The Star Trek Encyclopedia - Review

[Procutus]

Funny, I only replaced my previous laptop with a DVD-ROM drive 9 months ago. But it was really old.

I just bought this new one two months ago, and only because the previous unit had become very sluggish after upgrading to Windows 11. Other than that, there was nothing really wrong with it, but it was over six years old.

This OmniBook 5 has a Snapdragon processor which is light-years better than the i5 that was in my previous unit.

 

[Steve Roby]

I think I bought the 2016 edition. I should go up and have a look. I remember actually reading the first edition cover to cover, just a few pages at a time every now and then. Might have taken a year or more. I wasn't even tempted to do it with the later editions.

External optical drives come in handy. I've got two for my laptops. I think one is CD/DVD and the other is CD/DVD/blu ray. They get used fairly often. I still buy music CDs occasionally, not just Bandcamp or itunes downloads, and rip them to mp3 or flac. I also used one to rip everything off a British blu ray that was the wrong region for the various other players in the house (the Xboxes and the standalone blu ray player). The external drive was the only thing that would read it, so the movie and all the many special features that made the UK edition worthwhile are on redundant external hard drives as mkv files.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I really wish I got that updated Encyclopedia when it was "only" £80.

I wonder if a modern version could live on as part of the Roddenberry Archive site? It'd be updated by pros unlike the free-for-all Memory Alpha (awesome as that is) and tie in with links to their virtual exhibits.

 

[Eagan]

Recent posts have got me considering getting a copy of the Omniverse CD. I still buy all my music on CD so I make sure that whenever I buy a new desktop, it always has an optical drive built in, even though I don't like these modern flimsy vertical drives. You can probably tell that I'm a pretty old-school kind of guy.

Anyway, it appears that because it was produced to work under Windows 3.1, there are hoops that need to be jumped through to get it to work on more recent versions of Windows; I haven't read of anyone who uses it under Windows 11. Do any of you guys have first-hand experience of using it on a modern PC, and if so, can you tell me if it's a feasible proposition?

 

[NCC-73515]

My library here had the 3rd version, so I got it, took pictures of pretty much every graphic, then returned it

 

[Procutus]

Recent posts have got me considering getting a copy of the Omniverse CD. I still buy all my music on CD so I make sure that whenever I buy a new desktop, it always has an optical drive built in, even though I don't like these modern flimsy vertical drives. You can probably tell that I'm a pretty old-school kind of guy.

Likewise. For my writing, I'm still using a laptop with Windows 98. I'm still adjusting to the fact that this new laptop of mine does not have USB ports.



The last version of Windows I can recall using with the Omnipedia CD was Windows 95. I can only imagine that there might be more than a few hiccups trying to get it to run on any current OS.

 

[Eagan]

My library here had the 3rd version, so I got it, took pictures of pretty much every graphic, then returned it

Well, that's what libraries are for!

 

[Cap'n Calhoun]

The encyclopedia and the chronology both desperately need an update. I'd buy them in a heartbeat.

For what it's worth, the Chronology has received three partial updates beyond the 2nd edition in the form of the Star Trek Novel Timelines in Adventures in Time and Space, Gateways: What Lay Beyond, and Voyages of Imagination.

The VOI timeline includes everything through the end of Enterprise. That said, it's mainly a checklist without listings of specific events. It does make some interesting updates, such as switching Voyager productions 117-120 into production order rather than airdate order (which makes sense to me) and fixing a seeming error with the placement of "The Quickening". It also includes TAS, albeit in the order of the Alan Dean Foster novelizations. (The AITAS and GWLB versions used release date order for TAS.) Though it seems to mangle Voyager seasons 6-7 a bit, or at least it uses an internal logic I haven't been able to follow.

Really would love a properly updated Chronology in any case. I still reference mine frequently.

 

[Procutus]

Really would love a properly updated Chronology in any case.

Me too, but I doubt very much we'll ever get one.

