Chronology Question- Q & A
- Thread starter Ro_Laren
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Reference is made to Resistance having recently happened, and IIRC, KRAD told us he intended it to be before BD. 
Basic rule of thumb for continuing Trek book series (i.e., New Frontier, Titan, Vanguard, DS9 relaunch, post-Nemesis TNG, and various others):
Read the first one first, then the second one second, the third one third, and so on. Of the recent TNG post-Nemesis books, Resistance was published first, Q&A second, Before Dishonor third. They were published in that order because they're meant to be read in that order.
You can tell that Q&A is part of the current continuing series because it uses the same typeface and cover design style as the others in the current continuing series, just as you can distinguish an old DS9 standalone novel from the current relaunch books by the logo and cover design. Pocket isn't trying to make this difficult for us.
Shh. Move along. Nothing to see here.
The same design is used on Slings and Arrows as well.
^ Seeing as I am reading Resistance and there is no mention of Q (or at least yet), then you can't blame me for wondering if Q & A was a standalone book. And by the way, Pocket Books doesn't always release books chronologically (for example Buried Age was a blast from the past),
With this I agree.. Resistance even had an excerpt from Before Dishonor and NOT Q&A which didn't make a lot of sense to me.
With this, however, the point being made was that, while books may be released chronologically out of order the intended reading order is that of the published date. And Q&A was published before Before Dishonor so logically it should be read before it.
Taking a more relevant example the DS9 relaunch released Left Hand of Destiny well after books that were chronologically set after it. That didn't mean that LHoD should have been read before the other books that preceded it simply because chronologically they came after it.
I never worry about it, as IMO every Trek book is a standalone at the end of the day, except maybe books that are explicitly part 2 or 3 of a duology or trilogy or etc. There's always just enough subtle exposition to explain away events and references from previous novels in a series. When I was reading the ATT series, I couldn't find ...To Hate ANYWHERE (except online) but I already had To Kill, so I just went ahead and started it. I missed the death of a relatively important character, but it was spelled out quite clearly what had happened and everything worked out fine. I also jumped into Resistance without first reading Death in Winter, and had no problems understanding what was going on.
Well, effectively every TNG Relaunch book is a standalone book, in that it tells a self-contained story rather than being part of a serial. But, as with TNG itself, the individual episodes still have an overall continuity and character progression. Q&A is the next "episode" after Resistance, and it tells a different story, but it does introduce new cast members who show up again in the next "episode," Before Dishonor.
So it's not a "you have to read them in this order or you'll only get part of the story" situation as with, say, the Millennium trilogy. But they do take place in the order they were released, just like the weekly episodes of a TV series do. It's no more complicated than that.
But that was explicitly marked as "A Tale of The Lost Era." We're not trying to confuse you here. If a book comes out between two other books in the same series and isn't specifically marked as going somewhere else, then that's where it goes in the reading order. What you see is what you get.
I've never gone wrong by reading each new novel as it is published (until I fell behind and started to read more randomly). So publication date is always a good guide when weighing up which of a clutch deserves to be read first (except if it's a MMPB reprint of a hardcover, in which case the date will be about a year out of kilter).
But yeah, the TNG relaunch books have been quite episodic so far. There aren't many TNG TV episodes that must be viewed in a certain order.
The extract was aimed specifically at Borg fans. To tell them more Borg action was forthcoming. Regular TNG readers were going to pick up "Q & A" in any case.
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