VOY book suggestion for a non-fan

I’m not the biggest VOY fan but am rewatching “Workforce” and wondering if there’s anything in the lit that might strike my fancy. I remember reading Mosaic and Pathways decades ago, so those are out. What’s the greatest VOY novel ever written? Or one that is unusual enough, whether in tone or premise or quality of writing or what have you, that for whatever reason stands out as special to experience?

 

I'd recommend the anthology Distant Shores. Published in 2005 for the show's tenth anniversary, it has stories from throughout the seven years of the show. Some really good stuff in there.....

 

I just said this elsewhere, but Kirsten Beyer's books did more to make me love Voyager and it's characters than Voyager ever did. I think Full Circle is a good starting point that leads into a really great series of novels.

 

I enjoyed the numbered novel Echoes quite a bit when I was younger, though more for the premise than as a Voyager book. The first String Theory book was good as well, though I was unimpressed by the second and didn’t bother reading the third.

 

I remember liking "The Garden" quite a bit. Interesting aliens, and touched better on the survival aspect of life in the delta quadrant then the tv series normally did.

As I too don't particularly like voyager I haven't read many of the books so I wouldn't say it was the greatest or anything though.

"Children of the Storm" is exceptionally good (to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if it was considered the best VOY book ever), but it's part of a wider arc (that I absolutely hate the end of), and is best when focusing on non-voy characters, so I'm not sure about recommending it.

 

Kirsten Beyers Voyager are really good. Children of the storm is one of my favorite Voyager books.

 

Fire Ship. A great Janeway novel and very little of the rest of the Voyager crew.

 

I'd put in another vote for Kristen Beyer's Relaunch series, which starts with Full Circle.
If you're looking for TV series era stuff, I've only read a handful, but I'd recommend all of them.
The String Theory trilogy is really good, the first one is the best, but the whole trilogy is worth a read.
I recently read the Gateways Voyager book, No Man's Land, and the concluding novella, In the Queue, and enjoyed them.
If you want some different takes on the series, there have also been Myriad Universes and Mirror Universe stories featuring the Voyager cast.
The first Myriad Universes book, Infinity's Prism, features @Christopher L. Bennett's novella, Place of Exile. It takes place in an alternate universe in which Janeway does not make an alliance with the Borg during the events of Scorpion, and takes things in a very different direction from where the show went after that.
The Mirror Universe versions of the characters first appear in The Mirror Scaled Serpent, @KRAD (Keith R.A. DeCandido)'s novella in Obsidian Alliances. In this one instead of crew of Voyager going to the Delta Quadrant, Kes and Neelix end up in the Alpha Quadrant, and get picked up by a Rebel ship commanded by Chakotay with most of the Voyager crew on board.

 

I would recommend The Escape by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It’s a time-travel story, but it has a very different twist than most Trek time travel where the heroes go to one timeframe and then return. In “The Escape” the Voyager crew is jumping through multiple time frames.

Another good one is Susan Wright’s “Violations”, and it’s also interesting in that the plot of this book was later reused in a Season 4 episode.

Also “The Murdered Sun” and “Marooned” by Christie Golden are 2 of the Top Voyager numbered novels. Golden also wrote “Seven of Nine”.

Others are “The Badlands” by Susan Wright, “Echoes”, “Death of a Neutron Star” and the “Dark Matters” Trilogy (also by Christie Golden) that brings back the Romulan scientist from ‘Eye of the Needle’.

Plus in the vein of “Mosaic”, there’s the Voyager: Starfleet Academy trilogy that stars Cadet Kathryn Janeway, and also features other Trek alumni in cameos like Will Riker.

Also, in terms of novelizations, Diane Carey’s “Flashback” is up there in the Top 3 Trek novelizations of all time! I read the book before seeing the episode, and I thought that Carey was novelizing a 3-part episode, when it was only a single episode, but her “Flashback” adds a to Of extra detail.

Alsoo, while not strictly Voyager, William Shatner’s “Mirror Universe Trilogy” (Spectre, Dark Victory, Preserver) has the Mirror Universe counterparts interacting with the Alpha Quadrant series. It’s in the same universe as DS9’s Mirror Univerze.

 

Wow, that’s a lot of titles. For those who have read the ones suggested, what are some of your impressions of them?

