Trek Wars: An Introduction

Hello! Welcome to my new blog! You are great!

This is the place where I intend to critique and informally assess every single Star Trek novel ever written, in order of publishing. Since I am already about 30 books in, the first reviews will take the form of short blurbs, and then get gradually more in-depth as I assess books I've read more recently, until finally, books I've just finished will receive more thorough treatment.

But first, an inaugural word about this blog, Star Trek and me.

I was never super big on Star Trek as a kid (or so I thought - more on this later), and only recently got into it. I used to be a huge Star Wars fan (or so I thought - more this later), and since I grew up in the 90s, most current Star Wars releases took the form of the sci-fi novels that were becoming the basis of what is now known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Star Wars had been in a bit of a slump since the mid-80s, with only the odd Ewok movie or West End Games roleplaying supplement appearing occasionally to satiate fans.

That changed in 1991, with the release of Timothy Zahn's 'Star Wars: Heir To The Empire,' now considered a classic among fans, and largely responsible for Star Wars's steady climb back into the spotlight. It spawned first dozens, then hundreds of novels, comic books and games, all serving to slowly add to the endless detail and variety of the Star Wars universe.

My fandom had somewhat receded by the time the Star Wars prequels were coming out, but my favorable opinion of Revenge Of The Sith inspired me to get deeper into the Star Wars novels again, and I was impressed by the way they seamlessly incorporated the prequels into the grander story, which now stretched decades into the future and millennia into the past of the Star Wars universe. The Expanded Universe was a rich, diverse, breathing entity, crafted in minute detail by a wide variety of sci-fi and fantasy authors - some better than others, granted, and I loved it... until, of course, George Lucas decided to start fucking with things.

First came The Clone Wars, an awful kid-friendly rewrite of the masterful work done by authors such as Karen Traviss, James Luceno and Matt Stover. Then came the Disney buy-out and Episode VII, which promptly erased the Expanded Universe and started from scratch, a blow to my fandom made all the more heavy by the fact that I hated The Force Awakens almost more than I hated The Clone Wars.

But what was mystifying me most about these developments was the fact that it seemed like I was the only one who felt like this. Fellow Star Wars fans diligently followed The Clone Wars and its spinoff, Rebels, and lauded Episode VII as a return to form for Star Wars. I couldn't disagree more.

At around that time, I'd made the decision to sit down and try to watch all of Star Trek, mostly out of curiosity. I'd seen the occasional episode growing up, and had always been intrigued, especially by Deep Space Nine, which I felt on played on the same universe-expanding sensibilities of the best Star Wars novels, being an attempt to broaden the scope of the universe that before then, had only been glimpsed at the periphery of the Enterprise's viewscreen as it zoomed from flashpoint to flashpoint.

Almost from the very beginning of my Star Trek-watching, I was curious what kind of stuff the Star Trek novels got into (I knew they existed, because they were usually on the shelf next to the Star Wars books at the bookstores I shopped at). Lots of intriguing things are never directly addressed in any Trek TV episode or movie. How did the Klingons and Romulans first meet? How did the Borg come into being? And what happens after DS9 and Voyager end? Does the Federation go back to the Delta and Gamma Quadrants? Under what circumstances? I had a feeling these questions had been answered in the novels.

As I read the books and rewatched Trek episodes and movies, I realized I was on some weird subconscious mission to become as well-versed in the Trek universe as I had been in the Star Wars one; I was playing catch-up for a youth spent ignoring Trek and focusing on Star Wars. I craved the same detail, scope and mystery offered by the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and although the two franchises are ostensibly about very different things and connected only by their setting - outer space - there is, unsurprisingly, a fair amount of overlap and parallels between them.

Trek was created before Star Wars, and perhaps in some way paved the way for Star Wars's eventual production and release, but the Trek movies would never have been made if it wasn't Star Wars's mind-boggling success at the box office. The 1980s saw Trek hard on the heels of Star Wars, never quite equalling the Fox franchise's innovation or production values, and the look and feel of the original cast movies owe a great deal to Star Wars. In the early 80s, Star Wars was king, and Trek followed in its wake, eventually finding its own special tone, but still never quite rising to the level of Star Wars.

