My 90's and 2000's Experience: The Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch Novel Series (2003-2020)

 Hey everyone, how were your weekends? Mine was pretty good. So today I'm going to be talking about Star Trek novels, specifically the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch series that began publication in 2003, two years after the series ended its run on UPN. Despite it ending in 2020, my history with it only goes as far as 2014. I'll get into that a little later. Right now I wanna get into the history of the series before I get into my personal history with it. Let's get into it.

 Beginning in June 2003, the relaunch series began with Homecoming by Christie Golden. The DS9 relaunch series had started in 2000 with A Stitch in Time, which was written by Garak himself, Andrew Robinson and I guess the series was successful because Pocket Books began doing the Voyager series in 2003 and the TNG series in 2005. If you don't know what I mean by relaunch series, it's simple. Each TV show ended in the 90's or early 2000's. TNG ended with Star Trek Nemesis in 2002, DS9 ended with the series finale, "What You Leave Behind" in 1999, and Voyager ended with its series finale, "Endgame", in 2001. Each of these book series continued the story of each series where the TV show or movie left off. The Voyager series continued with The Farther Shore, also by Christie Golden, which acted as a continuation and wrap up of the initial storyline of what happened after Voyager returned to the Alpha Quadrant. It was published a month after Homecoming.

 Up next was the two book subseries, Spirit Walk, which consists of Old Wounds and Enemy of My Enemy, written by Christie Golden, and published in 2004. This duology is set after the Homecoming books, and Chakotay has taken command of Voyager following his promotion to captain. It also deals with the animosity growing between veteran crewmembers who'd been on Voyager since the ship began its journey through the Delta Quadrant, and those Starfleet officers who'd fought, suffered, and lost, but survived the Dominion War. This is the kind of thing that Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor had promised the show would be about when they originally created Star Trek: Voyager in 1994 with the conflict between Janeway's Starfleet crew and Chakotay's Maquis crew, which lasted all of one episode. Two at the most. Probably because Berman and Piller were too set in their ways and with Piller and Taylor as showrunners, things were done the way they'd been done on TNG. But that's a story for another time.

Aside for the tenth anniversary novel trilogy, String Theory, no new Voyager novels were published from 2005 to 2009, with the publisher focusing on the TNG novels, and then the major crossover trilogy, Star Trek: Destiny, which featured characters from TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise. Both Janeway and Seven of Nine played big roles in the TNG novels leading up to the Destiny trilogy. I won't spoil anything major here, but something happens to Janeway in those books. She gets better though.

Finally, in 2009, the novels returned with Full Circle, which was written by Kirsten Beyer. If you recognize that name, but don't read the books, and have never read these Voyager novels, it's because she was part of the committee that created Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard, and was co-executive producer for the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

After a total of fourteen books, published over a span of 17 years, the Voyager relaunch series ended on October 13th, 2020 with the novel To Lose the Earth. The relaunch novels were ended because of Picard, Lower Decks, and Prodigy dealing with events following the end of TNG, DS9, and Voyager, and the novels contradict the new shows. Which doesn't make any sense at all given that Paramount went out of its way to set the Kelvin Timeline movies, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016), in an alternate timeline/parallel universe. They could've kept these books going and have them be a separate continuity, given that the novels were never canon to begin with. Or, they could've just kept the books going since the novels take place before the destruction of Romulus, which was shown in the backstory for the 2009 movie, so there'd still be plenty of time for the backstory of Picard to happen. But, given that both Lower Decks and Prodigy revealed that Voyager was decommissioned as soon as she returned to the Alpha Quadrant, it makes sense that the novels would have to be discontinued.

My personal history with this relaunch began in 2003, as the books were being published. However, other than the Spirit Walk duology, I got every book up to Acts of Contrition, which was published in 2014. I had intended on getting Atonement, which was the next book in the series, which was published in 2015, but, between my parents and I getting ready to move, which ended up not happening until 2016, and me getting sick in December, 2015, I never got around to it. On top of that, there were also delays between books, after A Pocket Full of Lies was published in 2016. And with me not being able to get whatever the then current Star Trek official magazine was at the time, I had no idea that further books existed. And, being that Star Trek novels don't get talked about online very often, in particular on YouTube, I didn't find out that way either. 

