The STAR TREK Novelverse flowchart

This is cool: A poster on the TrekBBS calling himself Thrawn had the idea to put together a flowchart showing the interconnections among the various Star Trek prose-fiction series that Pocket Books has published in recent years.  It’s not a completely comprehensive chart, since that would be way too cluttered, but it’s an impressive overview.  It’s being hosted on 8of5′s Guide to the Trek Collective, and you can see it here:

The Almighty Star Trek Lit-verse Reading Order Flowchart

You can click to enlarge it.  On my browser it works best if you right-click and open, but maybe that’s just my browser.

The list includes seven of my works (at least implicitly, since I had a story in Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows), but doesn’t have room for Ex Machina or The Buried Age.  At least, not in its current form.  Thrawn went through about five drafts in one day putting this together, so who knows?  Maybe there will be future refinements.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out (and Thrawn does, on the left-hand side of the chart) that this web of interconnections doesn’t mean anyone is required to read all these books to understand what’s going on.  For the most part, except for the outright duologies and trilogies, you can read and understand any novel on its own, because we authors know any book is going to be somebody’s first and thus needs to be accessible without prior knowledge.  (Heck, I know my books may be read by friends or family who aren’t too familiar with Trek in the first place, so I always try to make my books understandable for them.)

Anyway, it’s a cool reference guide to Trek literature, so it’s worth calling attention to.

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