How did you come to Trek-Lit

[Jinn]

This question has been in my head for a while now and I was looking for an opportunity to write something about how I found Trek literature anyway. How did you start reading Trek books and are there people who read Trek before they watched it?

Back in 2012 I was preparing for my 2-weeks student exchange to France (not by learning the language which looking back could have saved me a lot of stammering) by looking for something to read. Having recently watched Deep Space Nine I typed "Star Trek Deep Space Nine" in the amazon search bar and found an entry called Star Trek - Deep Space Nine 8.01: Offenbarung - Buch 1 (Avatar book 1). Naturally if I see a novel called 8.01 I spend 30 minutes looking for 1.01 and so on. Then I read the description and learned that it was the "eight seaseon" (or at least it was promoted so by the German publishers). I bought the first two books and until today they are my fondest memorys of the exchange (which doesn't say much since the whole exchange was horrible, I liked them nevertheless.) And thats how I found my favorite hobby for more than three years now. It probably also preserved my love for Star Trek since you can only rewatch a show for some many times before it gets kinda boring.

 

[Jedi Ben]

Way back when, some time in 2000 I think, I stumbled on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Millennium and found a crazily ambitious and quite nuts tale that was a ton of fun.

Then the DSN Relaunch started shortly after that.... That led to lots of other stuff: Lost Era, IKS Gorkon, Left Hand of Destiny and so on.

There's stuff you can do in books that'd cost a bomb to do on TV / film and most of the Trek books I've enjoyed have taken full example of that - Vanguard being one very strong example.

 

[Jinn]

There's stuff you can do in books that'd cost a bomb to do on TV / film

Star Trek: Titan.. That would probably instant-kill the budget of half of the Star Trek franchise as a whole.

 

[Jedi Ben]

Heh.... That was one I never really latched onto to.

 

[Jinn]

Heh.... That was one I never really latched onto to.

I always liked the idea of having a ship with not a nearly-all-human crew but some of the characters were poorly written and reduced to a cliché (<- my French skills) like Chaka with the only character trait of being sexist to men because in their species males evolve into females which makes her think of the male crewmembers as too young too make decisions. They could've mentioned it once or twice but not in every frickin' appearance of her. I really liked Orion's Hounds and the first two novels. Also I think that Picard was really saulty about Riker taking most of the cool crewmembers with him to Titan.

 

[Jedi Ben]

Hmm, how was Titan post-Destiny? Easy to jump onto?

 

[Jinn]

Hmm, how was Titan post-Destiny? Easy to jump onto?

Most of the Titan novels are stand-alones so not much has changed except for Tuvok, he got some intersting character development after Destiny. I would give Over a Torrent Sea an average, Synthesis an above average (for introducing my favorite character) and Seize the Fire and Fallen Gods an very high above average. So if you've read Destiny it should be easy to jump on. I would recommend reading A Pocket Full of Lies between Synthesis and Seize the Fire for the whole Tuvok-experience. I would recommend readind APFoL at any time because it was amazing though.

 

[Jedi Ben]

Well, I'm about 5 books behind on Voyager, about to start Children of the Storm.

Sounds like A Pocket Full of Lies could be a good stealth launch point onto those two Titan ones you rated highly.

 

[Idran]

I can't really remember which came first, but I know my first one was either "Intellivore" or "Captain's Daughter". (That is, I know which one came out first, but I can't remember which one I actually got first. ) In both cases, family got them for me; parents for the former and great-grandmother for the latter. It wasn't long before I got sucked into the whole line.

I think I actually read TOS books before I ever even saw a single episode of TOS.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

With a first edition paperback of Blish's Star Trek 9, in 6th grade, at age 11.

By that time, Blish was working reasonably close to actual shooting scripts, and his short story adaptations were reasonably faithful to the episode as aired. And I picked up all the other Blish anthologies (and SMD), snapping up 10-12 as they were published. Around this time, I read a friend's copy of Mission to Horatius; it was not until Pocket reissued it that I got my own copy.

And from there, I picked up Spock:Messiah as soon as it was published (by which time I was a freshman in high school -- reading a novel in which prim ensign Sara George becomes possessed by the mind of a prostitute, and [once exorcised] described an encounter with an equally possessed Spock, "We took off our clothes and made love.")

Then again, I was a high school sophomore when I read -- and did a book report on -- David Gerrold's When HARLIE Was One, with scenes of sex and drug use that Paramount would never allow in a ST novel.

At any rate, from S:M on, I've read every single ST novel and anthology in first edition. And for those that never had publisher hardcovers, I've managed to snap up most of the book club hardcovers that have been issued.

 

[trampledamage]

My dad also collects Star Trek novels so I started reading his It's entirely possible i did read them before I watched any on TV but it doesn't really count because I certainly knew about the TV series even if I hadn't watched it.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

I've been reading Trek novels pretty much all my life - I was like... six? Seven? and my mother took me with her to a local bookstore. Wandering around, I found a shelf with Star Trek books on it - notably, the covers of Dark Mirror and Survivors caught my eye. The books have not released me ever since, just dragged me deeper and deeper into the hole.

 

[Starbreaker]

1998. I was Eleven years old. I read a whole bunch of Goosebumps and Animorphs books up until the 6th grade. One of my teachers had Orion by Ben Bova on her shelf and it was pretty much the first adult sci-fi book I read. I began actively searching the shelves at Walmart for anything SF&F to read. The one that stood out to me was Q-Space by Greg Cox. I had seen Star Wars but I never seen Star Trek to my knowledge even though I knew about it. I read Q-Space and loved it. Then, I discovered TNG was airing at 1 a.m. and DS9 at 2 a.m. That's how I became an insomniac and a Star Trek fan.