But then came the 90s, and Star Wars was, by then, largely underground. The huge success of Star Trek: The Next Generation had put Trek on top as Star Wars languished in relative nostalgia, with only crazy superfans - like me - still keeping up with the Expanded Universe. Star Trek now set the course for the tone of pop sci-fi, with dozens of copycat shows appearing rapidly on TV, and Star Wars duly followed suit, not with a TV show, but in the novels of the Expanded Universe.

The Expanded Universe features a lot of complex political worldbuilding, and are written as something far more akin to true sci-fi than the sci-fi/fantasy cocktail that distinguishes Star Wars, and it was this that drew me to Star Wars, perhaps even more so than the movies. Don't get me wrong, the movies are great, but my knowledge of the Expanded Universe enhanced and deepened my love for movies to the point where the movies almost became secondary addendums to the grander story depicted in the books - the movies showed you one group of influential characters that changed the galaxy, but the books told you the entire history of that galaxy, and showed you how the events in the movies tied into that.

And I've now come to the realization that the Expanded Universe owes much more to Star Trek than it did to Star Wars. The sheer amount of detail contained within its vast volume of works is something far closer to the TV series airing throughout Trek's 90s heyday than it ever was to Star Wars (which perhaps explains why George Lucas never seemed to give much of a shit what the Expanded Universe was doing). I was deeply enthralled by West End Games' roleplaying supplements and Del Rey's reference works, which now, looking back on them, were of course far more influenced by the practical, tech-heavy and grand sci-fi concepts featured on Star Trek shows than the swashbuckling adventure seen in the Star Wars films.

So, in short: I think I was always a Star Trek fan, but I just didn't know it. I am now closer to the roots of the Star Wars Expanded Universe than I ever was as a Star Wars fan. The truth of this is underscored by my distaste for J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot films, which resemble nothing so much as a desperate attempt by Star Trek to reinstate its position in pop culture by attempting to replicate Star Wars, with its cool dudes punching people and getting into gunfights and blowing things up. Star Trek flopped with Enterprise while Star Wars soared into the money-making stratosphere with the prequels, pulling a whole new generation of fans in, and the two franchises' incestuous tug-of-war continues to this day, with Star Trek: Discovery hoping to combine the flashy modernism and nostalgia fetishization that dominated Abrams's films with a return to Star Trek's true home: television (certainly an overdue return, considering that TV has been critically outperforming mainstream movies for well over a decade), even as Disney kicks Star Wars into overdrive with its impressively greedy one-film-a-year plan.

So as Star Trek becomes more like Star Wars again, I am left to play catch-up with all those wonderful (and some not-so-wonderful) Star Trek books I never read, but fell kind of like I should have, years ago. It's a task I am of course doing willingly, but it'll be a monumental journey; Trek, like Star Wars, has inspired hundreds of novels that I will probably never finish in my lifetime, since they're coming out faster than I can read them (and I'm already decades behind).

I feel, however, that there is tremendous value in coming late to the game, and being able to analyze things with more recent developments in mind. The books I'm currently reading were released in the 1980s, and it is often very interesting to see how certain books presaged Trek's future and interpreted what had already come out, often laying out groundwork for a universe quite different from the one the movies and TV series eventually set in stone, and it's also fascinating to see the tone of the books gradually change with the feel of the times and evolution of the onscreen Trek.

So I thought the least I could do was share my thoughts, revelations and experiences as I delve ever deeper into the world of Star Trek. I rarely write for my own pleasure anymore, being a translator and copywriter by occupation, and I wanted to tackle something I actually enjoy writing and thinking about. I can't guarantee that anyone else will enjoy it as much as I do, but I promise to try to keep things light and inviting, so you don't have to be some fat, smelly Star Trek geek like me to enjoy these. Think of it as me reading Star Trek so you don't have to, if that helps.

So! The next post will be a quick retroactive blurb about Mack Reynolds' 'Mission To Horatius,' which quite frankly I barely remember at this point, so the read should be interesting, at they very least. In the meantime, enjoy long life and prosperity, and welcome again to my new blog. Good things will happen here, I promise.