I know that this is really scraping the bottom of the Trek enthusiast barrel and I don’t expect more than maybe three or four replies from rjung, vivalostwages, and tarragon918, if that, but I was just reading another site when I happened upon a link to psiphi.org, a site that has, amongst other things, a page with upcoming Trek novels.
I never knew about that site although I have been a long time reader of the books and after looking at it, I think I’m just going to have to give up on trying to collect them all like I have been doing for the past seven years or so.
It seems to me that there are just getting to be too many of them and some, especially the S.C.E. books and the reprints of two to three novels in one large trade paperback, reeks of Paramount leeching the blood from the series instead of any true artistic endeavor. Of course, I’m reading too much into it as Trek fiction was never meant to be high art in the first place but, still… the practical inundation of novels these past two to three years is just too much.
You’ve got: The Original Series; The Next Generation; Deep Space Nine; Voyager; Enterprise; New Frontier; Starfleet Corps of Engineers*****; Stargazer; I.K.S. Gorkon; The Lost Era; the upcoming Titan; and what looks like a twelfth series, Excelsior. In addition to that bloated monstrosity of a list, there’re six tie-ins, most of which sucked, and constant unnecessary two-parters, trilogies, and series that’re just too much of a hassle to deal with.
Again, I know this means nothing to most and I’m sure that most that have read this far are probably snickering at the geek but as someone who’s been collecting all the paperbacks for eight years now, it’s a little frustrating to see something I once enjoyed festering like a zit that’s about to pop and spew its pus over everything that’s near.
I think I’ll take my old novels – probably 90% of the paperbacks published before 1999 – in addition to the DS9 Relaunch and New Frontier and just go to my corner. I think I know how the hard line TOS fans that scream about the other series not being real Trek feel now.
*****There will be 47 S.C.E. novels next year, four years after its first book. 47. That’s more than Voyager, an actual Trek series, has and it debuted in 1995, six years before the first S.C.E.