"Essential Legends" of Trek?

[Christopher]

I'm not here for charm, I'm here for stories that add to the tapestry of continuity. Correcting old novels might make them more relevant again. Like updating a science book to a 2nd edition.

That's an incredibly poor analogy, because it isn't science, it's make-believe. There are no "right" or "wrong" answers, and there sure as hell isn't going to be a test. The point of fiction is not to provide data points for continuity, it's to entertain and stimulate the imagination. Its "relevance" is in what it makes us think and feel, not whether it's compatible with some other story.

And seriously, back in the first generation of Trek novels, the books often had an impressionistic relationship with onscreen continuity, since back then it was an accepted norm for novelizations and adaptations to take creative liberties rather than being slavishly accurate. They were just stories, alternative interpretations of the general ideas and characters of a series, since it was understood that this was fiction and the premise and characters were just themes to explore variations on, not historical facts that had to be documented correctly. Goodness knows, back then I often wished some of the books would be more faithful to the screen, but fans these days have prioritized continuity to a toxic extreme, to the point of devaluing literally everything else about fiction, and it's just gone insanely too far.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Coda was released as TPB originally, so not sure what the point would be?

I wouldn't buy a trade paperback rerelease of Coda -- the trade paperbacks I have are perfectly fine -- but you know what I would? A Barnes & Noble Classics 3-in-1 leatherbound omnibus with bookmark ribbon. Comes shrinkwrapped, looks good on the shelf alongside B&N Classics editions of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, War and Peace, the King James Bible, and Star Wars: The Bounty Hunter Wars.

Yes, KW Jeter's Boba Fett trilogy was issued in a B&N Classic leatherbound edition. Personally, I liked it, but I am given to understand that's very much the minority opinion...

Am I the only one who loves Lost Years?

If you're talking the Dillard book on its own, I like it, but I don't love it. Her writing is fine, I've always liked Dillard's prose, and the characters all ring true, but it has a very reactive plot (the main characters are either at the mercy of others' decisions or reacting to others' actions) and it leaves me feeling dissatisfied. Which may be the point, come to think of it; we're so used to seeing Kirk as a man of action in command of a situation, and here we see him sold a desk job that doesn't suit him, so we as the readers are as much out of our element in a Star Trek novel as Kirk is here.

I do like it, truly. I've reread it three or four times over the last thirty-five years. It works, but I'm left unfulfilled, and the rest of the series doesn't rectify that.

As I sit here typing this, I feel that I would rather see this out of Paul Wesley and Ethan Peck, not a Star Trek Year One but a look at how and why Kirk and Spock go the ways they go at the end of the Five Year Mission. Why does Kirk take the desk job? Why does Spock abandon Starfleet for Vulcan asceticism? Yes, I know the literature, comics and novels, have offered multiple final years and final missions, and The Lost Years takes us into that untold chapter, because it's the part of the story on which Canon is silent. I would take that over the first days of Kirk's command of the Enterprise. Of course, I'd rather see them in a post Motion Picture timeframe, sans pajama uniforms, over a "Lost Years" era story.