Trek BBS ST Book Rating Stats

[Avro Arrow]

So just for interest's sake, I decided to take a look at the data on Sho's TrekLit review aggregator page. I don't know if anyone other than me will actually find this interesting, but I figured I'd share here anyway.

• There are 247 books included in the stats
• This data is all a point-in-time snapshot as of a couple hours ago on May 3, 2026
• As per the rules on the aggregator page, review threads with less than 4 votes aren't included
• I arbitrarily removed the review for the ST: Khan podcast series, since it's not a book, and therefore doesn't exist on GoodReads
• I also removed a duplicate where a single review thread was generating two lines in the table, for some reason
• In the few cases where Sho's page didn't include a GoodReads score, I looked them up manually and included them

If we look at the total mean score for all 247 books, Trek BBS had 3.89, and GoodReads had 3.88... almost identical. That means that our overall average score correlates to "Above Average", which is not really what you would expect. Intuitively, one would expect the average rating to be "Average", by definition. However, we all interpret the ratings slightly differently when we vote. And I'm not sure about GoodReads, but I think on the whole, members on the board tend to inflate their ratings, especially on the episode review threads. (I can't count the number of times I've seen an episode review on here that said something along the lines of: "The story was boring, the plot made no sense, and everyone acted out of character. I give it an 8.")

The standard deviation for Trek BBS is 0.56, and for GoodReads is 0.23. That means we have a greater variance around the mean than GoodReads does.

Next, I wanted to see how the ratings fell out if we assigned them all to one of the categories from our rating system. Since the aggregator page assigns a numeric value to each category (Poor = 1, up to Outstanding = 5) in order to calculate the mean score, here I'm doing the opposite: translating the mean score back into a category. The simplest way is just to round the mean rating to the nearest whole number based on standard rounding rules. Note, that means that the range for Outstanding and Poor is smaller than the range for Above Average, Average, and Below Average. (eg - Above Average would include ratings of 3.50 to 4.49, but Outstanding would only include 4.50 to 5.00.)

Here's how the numbers look for TrekBBS:

Outstanding - 29
Above Average - 167 (makes sense, since this is our "average" ranking)
Average - 45
Below Average - 6
Poor - 0

As you can see, there are no books rated "Poor". In order to fall into the "Poor" category, the average rating for the book would have to be between 1.00 and 1.49. Our lowest rated book, Triangle, has an average rating of 1.67.

For reference, those 6 Below Average books in order from lowest to highest are: Triangle, The Prometheus Design, Warped, Ship of the Line, String Theory 3: Evolution, and Broken Bow.

Here is the same breakdown for GoodReads. Note that I don't use GoodReads, but I know that they use a 5-star system, and cannot submit fractional or 0 stars, so that at least makes it comparable to our system. However, I don't know if there are "text" values for the various stars, nor how closely those might align to our system, so take this with a grain of salt.

Outstanding - 0
Above Average - 229
Average - 18
Below Average - 0
Poor - 0

I guess that stands to reason, with their lower standard deviation.

For reference, all 29 of our "Outstanding" books were rated "Above Average" on GoodReads. Interestingly, the "Below Average" ones show a bit more variation... here's how those six books were rated on GoodReads:

Triangle - Average (3.11)
The Prometheus Design - Average (3.10)
Warped - Average (3.12)
Ship of the Line - Above Average (3.50)
String Theory 3: Evolution - Above Average (3.74)
Broken Bow - Above Average (3.76)

It's worth noting that GoodReads seems to have hundreds of votes for each title, so maybe that's why everything there seems to get smoothed out into the 3.50 - 4.49 band. For comparison, rounded to the closest whole number, our average number of votes for the 247 books is 43. (Remember that if there are less than 4 votes, they are not included in the data.) Our highest number of votes was for Destiny: Lost Souls, at 195 votes (4.61). The next highest were Zero Sum Game (3.86) and Indistinguishable From Magic (3.69), with 181 votes each. Only 22 books out of 247 (8.9%) had 100 or more votes.

Finally, let's do some comparisons between us and GoodReads. As a point of interest, there are two books where our average rating was identical to GoodReads: Harm's Way (4.06) and Shattered Light (3.91). There are 52 books (21.1%) where the absolute value of the difference is less than 0.1, and 202 books (81.8%) where the absolute value of the difference is less than 0.5. If we look at the largest differences: where our rating is higher, the largest difference is 1.11 for The Wounded Sky, and where our rating is lower, the largest difference is -1.44 for Triangle. There are only 11 books (4.5%) where the absolute value of the difference is greater than or equal to 1, and in all but the one case (The Wounded Sky), our ratings are lower than GoodReads' ratings.

If you've actually read all this, thank you. Hopefully you've found it at least mildly interesting. And as always, thank you to @Sho for maintaining the aggregator page, and making this data available for us all!

 

[Christopher]

If we look at the total mean score for all 247 books, Trek BBS had 3.89, and GoodReads had 3.88... almost identical. That means that our overall average score correlates to "Above Average", which is not really what you would expect. Intuitively, one would expect the average rating to be "Average", by definition.

Not really. "Average" would mean the average quality for all books, so it just means that the voters rate the average Star Trek novel more highly than the average general novel. Which is what you'd expect from participants in a Star Trek literature forum, so the fact that Goodreads voters also rate Trek novels above average is a heartening sign. (Unless it's because they're predisposed to have lower expectations of media tie-in novels and thus grade them on a curve, which is much less flattering.)

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

(Unless it's because they're predisposed to have lower expectations of media tie-in novels and thus grade them on a curve, which is much less flattering.)

That those reviewing books on Goodreads are predisposed to have lower expectations of media tie-ins, and that our books are better than average, are not mutually exclusive.

Be that as it may . . . .

