Recurring Trek Lit Themes - What's your Favorite?

[Greg Cox]

I like The Follow Up stories, I a couple of people joking about how every episode of TOS might very well have had a follow up of some sort. And that's okay with me. Not everyone likes every episode, but any one of us has that episode that no-one likes but we would like to see more of..

Pretty sure nobody has touched "Spock's Brain" yet.

But, yeah, we've probably followed up on all of the more popular TOS eps by now.

 

[Sci]

My favorite TrekLit are definitely the political novels. I'm really fascinated by stories that are more broadly about how a republic as large and diverse as the Federation functions. (If I have one criticism for most of TrekLit's political novels [besides the over-reliance on presidential assassination stories], it's the idea that the Federation doesn't have political parties. There's science fiction, and then there's fantasy. )

After those, I love a type that I think the O.P. kind of missed: The cultural immersion novels. These would be novels that are fundamentally about a particular alien cultures in Trek, told from their POV. Examples would include the first Terok Nor novel Day of the Viper by James Swallow (which was very much a "Bajoran immersion" novel), Andrew J. Robinson's A Stitch in Time, and most of Una McCormack's oeuvre (especially The Never-Ending Sacrifice and The Crimson Shadow).

 

[Desert Kris]

Pretty sure nobody has touched "Spock's Brain" yet.

But, yeah, we've probably followed up on all of the more popular TOS eps by now.

The Wonder Years did, once upon a time...

Not the same thing, I know.

 

[Scout101]

^ I called out A Stitch In Time as a character piece, I guess, but maybe there's something between that and exploration where we're doing more world building? Wasn't trying to say all books fit one of those categories, and it was becoming a wall of text, so had to cut it off somewhere, but I get where you're going.

 

[Starbreaker]

I'm very partial to exploration novels. Voyager seems to be leading the pack in that regard right now, but still gets bogged down in "remember this character" and "remember this show plotline" sometimes. I wish we had a series that really just went out there and did new things.

 

[JD]

I like pretty much all of the categories of the books, but my favorites are.

• Follow Up: I really like it when the books go back and take another look at something we saw onscreen.
  
• Galactic Crisis: Big epic stories are a lot of fun.
• Character Piece: I love it when the book really take a good deep look at the characters.

 

[Reanok]

I like books that are about Characters story arcs and Space Exploration. I like the political intrigue in the Rise of the federation books and Like Star Trek Vanguard like having Jag investigations in that series. Also the TOS,TNG and Ds9 books. Like JD said I also like story sequels to Star TrekTV episodes too.

 

[Sci]

^ I called out A Stitch In Time as a character piece, I guess, but maybe there's something between that and exploration where we're doing more world building? Wasn't trying to say all books fit one of those categories, and it was becoming a wall of text, so had to cut it off somewhere, but I get where you're going.

I mean, I'm not trying to critique your post per se, I'm just suggesting another broad "category." I wouldn't necessarily just call it world-building, either -- The Never-Ending Sacrifice is fundamentally about Cardassian society's evolution from sort of imperial Chekist/military oligarchy into a full-blown cult-of-personality dictatorship, to an occupied world, to a world facing near-genocide, to its final redemption. Spock's World would be another example -- it's not just about information, but about the story of how Vulcan came to be Vulcan.

 

[Scout101]

I didn't take it that way, just struggled to try and keep the list from being ginormous, so had to kinda consolidate in places. There's plenty that don't fit into any category, and others that span a ton, was just trying to highlight some of the ones that come up dozens of times to see which ones were the most popular...

I'd definitely call things like the Cardassian books or Spock's World as worldbuilding, though. That's what's happening; you're taking a world or culture and fleshing it out. History, backstory, deep introspective look, immersion, culture, all there as part of making that world more 'real'.