Comment on Treklit/Novelverse: how to get up to speed on the lore?

Wooster@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• LtLiana@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Yeah, I assumed so too, but I don’t know which novels are particularly relevant to the continuity I am actually interested in. Continuity and canon are very important for me since I hold the Trek universe dear to my heart and it is “real” to me to an extent - so obvious continuity errors are jarring and dejecting. There’s hundreds of TOS novels for example that don’t have any bearing on the DS9 relaunch series.

  Which ones do I read by publication date? Are the numbered Pocket Books TNG novels relevant or not? The TNG relaunch? Titan?

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  • StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    In addition to the STLV group guide, Inhave found the flowchart created and maintained by the Trek Collective super helpful.

    Here’s a screenshot of the current version to give you a sense of it. Suggest bookmarking the link embedded above.

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    • gnuplusmatt@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      that diagram is amazing, needs to be updated for Coda tho - which would put lines everywhere…

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      • StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’m not sure that they would want to give that much of a spoiler for Coda, or may be like many of us and decide that we’d rather pretend it didn’t exist.

        I think Mack, Swallow and Ward are super writers, and understand why they thought Coda was needed, but it’s brutal.

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  • Wooster@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The numbered books tend to only have anything resembling continuity if the same author is involved. Peter David and John Vornholt come immediately to mind as ones to do that.

    A Stitch in Time (By Garak’s actor) also gets referenced, but that book is an extra special case in the franchise.

    Outside of the authors referencing their own work, sometimes New Frontier gets referenced: mostly in the form of Zak Kebron (The BEST character to ever happen to Trek) being Worf’s old academy roommate, or in the form of a major disaster hitting the entire quadrant and you get little cuts to various ships…

    But never anything of substance.

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    • alex@mstdn.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      @Wooster @LtLiana There’s also the interesting examples of John M Ford’s Klingons and Diane Duane’s Romulans - both of those authors’ works became touchstones for others - until TNG sort of swept away the Klinzhai and Rihansuu

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    • LtLiana@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      But every single The Fall novel is written by someone else. Characters like Blackmer or President Bacco are important in the books I read even though they originate in completely different novels. It seems to me like they are all vastly interconnected.

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      • Wooster@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        The fall was published after Nemesis, and the rules on novels were changed from being self contained to interconnected, and they abandoned the numbered novel system.

        Instead of rare bursts of continuity, you get random bursts of discontinuity, as the authors have different opinions on how to portray shared OCs, or takes on an event or its significance.

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