This is how the Star Trek Novelverse ends. Beginning in 2001 with DS9: Avatar (and along the way grandfathering novels as far back as the 1980's) and spanning hundreds of books expanding and continuing TNG, DS9 and Voyager, it's all coming down to the Temporal Apocalypse which will presumably leave everything as we see it in Star Trek: Picard and the rest of the current Star Trek Universe of shows. I cannot wait for the Star Trek: Coda trilogy. It's been one hell of a ride.

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I’m having FEELINGS about this.

I know that the Trek Novelverse inter-continuity line existed in a seperate beta canon line from a bunch of the old standalone episodic Pocket novels of earlier eras, and that it existed standalone of Star Trek Online, and that it existed standalone from whatever would come next in the post 24th century. Which is what we finally get in Star Trek: Picard.

But I love the Novelverse that spanned post-Nemesis and kept things going for more than 20 years in and out of universe. I loved following Voyager’s Full Circle. I loved finding out about the Caeliar and the fate of and origins of the Borg. I loved the DS9 exploration of the Gamma Quadrant - and the wild shit with the Orbs and the wormhole and Kira and Taran’atar and Iliana Ghemor. I loved the continuing adventures of the USS Titan, and seeing the Typhon Pact rise and Federation and their alliance politics with an equal alliance of rival powers in a cold war. There were so many characters and plotlines I loved. The Andorian reproductive crisis; the symbiont issue; what happened with Control and Julian Bashir.

 My heart hopes the Coda wraps things up in a way we could still see Novelverse adventures. I’m sure we won’t for publishing realities; they’re doing 6 Trek books a year now, so if they want to do 1 for each live-action airing series that’s 2 now and 3 when Strange New Worlds comes out, then at least 2 classic books (probably an annual TOS and then one set in the 24th century shows).

But I long for them to go back to the glory days of Trek publishing when it was 1 or 2 Trek prose novels a year, and when we got the continuing novelverse lines and they were going radical where they got things like the Vanguard and Titan spinoff novels based around characters who were largely new people! who hadn’t appeared on screen! and we could fall in love with and fear for them and some truly creative shit went down! I would love those days to come back, but I don’t think they are.

what I hope for now is maybe with the Temporal Apocalypse, it’ll wrap up in a way that some of the Novelverse aspects wind up reflected over in main TV canon. Give us a Captain Dax of the Aventine; give us Castellan Garak; canonize 4-sexed Andorians with the prefixed last names. Heck, have some of them dimension-shifted there and recall a timeline-that-wasn’t, that’d be wild.

I’m a veteran of long, tangled expanded universes and their dissolutions. I lived through the SWEU wipe when Disney bought it and cleared the path. I have lived through the arguments of  “well they aren’t Really killing anything, you’ll still have all those books to read” - yes, I will, but I won’t have more of it and it’ll be snipped off into a bubble timeline and I won’t get to see more. when any story or series ends, there is a sadness.

As TNG itself says, All Good Things come to an end... but god, I want to see what happens. I wish these versions, of these crews, a fitting final adventure worthy of 20 years of love and investment that I’ve given them.