Star Trek Books In Your Pocket

Pocket Books is a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster, itself owned by Star Trek producers Paramount, which owns the rights to the entire Star Trek franchise. Accordingly, in 1979 the (increasingly lucrative) contract for publishing Star Trek novels went to Pocket.

The first book to be published was an adaptation of "The Motion Picture", written by Gene Roddenberry himself and based upon the story for the movie. The book is notable not only as Pocket's first Star Trek novel, but also in that it highlights the issue of Star Trek "canon" - what is considered the "official" Star Trek reality; we'll discuss this later - and the place of the expanded universe in the Star Trek world as a whole. For now it is sufficient to note that the adaptation of TMP marked a new era in Star Trek fiction.

The Pocket era has continued until this day, and has itself undergone some tumultuous times, eventually arriving to the point now where we have coordinated editors acting as Tzars to protect the Star Trek franchise in print. Entire spin-off series have been created which touch upon, but do not directly concern, the crews of Star Trek on TV.

To say that the early days were fraught with problems, however, might be a bit of an understatement. The earliest novels, from the late 1960s onward, had a habit of defying previously established facts and figures even from the TV series. Margaret Wander Bonanno has been a long standing Star Trek author since the early 1980s; as she put it to me: "there was an era of, shall we say, too many cooks working at cross purposes with each other."

This does not mean, however, that the early days of Pocket Star Trek failed to produce any good - or even excellent - stories to add to Star Trek lore. It was in 1981 that Vonda N. McIntyre wrote "The Entropy Effect", one of the best Star Trek novels of them all. McIntyre would go on to be a prolific Star Trek author, writing the adaptations to Star Trek movies II, III, and IV, among other projects.

Jeff Ayers, author of the upcoming "Voyages of the Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion," has read every single Star Trek novel (ever) in his endeavor to chronicle the vast series. He ranks "The Entropy Effect" among his top eight favorite Star Trek novels. Not a bad place to be, considering that there are several hundred contenders.

The story takes place during the USS Enterprise's second five-year mission, between Star Treks I and II, and involves the familiar and ever popular motif of time travel. This book sees some of the dots coming together as Gene Roddenberry's adaptation of "The Motion Picture" told of the Enterprise setting off on her next mission. It was never established in canon whether or not this mission ever happened, but there's an entire series of books about it, and "The Entropy Effect" is one of the earliest and the best of the lot.

The Next Generation Of Star Trek Fiction

In the world of The Original Series alone there are over 200 books, most of them original fiction. When The Next Generation (TNG) hit the air, it opened up an entire new world to Star Trek fiction writers. They now had a new crew, a new ship and - in many senses - a wider universe to explore. Since 1988 we've seen the output of these books ramp up into the hundreds each year.

While most of the fiction about The Original Series was written after the series had ended, the fiction for TNG - and all Star Trek series that followed it - had two distinct phases of evolution.

The first was the fiction written as the series was still being produced. Throughout its seven-season run, TNG fiction was very much self-contained, with books forming their own little episodes. Fiction writers could do nothing that would seriously affect the characters, change their disposition or even ruffle their hair or shave their beards, as TNG was airing week to week on TV.

What the fiction writers could do was to give us more adventures in the vein of the TV series, and to an extent fill in some of the back story of the characters. Influential Trek author Peter David did with his much lauded "Imzadi", which described the love story of William Riker and Deanna Troi.

A significant shift in the way the TV series put together its storylines had a major impact on the world of Star Trek fiction, as well as later TV series, starting with the conclusion of Season 3, "The Best of Both Worlds". The episode introduced the idea of long story arcs within Star Trek, in this case the Borg and Captain Picard's battle with them. The idea of long story arcs going from one episode to the next has stuck with Star Trek ever since. It also made an impact on the fiction world.

With the ending of TNG on television, fiction writers became able to write entire story arcs for the characters and the ship. An whole series of articles could be created, and increasingly the world of Star Trek fiction became as continuous a universe as the TV one. Books would begin to reference events in prior ones, and character development would lead from one series of books to the next.

The end of the TV series marked the second phase in TNG fiction. "All Good Things..." left both the Enterprise D and her crew in business as usual, and while there was still the specter of movies on the horizon, the authors could, to a much greater degree, go nuts.