 

[Dukhat]

I have every edition, including the two-volume hardcover, which I thought was pricey at the time but am very glad I bought it because of how much it goes for now. However, I was not impressed with the newest edition, mainly because there were several mistakes from previous versions that were not corrected, and several instances where new information could have been added but the authors chose not to for whatever reason (for example, they did not bother to give a class name for the USS Centaur, probably because of their bias that the Dominion War kitbashes were not true starship classes.)

 

[Eagan]

Me too, but I doubt very much we'll ever get one.

If you have a lot of spare time on your hands, you could always start a project to produce your own. It would probably take an age, and require regular updating; but think of the sense of satisfaction.

By the way, did your library come up with the goods?

 

[Procutus]

By the way, did your library come up with the goods?

Funny you should ask that. They did... In a manner of speaking. What I ended up with was the 1994 version, not the updated, two-volume set. I may some day decide to acquire it, but it's not a huge priorty.

Needless to say I returned the old version to the library the following day!

 

[Therin of Andor]

... additional content in the 1999 edition was not interleaved with the entries from the previous (1997) edition, but was contained in a 108 page supplement. So the main section was simply a copy of the alphabetically sorted entries from the 1997 edition, and this was followed by the supplement whose entries were alphabetically sorted again. I found this very messy, made worse by the fact that the supplement contained "second" entries for people/things in the 1997 edition containing additional information about them from the newly incorporated episodes/movie.

Yes, unfortunately, the Okudas' editors explained that to interleave all of the new entries into the main text would have meant reformatting the entire project, which would have blown the budget.

 

[Stevil2001]

I would guess my copy of the Omnipedia was long discarded by my parents. I see from Memory Alpha that some copies came with the 4-CD "Epics on Audio" compilation of readings of early "giant novels"; I had that as a kid, too, so I guess that must be where that originated. I wonder what happened to that.

I received the answer to this question when I went home for Christmas this year, and my mother handed over a couple CDs she found while cleaning the basement. The others I covertly left behind, but I did make off with Epics on Audio! Once I finish the sequence of Doctor Who audio stories I'm in the middle of, I look forward to relistening to these.

 

[veritech]

Me too, but I doubt very much we'll ever get one.

My Question is do you think we would ever get a physical release of the chronology or encyclopedia given the current trends/atmosphere in publishing? Is it just too expensive? DK still publishes these type of books.

 

[Procutus]

My Question is do you think we would ever get a physical release of the chronology or encyclopedia given the current trends/atmosphere in publishing? Is it just too expensive? DK still publishes these type of books.

I'm no expert, but I'd guess that these days, it's just cost-prohibitve for whoever currently owns the rights to publish either the chronology or the encyclopedia to do so.

The whole publishing industry is very different than when I worked for Waldenbooks. Part of me greatly misses those days.

 

[JD]

My Question is do you think we would ever get a physical release of the chronology or encyclopedia given the current trends/atmosphere in publishing? Is it just too expensive? DK still publishes these type of books.

There are still some in non-fiction books coming out occasionally, so I wouldn't say it's impossible, but most of them seem to be either gimicky in universe stuff like the character autobiographies, the crew guide for the Cerritos, the travel guides and the Haynes Manuals or deep dives into a specific topic like the costume book or The Art of John Eaves. There doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in those type of more general books, the only ones like that I can think of from the last decade or so are DK's Visual Guide, and The Star Trek Book, and it's been a while since either of them came out.

 

[Eagan]

Sadly, I agree with the consensus here.

Given the high cost of the last edition of the Encyclopedia, the additional cost required to incorporate all the canon content generated since then (i.e. ten years' worth) would probably result in an astronomical list price. Maybe an updated edition of the Chronology would be more affordable as it could be restricted to just descriptions of events, without all the additional background information contained in the Encyclopedia; but it would still have to be a substantial expansion of the last edition.

Still, the supply of less comprehensive reference books does seem to be continuing, a good example being "Star Trek in 100 Objects" which is due for publication in August and seems like it will be high quality, but expected to sell for £40 (I only think in UK money) for only 192 pages, which seems like a lot to me.

 

[JD]

If they wanted to go for an official encyclopedia, I think our best bet would be if they added a database to the official site like they have on the Star Wars site.

 

[Procutus]

^

That would be very cool to see.