Some more off-the-beaten-track recommendations:
Anthologies
There've been a spate of short-story anthologies over the past few years (besides the anniversary anthologies I mentioned upstream). For the past ten years, there's been the
Strange New Worlds volumes, edited by Dean Wesley Smith (et al), which was specifically only open to nonprofessional authors.
Besides those:
- The Lives of Dax, ed. by Marco Palmieri
Tales of the Dominion War, ed. by Keith R.A. DeCandido
Tales from the Captain's Table, ed. by Keith R.A. DeCandido
Prose-only series
In 1997,
Star Trek: New Frontier by Peter David debuted. The first series not to be directly tied into one of the TV shows, it featured the
U.S.S. Excalibur and its sometimes eccentric crew assigned to the Thallonian sector, an area of space once controlled by a great empire that recently collapsed. The series was a huge hit, and has continued to this day. The two most recent books were intended as jumping-on points, but in the interests of completeness, here's the whole list:
- House of Cards
Into the Void
The Two-Front War
End Game
Martyr
Fire on High
Captain's Table: Once Burned
Double Helix: Double or Nothing
Double Time (graphic novel)
"Stone Cold Truths" in Tales of the Dominion War
The Quiet Place
Dark Allies
Excalibur: Requiem
Excalibur: Renaissance
Excalibur: Restoration
Gateways: Cold Wars
- "Death After Life" in Gateways: What Lay Beyond
No Limits (short story anthology by various authors)
Being Human
Stone and Anvil
"Pain Management" in Tales from the Captain's Table
After the Fall
Missing in Action
There's also an upcoming
NF comic book from IDW.
NF's success led to more, including
Corps of Engineers (originally called
S.C.E.), an eBook original series that debuted in 2000. Focusing on the S.C.E. team on the
U.S.S. da Vinci, these are high-adventure problem-solving stories, as much in the vein of
M*A*S*H (in terms of focusing on kooky specialists rather than the more spit-and-polish crews of other ships) as
Star Trek. The eBooks -- all novella-length by a variety of authors -- started being collected into print form in 2002:
- Have Tech, Will Travel
Miracle Workers
Some Assembly Required
No Surrender
Foundations
Wildfire
Breakdowns
Aftermath
Grand Designs
Creative Couplings
Michael Jan Friedman introduced the crew of Jean-Luc Picard's previous command, the
Stargazer, in a
TNG novel in 1991 called
Reunion. He shows Picard taking command of the ship in a flashback
TNG novel called
Valiant. After that, the
Stargazer series kicked off, all by Mike and focusing on the early days of Picard's captaincy:
- Gauntlet
Progenitor
Three
Oblivion
Enigma
Maker
Keith R.A. DeCandido (who????) introduced the
I.K.S. Gorkon in the
TNG novel
Diplomatic Implausibility, and the ship also appeared in
The Brave and the Bold Book 2, and a bit of backstory for one character was in Robert Greenberger's "A Song Well Sung" in
Tales of the Dominion War. In 2003, the
I.K.S. Gorkon series debuted, renamed
Klingon Empire in 2008, and showing
Trek adventures from a distinctly Klingon perspective:
- A Good Day to Die
Honor Bound
Enemy Territory
"loDnI'pu' vavpu' je" in Tales from the Captain's Table
A Burning House
Two new series debuted in 2005 -- one was
Titan, which I mentioned in my first post. The other was
Vanguard, which takes a new look at the TOS era, through the eyes of a space station in an uncharted region of space:
- Harbinger by David Mack
Summon the Thunder by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
Reap the Whirlwind by David Mack
Other odds and ends
Last year Pocket tried an experiment -- rather than a six-book crossover that included six separate mass market paperbacks, they did a six-book crossover that was released as two paperbacks, with three novel-length stories in each. They started it out with
Mirror Universe, which has visits to the MU focusing on each of the five TV shows, plus
New Frontier:
- Glass Empires by Mike Sussman, with Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore (ENT); David Mack (TOS); and Greg Cox (TNG)
Obsidian Alliances by Keith R.A. DeCandido (VOY), Peter David (NF), and Sarah Shaw (DS9)
(That format will be revisited in the "what if" tales in
Myriad Universes this summer, and there'll be more MU next year with the
Shards and Shadows anthology.)
Two other novels that defy categorization are both 2005 releases.
Articles of the Federation by Keith R.A. DeCandido (him again!) took a look a year in the life of the Federation president -- a year that happens to take place after
Nemesis, so among the
many other things President Nan Bacco has to deal with in her first year in office is watching the Romulan Empire fall apart.
The other is Gene DeWeese's
Engines of Destiny, which is a TOS/TNG crossover focusing on Scotty as, post-"Relics," he tries to go back in time to save Jim Kirk, which doesn't quite work as expected.....
)
