Star Trek Online tie in

[Saul]

This sounds interesting

Hailing Frequency, a fansite devoted to Star Trek gaming, unearthed an interesting piece of news a few days ago: an upcoming Star Trek Online tie-in novel.

Details are a bit sketchy, but the important ground is covered. The author of the book is Michael A. Martin, author of several Star Trek novels such as Star Trek Enterprise Romulan Wars. The title will be Star Trek Online: The Needs of the Many, it will have 340 pages, and the release date is set for March 30th, 2010.

The actual content of the novel is of course not known yet, but it is possible that the novel takes place in the timeframe of the game, 30 years after Star TreK Nemesis.

The book can be preordered through Amazon.com now, or directly from the publisher.

So will this be tied into the rest of the current Book continuity? Is the game leading the way of the future?
I'm interested to pick this up since Michael A Martin is writing it. Wonder how much backstory it will fill in/set up.

 

[reech]

It will probably be a 'side story' - the plot of the STO game started to seem similar earlier in the year (Donatra, the Romulan aftermath that appeared in the Titan books) but with the Destiny stuff happening in the book continuity and no sign of it in the relevant time frame on the STO site. There's also nothing mentioned of the Typhon Pact on the STO site over the years that it should have been apparent. Unless, of course, the impact of the Destiny stuff and the Pact is so teeny-tiny on the scale of things that no one's looking...

...yeah right! It seems obvious to me that the STO plot is all penned out, and is not a 'prime' timeline, but hey - at least we get a proper writer to pen the novel. And the first person who mentions the word canon gets loaded into it, and fired. I'm serious

Ah - the other thing that occoured to me is that there is no novel, and Amazon has jumped in too fast, but the presence of it on the S&S site insists that it may be real...

 

[DarkHorizon]

Note: earlier discussions here and here.

 

[Christopher]

So will this be tied into the rest of the current Book continuity? Is the game leading the way of the future?

As reech pointed out above, the ST:O continuity and the book continuity are incompatible. This section on Memory Beta lists the differences between the two, including the elements of the book continuity that ST:O has borrowed in a modified form.

On the whole, the novels, comics, and game are following their own separate paths, occasionally borrowing concepts from one another but not bound within a single continuity. Of course, the novel line encompasses several different continuities already (main novel continuity, Mirror and Myriad Universes, Shatnerverse, the upcoming Abramsverse novels, various standalones like the Crucible trilogy), so there's certainly room to add an ST:O novel (or novels) to the mix.