What are the least Star Trek-like Star Trek novels?

[The Laughing Vulcan]

A question prone to subjectivity of course, and literary fashions have changed significantly over the past four decades.

For some the Marshak Culbreath Phoenix novels may be quintessential Trek-lit, for others maybe not.

So of all the books you have read, which is the one that makes you say "I don't know what I'm reading, but it sure as hell isn't Star Trek!"

Note, this isn't necessarily a comment of the merits of the book. It took me a good couple of reads before I could see The Final Reflection as a Trek novel.

As for me right now, the least Trek of the Trek novels have to be the New Frontier novels. It isn't just the non-screen crew, it's the style and approach of the stories, grand comic books without the pictures, and without the Zap! Pow! and Kablam! bubbles. I have enjoyed some of them, but as the series has progressed, they've become ever more farfetched and out there. I certainly am not in the Trekverse when I read them.

 

[Paris]

I've always considered the New Frontier books to be very much Trek. I would even consider some of the more outlandish plot devices, the great bird of the galaxy for instance, to be very third season TOS. Remember the one where Spock was missing his brain? Or the one where a giant hand in space grabbed the Enterprise? The third season of TOS was very comic-booky, much in the way NF has been from the beginning...

As for books that don't feel like Trek...

I would have to say that Articles of the Federation by KRAD felt more like West Wing when I first read it, but had enough trek in it to make it one of my all time favorite treklit books, especially as it was unlike any treklit that I had read before

 

[Christopher]

^The "giant hand in space" was from "Who Mourns for Adonais?" early in the second season.

 

[F. King Daniel]

"Trek to Madworld" and "How Much for Just the Planet?" had Trek characters put into the most un-Trek situations imaginable.

That Andrew Robinson book could have easily been passed off as non-Trek.

 

[Christopher]

"Trek to Madworld" and "How Much for Just the Planet?" had Trek characters put into the most un-Trek situations imaginable.

Really? Trek gave us "A Piece of the Action" and "I, Mudd." There's certainly precedent in Trek for goofy comedies.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I think it's fair to say the two books I mentioned are a whole level of weirdness above those episodes.

 

[Christopher]

^Still, that's just taking the same precedent further. It's not doing something completely unlike Star Trek.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

Offhand, I'd say 'Shadow Lord.' The Enterprise barely appears, Spock and Sulu can only generously be called supporting characters, and the whole book focuses on an alien race created by the author, who seemed to want to do a samurai story on a different planet.

 

[Christopher]

^Not to mention that the whole plot of Shadow Lord involved the Federation doing the very thing that the Prime Directive forbids: artificially advancing a medieval culture's technology to a 23rd-century level. Indeed, the upheavals that causes in the book are an excellent demonstration of why there should be a Prime Directive forbidding it.

 

[Cap'n Crunch]

Do Comets Dream?

It read like some fantasy novel, but with the TNG crew thrown in to make it Trek.

 

[aarenlainey]

Star Trek has been referenced numerous times in The Hardy Boys novel series,published by Simon and Schuster,the company behind the Star Trek novels.Most recently in The Hardy Boys Undercover Brothers Double Trouble, where Joe Hardy sarcastically compares his older brother,Frank, to "Mr. Spock",and most notable in The Hardy Boys Trouble in Warp Space, in which the Joe's girlfriend gets a walk-on part in a new TV series called Warp Space,an obvious reference to Star Trek: Enterprise.

 

[JD]

Ok, and that has what to do with this conversation?

 

[RonG]

off the top of my head - I would say Inception.

While it had established Trek characters in established points of their pasts, it just didn't ..feel.. like Star Trek to me.

I had (unfavorably) called it in my review the Trek Lit version of Twilight, and perhaps the reason I didn't take to it was because it just didn't feel like Trek to me..

 

[F. King Daniel]

The Case of the Colonists' Corpse.

The Romulan Way.

 

[Greg Cox]

Do Comets Dream?

It read like some fantasy novel, but with the TNG crew thrown in to make it Trek.

It was actually a reworking of a non-Trek novella Somtow sold to AMAZING STORIES back in the early eighties. I know because I had one of my first stories in the same issue!

 

[ronny]

Chainmail by Diane Carey. You could change a couple dozen lines in that book and I wouldn't know it was supposed to be related to Star Trek in any way.

And the subject said "novels" but I'm going to mention the two Diane Carey stories in Enterprise Logs, an American Revolutionary War story and a World War II story.

 

[BrotherBenny]

It seems to be a fact that authors who try to experiment and shoehorn Trek into other genres (steampunk's Warped by K W Jeter comes to mind) generally don't do that well. Trek is somewhere between soft- and hard-SF and should stay that way.

 

[ATimson]

It seems to be a fact that authors who try to experiment and shoehorn Trek into other genres (steampunk's Warped by K W Jeter comes to mind) generally don't do that well. Trek is somewhere between soft- and hard-SF and should stay that way.

But even within that, there's still some room for interpretation - in my very-biased Sorkin-loving opinion, Articles of the Federation makes up for any possible failures by any other attempt at a non-Trek-like novel.

 

[RonG]

It seems to be a fact that authors who try to experiment and shoehorn Trek into other genres (steampunk's Warped by K W Jeter comes to mind) generally don't do that well. Trek is somewhere between soft- and hard-SF and should stay that way.

But even within that, there's still some room for interpretation - in my very-biased Sorkin-loving opinion, Articles of the Federation makes up for any possible failures by any other attempt at a non-Trek-like novel.

I wholeheartedly agree about AoTF, and I also think The Case of the Colonist's Corpse and both Cardassian novels (A Stitch in Time and The Never-Ending Sacrifice) were great "non-Trek" novels.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^A Stitch in Time! Thanks. I was starting to get annoyed at my brainmush's faliure to name "That Andrew Robinson book".