Most significant additions to lore in LitVerse and the things you wish were canon

Well, at least they left enough of a crack in the door that you could reintroduce the idea of Borg born as Borg in "Greater Than the Sum". But I agree, Voyager should have had at least some Borg featured who were not assimilated, just to acknowledge "Q, Who?" if nothing else. It wouldn't have affected anything else in the stories they wanted to tell.

Just like Discovery should have had one or two smooth headed Klingons, even if in the background, to acknowledge "Affliction/Divergence"-------Bwahahahaha . I know. Did I really have to go there?

But then, we all have our favorite nitpicks

 

I really enjoyed the Destiny series, probably one of my favourite page turner Star Trek series ever actually. However, I also feel that the Trek universe in recent years has been suffering catastrophe overload. In timeline is it just 3 or 4 years before Destiny that the Genesis Wave occurred? JJverse Star Trek has us leading up to the destruction of Romulus. There’s a whole rake of highly destructive, epoch changing things occurring while our main characters saunter onwards, ensuring that we get Worf out the airlock in an EVA suit to feel queasy every second book.

If I think about the Star Trek universe from TOS to the ending of VOY, we have the likes of the destruction of Praxis as a standout moment (a scaled up Chernobyl on galactic empire scale) and the Dominion War (and its precursor Cardassian-Federation-Klingon entanglement) as probably the first time we watched a World War scale event onscreen.

In the novelverse in recent years we’ve basically had the, I dunno, Thirty Years War with nukes? Hit after hit after hit that are generally out of proportion to anything we’d seen along with pretty dramatic revelations about Section 31 that move it from NSA to 1984. Now, canon Trek had started to go that way, ala the attack on earth in ENT and of course the destruction of Romulus, and I feel it’s a bit of a trend in some modern media (JJ again and Star Wars.... we’ve had the Death Star, now let’s do Starkiller Base and also put a planet killing cannon on the bottom of several thousand star destroyers, boy, that tech won’t have any long term consequences and anyway it looks cool!)

Anyways, I just feel when I’m reading Star Trek novels lately that the sheer scale of the hits over a short period of time would land the 237x-2387 period as one of the most oddly concentrated periods of destruction, upheaval and change in all of recorded history, anywhere. This was driven by the need to keep the novelverse in a particular timeline, but I just find it keeps dragging me out of a story to consider “just how screwed up would everyone be and why are they still carrying on as before in large measure when x, y and z has occurred.”

There’s lots of good stories and stuff to keep (and bring into canon as story inspiration, ala the Nejamri story from available light), but yeah, when I heard the slate would be wiped clean by STP I did think that perhaps a positive would be returning to a universe where yes, cataclysms do happen, but perhaps the scale and frequency is a little more measured.

 

The classic Trek novels faced off against universe-ending cataclysms all the time, but it didn't seem quite as overused because they weren't in continuity with each other.

 

I realized a few years ago how odd it was that the books went to the threat-to-the-entire-universe well so often, given that the shows almost never resorted to that trope, except in "The Alternative Factor" and to a degree in DS9: "Playing God." And now in Discovery, but that show didn't exist yet when I had that realization.

 

I think part of the difference is threat versus reality. I remember the Double Helix series way back when, part of a really fun era when you had these TOS-current show crossovers. Big problem but still fairly local in its effect. Or “Invasion!”, that was another fun one.

The recent novels have carried through. Reading Collateral Damage there recently it pulled out the stat that 11,000 Starfleet personnel had lost their lives at the Battle of Wolf 359. That was a pretty major engagement that we know set up a load of character arks in novels and, of course, Sisko’s in DS9. Meanwhile in the novels we’re regularly blowing away billions of people post-Nemesis.

 

David Mack's envisioning of the Breen as a multi-species society in which standard, visually identical, uniforms conceal an individual's species even within the society. (Why am I suddenly thinking about The Planet Purple, where all the males are named Paul, and all the females are named Pauline, from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood?)

 

I liked that Bajor joined the Federation in the novels but I also like in the DS9 documentary, Ira Behr, Ronald D. Moore's etc. Bajor didn't join the Federation.

 

I suddenly find myself thinking of an obscure litverse reference to Cait constantly joining and leaving the Federation: when they're in, the Caitans want out, and when they're out, they want in.

 

That is, of course, a Peter David joke, from one of his New Frontier novels.

 

Thanks. I honestly wondered whether anybody here even remembered that, much less had any idea whence it came, or from whom (I only barely remembered the reference, and had completely forgotten the whence and the whom).

 

I rarely see this sort of behavior. Of course, we have a cat door, and the little furry people can use it as they please during daylight and early evening hours, when cat-eating monsters are less likely to be skulking around.

 

"Little furry people"...made my day. I never was a dog-person and cats DO seem to have more personality and over-all "people-ness" then dogs to me ;-P

 

IIRC, it's from Cold Wars, the scene at the start of the book where M'Ress is briefed on current events.

 

What kind of dogs have you dealt with? Our American Staforshire Terrier/Border Collie mix is frighteningly human, you can just make a casual comment and she'll respond to it perfectly. It's a running joke between me and my mom that she's actually a human shapeshifter.

 

One of our cats (now deceased) appeared to be, for all intents and purposes, a dog trapped in a cat's body. Then again, by all accounts, it was a dog who taught him how to be a cat.

One of our current brother-and-sister pair also shows signs of being a dog trapped in a cat's body, and we've had them since they were kittens, so we know that no dogs played any role in their learning how to be cats.

 

I’m struggling to think of a common denominator to these stories

 

One thing that I like from the lit verse is the explanation for how Starfleet systems went from the way the looked in Enterprise, to how you had all the analog type buttons in TOS.

Of course I still prefer “Starfleet Year one” over what was seen in Enterprise.

 

The goofy futuristic terms they used for everyday things in the 80's novels. "Wrist chrono" instead of wristwatch. Even 2000's Collision Course had "personal comm" for what was clearly a smartphone. These tickle me and I want them canon.