, then picked them up as they came out.

I missed Mission to Horatius, but enjoyed Blish's Spock Must Die! when it came out, and got the rest of the Bantam novels through the 70s. There were also 2 Bantam collections of fan fiction (The New Voyages, edited by Marshak and Culbreath), plus Star Trek Lives! and The Making of the Star Trek Conventions, which exposed me to a bit of fan culture, despite living in the hinterlands. I was later able to obtain & read an early fan story by Jean Lorrah (Epilogue 1 & 2), but was too busy reading a lot of other fiction to pursue any other fanfic.

Bantam novels and Foster TAS adaptations in the 70s, then the Pocket fiction line from late '79 on. I fell behind when Pocket was publishing 2 books per month, plus occasional "giant" novels; money was tight in college and for a few years afterwards, and then I lost most of my books in a fire.

I started reading and collecting again with the DS9 relaunch. But I just don't have space for that many books. (And Star Trek isn't my only interest; I also enjoy other science fiction & fantasy writers, plus history, heraldry, hymnals, role-playing games... And my wife and children are also all readers. We have a lot of bookshelves, and they are all full!) So I pick up old Bantam novels, non-fiction, and technical manuals/blueprints when I can find them, but new books and the Pocket back catalogue is now bought as ebooks, out of necessity. I am still woefully behind in my reading. But I really enjoy the discussions on this forum, with so many like-minded and book-loving Star Trek fans...

 

[Kilana2]

My story echoes that of a few others here. I dimly remember seeing some episodes of Star Trek when it aired in the 60s, plus I have a board game and a model of a Klingon battlecruiser my dad helped me build, both from that time period, so I must have latched onto the show early. I regularly watched TOS reruns, then a friend gave me one of the Blish episode adaptations (Star Trek 4, to be exact), which I hadn't known existed. I scoured the town for the rest of the books that had been published up to that point, then picked them up as they came out.

I missed Mission to Horatius, but enjoyed Blish's Spock Must Die! when it came out, and got the rest of the Bantam novels through the 70s. There were also 2 Bantam collections of fan fiction (The New Voyages, edited by Marshak and Culbreath), plus Star Trek Lives! and The Making of the Star Trek Conventions, which exposed me to a bit of fan culture, despite living in the hinterlands. I was later able to obtain & read an early fan story by Jean Lorrah (Epilogue 1 & 2), but was too busy reading a lot of other fiction to pursue any other fanfic.

Bantam novels and Foster TAS adaptations in the 70s, then the Pocket fiction line from late '79 on. I fell behind when Pocket was publishing 2 books per month, plus occasional "giant" novels; money was tight in college and for a few years afterwards, and then I lost most of my books in a fire.

I started reading and collecting again with the DS9 relaunch. But I just don't have space for that many books. (And Star Trek isn't my only interest; I also enjoy other science fiction & fantasy writers, plus history, heraldry, hymnals, role-playing games... And my wife and children are also all readers. We have a lot of bookshelves, and they are all full!) So I pick up old Bantam novels, non-fiction, and technical manuals/blueprints when I can find them, but new books and the Pocket back catalogue is now bought as ebooks, out of necessity. I am still woefully behind in my reading. But I really enjoy the discussions on this forum, with so many like-minded and book-loving Star Trek fans...

I also read different books. I'm sad that my Neverending Story copy by Michael Ende has vanished due to several moves. I'll have to get another copy as it is one of my favorite books ever.

 

[thribs]

It was the Destiny novels that did it for me. The story intrigued me either the big Borg invasion and Ezri as a captain but I felt that I needed to read the Titan novels before hand to understand it. So the first four Titan novels were my first foree into them.
After that I went into the Enterprise novels as with The Good that Men Do. The idea that Trip never died and faked his death sounded like a cool idea and so I wanted to read that and see how it went. I’ve since read all of them from that book onwards.
After that I went back and read all the TNG novels from Resistance onwards. Now I read novels from all the series except Voyager. I’m leaving that to last.

