Where and when you started reading Trek....

[Paris]

I remember my middle school library having a bunch of the early numbered TNG novels, and having gotten into Trek a few years before that, I picked up TNG#8: The Captain's Honor by the Dvorkin's as my first foray into treklit. I continued with some of the numbered novels and then got Federation by the Reeves-Stevens and it was game over. 20+ years later, and i'm still loving them

 

[Therin of Andor]

The Price of the Phoenix and the Fate of the Phoenix...

Try reverse order - and without having seen "The Enterprise Incident"!

Enterprise: The First Adventure (the German translation to be precise) sometime in the early/mid nineties. It was actually my brother who bought it, but he didn't like it so I "inherited" it.

Liked it well enough, but i wasn't instantly hooked

This might have been my first Pocket disappointment. I was reading each Pocket novel as they were released, and they were now coming out quite regularly! Loved that it was such a chunky paperback, but it came hard on the heels of DC Comic's own 20th anniversary commemorative story of the "first adventure": an annual, "All Those Years Ago..."

Up until then, Pocket and DC (and FASA) had conferred a little on quite a few things but this time, obviously, no one had made an attempt at agreement over which crewmembers were already aboard Enterprise when Kirk arrived, and who came with him, or soon after.

The "first contact" story has definitely grown on me. (Not so at first; and I still don't think much of the traveling circus subplots. Steven the blond Vulcan juggler cousin of Spock who is toying with emotions?) Some very alien aliens, and that part of the story works very nicely in the greatly-abridged audio.

 

[RoJoHen]

My first Trek book was William Shatner's "The Return" when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I remember reading it in the nursery at my church. It was at night, and I think my mom was there for a meeting or something. I was just killing time waiting for her to do that.

I shortly thereafter started reading the New Frontier novels. I was in Pittsburg visiting my grandparents, and they took us to a used book store, where I found the first four novels.

I used to read so much Trek Lit, but I've cut way back in recent years. It's not really intentional; I just don't have the time to read as much as I used to. Kind of a shame.

 

[Admiral_Young]

I had the Blish books as well when I was a kid, before I was a Trek fan, I got them for Christmas one year. My first book though was probably the "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" novelization and then Peter David's "Imazdi". I think when i was around 11 or 12.

 

[Tarheel]

I vaguely recall owning one of the old Peter Pan book-and-record sets, but I clearly recall purchasing some of the TMP-era Marvel comics. However my true TrekLit introduction came in 1986, starting with the TWOK-TSFS-TVH novelizations and the DC Comics run. I think my first original novel was Strangers From The Sky.

 

[drc]

My 7th-grade library had The Star Trek Reader, which was a collection of the Blish books.

Very soon after I got both New Voyages books, the Trek IV novel and Ishmael. Later that school year I did a report on Enterprise: The First Adventure.

 

[dstyer]

I do vaguely remember checking out the Foto-Novels from my elementary school or middle school library in the 70s. The first novel I actually purchased would've been the adaptation of The Motion Picture. I was thankful that the novels weren't coming out every month, because my dad would only take me downtown to Readmor bookstore about every three months.

I also remember being thrilled when they re-printed the Bantam novels in 1984. I made sure to get a complete collection of these and the Log series. I wish I had kept the Bantam novels....

 

[greenmystik]

I read my first Trek book junior year of high school. It was a Shatnerverse novel; Spectre. That got me hooked, and it wasn't until I finished the trilogy and started a new ST novel (which I believe was the Double Helix series) that I realized the Shatnerverse was separate from the Trek Lit books. That was over 15 years ago and I haven't turned back.

Star Trek novels were the only books I read for 5 or so years until I decided to branch out.

 

[Tirius]

My first Trek novel was the only one at the local library at the time: the novelization of Generations, back when I was around 16. (Which coincidentally means I've been reading Trek for exactly half my life now...) The first books I bought shortly after were the Dominion War duologies and DS9's Wrath of the Prophets, the start of a journey that never stopped.

 

[Galekarens]

I'm pretty sure I read Spock Messiah! and I know I read many of the James Blish TOS novelizations, and also at least some of the TAS Star Trek Logs by Alan D. Foster, which I bought in the 70's (whoa!).

 

[JoeP]

Deep Space Nine: Bloodletter.