 

The ones I have read that stand out the most are Distant Shores, the Kirsten Beyer relaunch novels (they combine great character work and sci-fi concepts), and Mosaic.

 

It depends on what you're in the mood for. There are two kinds of Voyager novels - the ones set during the series and the ones that continue the story after. The publishing line got a little confusing for a while after Voyager returned home but all the pieces got put together in the novel Full Circle which begins a run of 10 Voyager novels chronicling the ship's return back to the Delta Quadrant to explore with a fleet supporting. Be warned that Full Circle is a weird read, since Kirsten Beyer (the author, who is now a writer for Discover and co-creator of Picard) had a lot of bits of other authors' stories to work around and some pretty big events happened in those stories, but I've recommended the Full Circle books to several people and they've all said that it wasn't too difficult to follow and that the rest of the novels are unequivocally phenomenal. That run just finished with her tenth, To Lose The Earth, this month. Some of the best Trek ever written, in my opinion.

Or: if you want books that take place during the TV show, pretty much anything else recommended in the thread will work.

 

I hope you don't mind if I add a bit of background to some of these recommendation.

The Badlands is a duology with each book containing two novellas, one for each for TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager. The Voyager novella is the second one in the second book, and ties up stuff set up in the first three novella. It is set before and during Caretaker, so it follows the Voyager and Maquis crews separately.

These were part of the YA Starfleet Academy series from back in the '90s, so they have never been released as E-Books, and have been out of print since then. Pretty much the only way to get ahold of them now is second hand from places like Amazon or EBay.
I was part of the target audience when they came out, and so I read them. From what I can remember, I enjoyed them, so if you don't mind reading YA, and are willing to possibly spend a more than you would on a typical new paperback, I'd recommend them. Just for reference the cheapest copy of the first book is a "very good" copy for US$19.01, and the one and only "like new" copy is $57.50.

 

It could even be broken down further:

#'s 1-15, plus Flashback, Day of Honor #3: Her Klingon Soul & Mosaic are set during the Kes era of the show (Seasons 1-3)
#'s 16-21 plus Day of Honor (episode novelization), Equinox, Endgame, Pathways, Fire Ship, Shadow, No Man's Land, The Nanotech War & String Theory #'s 1-3 are set during the Seven of Nine era of the show (Seasons 4-7) with Endgame even leaping off into the Post-Series stories with a few chapters from Homecoming added to the book (as a preview, although at the time, we would have to wait 2 years for the full book of Homecoming to come out! Which was ridiculous---seems like Homecoming was pretty far along in 2001, and might've been getting prepped for a Christmas 2001 release, since S&S was actually advertising a book that wouldn't be out until 2003!)

 

Mosaic and Pathways are also worth special mention since Jeri Taylor, a writer on the show at the time, penned them; they weren't canon, and different creative choices were made after she left with some of the backstories, but it's neat nonetheless.

But: I still recommend Beyer's books. She's so good.

 

Taylor wasn't just "a writer on the show," she was its co-creator and showrunner. At the time she wrote the books, she did consider them to be canonical, and elements from Mosaic were referenced in "Coda" (the bits about Janeway's father) and "Revulsion" (the backstory of how Janeway met Tuvok). However, her successors were not bound by her intentions and made no effort to stay consistent with the books.

 

There’s also Susan Wright’s “Dark Passions” duology which is completely different to all the other Mirror Universe stories. I’ve had it on my shelf for about 15 years, and haven’t gotten around to it, but it can’t be called just Voyager, or just TNG or just Ds9, as it features a mix of characters. It apparently takes place in the Prime universe’s TNG 7th/DS9 1st seasons, but there’s no interaction with the Prime or Mirror characters, it’s all Mirror. But it seems to focus more on the women of Trek in the Mirror Universe, since Annika Hansen is on both covers, then you have Troi and Kira on Book 1’s cover, while Book 2 has Janeway and Crusher.

 

And just in case anyone is wondering, Dark Passions takes place in a different version of the Mirror Universe from The Mirror Scaled Serpent and other recent Mirror Universe stories.

 

I actually read the Mirror stories a while ago. Kinda hated them at the time, but I wasn’t enjoying them for what they were going for.