What did they do to my series?!

I will admit I've been away from trek novels since... well since they decided to move everyone to other ships... And I seem to have jumped in to the middle of madness! :p I don't mind that they're jumbling everyone up, but um... Point me in the direction of when this all started? :) I'd kind of like to go /back/ and catch up so it all makes a tad more sense.

I guess what I'm trying to find out has probably been asked before, so I'm working on putting it in a unique way. :) At what point in publishing time did the paperbacks diverge from the typical TNG, DS9, VOY and go into these offshoots that included everyone all at once? Is one of those offshoots better to start with than any of the others?

I think the "A Time To..." series might be when things first started to get shaken up a little. At the end of the Nemesis movie, we know that Riker has accepted the job as Captain of the U.S.S. Titan and there's a dedicated novel series about that which I absolutely LOVE. Then the Destiny series came out that also deals with where various characters are. You could probably start there if you wanted, but there are references to earlier TNG books. Destiny was a fantastic storyline. Then, I think there were a couple of VOY books after Destiny which deal with some of the effects of that storyline and one TNG book. Then they came out with the Typhon Pact crossover, which really disappointed, in my opinion. It really wasn't a crossover at all. I myself was a little lost with regard to the DS9 characters when I read those books.

Destiny is a great storyline. I can't recommend it enough.

I'd kept up with DS9, so that's the only thing that didn't throw me.... I'll have to go back and to the Time to stuff once I'm done with the Typhon pact, which I'm reading now. Like I said, I kind of went all backward about what to read. I'd been following DS9 and ignoring everything else, then suddenly nothing made sense! :) I knew about Titon... the rest... woah. :)

And there was the movie which was a relaunch of the whole series.

I played the Star Trek MMO. I would have hated to have Gene see that.

Yeah, I think everyone knows about the movie... Did they ever decide to make a novel series out of it? I know there was talk, but...

It's five books so far New Star Trek, although, looking at them it may be that only the first is a book/novel. The others look more like comics.

It depends on how out-of-date you are...

The first book series that wasn't linked with one particular TV series was Star Trek:Invasion!, in 1996, though that one at least kept the series separate between the books.

Then there was New Frontiers starting in '97, which was set on an entirely new starship with none of the main characters.

After New Frontiers they started branching out in to a lot of little independent series like that, and within a few years they'd pretty much stopped putting out the main numbered series at all.

Sometime in the early 2000s, they decided that all ST novel and comics were in continuity with each other (like Star Wars is), which was interesting in that none of the earlier ones worried about continuity at all so it didn't really work, and at that point, all the novels started being really intermixed with each other.

...I don't have a starting recommendation for you, I deal with it by endlessly re-reading the pre-2000s novels.

Avron, actually some other of those are out. They're "young reader" titles, though, which disappointed me. They had planned a series of regular novels, but they pulled the plug on them in lieu of the sequel to the movie.

How out of date I am is that "I'd been following DS9 and ignoring everything else." The Soul Key or maybe The Never Ending Sacrifice were really the last two in the DS9 relaunch. After that it went all screwy on me. :p

But thanks for the help all... I guess I'll have to just find a way to work my way through from another series somehow. Pick a random book and go forward from there.