The Star Trek Lit-verse Reading Guide

[Christopher]

I have a couple of questions, and this seems like the best place ask them.
Are there any specific connections between The Q Contiuum books and the Novelverse?

Maybe somebody made a passing mention to them somewhere, but I don't think they really connected.

Is it possible to reconcile the TNG: Dominion War duology, with the DS9 Reluanch? I had assumed they would have to be separate since the Dominion War books have Ro working with Picard and the Ent-E crew, and then the one of the Avatar books have them encountering each other for the first time since she joined the Maquis. But now I'm confused because Memory Beta has the Dominion War books on the "First Spinter", which is what they call the Novelverse, page for the Enterprise-E and/or Ro.

Memory Beta makes strange choices sometimes. You're right, they're incompatible in how they portray Ro and Picard.

Let me rephrase. Any way I can only see the novels that represent the original Lit-verse? Before the relaunch?

I'm still confused. Generally the term "Lit-verse" is used to apply to the novel continuity that began with the Deep Space Nine Relaunch in 2001, and that also included later "Relaunches" like Voyager and post-Nemesis TNG. So are you asking about the continuity that ran from roughly 2001-2021 and was ended (at least the post-First Contact portion of it) with the Coda trilogy?

If you mean before the 2001 DS9 relaunch, there wasn't a unified novel continuity back then. There was a loose continuity among a number of the Pocket novels in the mid- to late 1980s, but it was abandoned after a lot of it was contradicted by TNG.

 

[JD]

The best place to find all the interconnected books, from all the different eras, is the site that this thread is about. @ryan123450 has done a great of cataloging all of the connected books and how they fit together.

 

[ryan123450]

Over the last couple of months I've finished several big projects on the site. In the fall I pulled out the recent interconnected IDW Comics' series into their own reading list.

www.startreklitverse.com/theseus-and-defiant.php

Since they are only marginally linked to the rest of the interconnected Lit-verse web, and only include a few characters from each relevant series, they were really cluttering up the Lit-verse Reading List pages. So now they are listed on their own, which is also appropriate based on how big those series got. They deserve their own pages as much as some of the shorter prose series do. This project also included adding the final arcs and issues of these series which I hadn't figured out the chronological order of yet. And then I created a simple suggested reading list for these series.

I also created a Lower Decks Reading List page, and completed the few minor tweaks that I still lacked after creating the Strange New Worlds/ Captain Pike Reading Lists.

Over the winter I've been working on a new Story Count page format, and it is complete! Instead of each publisher's series having their own separate page listing each story's name, now those names are listed in expandable dropdowns under each series count.So everything is present on one giant page. I've continued to display the count in two different layouts, by publisher and by series, each now on a separate page.

https://startreklitverse.com/story-count.php

During the process of doing all that I went back over all the information with a fine tooth comb and discovered a few errors, including one story (Captain's Blood) that has accidentally been missing from the count since day one. I moved the "Thesesus" and Defiant series to their own separate category instead of being a part of "Other." I added audiobooks and the audio portion of story records to the count, which I previously hadn't counted. This led me to notice Buena Vista Records was a publisher that I previously had overlooked (having listed those stories under Simon and Schuster.) And I added the short novelizations of each episode that were included in each issue of The Next Generation Magazine, Deep Space Nine Magazine, and Voyager Magazine. I had been debating this for a while, but ended up deciding they should count. All this added more than 500 stories to the total count, which now stands at 3,261 individual Star Trek stories ever published.

I've also added a few new stories to the Lit-verse web as I've discovered a couple of new links. And as always I've been keeping things updated as new releases come out each month.

Let me rephrase. Any way I can only see the novels that represent the original Lit-verse? Before the relaunch?

If you're referring to the Litverse Reading Guide in particular, no there's not currently any way to sort out just those Original Lit-verse stories on the TOS Reading List. I do have plans to revamp each page to be able to see different individual publication eras someday, but haven't gotten to it yet. I've got quite a few ideas floating in my head regarding that.

 

[JD]

I'm in the process of rereading DS9: Too Long A Sacrifice, and in it a Betazoid talks about the attack on Betazed and the Dominion setting up Sentok Nor afterwards. So I was wondering, would that place it in the Novelverse? I was under the impression that Sentok Nor was created just for The Battle of Betazed, and so far I haven't noticed anything that directly contradicts any Novelverse stories.

 

[Christopher]

I'm in the process of rereading DS9: Too Long A Sacrifice, and in it a Betazoid talks about the attack on Betazed and the Dominion setting up Sentok Nor afterwards. So I was wondering, would that place it in the Novelverse? I was under the impression that Sentok Nor was created just for The Battle of Betazed, and so far I haven't noticed anything that directly contradicts any Novelverse stories.

Fiction can borrow elements from another continuity without belonging to that continuity, but if there are no contradictions, then the individual is free to exercise one's own imagination and interpret it however one likes.

 

[ryan123450]

I placed in on the site due to that reference. Like every book in the web of continuity references, it’s up to each person to decide if it “fits” or not. I make no judgement calls about that and list everything, even when there are massive contradictions.

 

[JD]

You guys bring up a fair point, I was just a little surprised a reference like that pop up in something that wasn't specifically marketed as being connected to the novels, like the New Frontier comics, or Divided We Fall. Personally I tend to include anything that fits but doesn't contradict the other Novelverse stuff.

 

[Christopher]

You guys bring up a fair point, I was just a little surprised a reference like that pop up in something that wasn't specifically marketed as being connected to the novels, like the New Frontier comics, or Divided We Fall.

Creators get inspiration from all sorts of places. What matters isn't where it comes from, just whether it's useful in what you're creating. And writers are frugal. We recycle stuff a lot, even if it's in different continuities. If someone wants to mention a Cardassian station over an occupied Betazed, why not use the one that was already created?