beatrice_otter | List of Best Star Trek TOS Novels

When I was a teenager, some of my favorite books were the Star Trek: The Original Series novels of the 80s and early 90s. They varied wildly in quality, but many of them were really good and all of them were written out of love for the source material. Unlike most tie-in novels, authors (both pro and fan) vied for coveted Star Trek contracts because they'd been fans of the series for two decades and wanted to be a part of it. Some of them were amazingly good. Some of them were, uh, not. Some of them were cracktastic. All of them were fun. It was a golden age.

None of these novels were canon. It was official franchise policy at the time that only things which appeared on screen were canon, so the TV writers didn't have to worry about keeping up with what was in the books. The bad thing about it was that some of the amazing stuff in the books never made it to screen, or was contradicted by later on-screen stuff. (Duane's take on 'Romulans' is way cooler than anything they managed on screen, as just one example.) The good thing about it was that the authors were not constrained away from anything, and had a lot more freedom to worldbuild and dream and plot to their hearts' content than most franchise tie-in authors.

Over the years, I have been asked for rec lists for these books and have made them several places. None of those places, alas, were in my own journal, and alas I cannot find them. So! Here it is. Please feel free to quibble in the comments, and let me know if I've missed anything major. The links are to Kobo ebook store, I'm not making anything off of them.

Amazing, Incredible Books
My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way by Diane Duane. Romulans, honor, and espionage, with Duane's characteristically excellent worldbuilding, compelling original characters, and fun action plots (You may find it easier to search for the anthology The Bloodwing Voyages which have these two books plus three later sequels all together in one volume.)

Spock's World by Diane Duane. Vulcan is thinking of seceding from the Federation, and Enterprise goes to bear witness and represent the Federation. Also, lots of really fascinating Vulcan history interludes. A primary inspiration for Vulcan culture in the Reboot movies.

Best Destiny by Diane Carey. Post-movies Kirk reflecting on an adventure he had in space as a youth; much of the characterization was used as an inspiration for Kirk in the reboot movies.

The Final Reflection by John Ford. These are not the Klingons as TNG imagined them, but it's a fascinating take.

Good and Entertaining Books
Yesterday's Son and Time for Yesterday by A.C. Crispin. Spock accidentally got Zarabeth pregnant in the episode "All Our Yesterdays," so he goes back to retrieve her and the kid using the Guardian of Forever, and mistimes his arrival--the kid's already an adult. Adventures ensue.

Vulcan's Glory by D.C. Fontana. Fontana was one of the writers on the original show, and here's her take on Spock's early years in Starfleet.

Uhura's Song by Janet Kagan. Uhura's musical knowledge holds the key to finding the cure to a plague, and launches the Enterprise on a quest to find the people who wrote the song.

The Vulcan Academy Murders and The IDIC Epidemic by Jean Lorrah. Vulcans, murder, and Enterprise caught up in it. Lots of fun, and I love the OCs.

The Pandora Principle by Carolyn Clowes. Saavik's backstory

The Wounded Sky by Diane Duane. Look, it's Diane Duane, of course you have to read it. Featuring wacky physics and metaphysics and deeply thoughtful worldbuilding.

Dreadnought! and Battlestations! by Diane Carey. Plucky lieutenant and her friends foil treason against the Federation, with help from Kirk & Co. You will note many similarities between the plot of Dreadnought! and Star Trek Into Darkness. I always enjoyed them, but a lot of people didn't like the books--I'm pretty sure it's snobbishness and thinking that Lieutenant Piper is a Mary Sue.

Final Frontier by Diane Carey. Early adventure of the Enterprise under her first captain, Robert April, with James Kirk's dad aboard.

The Kobayashi Maru by Julia Eklar. The stories of young Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov in Starfleet Academy as they take the iconic test.

Dreams of the Raven by Carmen Carter. McCoy has amnesia, but his memory has the key to Saving The Ship!

Death Count by L.A. Graf. Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov have an adventure while on leave. Don't judge a book by its title, I have no idea where they got it, it doesn't have anything to do with the story.

