Somewhere around March 2022, I started rewatching Star Trek Enterprise for the first time in like 20 years. I'd just finished TNG, DS9, and Voyager, so it seemed a natural progression.

I'm kindof a stickler for chronological order. TOS was never meant to have any in-universe chronology set to it. TNG and later series did have something of a more coherent chronology that became more or less ridged depending on the needs of the series. When I (re)watched TNG, DS9, and Voyager, all those years ago, I tried to interleave the episodes and movies as they occurred in the in-universe chronological order. So to my mind, Enterprise being the first series in the in-universe chronological order, I was kindof starting over.

And for some reason, I decided to look up how many novels there were. I own a lot of Star Trek novels. I have an expansive collection, some bought new, others filled out second hand. All of the original pre-Pocketbooks publications, a few of the James Blish novelizations, and not all, but probably most of the Pockebooks and later Gallery Books publications. But while I own probably most of them, I'd only read some 30 or so in total, mostly in my teens and 20s. And I felt that I wanted to remedy this. I was also missing a lot of the intermediary stories. The Romulan War, and what would later become known as the First Splinter timeline. I was aware of these, I owned many of the books, but had never read them.

And I think part of that desire was to fill a void that Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard failed to satisfy. To be clear, I don't hate Discovery. I liked it for the most part, though I do have issues with some of the creative choices they made. I'm not going to get into that right now. But I felt it was missing something. When I went looking for it, I found Star Trek Online and other beta canon works. Many of which were sitting on my shelf waiting for me.

So I looked up how many Enterprise novels there were, and discovered there were only 19. 3 episode novelizations, 16 original novels, 7 set during the run of the series, and the rest set after. And little to no comic book presence to speak of. And their placement in chronological order was mostly established.

This felt achievable to me. So I decided to read the novels, in chronological order, along with the show. I would watch episodes, and when I got to a point where a novel was set, I would stop and read the novel, and then go back to watching the show. When I was done with the series, I kept going with the books set after, the Romulan War, and “Rise of the Federation”.

Then I kept going. There were at the time very few novels set in the years between Enterprise and The Original Series, but quite a few that flashed back to it. So using Memory Beta, I planned out my reading list. I had a loose set of rules; if the novel had a flashback, then a fair sized chunk of the story should take place in this era, regardless of the frame plot. There were a few exceptions, and I especially went out of my way to make room for some that covered McCoy's backstory. I largely ignored the Mirror universe, and the Kelvin timeline. And time travel stories; did not pose quite as much of a problem as you might imagine.

I re-watched all of Star Trek Discovery, reading the novels that tie into that series as well. I went on a side-quest following them into the 32nd century, before returning to the 23rd and Strange New Worlds. And as it happens, the Season 2 DVD of Strange New Worlds released at just the right time to be included.

On and off, I would post my impressions, sometimes of the episodes but mostly of the books as I read them. First on Twitter, then on Mastodon and Bluesky. This became a regular thing, that I came to call my “Social Media Book Report.

I have so far read every Enterprise novel, every Discovery novel, every thus far released Strange New Worlds novel. Most of them in chronological order, with obvious exceptions for new releases or acquisitions.

I don't typically go in for comics, with a few exceptions. But if I own, or can easily obtain a comic when I reach its placement in continuity, I'll read it. And if a video game has a coherent plot in chronology, and I can easily obtain it, I'll give it a go on-stream. I did this with the Star Trek Online missions that tie into Discovery.

When I reached TOS, I had a decision to make. While I do own a lot of novels, I don't own them all. Some are hard to find. Maybe most of them are available as e-books, but there are time and money constraints as well, and TOS is not my favorite era. So I decided to prioritize books that I actually own or can easily acquire copies of. Books I don't own get a skip, unless it belongs to a mini-series that I've already started, or has a premise that entices me to go hunt it down. And it hasn't happened yet, but I reserve the right to skip a book I do own.

As I'm writing this, I have just finished Season 2. of TOS, and am progressing into Season 3.

Posting my impressions on social media has its limitations. Character count mostly. Especially cross-posting on Bluesky and Mastodon, which have differing character limits, and require me to thread them. So I'm going to try doing it on paper.wf (WriteFreely instance) for a while, and see how it works out. It'll give me more freedom to expand my thoughts, go off on more tangents, and eventually I'd like to track down some of my older threads and see if I can import them.

So welcome to my poorly thought out experiment reading Star Trek in chronological order.

#StarTrek #StarTrekTOS #StarTrekEnterprise #StarTrekDiscovery #StarTrekSNW #StrangeNewWorlds #StarTrekTNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #StarTrekVoyager #StarTrekOnline