Invasion-series!?

[faithhopelove]

I'm just wondering if it's important to read all the four books to understand the last one?
I'm reading all the Voyager-books, and as you might know, the last Invasion-book is a Voyager-book. Hence my question. :-)

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

No, I don't think you have to read all of them. It does help if you do, but they are all self-contained stories.

 

[Christopher]

Most Trek novel crossover miniseries, with the main exception of Destiny, are designed so that you can read as many or as few as you wish. As a rule, they're essentially standalone tales that simply involve the different crews dealing with different aspects of the same problem or theme. Kind of like the various Maquis-themed episodes TNG and DS9 did leading up to the Voyager pilot -- self-contained and complete on their own, but adding up to a larger arc if you see them all.

After all, the goal is to include different types of readers, not to exclude them. Some people are interested in just one or two series, while others are interested in the whole saga. So it makes sense to design crossovers to appeal to both, and to work both as individual stories and as pieces of a bigger whole.

 

[RoJoHen]

I bought the big Invasion! omnibus and read them all, but that was about a million years ago, so I don't remember too well how they intersected. I suspect you can enjoy them on their own, but it might be a richer experience reading all four.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I'm just wondering if it's important to read all the four books to understand the last one?
I'm reading all the Voyager-books, and as you might know, the last Invasion-book is a Voyager-book. Hence my question. :-)

It might help to read the TNG book before the Voyager book, because there's a character shared between them; you meet him first in Soldiers of Fear, and then he returns in The Final Fury.

 

[borgboy]

While the individual books stand alone, I thought they were all good reads and would recommend them all. The whole does tell the bigger story of the invasion and I really liked the "Demon" aliens and their culture a lot.

 

[Stevil2001]

I'm just wondering if it's important to read all the four books to understand the last one?
I'm reading all the Voyager-books, and as you might know, the last Invasion-book is a Voyager-book. Hence my question. :-)

It might help to read the TNG book before the Voyager book, because there's a character shared between them; you meet him first in Soldiers of Fear, and then he returns in The Final Fury.

That would be the most relevant to The Final Fury, I agree. First Strike is helpful for general background but probably skippable enough. Ironically, Time's Enemy is the most irrelevant but also the best.

 

[Christopher]

It's probably best to read The Final Fury without reading the prior books, because it has some pretty major inconsistencies with the previous volumes. For instance,

Spoiler: Invasion

the first two books treat the "racial-memory fear" aspect of the Furies as something passed down culturally through childhood stories and myths, a learned response that can be overcome through will and rationality, but The Final Fury interprets it as a genetically encoded fear response so overpowering as to be virtually impossible for even the strongest-willed being to resist.

Which is not to say that the other books aren't worth reading. Time's Enemy is indeed the best of the four. It's just that TFF doesn't really mesh that well with them, and reading them all back to back just throws the inconsistencies into relief.

 

[tomswift2002]

To date The Final Fury has been the only Invasion book that I've read, even though I've got the omnibus and the box set of the four individual volumes, and I found that I had no trouble understanding TFF.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

I bought the big Invasion! omnibus and read them all, but that was about a million years ago, so I don't remember too well how they intersected. I suspect you can enjoy them on their own, but it might be a richer experience reading all four.

I'm the same, its not sitting on a shelf and hasn't been looked at for a long time. I do remember though finding the DS9 book to be a little confusing.