Strangers from the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonano. Kirk and Spock go back in time to make sure history's first contact with Vulcans goes right

Prime Directive by Judith and Garfield Reeves Stevens

Sarek by A.C. Crispin. A story about Sarek and Spock's tumultuous relationship.

Doctor's Orders by Diane Duane. Kirk leaves McCoy in command of the Enterprise as a joke while he's on a simple, easy away mission ... and then disappears, leaving McCoy in charge of the ship!

Dwellers in the Crucible by Barbara Hambly. Romulans and Klingons kidnap the kids of high-status Federation officials and hold them hostage, and it's mostly about two of the hostages (one human, one Vulcan). Warnings for 80s misogyny-masquerading-as-feminism, which I didn't notice when I was a teenager in the 90s reading it.

Cracktastic Books
How Much For Just The Planet? by John M Ford. This book is AMAZING, and HILARIOUS, and features musical numbers, a game of golf through a minefield, and a climactic pie fight. Basically, a group of anarchist theater people settled a planet and found out too late it had resources everyone would want. When Starfleet and the Klingons show up at the same time to claim the planet, they know they can't possibly maintain their independence through fighting, so they try Plan C: Comedy.

Black Fireby Sonni Cooper, featuring Spock as a space pirate

Ishmael by Barbra Hambly. Amnesiac Spock in the Old West, featuring lots of stealth crossovers the publisher never caught! Including the fact that the entire setting and most of the non-Trek characters are taken from a 60s TV Western called "Here Come The Brides" in which Mark Lenard (as in, the ORIGINAL SAREK) played a starring role.

Killing Time by Della van Hise. Time-travel and alternate universe shenanigans, VERY slashy, and the first print run mistakenly left in some extra-slashy stuff the publisher had wanted cut out. (But those are hard to find.) Featuring Jim Kirk as a twink and Spock as captain.

The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. Really 70s, really slashtastic, really psychedelic, must be read to be believed.

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Great list.

Thank you!

I read these novels without ever having seen an episode of the show, because there was no way to watch it - it wasn't released on VHS in Australia until later, and it didn't air on TV in my lifetime. After all the species diversity and fantastic female characters I was quite disappointed with the actual show and haven't seen all of TOS to this day! Great list - my favourites were the Jean Lorrah books and the Diane Duane books.

Aha. Yeah, I can see how that would be the case. I, meanwhile, was young enough that while TNG and sequels were on the air all the time, TOS episodes were much rarer. I saw most of them? But it wasn't a Thing the way TNG and DS9 were for my family.

And I tried to read the TNG and DS9 novels, but unfortunately most of them were more "meh" than interesting, despite the fact that I liked TNG and DS9 more than I liked TOS.

Ooh thanks for this list! I've really only read the Duane books, since I was a fan of hers as a teen! I wonder how many of these will be at my library...

You're welcome! The library may well have gotten rid of them because they're 30-40 years old at this point, and paperbacks don't tend to last that long in the hard use that library books get. You might have more luck at used books stores.

I have read a surprising number of these!

They're lots of fun, so it's not surprising.

Oh, nice list!

To the Good and Entertaining list, I would add The Entropy Effect by Vonda McIntyre and Troublesome Minds by Dave Galanter. The latter is one of the few TOS books published after 1995 that I really like. I'm also a huge fan of Vulcan's Heart by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz, but you have to ship, or at least be okay with, Spock/Saavik to like that one.

The Galactic Whirlpool by David Gerrold is also great, and really interesting to read because it's one of the handful of books published before the first movie came out, so it has worldbuilding which is entirely based on the TOS series.

Trek to Madworld by Stephen Goldin definitely belongs on the Cracktastic list.

I also really like The Three-Minute Universe by Barbara Paul.

And Crossroad by Barbara Hambly is darker than I usually like Star Trek to be, but there's no denying it's a really well written book.

Edited (accidentally hit post too soon) Date: 2021-03-12 03:52 pm (UTC)

I own The Entropy Effect, but it made so little impression on my that I can't remember the plot of it. The others I haven't read, but thanks for the recs!

