Hi everyone, newbie here, I'm very interested in getting onboard with Trek fiction but I was wondering where is a good place for a jumping on point with Trek fiction?
There are a lot of entry points, I think. I would personally recommend the DS9 relaunch books - starting with the Avatar duology by SD Perry - but I'm a Niner. What's your favorite series?
If you're interested in Romulan history I can recommend the Vulcan's Soul trilogy and I've heard that The Romulan Way is really, really good. The Voyager relaunch books (or at least the ones written by Kirsten MF Beyer, that would be Full Circle, Unworthy, Children of the Storm, The Eternal Tides, Protectors, Acts of Contrition, Atonement & A Pocket Full of Lies) are also very-well received by both Voyager fans and non-fans. Beyer is also part of the Discovery creative team. The New Frontier series is very popular, but it is very... Different in tone from many other novels and episodes. Star Trek: Vanguard is essentially Sci-Fi meets political thriller meets spy thriller and one of its authors also wrote Destiny.
Cheers guys, some food for thought there, mostly a fan of DS9 and TOS, is the Titan series worth a read?
Very good exploration and scifi concepts in Titan and interesting characters. If your favorite series are DS9 and TOS, you can't go wrong with Avatar or the first Vanguard book. Once you start a series and wonder what book comes next, check out my website. The link is in my signature. Happy reading!
If you're a TOS and DS9 fan, then I'd have to put in another vote for the DS9 Relaunch and Vanguard. The DS9 Relaunch was the first series to continue the story after the show ended, and it does it really well. It moves the stories from the show forward in ways that really felt right, and it introduced a great new group of characters who took over for the people that left at the end of the show. Vanguard takes place on a space station during the same time that TOS is happening. It's got one of the biggest and best story arcs of any of the book series and does a lot to expand the 23rd century beyond just what we saw in TOS. Edit: I love the Titan books, but I'm a huge TNG fan and I'm not sure how much somebody who isn't would enjoy it.
I'd start with Spock Must Die!!! To be honest, it all depends on which series you enjoy the most. Which era.....which characters. If you want old school....the books published before the current creative regime, I'd go with something like Demons, Vulcan Academy Murders, or The Entropy Effect. It all depends how much you know about trek. Vanguard was awesome.
Cheers guys, I've picked up Titan: Taking Flight and DS9: Avatar - hopefully I will be fully indoctrinated before long.
In my signature there's a flowchart that might be helpful - the series connect to each other in ways that are complicated and not at all obvious from reading back covers.
You beat me to the snarky remark. You can't go wrong with Diane Duane, Dayton Ward, or Christopher L. Bennett. On the other hand, Diane Carey is one whom people either love (whether they like her hard-Libertarian politics or not) or hate. The old Bantam ST novels are literally hit-or-miss: it seems like toward the end, they alternated every other book between "decent enough" and "formulaic equine scat" (e.g., The Starless World, World Without End, and the ever-popular Devil World) And even some of the equine scat (albeit not the formulaic equine scat) is kind of fun, in a "guilty pleasure" sort of way (see Spock: Messiah!). If you have any interest at all in TAS, you might want to track down a set of Alan Dean Foster's Star Trek Log series. Log One through Log Six each adapted three episodes into a trilogy of linked novellas; the last four each expanded a single episode to novel length.
Thanks! I never agreed with her politics, but I liked her writing style. Kinda like Poul Anderson, another Libertarian-leaning SF writer whose prose style and worldbuilding are favorites of mine. It's kind of surprising how many Libertarian SF writers there are. Or rather, they gave each episode an even longer, original sequel adventure in order to fill out the rest of the volume. Or in the case of Log Ten, three original adventures respectively occurring before, during, and after the events of "The Slaver Weapon."
The extent to which it was expansion or sequel (or in the case of Log Ten prequel and seqel) of course varies from one volume to another, with Log Eight and Log Nine being perhaps the most closely integrated. And you're welcome, Mr. Bennett, but (as Sarek would say) one does not thank logic.
^Your "[sic]" is in error. I was responding to your statement "the last four [Logs] each expanded a single episode to novel length." So the antecedent was "the last four," which is plural. And I would count both the original stories in Logs 8 & 9 as sequels rather than expansions, because they both involved an immediately subsequent adventure with the same guest characters. Log 8 had the crew get out of the Lactran zoo, then agree to help the Lactrans track down a new specimen -- a separate situation, even if it was set up as an outgrowth of the preceding situation. (In the same way that The Search for Spock is an outgrowth of The Wrath of Khan but is still a distinct story.) And Log 9 had the crew deal with Bem's antics on Delta Theta III, then had a distinct adventure on Bem's homeworld.
On the other hand, Log Seven was anything but seamless. I think we've had commentary about authors being tapped to novelize episodes they didn't particularly like, and making that antipathy fairly obvious (if memory serves correctly, Diane Carey's novelization of "Broken Bow" is frequently cited as such); such seems to be the case with ADF and the reverse-time universe of "The Counter-Clock Incident." Spoiler: That is to say . . . After returning from the reverse-time universe, the Enterprise encounters a rogue planet that somehow manages to be not only Class-M, but inhabited by humanoids, only to discover, at the end of the book, that from the moment they first encountered Karla Five's ship plunging into the remains of Beta Niobe, they'd been steadily manipulated through fantasy worlds concocted by a group of superbeings calling themselves "The Wanderers Who Play." Quite honestly, it's been so long since I read Log Ten, that I don't remember what all happened beyond the episode itself. I think I'll re-read it as soon as I finish The Most Rev'd Desmond Tutu's God is Not a Christian, and before I get to Mr. Bennett's new e-novella, or to the new ST print novel that should be out sometime next week. ************************************* I'm now down to the last 75 pages or so of Star Trek Log Ten, and I'd underestimated how much I had forgotten. "The Slaver Weapon" was not so much expanded, or framed with prequel and sequel, as inserted as one of the episodes of an episodic, mostly original novel about a diplomatic mission (which incidentally provided a tidy explanation for why Spock, Uhura, and Sulu were transporting a Slaver Stasis Box via a shuttlecraft). I suspect that ADF was restrained (either by professional courtesy, contractual obligation, or both) from doing a whole lot with Niven's script, given that it was itself an adaptation of a piece from Niven's own Known Space franchise.