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r/startrek: The Next Generation
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Agreed, I've been using the chapter breakdowns on this site for my journey through the Litverse.
Oh that's great! Thank you!
Are you aware that the Litverse as it stood has an end point? Just letting you know in case that factors into your enjoyment.
No?
Ah, ok. With minimal spoilers:
When Picard came out, it became obvious that the post-Nemesis future depicted in the Litverse books was no longer compatible with canon. The decision was made to write finis to the Litverse, and that resulted in the Coda trilogy, which pretty much marks the end of the Litverse continuity. No future books will be set in that continuity, although some references may be made.
I mean, the easiest way would be to read the novels by publication date… I don't think there's a short cut around that.
That said, having full context is… not always worthwhile. Sometimes just knowing that something happened in the past is more enjoyable than reading it in practice.
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?
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.
that diagram is amazing, needs to be updated for Coda tho - which would put lines everywhere...
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.
I enjoyed Coda, but if there was a time to take a hatchet to characters and storylines, that was the time. I understand why they did what they did.
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.
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.
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.
The Fall ‘event sequence’ crossover is quite late in the Relaunch novelverse. It pays off some storylines that had been building for quite awhile.
I didn’t jump in that late, but still found it better to jump quite a ways back to where the Relaunch took off between the later TNG movies Insurrection and Nemesis.
One doesn’t have to read everything, as there are definitely some core books and ‘event sequences.’
Most Relaunch fans consider the two David Mack books in the TNG ‘A Time to …’ series (A Time to Kill & A Time to Heal) as key foundations, then Keith DeCandido’s ‘Articles of the Federation’ set after Riker takes command of Titan in ‘Taking Wing.’
Mack’s Destiny trilogy is fantastic and is the pivot point of the Relaunch novels. DeCandido’s ‘A Singular Destiny’ then bridges to set up the Typhon Pact sequence.