Oh the many memories these brought back! I have and have read and enjoyed them all. I even managed to find a hardback copy of Uhura’s Song, a family favorite. On long car trips I used to read to the assembled and captive masses, and sometimes it was a childhood favorite of mine, or another personal favorite discovered later,and sometimes it was one of these. Geekdom is a heritable condition!

I am also now amused by how oblivious I was back in The Day to the slashtastic nature of some of these. I did have plenty gay friends, but had not read any fanfic that was not professionally published by mainstream companies like Bantam, and so I just didn’t have the right goggles, but now, hoo-boy! So clear! Facepalm at the oblivious nature of my young self.

Hey, you're talking to someone who, as a teenager, was a great fan of Xena, and got told that there was a lot of lesbian subtext in it, and couldn't see it even while looking for it. In those days, I was the definition of oblivious. (In Xena, the lesbians subtext isn't so much subtext as just plain text.)

I did not know there was a hardback version of Uhura's Song, though I have one of The Vulcan Academy Murders.

And I just trotted off to order The Bloodwing Chronicles, because I did not know there were further novels in the series. I had kids, as demonstrated in my icon, and got too busy to keep up with it all, I guess. [rubs hands in anticipation]

Edited Date: 2021-03-14 01:33 am (UTC)

Well, the later three aren't as good as the first two. But they're still Duane, and thus better than most books.

Did Janet Kagan have a pen name for Uhura's Song?

Nope, that's just a typo! It is fixed now, thank you for letting me know.

No worries. ^_^ Janet Kagan was a very nice person.

Yesssss, thank you for this! I've read and loved several of them, have been meaning to read others, and have never heard of a few. Definitely bookmarking this!

(Though, uh, typo alert -- it's Romulans and Klingons, not Romulans and Vulcans, who kidnap the hostages in Dwellers in the Crucible, yes?)

You're welcome! And thank you for pointing out the typos, I will fix them!

It was a real joy last year to read My Enemy, My Ally for the first time and realise how much Rihannsu mythos had been folded into canon in Picard.

Well, it was miles better than anything TNG or DS9 had, so.

Not sure if I ever saw any Trek as a kid, though someone gave me a coloring book. I read a bunch of the tie-ins; I had a box set of MEMA, Wounded, Uhura, and Tears of the Singers. Read more via the local library, like Ishmael. Bought the Piper novels; I can hear Carey grinding a libertarian axe but they were still fun.

_Spock Must Die_ is by James Blish; I am unaware of any relation to the Marshak and Culbreath _Price of the Phoenix_ and _Fate of the Phoenix_ novels. Which are kind of slashy and weird, yes, but also have perhaps the boldest exploration of transporter tech implications ever seen.

I like to gripe about Duane retconning her own history between MEMA and the Romulan Way.

_Corona_ is another one by a big name author (Greg Bear) but I was underwhelmed when I read it as an adult. Has at least a couple of interesting ideas.

Oh! But the interesting thing about the early Star Trek novels: they had much higher female authorship than after 2001, or I suspect in SF in general. https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/433336.html

Thanks for correcting me; I should have looked up on the list of Trek novels to make sure that Spock Must Die is the one I was thinking about.

I think I knew about the higher female authorship in the 80s than today? But I haven't thought of it in a while. So I didn't mention it here.

As for Corona, well, I read pretty much every Trek novel published before 2000 (when I went off to college and had much less time for fun reading), and all the ones I have actual memories of are on this list. If it wasn't interesting enough to me to remember even a vague hazy idea of it, I didn't include it here :D

Oh, you absolutely captured all of my favorites! I only caught a few eps of TOS, but I watched all the movies multiple times. I spent so much time perusing the local used bookstore for new-to-me TOS books; I think I still have all of them, plus more from my husband's family. Diane Duane has such an amazing voice and background for her characters; she put waaaay more thought and history into her plots than the ST show writers ever did. I would read anything she publishes.

She is AMAZING, and yes, her worldbuilding and plot and characters are way better than your average Trek writer.