I debated whether to say this in the TWS review thread or in this thread:
It is no secret that I'm very stingy with "Outstanding" ratings, and a major reason for this is that Diane Duane set the bar very, very high. So high that very few of her ST novels would fail to get an "Outstanding" out of me: maybe one or two of the later "Rihannsu" novels might only get an "above average," but I can't think of much else. And I would argue that TWS (despite its detractors), Spock's World, and maybe also My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way really go beyond merely "outstanding," and would be better described with a rating of "Masterpiece."

As to why we average around "Above Average" is simple enough: we don't usually bother with review threads for the bad ones (most of which were from before we had review threads with polls). I'm pretty sure Triangle is the only Marshak & Culbreath novel we've even bothered to review, and likewise with the rather infamous period during the Bantam era when it seemed like literally every other book was just a rehash of the same basic plot as Planet of Judgment, with a downward spiral of quality, and some of the ones that weren't PJ-wannabes were worse. (Kathleen Sky's Death's Angel was fun, with lots of what I found to be delightfully bad puns in the names of alien species and their planets, and a kinder, gentler precursor of the loathsome "Section 31," but her Vulcan was the stuff of bad fanzines, "M&C-bad.")

 

[Christopher]

That those reviewing books on Goodreads are predisposed to have lower expectations of media tie-ins, and that our books are better than average, are not mutually exclusive.

Yes, but if you can't separate out the variables, you can't determine how much influence each one may have.

As to why we average around "Above Average" is simple enough: we don't usually bother with review threads for the bad ones (most of which were from before we had review threads with polls). I'm pretty sure Triangle is the only Marshak & Culbreath novel we've even bothered to review, and likewise with the rather infamous period during the Bantam era when it seemed like literally every other book was just a rehash of the same basic plot as Planet of Judgment, with a downward spiral of quality, and some of the ones that weren't PJ-wannabes were worse.

Good point. Since there aren't threads for every single book, just ones that various posters are motivated to review, it's an intrinsically biased sample.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Even if only some of the Goodreads score is high because of generally high quality, or even if it's only high compared to what people expect of media tie-ins, I'd still be inclined to count it as a win.

And one of the things that jumped out at me almost instantly when I recently read Lloyd Douglas's The Robe (my understanding is that it's considered "literary fiction," rather than "popular fiction" by at least some of those inclined to make that distinction) is that (and I've mentioned this before) he keeps beating readers over the head with a costuming detail that was kind of implicit in the setting (and had little or no bearing on plot or character developmet), to the point of flogging a dead horse. Even ADF knows when the reader has had enough of the minutiae. The point being that while The Robe is a very good book, which I did enjoy, and do recommend (even for those not familiar with the relevant Biblical events), I've read plenty of TrekLit (especially DD's stuff, and some GC and CLB, among others) that's at least as good, and a good deal better than most of the other media tie-in stuff I've read. (I will note that I've never disposed of a ST book unless it was to replace it with a better copy of the same title, but I've said "good riddance" to a few SW novels).

 

[David cgc]

There's also the issue of rating inflation, which has been a problem with any multi-point scale. People tend to think everything should get an "A" all the time. A three-out-of-five star rating isn't viewed as "the normal level of quality I would expect," but, at best, "Not outright offensive." That's become even more prominent with an increased reliance on customer ratings to receive business at all.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And customer ratings tend to encourage ratings inflation, because employers tend to treat consistent 10s as an expectation, and anything less as a reason to discipline their employees. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having customer ratings at all, let alone having anything beyond "satisfactory" vs. "unsatisfactory."

Which spreads into things like book ratings.

Now I give current TrekLit "Above Average" more often than all other ratings combined, because I've been reading it long enough to have seen how bad it can be, and the current editorial standards are quite high.

 

[Avro Arrow]

"Average" would mean the average quality for all books, so it just means that the voters rate the average Star Trek novel more highly than the average general novel.

I guess that ties in to what I said about all of us interpreting the ratings slightly differently when we vote. To me, I think of “average” as being based against other Star Trek novels, since that’s the only thing we’re rating in this forum. (Of course, I also think that if you’re voting in an episode poll, and you post that you didn’t like the episode, then your rating should be 5 or less, which doesn’t seem to be the consensus here.)

As to why we average around "Above Average" is simple enough: we don't usually bother with review threads for the bad ones (most of which were from before we had review threads with polls).

I think we have been pretty consistent about creating a review thread for every release in, what, at least the last decade or so, probably longer? And normally the review thread is posted just as the book starts to become available in stores, so we don’t know at that point whether the book will be good or not.

You are right about older books, though. We don’t do a lot of “retro” review threads in general. But I don’t think the there seems to be much of a bias between good vs bad older novels… they usually just seem to come up when people decide to try out an older book. For example, in the recent The Wounded Sky thread, although many people (myself included) consider this an early classic, the OP of that thread seems to actively dislike it, so I don’t think it’s fair to say the OP posted that thread because they thought the book was “good”.

I'm pretty sure Triangle is the only Marshak & Culbreath novel we've even bothered to review

I mean, The Prometheus Design is right there in second-last place!

 

[Christopher]

I guess that ties in to what I said about all of us interpreting the ratings slightly differently when we vote. To me, I think of “average” as being based against other Star Trek novels, since that’s the only thing we’re rating in this forum.

But you said the Goodreads rating was about the same, and clearly that wouldn't be the case there. Also, I think that most Trek readers would be rating how much they liked a book in general, rather than narrowing it specifically to how it compared to other Trek novels. Unless the only things they ever read are Trek novels, and that would just be sad.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I mean, The Prometheus Design is right there in second-last place!

I stand corrected. On the other hand, their Phoenix books, from the Bantam era, would fall off the bottom of the scale.