This is probably a stupid question, but I noticed that as I read the novels I tend to jump, which is the intended purpose of the numbered Pocket Books lines for TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT. But it got me thinking: was there ever any benefit to reading these in the release order as they came out?
Was there any benefit to reading the numbered novels in order as they released?
- Thread starter ace2k
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It was never an issue for me, since I always grabbed up the novels as soon as they came out (until money became tighter and I didn't have the luxury any longer, but then there was still the library).
They didn't actually start numbering the novels until The Final Reflection, #16, so they managed fine without them for the first few years. I figure the numbering was just to let people know how many books there were if they wanted to collect the whole set. But once the numbering got up into the 80s or so, it started to feel intimidating to new readers (reportedly), so they discontinued it after #97. They were planning to do a final trilogy to bring it to 100, but that fell through. It would have been an arbitrary number anyway, since the numbering included the first three movie novelizations but not the later ones, and excluded the "giant" novels and hardcovers.
They didn't actually start numbering the novels until The Final Reflection, #16, so they managed fine without them for the first few years. I figure the numbering was just to let people know how many books there were if they wanted to collect the whole set. But once the numbering got up into the 80s or so, it started to feel intimidating to new readers (reportedly), so they discontinued it after #97. They were planning to do a final trilogy to bring it to 100, but that fell through. It would have been an arbitrary number anyway, since the numbering included the first three movie novelizations but not the later ones, and excluded the "giant" novels and hardcovers.
A shame. I actually find the numbering satisfying and wish they kept going with it.
There were of course other factors, being that by the point they stopped numbering them there were already plenty of novels which were "exempt" from being numbered, plus there was the various crossover miniseries, some of which were numbered, some of which weren't and even when they were numbered, there was never any consistency as to which series they were branded under. IE, while each novel in the Invasion series was a numbered novel under its individual series, you'd have something like Double Helix which were all branded as TNG novels and numbered accordingly, even though you have novels there which are basically DS9 or Voyager or even New Frontier Stargazer* novels but with the TNG logo on the cover. Or something like The Captain's Table which weren't numbered at all. By the early 2000s it just made more sense to drop the numbers altogether for simplicity sake, to make things more streamlined and less complicated. Especially since at that point, they were beginning to have a few novel exclusive series going on.
*Granted, the Stargazer series didn't officially begin until a few years later, so at the time it made the most sense to brand the Stargazer centered novel of Double Helix as a TNG novel.
*Granted, the Stargazer series didn't officially begin until a few years later, so at the time it made the most sense to brand the Stargazer centered novel of Double Helix as a TNG novel.
Susan Wright's novel The Best and the Brightest was going to be published under the Starfleet Academy banner, since it is an Academy novel guest-starring characters from TNG, DS9, and VGR, but it was decided to publish it as a TNG novel since they figured it would get better sales that way. Which is the same reason my The Buried Age was published under the TNG banner as "A Tale of the Lost Era," rather than under the banner of The Lost Era as originally intended.
Conversely, though, I was told that my DTI novel Forgotten History would probably be published under the TOS banner, so I wrote it essentially as a TOS novel guest-starring DTI characters, but it ended up getting published as a DTI novel instead.
I wasn't interested in the premise of Double Helix, and even though I noticed there was a cover with Calhoun on the cover, I assumed it would be a minor role and that I'd be lost without having read the other books. I was moderately confused when it was referenced briefly in the next NF book, and then very confused when it turned out to be a key element a few books later, so I only figured out what had happened and doubled back to read it during the long gap between "Being Human" and "Gods Above."
Ironically, the numbers stopped right as the books were becoming more serialized and it would've been helpful to have them itemized that way. And there were even more crossover events (though by that point, I was a committed reader and was getting everything) that would make it easy to miss when the next Deep Space Nine novel (for instance) came out.
I have mine shelved first by series (with stand-alone crossovers by primary series, and multi-volume crossover series shelved separately), then by author (except for multi-volume, multi-author series), then by publication date.
And there is some value in reading books from the period immediately preceding Richard Arnold's "Reign of Terror" in publication order, because there was a "proto-novelverse" going on, with a number of characters and situations shared among multiple authors. As I recall, there was a Vietnamese junior officer (named Nguyen, of course) showing up in multiple novels at the time. If not for Richard Arnold, it might have developed as fully as the more recent Novelverse.