Diane Duane rocks the world, as far as I'm concerned! I love her stories in general and her Rihannsu books are some of my favorite novels period. A.C. Crispin's books are also up there, especially the two follow ups to All Our Yesterdays, and a lot of my other favorite Trek novels are in your list as well. I have to disagree with you on Drednaught!, though. I read that book when I was devouring Trek novels and enjoying even the not so great ones, but even then Piper struck me as an eye-rollingly bad Mary Sue long before I ever started reading fan fiction or had heard of the term 'Mary Sue'. :-p

If you're looking for another good Trek novel, try Howard Weinstein's Deep Domain. It's been decades since I read it, but I still have the paperback and remember enjoying it greatly. I'm going to have to buy that one on Kindle so I can read it again comfortably.

Edited to add: Vonda McIntyre's Enterprise: The First Adventure is another not to be missed Trek novel. I really enjoyed reading about Jim Kirk's first outing as captain of the Enterprise and this novel is another one on my 'to buy on Kindle' list.

Edited Date: 2021-03-12 11:30 pm (UTC)

IMO Piper isn't a "Mary Sue", she's a young female Kirk.

That's my point: what do you call a male Mary Sue? Batman or James T. Kirk or Luke Skywalker. What it actually means is "a female character who gets to be as cool as the male characters." But lots of people hate characters like that because misogyny. I mean, sometimes there is bad writing involved as well; but it's telling that that sort of bad writing is only critiqued when it's used to portray a female character.

Edited Date: 2021-03-13 12:11 am (UTC)

Gary Stu is one term I've heard. A possible example is main characters in later Guy Gavriel Kay books (Crispin, I am certainly looking at you).

Exactly! And Kirk as played by William Shatner was about as Marty Stu as it got.

I've been active in online fandom for about 25 years at this point. I have quite literally NEVER seen the term Gary Stu used in the wild. The ONLY times I have ever seen the term show up--and I have been watching for it--have been in context of people talking about Mary Sues and how it's a gendered term and you never see male characters accused of similar failings and then someone pipes up with "a male Mary Sue is called a Gary Stu!"

I have seen, many times, "ugh, I can't stand that character, she's such a Mary Sue." I have quite literally NEVER seen "ugh, I can't stand that character, he's such a Gary Stu."

When male characters are hyper-competent to an absurd degree, even when they're poorly written and completely over the top, people just ... accept it. They may quibble about the quality of writing in the work as a whole, but they rarely point out the poor quality of writing of the male character specifically. On the other hand, even female characters of average competence and decently written get accused of being "unrealistic" and "poorly written." Sure, when someone asks for a list of absurdly OTT hypercompetent-and-cool male characters, we can all name some. But dissing such characters isn't a thing the way dissing female characters is.

I guessed that people might call Kvothe, or Terry Goodkind's Richard Rahl, Gary Stus, and googling seems to confirm it, though I don't care enough to dig around for context.

Agreed, Piper is absolutely a young female JT Kirk as he's portrayed by William Shatner. Even when I was 7 years old and hiding behind my Dad's easy chair to peek around and watch TOS in its original run (it was on after my bedtime), I thought Kirk was eye-rollingly over the top. I have always loved Trek novels a bit more than the series itself because the novelists I enjoyed reading toned Kirk down considerably from Shatner's portrayal. I'll give Diane Carey props for getting Kirk's character as portrayed by Shatner dead on the money!

My main criteria for "which books go on this list" is "did I like it well enough, when I read it as a teenager, that I remember it today 20 years later?" Not a highly scientific selection process, I will admit, but this is my rec list :D I know I read both Deep Domain and The First Adventure, but neither stuck with me.

We will have to agree to disagree about Piper. Both reading it as a teen and today I see nothing about Piper that would not be equally true of a young James T. Kirk at a similar age.

"...I see nothing about Piper that would not be equally true of a young James T. Kirk at a similar age."

Bingo. I never cared much for William Shatner's portrayal of Kirk and always thought he was waay OTT.

Thank you for this: the ones I've read I really enjoyed, which makes me want to go find and reread them (and maybe track down the rest ...)

Good luck! Haunting used bookstores is probably your best bet.

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List of Best Star Trek TOS Novels

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