This book series contains summaries of most of the Star Trek books I’ve read, and I include how the story ends (but you know who’s going to win at the end anyway, don’t you?) These are not meant to be reviews, and in no way reflect on whether I liked the book or not. OK, I liked all of them simply because they are Star Trek, but I did enjoy some more than others.
I prepared the summaries originally to give myself an easy way to remember what the storylines were, without having to dig through hundreds of books, and I hope you find the information useful in that way. The summaries have accumulated over many decades, so there will be some variation in style and length. I originally aimed for producing a one paragraph summary for each book, but those paragraphs often grew to be more like full pages.
Generally speaking, I have listed the books in order of publication date, which was also mainly the order that I read them. However, for this book I have brought together stories that are part of a series.
There have been novelizations of the Star Trek films and of some of the TV episodes, but I have not written summaries for those, as it much more fun watching reruns of them. Besides, at least for the films, you should be able to find plot summaries on Wikipedia.
The first part of the book (the vast bulk of it) is related to novels based around the original Star Trek Series featuring Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty and the other favorites. There is a separate section for three stories published as Young Adult Books that feature Kirk, Spock, etc., while they were still at Starfleet Academy.
The series of books written by William Shatner in association with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, set after the events of the film Generations, are in the timeframe of The Next Generation, so I have kept them separate under the heading of Shatnerverse.
Another section contains books related to other universes that may be the Mirror Universe from the TV series or another alternate universe. Sometimes you might want to read some things in the main Original Series novels as being erroneous memories of the person telling the story, or you could assume they are from an alternate universe, because with so many novels and different authors, there are bound to be some contradictions occurring.
The final section (in this volume) tells the stories from books related to the 2009 reboot of the series. Many of these books were published in comic book style.
Almost all of these novels are still available for purchase, often in paperback form and almost certainly as a Kindle edition, so you can get into binge-reading.
When a well-known novel gets made into a film, there are frequently complaints that this part or that part of the story is left out of the film. Unfortunately, that has to happen because there simply isn’t time to cover everything in the two hours or less of a film. Likewise, in summarizing the books I have had to leave out subplots and even simplify the main plot even more than a filmmaker has to.
If you are interested in what is my favorite novel from the Original Series, it would have to be “How Much for Just the Planet?” That novel had me doubling up with laughter. In second place would come anything by Peter David.