The first Ds9 Relaunch and Destiny got me back into Trek Lit, and basically back into Trek after a loooooong hiatus of it being almost a thing I had grown out of. For that I am grateful, as I am enjoying reverting to my teenage self in some respects. Typhon Pact and The Fall let the side down a bit (I am a long poster over in the other discussion XD) but the current range also gave me many things I really like.
The Vesta class. Should see better use, but I love the Aventine (I still fly one over in STO sometimes.) and really like her crew and would love to see more.
The Titan series...some of that was really good. I have occasional misgivings about it's much lauded diverse crew (political correctness for its own sake is sometimes a silly thing to even go near...that's part of what killed the Ghostbusters reboot...and a velociraptor doctor is a hard sell. But Titan mostly makes it work.) but there are some I love so much I can gloss over the bumps. I love the notsohidden Tachikoma. The soap opera antics actually don't go far enough sometimes, the rest of the plot gets in the way (I love Melora, always liked her, and Xin is interesting sometimes...but it needed more focus.)
I like the new kids in both Titan and TNG, but again, it's something I think needs a lot more focus (Rene Picard in particular isn't very convincingly written, and considering how well Jake and Benjamin were done on TV, it's amazing how in the broader canvases of novels, there is t better development of Picard and Crusher as parents in most of the novels.) but love the vignettes we do get. I love Troi taking Tasha ice skating, and the oh so sensible making her family on Earth English. We know about Trois Betazoid side, so seeing her fathers influence was great. Saying that, in recent years, Troi largely keeps seats warm, which is I think a terrible misstep for the Rikers. Titan was probably the biggest relaunch, because it was actually a launch, dictated by screen events. But it made the characters really work. (Even the dinosaur.) I like what I do get of the character development, but again, I think more focus on that core Troi/Riker relationship would be good, because it's a hard tie to the screen we started with. (And for gods sake don't divorce them or anything silly like that. The noromo bullets just fly at anything we ended the screen series on.)
Which is something else I like in the books now, purely selfishly, which is the Britishness sneaking in. Runabouts called Thames. Characters of Indian subcontinent extraction being written as that, or as Brits, is just awesome. (Seeing the names like Choudary alone, gave a warm sense of familiarity as Trek actually looked like something joined to my corner of the world.) It's Just fun. Now there's Scandinavians creeping in too, and that's pretty cool as well. We aren't just stereotypes in Europe anymore....there's a blooming Portugueser on the Aventine bridge. (Bread should therefore become more of a plot point.) Human people with glimmers of faith (hijab wearing is silly in a Trek milieu though, unless off duty...look at the portrayal of Spock and Tuvoks Vulcan belief...humanity seems to have discarded overt religious symbolism of that kind, the practice of religion having adapted to the nature of space travel and a populated universe.) were awesome to see being handled subtly and well. I would love to see more of that being done properly for both the various faiths and for Trek itself.
There are bumps along the way (as I have said elsewhere) some of them really rather chasm like, but the overall trend is of high quality (which is why I bitch about the bits I don't like...they endanger the whole range, insofar as keeping me and others actually reading.) and after a dip recently, some of the ranges are once again heading upwards.
I actually want more 24th century books put out a year.
Oh...and a side note for things like DTI and the very few Movie Era books we get. I love the movie era Kirk stuff way more than TOS. So I am glad we have some. But it's not enough, and doesn't need to be used just as framing to TOS flashbacks. TMP era in particular needs some love. DTI does a wonderful job of showing how you can fill a book with references and make a story work. Really good. In fact, even in some of the duller books, it's great to see little fixes (TNG tech looks less advanced because it's rugged for space exploration use. Nice.) though some of the dipping into past co tinuity is...dull. If I never see another bloody planet killer again, it will be too soon. And the dipping into the past for Cold Equations was excellent (not sure about the terminator references, but it kinda worked and was kinda funny) even if I have been less impressed with how that resolved and in some ways still hasn't. (That's my problem with Trek Lit in some ways.....it needs some actual resolutions to happen. And like a James Clavell novel, you can have thousands of pages of awesomeness...before a crap unfulfilling ending takes the thing down a few notches. I would love some Clavell style novels in Trek Lit actually. The TV version of Shogun is like Riker stuck on Kronos in a parallel universe sometimes.)