My parents bought me a huge stack of hardcovers for Christmas that year: Crossover, Kahless, Devil's Heart, Mosaic, Shadows on the Sun, and Dark Mirror. Then I somehow got Q-Squared, Metamorphosis, Imzadi, and Pathways. I remember just reading one after the other without taking breaks in between. Now every 5 years or so, I do the same thing with new books.

 

[David cgc]

I was a kid, I must've been 8 or 9. I was chewing through the young-readers books (in general, I never was into the Star Trek ones; Why would I care about the main characters before they were grown up and cool?) and had been appreciating the cover art on the Trek novels in bookstores forever. I must've started feeling confident, because I decided to actually try reading one. I can't remember the precise order, but my first few were Rogue Saucer, The Final Fury (mildly confusing, as you might imagine), and the paperback reprint of The Return.

I can't find a chronological list of releases to figure out how many I got in the early years, but I remember getting the initial release of the first New Frontier books, and I was also a sucker for the big "event" books. I backfilled from the library and the occasional used bookstore up through college (not to say I've read even most of the pre-2000 books. Not even most of the classics. I should probably pick up "The Final Reflection" next time I run across it), but I'd say by the time the DS9 relaunch started, I was pretty well committed as a reader.

Now the trick is just finding the time for novels. I can keep up with the Trek line easily enough, but other fiction can have trouble squeaking in, and I've really slowed the pace of my non-fiction book-reading. The damn internet just throws words at me faster than I can read them.

 

[JD]

My parents were Trek fans, so I was pretty much raised on Star Trek. I was born just a couple weeks before TNG premiered so I have litterally been watching Trek my entire life. My mother was a big Peter David fan, so she read the New Frontier books as soon as they came out, and once I was old enough she let me read them. I spread out a few years later, first with the DS9 Relaunch, and then onto the other series. I honestly can't remember how I found Avatar Book 1, I think I either saw it online, in an add in an NF book, or I might have just stumbled across it at the book store.

 

[Trekfan12]

I started reading them when I accidently found out there were Star Trek novels. I was with my mom at the public library, I was just browsing the shelves and came across the New Voyages by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath then I discovered other novels and it just went from there. a couple of years later I was working for Doubleday books and got a discount on all novels at their bookstore and the ST books were being published every other month and I took plenty of advantage of that discount.

 

[Joanna McCoy-Kirk]

I have been a Trek fan since my mid-teens but I did not start reading Trek literature until about 10 years ago. My mother had just had a devastating stroke, and as a distraction I was perusing the new Wal-Mart that had recently opened up in my small town. I saw that the book section had a few Star Trek novels, including Christopher L. Bennett's new book Ex Machina. I bought it because I liked the cover, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book (it is still my favorite Trek novel). I have bought many novels since then, and I have Christopher's latest Enterprise novel on pre-order from Amazon.

 

[vegaslover62]

Back in 1998, I got into the Blish episode novelizations after the book manager of the thrift store I frequented collected them for me. They were all titled "Star Trek 1," "Star Trek 2" and so forth, but he didn't have all of them. I decided to go to a regular bookstore and order the ones I was missing, and as the girl looked them up by number, she read off the titles of the Pocket novels instead of the Blish novelizations. I had never heard of the original novels, so I ordered those instead. I've been reading them ever since, and now I own one copy of every single Trek novel that has ever been released, including all of Bantam's and the original Whitman. (With the exception of Pocket's YA novels, though.)

 

[Timewalker]

This question has been in my head for a while now and I was looking for an opportunity to write something about how I found Trek literature anyway. How did you start reading Trek books and are there people who read Trek before they watched it?

The first two Star Trek books I ever owned were Star Trek 4 and 6, and were purchased at Woolco (now Walmart) in November 1975. So I can honestly say that I read the adaptations of some of the episodes before I saw the episodes themselves. From then until the late '90s, I kept up with each new release (even acquired the original hardcover of Mission to Horatius at a second-hand store).

After that, though, life's circumstances made book-buying a luxury and so I've got huge gaps in my Star Trek collection. And over the years I've made decisions to forego certain miniseries or authors, for various reasons.

These days I'm trying to fill in some of those gaps (thanks, Amazon Marketplace) while being careful not to exceed the rapidly shrinking space available on my bookshelves (if anyone has a spare TARDIS they don't want anymore, I could sure use one...).

And from there, I picked up Spock:Messiah as soon as it was published (by which time I was a freshman in high school -- reading a novel in which prim ensign Sara George becomes possessed by the mind of a prostitute, and [once exorcised] described an encounter with an equally possessed Spock, "We took off our clothes and made love.")

I remember when I bought Spock, Messiah!. I was out shopping with my mother, and she was horrified when I picked up a Star Trek book. She followed me to the till and watched as I counted out 7 quarters to pay for it (my babysitting wages at that time were 50 cents/hour, so this represented more than one evening's work). "You don't really want that, do you?" she demanded, hoping I'd change my mind. My mother did not understand science fiction, never mind Star Trek.

 

[Defcon]

For convenience sake I just will quote what I wrote the last time a similar topic came up:

Enterprise: The First Adventure (the German translation to be precise) sometime in the early/mid nineties. It was actually my brother who bought it, but he didn't like it so I "inherited" it.

Liked it well enough, but i wasn't instantly hooked, so over the next couple of years I bought a book every couple of month, until in the late nineties I started to get really into it when I had much time to kill during my Grundwehrdienst (mandatory basic military service) both on the train rides to the base and back on the weekends and in the evenings during the week.

When Heyne (the former German publisher) started to cut down its releases significantly I switched to English releases exclusively.