Where and when you started reading Trek....

[TheUsualSuspect]

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??

I remember those days too! Before ST IV came out, I thought they should make Kirk and crew an elite force of some kind - with a small ship and tasked with important, sensitive missions. After they did something amazing to get pardoned for their actions in ST III, of course.

I also remember how unexpected The Final Reflection by John Ford was. A novel, that, except for the brief framing sequences, featured none of the TV cast, with only cameos by Sarek, Spock (as a ten year old) and an infant McCoy.

There was a freshness to Trek back then that sometimes seems diluted by the many iterations we've had since.

 

[Warped9]

I loved The Final Reflection and still have it on my bookshelf.

 

[Therin of Andor]

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.

Camps of fans who were always clever at moving the goal posts! Very hard for newbies to enter the cliques.

I arrived with TMP, but was shocked that some fans hated TMP so much! And yet, years later, some of those fans were wishing loudly that Roddenberry had never handed TNG over to Rick Berman, conveniently forgetting that Roddenberry had been producer of TMP, that they had once hated - and the ST II they loved so much had been created by a producer (Bennett) and a director (Meyer) both new to Trek.

It's very amusing to read the post-TOS volumes of "The Best of Trek" and see fans scrambling to shunt TMP into an alternate universe, in order to make it more acceptable.

I read very few novels for a few years, until the DS9 relaunch started in 2001 and got me hooked on the current continuity.

That was an exciting new chapter in TrekLit!


DS9 Relaunch by Ian McLean, on Flickr

 

[vegaslover62]

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.

I really wish I didn't have to use an image-hosting site to show one picture to one person and then never use it again.

 

[EddyDrama]

My first Star Trek book was novelisation of Star Trek First Contact. I think I read it in the summer of 1997 so I was 13 at that time, and it was the first novel I ever read, not to mention it was in english and I started studying english in school the following semester I had picked up english by ear, and had been reading some english language comics so I already knew that I understood english, but I was not sure I would have the attention span to read a whole book, to my positive surprise I did.

I think it took about 3-4 weeks to read the book, and after that I read Star Trek TNG All Good Things novelisation. I don't remember what I read after that but it was some Star Trek book. The first non-Star Trek book that I read was Dune during christmas vacation in 1999 if I remember correctly.

But yeah, for a long time I never read any of the books that I had to do a book report for school, before Star Trek I just could not keep my attention on reading a book and did not want to read all that much, when I started reading Star Trek that was pretty much all I wanted to read. Until I stopped reading Star Trek books sometime early 2000's, when I started reading all sorts of things from fact literature to fiction.

 

[Idran]

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.

I really wish I didn't have to use an image-hosting site to show one picture to one person and then never use it again.

No I meant upload it there and post the link here in this thread, since you were saying you wished you could post a picture. I meant you could do it that way.

 

[vegaslover62]

No I meant upload it there and post the link here in this thread, since you were saying you wished you could post a picture. I meant you could do it that way.

And I meant I wish I could post it here directly instead of registering for a separate site I'll probably never use again.