Peter David’s Star Trek: New Frontier was my gateway drug to Star Trek fiction. I never quite took to the numbered series books published concurrently with the television series themselves, feeling at best that all the pieces had to be put back in the box at the end and at worst that whatever was established in the novels could too easily be contradicted by the show episodes hence.¹

But New Frontier was, for one thing, excellent, and also arrived in the heady summer where Deep Space Nine was just about to start the Dominion War, Voyager had just met the Borg (in the wake of the exhilarating Star Trek: First Contact the previous year), and my Star Trek TV fandom was at an all-time high. Plus that the books weren’t beholden to a show week to week, plus they contained crossover material (Picard and Spock(!), what’s become almost everyday all these years later), which is what had fueled my Trek book reading thus far — “Invasion!,” the “Shatnerverse” books, anything that brought characters from different series together or that took place for The Next Generation after “All Good Things.”