Today STAR TREK spans six television series, ten feature films and several interactive CD-ROMs. In addition, the STAR TREK afficionado now has hundreds of novels to choose from with dozens more being published each year. It was not always thus. Those of us who were loving STAR TREK in the late 1960's and into the early 1980's remember a time when STAR TREK was not so abundant. In the years between 1969 and 1981, we had only the animated series (22 half hour episodes), reruns of the original series, one movie and a handful of novels. In those 12 years there was published only 15 original novels and two collections of short stories. This was before Pocket Books gained the rights to publish STAR TREK books.

  This site is a guide to those early STAR TREK novels published by Bantam Books. This site has two main areas, the Novels page and the Timeline. The Novels page contains a list of the novels ordered chronologically. For each book there is a book cover picture, writer credit, publication date, ISBN number, page count, story synopsis and comments. The Novels page was created to allow those who have never read these books to discover the stories for the first time. Some of the books are still in print and for those the Novels page gives a link to the book page within Amazon.com to facilitate ordering. However, several of the books are out of print, but the interested person may still find them at used book sellers. The Novels page was also created for those who may have read the books some time ago. These persons can use the list to remember these classic tales.

  The Timeline page is a chronological listing of all the references to specific dates mentioned in the classic STAR TREK novels. The classic STAR TREK novels were only seventeen in number, but a wealth of past history was revealed in those few adventures. This may win the award for the most obscure and unecessary STAR TREK timeline on the web, but I just created it out of curiosity. I was interested in how well the events from these stories fit into established STAR TREK history, especially because the classic novels were written with less strict guidelines than Pocket Books currently imposes on its writers. Also, the writers of these books had no official chronology to refer to like today's STAR TREK writer have access to.

  I invite you to use this guide as a way to explore these classic novels, and I encourage you to buy and read any book that may interest you. Not listed in this site are the several James Blish and Alan Dean Foster novelizations of the original and animated series respectively. Those were published by Bantam Books during the same timeframe as these 17 novels, but I chose not to include them because they were retellings of aired televison episodes and those have been covered by several books and web sites. The Animated STAR TREK series was the subject of my very first web site. One final note: This site is a guide to these early books, it is not intended as a replacement for them. Enjoy!



Curt Danhauser,July 8, 1999.



STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved. The above mentioned books were published by Bantam Books, and by the Whitman Publishing Division of Western Publishing Company, Inc.

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Email: curtdan@ridgenet.net



I also created the book cover of Arctic Ice - A Novel.
I recommend it highly.