This is the starting point for a book-by-book retrospective of the Star Trek lit-verse. It will encompass both the post-Enterprise timeline and the 24th century timeline from Star Trek: Destiny forward. It will lead off with the 24th century storylines with Enterprise books peppered in along the way.
The Run-UpThe first building blocks were laid in 2003. May of that year saw the publication of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Avatar, the first book in what would be called the Deep Space Nine Relaunch. This two book series picked up in the immediate wake of Deep Space Nine's series finale "What You Leave Behind" and would eventually encompass 20 books, the last of which was published in 2009. A month later in June Star Trek: Voyager - Homecoming, the first novel set after the completion the finale "Endgame", was published.
The following year a series of nine novels referred to as Star Trek: A Time to... was published. They covered a period of time beginning after Star Trek: Insurrection in the wake of the Dominion War and ending immediately prior to the opening of Star Trek: Nemesis. The series followed the crew of the Enterprise 1701-E through a number of different events and included explanations for some apparent continuity problems between the two films.
Finally in 2005, with Enterprise ending and the 24th century series and movies already in the rear view mirror, Star Trek novels took flight and began exploring where no series had gone before. Leading the way were the first three novels in the Star Trek: Titan series (published in March, September, and December) which followed Captain Riker and Counselor Troi leading the crew of the Starship Titan. Also published in September was Star Trek: The Next Generation - Death in Winter which continued the Enterprise crew's adventures following their last movie.
Boldly Going
Star Trek: Enterprise would get its share of literary love starting in 2007 with the publication of Star Trek: Enterprise - The Good That Men Do which picks up after "Terra Nova part 2". The Enterprise novel series would run from 2007 to 2017 and consist of nine novels.
All of this pales in comparison to what kicked off in 2008.
Star Trek: Destiny was a three part series that took place about 16 months after Star Trek: Nemesis. It brought together characters from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Titan--effectively time jumping them all from wherever their previous adventures had ended to a common present.
After Destiny concluded 24th century Star Trek novels expanded into a complex series of stories, both one-off adventures and complicated intertwined epics. So varied was Star Trek's expanded literary universe that it included books specifically about the likes of Section 31 and the Department of Temporal Investigations. Starting with the first Destiny novel, the expanding lit-verse eventually included over 50 novels. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately depending on how you look at things) all good things must come to an end.The development of Star Trek: Picard for Paramount Plus meant that the late 24th century was returning to television, and since film and television take storytelling precedence the days of the lit-verse were numbered. Things could have ended with a whimper much like the old Star Wars Expanded Universe series of books that were unceremoniously drop-kicked from cannon after Disney acquired the franchise. Instead, the Star Trek lit-verse ended with a bang.
Star Trek: Coda, a three book series published in 2021, brought the lit-verse to a definitive end. While it couldn't wrap up every subplot, it still provided welcome closure.
War and Peace Star Trek Style
Minor spoilers for the Enterprise novel series follow.
When Enterprise was cancelled after its fourth season there were already a number of ideas for stories that would make up season five, not least among them was exploration of the newly formed Federation and the build-up to the Earth/Romulan war. Both of those ideas made their way into the Enterprise novels. Star Trek: Enterprise - The Good That Men Do expanded on the story threads from the Vulcan trilogy and the Romulan trilogy in season 4. Those continued into Star Trek: Enterprise: Kobayashi Maru and culminate in the two-part Romulan War series that concluded with the founding of the Federation.
How was the Federation founded in the novels if it was already founded in Enterprise's final episode, you ask? It was because The Good That Men Do did something that had never been done before in any book: retcon a television episode.
Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels took the reins of Enterprise when it jumped from television to books after the series ended. The events of Enterprise's finale "These are the Voyages...", specifically Trip's death, was no more popular with the two writers that it was with the audience at large. The editor in charge of Star Trek felt the same way. So when the opportunity to write The Good That Men Do came along, they asked CBS for permission to change the circumstances of that episode."These Are the Voyages..." was an episode told as a holodeck program two hundred years after Enterprise NX-01's voyages. Martin and Mangels justified the changes by framing The Good That Men Do in the 24th century, establishing that the events shown in the final episode were actually a deliberately falsified historical account. In addition to having the freedom to use Trip, they would be able to fix some continuity discrepancies about the Federation's founding that resulted from "These Are the Voyages...".