 

[dansigal]

November 2011 I decided to take on the Litverse starting with the DS9 relaunch and specifically the Left Hand of Destiny duology.

 

[vegaslover62]

A loooooooong time ago, I used to work in a thrift store. The guy who was in charge of books knew I was a Trek fan and managed to cobble together all of the Blish novelizations he had and gave them to me. But he didn't have all of them. There were apparently 12 or more of them, but he could only find seven of them. I enjoyed reading them, so I went to a bookstore and tried to order the other ones. They were just known as Star Trek 1, Star Trek 2, so on and so forth, and the lady was looking them up and reading off the titles: The Entropy Effect, The Klingon Gambit, The Covenant of the Crown, and I said, "These aren't the books I'm looking for!" She said, "Do you want me to take them off the order?" I stopped and said, "Let me see these books." I had no idea any original novels existed at that point, so I wound up ordering them instead. I enjoyed them so much, I wound up collecting all of them, and I still have them. One copy of every single Trek novel ever published(except for the YA books), and they take up three whole bookcases in my den. The Pockets, all the Bantams and even the solitary original Whitman. I wish I could post a picture.

 

[Trek Survivor]

My first were the adaptation of "Encounter At Farpoint" the TOS novel "Klingon Gambit" (I brought both at the same time; read EaF first!). This was in 1990 - BBC2 had just started showing TNG and I was hooked.
Shortly thereafter, Marvel UK started publishing their TNG comic.

So many happy memories of those days...

 

[Claudia]

I remember watching TOS-reruns on TV in the 1980's, then came TNG, of course. My first book was the German translation of the STIII-novelization, but I didn't read that until after some German early TNG-books.

I switched to the English books... was it 1994/5?... with Imzadi and Reunion, and haven't looked at the German versions since. I read practically everything until 2001 when I grew tired of TrekLit (and got hooked on Harry Potter et al. *g*) There are phases when I pick up Trek books and read one after the other. One such phase was when Destiny was published, another was last year when I read through the Vanguard-saga. Right now, I'm munching my way through SCE, but don't quite feel so keen on getting really into TrekLit, so it's slow going.

 

[Idran]

I enjoyed them so much, I wound up collecting all of them, and I still have them. One copy of every single Trek novel ever published(except for the YA books), and they take up three whole bookcases in my den. The Pockets, all the Bantams and even the solitary original Whitman. I wish I could post a picture.

Could you upload it on Imgur and post the link? Or do you mean you don't have a camera? Because I would love to see that.

 

[Warped9]

When the TNG books first started coming out I actually preferred the early books to the series itself. The characters seemed slightly different given things weren't firmly ironed out yet on the series.

 

[TheUsualSuspect]

I started reading the books just after I started watching the series in the late 70s. Probably my first novel was either Planet of Judgment by Joe Haldeman or The Price of the Pheonix by Marshak and Culbreath, along with the Blish adaptations and the Foster Log series. I read all the Bantam books as they came out from that point on. Once Pocket started publishing, I read all the novels and novelizations, good, bad, or in between, through the mid-90s, when I decided that too many of the novels were bad or mediocre, and I just didn't have the time to read them all. I read very few novels for a few years, until the DS9 relaunch started in 2001 and got me hooked on the current continuity.

 

[Klaus]

One of the clear threads emerging here is how important the DS9 relaunch was to many of us....

 

[Warped9]

Yesterday on a whim I began to browse through one of my copies of one of Best Of Trek books. In an odd way, for some moments, I was transported back to when TOS, TAS and then each successive film released (until 1987) was all there was to filmed Star Trek.

It was time when the idea of a Star Trek without the familiar characters or those characters played by different actors was a notion too bizarre to contemplete. There had been some talk of recasting the characters for a feature prior to TMP, but it obviously lost traction as TPTB likely realized what a foolhardy move that would have been particularly given the availability and health of the original cast.

Today the films are a done deal, but back then fan speculation exploded over what could happen in each successive film. WTF? They killed Spock??? They destroyed the Enterprise??? How can they possibly go forward from that? How can they possibly make it work now??

Today we have camps of fans, but that actually began back in the day as there appeared to be fans who preferred TOS, fans who preferred the films and those who liked all of it. The advent of TNG also expanded the number of fan camps, something thats happened with each successive series and film.

Definitely a trip down memory lane.