I am a (relatively) new reader in Treklit, and I was wondering about the Historian's Note. I have two questions about it. 1) When did Pocket Books start putting the Historian's Note in front of books? and 2) What decides which books have the Historian's Note and which ones don't?
For 1), the Historian's Note goes at least as far back as 1994, as my paperback copy of Dark Mirror has one.
I don't remember specific titles, but I know they were already around when I started reading Trek lit in the mid '80s.
They were probably more necessary back when the shows were actually on the air and you needed to clarify what season a book was set during. As in "This book takes place before Odo and Kira got together" or whatever.
I remember a DS9 novel where the Historian's Note says "The Trojan Spaceship takes place during the fourth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine". All well and good, even though the novel was called The Heart of the Warrior.
Yeah, that was the earliest novel that was able to acknowledge Worf joining the cast, so apparently they gave it a Worf-centric title and cover even though he plays a minimal role in the story. The Trojan Starship must've been its title up until late in the process, and they didn't get around to making the change in the historian's note.
I love them too. They don't need to be super specific, but just "This takes place during the five-year mission" or "this takes place sometimes before/after X episode" or "between this event and that event". The compulsive part of me appreciates when the writer narrows it down to a rough stardate or whatever but that level of specificity isn't really necessary.
The 1990's were really the first time I started noticing them more. A few novels from the 1980s had them sporadically. Sometimes you could glean the timeframe by something in the narrative. And sometimes you just had to guess. I think these days they are pretty much in every book. Probably because there are so many seasons between all the shows, then the relaunch timelines as well, that it's probably almost a necessity to give you the proper reference point for the book. And it makes sense, I mean, I'm sure the authors and editors want to let people know when the story takes place in the Star Trek universe so whomever is reading the story can focus on the story they are telling, and not spending time trying to figure out what time frame it is.
I often try to signal where my books take place in the first few pages. "Kirk recalled that time, only a few months ago, when he was impersonated by an android" or something like that. "Kirk was still getting used to this new replacement Enterprise; he missed his old ship which had self-destructed over the Genesis planet a year ago," etc.
Star Trek novels have spoiled me with specific chronological details by the authors. Every time I try and fail to pick up a Star Wars novel, the frequent lack of a year just bugs me.
The novels in the current continuity tend to have timeline pages in the front showing where they fall in relation to other books, films, etc.
Not what I was addressing. I am too well-versed in the sequence of major films. But Star Wars spans even more time than that. The highly-generalised Del Rey timeline does little for me.
I did enjoy the more specific year by year timeline that the Star Wars Legends novels had starting with the New Jedi Order and running through the “finale” of Crucible and would like to see that style of timeline tracking return to the new continuity - that I’ve been following it since the novels have been published means I can guess at how to juggle them, but I’d like a little more guidance (to say nothing of the frustration of not including the novels that aren’t classified as “adult” but are still part of the narrative, like the Padme novels by EK Johnston...). As for Trek, since I aim for a reading order of roughly chronological, the novels coming with historian’s notes are always welcome. Even if it becomes a matter of trying to figure out where it takes place amid a handful of other novels (TOS being a frequent offender here), it at least offers a guidepost to the place it should be in my shelves.
I'm torn. As a devoted follower of the defunct SWEU for nearly its whole run, I do love sprawling connect 'verses. But as someone who grew up enjoying TOS and TNG in syndication, I definitely also being able to enjoy bouncing around without feeling lost. I'm slowly working through the lit-verse in general publication/chrono order, but I do really appreciate resources that let me know which are good jumping-on bits in the event that I want to bounce around a bit or want to follow an author instead of a timeline for a while.
One resource I use is startrekreadingorder.com. It contains virtually every piece of Star Trek content out there and uses similar principles to how the timeline in Voyages of Imagination was created. They have years and stardates where applicable, and there are suggestion boxes and discussion forums to help improve the ordering or to better understand the choice that was made. I like Greg's approach to give some time-related information up front, such as having Kirk wonder if it was only yesterday that he was fighting Garth of Izar in hand-to-hand combat (I don't think this was actually used, just an example from me to illustrate an approach).
I've been using this timeline of Wookiepedia to figure out what order I want to read the canon novels and comics in. I like the fact that you can turn the different off and on the different types of media. So if I'm only look for books and movies, or just the comics, I can turn the other stuff off, but if I want to go through everything, I can do that too.