 

[Kilana2]

It was the Destiny novels that did it for me. The story intrigued me either the big Borg invasion and Ezri as a captain but I felt that I needed to read the Titan novels before hand to understand it. So the first four Titan novels were my first foree into them.
After that I went into the Enterprise novels as with The Good that Men Do. The idea that Trip never died and faked his death sounded like a cool idea and so I wanted to read that and see how it went. I’ve since read all of them from that book onwards.
After that I went back and read all the TNG novels from Resistance onwards. Now I read novels from all the series except Voyager. I’m leaving that to last.

As to Voyager: you might find Christie Golden's novels meh, but Kirsten Beyer's novels pick up speed and excitement.

 

[thribs]

As to Voyager: you might find Christie Golden's novels meh, but Kirsten Beyer's novels pick up speed and excitement.

I will get to them eventually. Might give them a go after I’ve finished the New Frontier series.

 

[Kilana2]

I will get to them eventually. Might give them a go after I’ve finished the New Frontier series.

Luckily New Frontier has been translated into German. They won't translate the last ebooks, though. As I don't read ebooks it doesn't matter. The series that I find the least interesting is Corps of Engineers.

 

[StefanM]

As to Voyager: you might find Christie Golden's novels meh, but Kirsten Beyer's novels pick up speed and excitement.

To be honest, I am really not a big fan of Kirsten Beyer's VOY novels yet.
I've now read her first 4 VOY-novels:
Voyager 5 Kirsten Beyer Projekt Full Circle Full Circle
Voyager 6 Kirsten Beyer Unwürdig Unworthy
Voyager 7 Kirsten Beyer Kinder des Sturms Children of the Storm
Voyager 8 Kirsten Beyer Ewige Gezeiten The Eternal Tide
All I can say yet, is that they are...... long and unfinished
Full Circle had a good first half, when they finished/continued Goldens best story-part. the second half? Nothing really happened, everyone and everything was depressive. It was just an extremely long prologue to the next book. And just by the way, Beyer killed most of Golden's characters
Unworthy was almost as long. This connected species was boring, the story was told in an much too long and boring way, and nothing really happened. Oh, wait, one interesting thing happened: this telepathic species had locked up the minds of some criminals, and one took control of a super-advanced hologram. The Hologram escaped.... and nothing happened. At least not in this book and the next two. Although it was long enough to also tell this story.
Children of the Storm had another telepathic species. At least, this time there was more action, but how did it end? By growing flowers.... they solved every problem. Too many new ships, with new (uninteresting, generic) characters, and no reason to care about their deaths.
And then... The Eternal Tide. Bringing back Janeway, because she is SOOOO important for solving the problem (although she didn't really do anything but talking). Oh yes, the problem.... Not only the crew is in danger, not only earth, not even only the federation, the galaxy, the universe.... NO! Janeway has to rescue the whole multiverse, the Q-Continuum and just EVERYTHING. Yes, why not? How lucky, that they were right in place (in all of the multiverse, space, time...). The book really started interesting, Captain Eden finding out more about her past, her origins. But why did Beyer have to exaggerate so extremely? Absolutely ridiculous.
I have now started Protectors. Once again an interesting premise (finding an extremely injured Celiar), but once again pages after pages with... nothing really happening.... Let's see, how it will continue...

Therefore I can understand, that some people have not much motivation, to read those very long stories. Sometimes it's much more fun, to read a 200-pages-book, than 400 to 500, if you just have the feeling, they are filling pages instead of getting to the point. (A very extreme example for this, in my opinion, is Double Helix 3: Red Sector. I can't believe, how you can tell such a boring story in so many words. The first 150 pages could have been compressed to 40, especially with such a pathetic character like Ensign Stiles .)

 

[Kilana2]

Sometimes it is important how your mood is when you read a book. That's why it took me so long to read some English TOS novels which weren't bad per se. When I read books in a bad mood, they seem to drag on forever.....
I guess I'm just a Kirsten-Motherfucking-Beyer-Fan.
At least we agree on Red Sector. Ensign Stiles was - at least to me - the worst Trek character ever. I disliked T'Ryssa Chen, but I came to like her later as the stories progressed and the character had some development.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I read The Eternal Tide in a day. I've been halfway through Protectors for about a year.