I actually loved the Voyager relaunch novels, because, aside from Admiral Janeway appearing as a quick cameo in Star Trek Nemesis as Captain Picard's superior officer, we had no idea what happened to any of the remaining characters. And with Paramount being focused on prequels to TOS with the movies and TV shows since Enterprise started in 2001, both DS9 and Voyager were kinda just swept under the rug once the shows ended in 1999 and 2001 respectively. However, there was one aspect that I didn't like in the final two books of the series that I read, Protectors and Acts of Contrition. There will be minor spoilers for these two books, so if you're a Voyager fan and have never read these books, this is your warning.

In Protectors, Tom Paris's mother, Julia, consumed by grief over the death of her husband, Owen, decides to petition the Federation courts to declare Tom and B'Elanna unfit to be parents, effectively removing Miral, and their son, whose name I don't remember as it's been a few years since I read these books, from their care, simply because she's angry at Tom for having to lie to her about B'Elanna and Miral's survival during the Destiny trilogy, because of the fact that a renegade faction of Klingons were attempting to assassinate Miral. The hearing is shown in Acts of Contrition, but I had to wonder why, something as petty as family court to determine the fitness of two Starfleet officers to be parents was even being brought up in the first place. I get that these novels came out in 2014, when entertainment media had already taken more realistic elements, but from what I've read about Kirsten Beyer, she's a Star Trek fan, so why would she include this in here, considering the whole idea of Star Trek is that Earth is a utopia, where petty squabbles and disagreements over things like this no longer exist?

Especially because if you're doing this to someone like Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres, then wouldn't you have to do this to every Starfleet officer who has inadvertently put their child in danger simply by bringing them with them to assignments like on Deep Space 9, other starbases and ships like the Enterprise-D that allowed officers to have their families onboard? Because I don't know about you, but Jake Sisko was in alot of dangerous situations over the course of DS9's seven seasons. Same with all the children on the Enterprise-D in TNG. What about Naomi Wildman who was born on Voyager? I get Beyer was trying to add drama to the story and actually give Tom something to do, but, again, this is Star Trek, people in general shouldn't be THAT petty, but the wife and mother of Starfleet officers especially shouldn't be that petty when all Tom and B'Elanna tried to do was protect Miral from Klingon assassins. 

Unfortunately, there's no real information on the creative process behind the writing of these books, so I have no idea if this was something Beyer came up with on her own, or if she had help from Pocket Books. Paramount's licensing department didn't veto its inclusion, then again Paramount is so anti-Star Trek, and always has been, no matter what they say, the licensing department probably didn't care enough to veto it. Especially since by 2014, they were starting to get CBS All Access (now Paramount+) ready and getting ready to bring Star Trek back to television, not to mention preparing for the production of Star Trek Beyond. They probably weren't all that concerned about tie-in novels to a TV show that they had already ended thirteen years earlier, and wanted nothing to do with.

Aside from that, these books are great. It gave us more time with everyone from Voyager, given that they were being ignored in the shows and movies, AND at the time Homecoming came out in 2003, nobody, not even Paramount, had any way of knowing that Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, and Star Trek: Prodigy would be a thing twenty years later. Even the comics being published by IDW were ignoring DS9 and Voyager for the most part, aside from the occasional appearance of certain characters in the TNG comics they were publishing. So if these novels were the only way I was going to get more from the characters of one of my favourite TV shows of all time, then, yes, I was happy to buy and read them so long as I had the shelf space and the money to do so.

Alright my friends, I think that's gonna be it for me for today. I'll be back soon for more blog posts in the very near future. In the meantime, I hope you all have a wonderful evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.   

My Star Wars Experience: Vector Prime and the Effect It Had on Star Wars

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Friday. Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the original publication of the first book in the Star Wars: The New Jedi Order series, Vector Prime by R.A. Salvatore. So I wanted to talk about that book and the impact it had on the franchise going forward. Let's get into it.