And there is some value in reading books from the period immediately preceding Richard Arnold's "Reign of Terror" in publication order, because there was a "proto-novelverse" going on, with a number of characters and situations shared among multiple authors. As I recall, there was a Vietnamese junior officer (named Nguyen, of course) showing up in multiple novels at the time. If not for Richard Arnold, it might have developed as fully as the more recent Novelverse.
The thing about those crossover miniseries in the '90s or early '00s is that they were very loose crossovers, designed so that each individual book could stand alone and you didn't have to read them all. They weren't telling a single story like Destiny or Coda would do, just several standalone stories dealing with a common premise or a common catalyzing crisis. Think of the various Maquis episodes that were done across TNG and DS9 in the season before Voyager premiered -- "Journey's End," "The Maquis," "Pre-emptive Strike," "Tribunal." Each a standalone story, but with a common theme and continuity. It was kind of like that. Sometimes it was even looser, just a common theme like four books about Section 31 or the Klingon Day of Honor.
So if a book was part of a serialized series like New Frontier or the DS9 post-finale books, it would be much more closely tied to its own series's continuity than to the other books under the crossover title. It wasn't until Destiny that we got a crossover that was all one continuous story.
You're thinking of J.M. Dillard's novels, which had their own ongoing continuity within themselves and featured multiple original, recurring security-officer characters, including Lisa Nguyen. In the early years, there was often continuity between successive books by the same author, but there was only infrequent crossover between different authors' continuities. Dillard's characters stand out because she did so many books in fairly quick succession and featured them prominently across the sequence. The first real crossover between different authors was Margaret Wander Bonanno's Dwellers in the Crucible, which picked up on Duane's Romulans and John M. Ford's Klingons. Dillard's security chief character of Ingrit Tomson got picked up by Duane and one or two others, but I don't think any of Dillard's other characters did. The biggest single piece of connective tissue in the '80s "proto-novelverse" is A.C. Crispin's Time for Yesterday, which references at least a half-dozen other novelists' works (Duane, Ford, Brad Ferguson, Jean Lorrah, Vonda McIntyre, and Howard Weinstein), most of which were otherwise unconnected to each other.
True. In fact, one of the first Trek books I bought was the Voyager entry in the "Furies" miniseries, and I didn't read the other three until later. If Double or Nothing had been branded New Frontier instead of TNG, I certainly would've gotten it when it was new.
Lisa Nguyen also showed up in Brad Ferguson's A Flag Full of Stars, and possibly, nearly three decades later, in GC's A Contest of Principles.
Which begs a couple of questions (and I don't mean that in the sense of the logical fallacy) for @Greg Cox: (1) Memory Beta's character list for A Contest of Principles includes somebody named Nguyen; is there in fact such a character? and (2) if so, is the Nguyen in your book intended to be Dillard's Nguyen?
Which begs a couple of questions (and I don't mean that in the sense of the logical fallacy) for @Greg Cox: (1) Memory Beta's character list for A Contest of Principles includes somebody named Nguyen; is there in fact such a character? and (2) if so, is the Nguyen in your book intended to be Dillard's Nguyen?
1) That was five years and three Trek novels ago, so I honestly don't remember.
2) Pretty sure I didn't consciously borrow any characters from Dillard. It's possible, I suppose, that I could have lifted the name from some online list of Enterprise crew members, but it's most likely just a coincidence.
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If anything, the continuity among the Invasion! novels was rather weak. The VGR novel contradicted the earlier novels' portrayal of the Furies in various ways. For instance, the first two books portrayed people having a reflexive anxiety reaction to the Furies because they'd been conditioned to unconsciously fear them through the cultural mythology they were raised with, but it was a moderate anxiety that could be overcome with effort and reason; but The Final Fury exaggerated it to a genetically ingrained race memory that induced instant, debilitating terror, even in Tuvok IIRC. The book also seemed to assume that the first novel, First Strike, had taken place during Sulu and Tuvok's time on the Excelsior rather than during season 2 of TOS.
Given that Nguyen is by far the most common Vietnamese surname, it is very likely a coincidence.
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