Martin and Mangels would go on to write Kobayashi Maru. The Romulan War novels were written by Martin alone. Once the Romulan War story was out of the way, the Enterprise book series was handed off to Christopher L. Bennett and it went on to explore the early years of the Federation.
Bennett was drawn to the series because almost nothing had been established about the Federation's formative years. He described it as a sequel to Enterprise and a prequel to the original series. He intended to make world building front and center as he followed the established characters on their disparate lives after Enterprise NX-01 was decomissioned at the end of the Romulan War.
Bennett's final novel, Star Trek: Enterprise - Rise of the Federation - Patterns of Interference, was published in 2017. Following that book he was no longer under contract, and there have been no books set in this era since. While Patterns of Interference does not resolve every story thread running through these novels, it does provide a reasonably good endpoint to the series.
In the 24th Century...
Minor spoilers for the post-Destiny timeline follow.
Star Trek: The Next Generation - Death in Winter began a five book Next Generation series. Three of the books were Borg-centric stories that ultimately flowed into Star Trek: Destiny, a three book series about a devastating Borg invasion of the Alpha Quadrant. Destiny included characters from all three 24th century television series as well as characters from prior lit-verse novels such as Star Trek: Articles of the Federation, the Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers series, the Star Trek: New Frontier series, and the Star Trek: Titan series.
The inspiration for Destiny was actually a painting by Pierre Drolet in Star Trek: Ships of the Line that showed the Columbia NX-02 crashed on a dessert world. The original goal of the book series that became Destiny was to introduce new characters and send the lit-verse in new directions. The painting had a caption that stated Columbia was found in the Gamma Quadrant by the Defiant. When David Mack was approached with the project, he believed that wouldn't be possible without wrapping up old business once and for all so there would be a more or less clean slate moving forward. Using the Borg in this deck-clearing series was Mack's idea, and it took a little convincing for the editors to get on board because The Next Generation had just done three Borg books.
Destiny served as a jumping off point to relaunch all the post-television series books into an extremely cohesive shared universe that included a number of overlapping events while also telling self-contained stories. With no television series or movies to risk contradicting, these books pulled very few punches and introduced real stakes in a way Star Trek novels featuring these characters couldn't in the past. Eventually, though, Star Trek: Picard threw a wrench in the writers' ongoing plans.
Dayton Ward, who had written a number of Next Generation books by this time, found out in 2018 that Patrick Stewart was coming back in a Picard-centric series set a number of years after Star Trek: Nemesis. At first Ward, along with fellow Trek novelists David Mack and James Swallow, explored ways to bring the lit-verse timeline in sync with the new Picard timeline. Ward had already seen scripts for the first season, though, and realized that the first events of Picard took place three years in the past by the lit-verse's reckoning. This meant that everything past that divergence was completely incompatible with the events that would be established in Picard.Knowing that the current lit-verse was going to end, the three writers turned to finding a way to bring it to a satisfying conclusion. Neither the writers nor Simon & Schuster and CBS wanted to abandon the lit-verse in the same way the Star Wars Expanded Universe had been. They felt the fans who had stuck with the lit-verse for 20 years deserved an ending--that to simply wipe the novels away as though they never mattered would do the fans a disservice. That conclusion became the three book series Star Trek: Coda.
Resolving every dangling plot thread was a tall order. Ward pitched four books, the first of which would be a stealth setup book that positioned everyone ahead of Coda. Unfortunately the team only got three books with which to tell their story. Unable to address everything floating around the lit-verse, they concentrated on the events and characters that most tied into Coda's story while trying to mention as many other subplots in passing as they could.Buckle Up
I'll be discussing the books in chronological order instead of publication order. I've used the Trek Collective's Flow Chart as a guide. Some books take place almost concurrently, so there a few instances where I have deviated from the Trek Collective if I feel it improves the flow of the stories. Tackling these books in chronological order means there will be some bouncing back and forth between different series. In instances where the next book in chronological order does not directly continue the current book's story, I'll link to both the next book in order as well as the continuation of the current book's story. This will happen in a few places with Deep Space Nine books, and there will be a long detour for the Voyager books which follow a very compressed timeline as compared to the rest of the books.
Needless to say, I will be completely spoiling every book in this retrospective. So if you've never read any of these and think you'd like to--be warned. But whether you've read these books or not, I hope you'll find this retrospective interesting, and I look forward to any comments you might have.
Next>
INDEX
No comments:
Post a Comment