Trek Novels into Episodes

[Nate the Great]

Yeah, Millennium is great, but I think that that falls into the "meganovels too big to fit into episodes." You'd need at least two for each book, unless you chopped out most of the lesser plotlines. I'd hate to do that. Minor plotlines are my cup of tea.

Second recommendation: Star Trek TNG: Dragon's Honor. If you haven't read this one, all you need to know is that Picard eats the most vile stuff imaginable, Riker wins an entire planet in a poker game, and Troi comes within half an inch of being abducted and made part of an emperor's harem! Who can't love that?

[Sa'ar Chasm]

None. I've read them. They're terrible. Diane Carey did a good job with Prove, and AC Crispin did an excellent job with Sarek, but I read an atrocious numbered AC Crispin book (or it might have been the Star Wars Han Solo Trilogy from back in the 80s) that makes me think it's a shared pseudonym.

Michael Jan Friedman is awful. His dialogue is wooden, his prose is stilted, and he's got a strange obsession with referring to every character by their full name, rank and title all at once every chance he gets.

Don't get me started on The Laertian Gamble...

<-- Cranky Old Man

[Chancellor Valium]

I think 'Vanguard' might be interesting, but it's atrociously written...

[Nate the Great]

Which ones are terrible, Sa'ar?

How about Rogue Saucer? It's one of the more obscure ones. Ro Laren arranges the theft of the Enterprise, Admiral Necheyev crashes and almost dies of hypothermia!

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Which ones are terrible, Sa'ar?

*All* of them. They seemed readable when I was 15, but when I go back and reread them, I cringe.

In fairness, the meganovels are readable, although Vendetta, which I really liked ten years ago, doesn't seem to have aged very well. Q-Squared is the same way. Devil's Due was poignant, though, and I recall Imzadi choking me up at the end (in a good way).

The Garak novel that Andy Robinson wrote is pretty good (who better to write Garak than Garak?), and there was a NexGen Q-trilogy that I enjoyed, but they seem to be exceptions. The Dyson Sphere Revisited book featured a starship full of Bible-thumping Horta (buh?!)

[Nate the Great]

I also prefer meganovels. They tend to be written by major Trek authors that know the universe and the fans inside out. They have the time and space to do a Trek story right and indulge the fan both inside themselves and in us. It's just that every single one would take umpteen episodes. Every single one. Take Mosaic. Now whatever your feelings on its canon status, you'd have to agree that it'd be at least five episodes: child/preteen Janeway, teenager Janeway, Cadet Janeway, Lieutenant Janeway (the deaths of her father and fiancee along with the subsequent mourning), and early Captain Janeway (meeting Tuvok and so on). There's just too much. All of the other meganovels are the same.

Okay, fine, so the Q Continuum trilogy paints a more canon-friendly version of Q that fits in better with the rest of the Expanded Universe, but I still like Q-Squared. I also like Federation, which has been so completely debunked by later series (including First Contact) that it's not even remotely applicable anymore.

[Zeke]

Sa'ar: I've liked some of Friedman's work. He had a long run on the TNG comic series -- my favourite is #46, a terrific standalone story. My main beef with him is that he wrote the same book twice! Reunion was a murder mystery involving Picard and his former crewmates from the Stargazer; Saratoga took Sisko and his old crew and did exactly the same thing. In both cases, a secret involving the death of someone close to Picard/Sisko came out. It was pretty blatant. (You're in good company, though, as Tim Lynch hates Friedman's work too.)

The Trek books as a whole are definitely not up to the shows' standards. They're not much more than licensed fanfic. If you think Wesley is a Mary Sue, you need to read J. M. Dillard's The Lost Years -- the two original female characters will teach you what Mary Sues REALLY are. The worst of a bad lot is, in my opinion, Here There Be Dragons. I'm not a John Vornholt fan either, but he may have improved since the ones I've read, as he seems popular now.

There are exceptions to the general mediocrity. My love of Carmen Carter's The Devil's Heart is on record. The two Dianes (Carey and Duane) don't rock my socks off, but they're always good reading. Dafydd ab Hugh's books are standouts. And the Reeves-Stevens write fanfic, but very, very GOOD fanfic -- the kind that's a great story and a love letter to the show at the same time. (Yahtzee does this with Angel.)

I can go either way on Peter David. Comics are his home, and he's a champion there, with countless Marvel and DC titles under his belt. I like his lighthearted stories best (his current Spider-Man title is a desperately-needed breath of fresh air for that character), but almost anything with his name on it is worth checking out. Sci-fi, on the other hand... PAD clearly loves Trek, but he fits it like a bikini fits a sumo wrestler. His books are always funny and often cool (Vendetta's a classic), but they're not Star Trek books, they're Peter David books. So while I like his writing, I hope he never writes for canon Trek. He serves his own characters much better.

(By the way, I suspect that if I ever wrote Trek books, they'd turn out like that too. I did some stuff in VVS that went way out of character for comedy's sake. It's so tempting to give characters cool or funny lines whose only flaw is that the characters would never say them.)