2026 Novel Releases

[Steve Roby]

Yes, the shows could somehow be made to fit if they had to, but generally speaking, no one cares about the new series anyway.

The Paramount+ series have fallen below Star Trek and TNG, which are now both trending well below their previously stable level. This is why I think this discussion is pointless—the audience that cares about the streaming series is small enough that they don't have meaningful mindshare (deservedly or not).

TOS and TNG are products of a different age. Very few TV shows -- including a lot of the ones that people talk a lot about -- get the kind of audiences shows used to get. Star Trek is hardly unique in this.

Generally speaking, compared to the viewership of 1990s US network TV, no one cares about pretty much any streaming era show you could name. Almost everyone I know offline has seen a Star Wars movie or two, but not many have seen Andor. I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of the people who watched the Lord of the Rings movies or Game of Thrones don't even know there are streaming spinoffs of them. That's got nothing to do with the quality of any streaming show, and everything to do with there being too many streaming services and too many shows.

 

[JD]

There might be more people watching the new Trek shows than some of us think. I saw a story ranking the streaming services by number of subscribers, and I Paramount+ was actually a lot higher up than I expected. I don't remember exactly, but I was shocked by how high it was, and it was higher from some other big services that I thought would be way above it. Obviously that's not just because of the Star Treks, but I'm sure it has at least some impact.

 

[Therin of Andor]

There might be more people watching the new Trek shows than some of us think. I saw a story ranking the streaming services by number of subscribers, and I Paramount+ was actually a lot higher up than I expected.

DSC is watched by many folk who have no idea of the existence of Star Trek fandom. It's just a streaming TV show that they happen to like. I am sure those people then sampled SNW and stuck with it, too.

TOS broke records when in re-run early-primetime syndication. A lot of brand, new fans!

TNG broke records as a one-hour drama in first-run syndication.

VGR was UPN's top-rated one-hour drama, IIRC.

For all the complaints about the Kelvinverse movies, that first one in 2009 caused non-fans to run to DVD stores and buy boxed sets of all the Trek series, in unprecedented numbers! (I was told this by a Big Wheel at Paramount Home Video.)

And DSC set some impressive numbers in streaming, AFAIK.

 

[F. King Daniel]

IIRC, Star Trek 2009 was the #6 best selling Bluray. Of all time. And it held that title for a good while. That's completely fucking insane.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I know the news for 2026 is scant at this point, but just a reminder to all that if you want to discuss performance/ratings/etc of the shows, to please take it to the individual show forums, or GTD.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

Pulling it back as per moderator requests...

Anyone guessing about who and how "To Defy Fate" would apply to? I mean, sure, it could just be within the set up of the novel's story itself, but until we know for sure, speculation is all we have.

One of the first things that comes to mind would be exploring the Romulan supernova proper, since Last Best Hope implied that there was something more to it going on than just "happening" (even beyond how a star doesn't just spontaneously go supernova, especially a star with planets we'd recognize as habitable). That would fit the title, and explore an element that the show didn't take the opportunity for. Only real hitch I see here would be about who the focus would be on, since I doubt Narek was in a position to know about anything deeper than the official story, or he'd have alluded to it, and Elnor was too young and no where near Romulus proper, while Laris's origins were explored in the Countdown comic, without offering anything about the cause of the nova. That about runs down the characters who'd have been in a position to have a direct influence on the plot.

So it could be something else - maybe something about Maddox and Soong developing Dahj and Soji? "Defying fate" by way of not letting Data's legacy die with him on the Scimitar? Or, possibly, Crusher's efforts to "defy fate" in having her child, not the child of Jean-Luc Picard? That one honestly seems like one of the more likely possibilities, though, of course, this is all just speculation.

 

[The Wormhole]

I was thinking/hoping it could be a Titan A story set before S3 with Shaw and Seven in the lead, but given the last Picard novel was a Seven centered one, it's not likely they'd do another so relatively soon.

 

[tenmei]

I was thinking/hoping it could be a Titan A story set before S3 with Shaw and Seven in the lead, but given the last Picard novel was a Seven centered one, it's not likely they'd do another so relatively soon.

Jack and Beverley?

 

[Christopher]

(even beyond how a star doesn't just spontaneously go supernova, especially a star with planets we'd recognize as habitable)

In reality, yeah, but TOS season 3 alone had four instances of habitable planets whose stars went supernova -- Minara from "The Empath," Sahndara in the distant past of "Plato's Stepchildren," Fabrina in the distant past of "For the World is Hollow...," and Sarpeidon in "All Our Yesterdays." TNG added Kataan in "The Inner Light" to the list. None of those were implied to be artificial events.

Granted, several of those were called novae rather than supernovae, but that's because the terminology was less clear in the '60s, at least to TV writers. And what we call novae today only happen in binary systems like the one depicted in TNG: "Evolution," which are just as unlikely as candidates for habitable planets as the kind of supergiants that are capable of going supernova.

 

[Tuskin38]

And the Tkon Empire mentioned in TNG. It was said their star somehow destabilized

 

[Christopher]

And the Tkon Empire mentioned in TNG. It was said their star somehow destabilized

Oh, yeah. Memory Alpha just said it was a star within their territory, but the dialogue said it was their sun.

Which raises the same question as TUC or ST '09 -- why would a cataclysm affecting only the capital planet of the empire bring down the entire empire (or threaten to do so in the case of Praxis)? In reality, it's because the writers didn't think through the difference between a single star system and a multi-system interstellar polity, but in-story, all three empires would have to be incredibly centralized, so that they'd collapse entirely if the metropolis fell. I mean, when Rome fell, the western half of the Roman Empire fell apart, but the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire thrived for another millennium.

Granted, a supernova would not just affect one system, but would have cataclysmic effects on inhabited planets even dozens of light-years away, so that could be pretty crippling to an empire depending on its size. But the Tkon Empire was said to be "huge." I don't think an empire can be both huge and hypercentralized, because it would need to have a sufficient distribution of power among regional centers in order to maintain control over a vast territory (as with Rome and Byzantium). Perhaps Data was oversimplifying and the supernova was just the beginning of a long process of decline for the empire.