 Published on October 5th, 1999, Vector Prime was the first book in Del Rey's new line of novels set after Return of the Jedi. Bantam Spectra had begun their Star Wars novel program with Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn in 1991, but since then their approach, most likely due to the prequel era embargo they'd been placed under by Lucasfilm, things had gotten stale by 1999. Luke was too powerful, the Empire had been defeated, and there was no serious threat to any of the main characters. Especially since the Emperor and Darth Vader had been destroyed in Return of the Jedi and Thrawn was gone. So Lucasfilm, with the help of Del Rey, Dark Horse Comics, and author, James Luceno, developed a series where nobody was safe and there was uncertainty as to whether the New Jedi Order, led by Luke Skywalker, could defeat the latest enemy of the New Republic, the Yuuzhan Vong.

I first heard about Vector Prime and The New Jedi Order when I got issue #43 of Star Wars Insider. The news section, which was called "Star News" at the time, had a brief announcement article on the new series in that issue, and then by the time issue #46 came out in late 1999, the book had been published. I thought it was cool, but I didn't immediately rush out to buy the book in hardcover when it came out because hardcovers were pretty expensive 25 years ago. 

I did end up getting the book when it came out in paperback in the summer of 2000. I'm pretty sure I got it in August 2000, because I don't think I got it for Christmas or my birthday as I was focusing on getting the Bantam era novels, which I didn't own very many of at that point. I enjoyed it, but actually reading Chewie's death near the end sucked. I knew about it before I read the book because issue #47 of Star Wars Insider had a whole article on it. So I knew about it going into the book. That article did not prepare me enough that's for sure.

As I mentioned the novels published by Bantam had gotten stale by 1999, and with the world changing, and the Prequel Trilogy coming out, people were no longer interested in novels where there were no stakes because Luke was really powerful and the stories were disconnected from one another despite sharing the same continuity. Even to this day, the novels are no longer tied to Han, Luke, and Leia. And that was another problem that The New Jedi Order ended up fixing. That and the prequel era novels gave us so many other characters as well. Like Jax Pavan in Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter by Michael Reaves. 

While I do think The New Jedi Order was a bit too dark and not alot of fun, it was still important, because it revitalized the Star Wars book publishing program at a time where the books were just as important as the movies. But, it also signified the end of the importance of the novels as the franchise was entering into television with Genndy Tartakovsky's animated series, Star Wars: Clone Wars in 2003, and then Dave Filoni's animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars in 2008. Because we had weekly episodes of Star Wars coming out, people began gravitating away from the books and comics and they became the aspects of the franchise that the really hardcore fans experienced and the general audience had no interest in anymore. Which is fine, because Star Wars novels and comics are still being published today even though they're a more niche corner of the Star Wars Universe.

One thing that I feel is unique to Vector Prime is the marketing. While the Shadows of the Empire Multimedia Project had commercials for the toys and the video game, Vector Prime had a TV commercial, narrated by Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, for the book itself. I don't remember seeing the commercial for the book on any TV channel I was watching in 1999, but it exists. Which is fascinating to me because Star Wars novels and comics never got TV commercials before this, and I don't think any of the books had them after this. So this was an unusual way to market the book. 

According to Leland Chee, the former keeper of lore for Lucasfilm, and I did not know this until recently, Chewie's death in Vector Prime was one of the reasons that the Lucasfilm Story Group chose to relegate the original Expanded Universe to Legends, in favour of a new continuity in novels and comics. Which makes sense since you can't just retcon Chewie's death so that he can appear in the Sequel Trilogy movies, but keep The New Jedi Order and all the books that came after it in continuity. It just doesn't work. Especially when The New Jedi Order takes place within the same time period that the Sequel Trilogy movies ended up taking place in. 

Vector Prime, and just The New Jedi Order in general, revitalized the Star Wars novel publishing program in a way that caused it to grow to where it is now. Because, even the prequel era book program was slow to start following the novelization of The Phantom Menace and the first few books in the young reader series, Jedi Apprentice. I mean Rogue Planet didn't come out until 2000, and Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter and Cloak of Deception didn't come out until 2001. And that was because of potential spoilers for The Phantom Menace. So The New Jedi Order kept things going until the prequel era could be better explored once Attack of the Clones came out and authors could tell stories set during the Clone Wars.

Alright my friends, I think that's gonna be it for me for this week. I'll be back next week for more blog posts. So until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you later. Take care.