Book bits: First The Higher Frontier details, new blurbs, and updated covers

Got a few book updates today, including a better look at the most recently revealed covers. But first, some new blurbs:

Due out in March is Christopher L. Bennett's The Higher Frontier, the new blurb for which has popped up on Amazon's new listings, and reveals this TOS novel is move era (a bit of a rarity for TOS stuff) and will feature the Medusans. UPDATE: Bennett has now confirmed this is a The Motion Picture era follow up to his previous books in that period, most notably Ex Machina.

An all-new Star Trek movie-era adventure featuring James T. Kirk!

Investigating the massacre of a telepathic minority, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise confront a terrifying new threat: faceless, armored hunters whose extradimensional technology makes them seemingly unstoppable. Kirk must team with the powerful telepath Miranda Jones and the enigmatic Medusans to take on these merciless killers in an epic battle that will reveal the true faces of both enemy and ally!

There's also a rather less descriptive new blurb for Una McCormack's Picard prequel novel, The Last Best Hope, coming in February:

A thrilling novel leading into the new CBS series, Una McCormack’s The Last Best Hope introduces you to brand new characters featured in the life of beloved Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard—widely considered to be one of the most popular and recognizable characters in all of science fiction.

Explaining the higher price point of this book, Simon and Schuster now have it listed as a hardcover release; if so I think that would be the first Star Trek novel in hardcover since the Kelvin timeline Starfleet Academy series at the start of the decade!

Simon and Schuster have also now released the digital versions of the cover art recently revealed at the Star Trek Las Vegas convention, giving us a clearer look. Here's David Mack's TNG book, Collateral Damage, front and back covers. This is coming in October:

Mack has also tweeted a little about the continuity connections to the book, including recommending a reading list of books to inform you for the new book, and another bit of reassurance there's hope for the litverse continuing despite the changes coming from Picard:

I've been asked a few times now about what it means that my upcoming TNG novel COLLATERAL DAMAGE "represents the culmination of 16 years of literary continuity." For those who didn't know, the Trek novels have been working in a mostly coordinated/shared continuity since 2001.

I started contributing to the shared Star Trek literary continuity in 2001 with my work for the S.C.E. eBook series, which at that time published monthly novellas. It was a mix of episodic and serialized narratives, and we put in links to other Trek book series.

My first full-length paperback novels were a pair of TNG books, released back-to-back in September/October 2004. Those were A TIME TO KILL and A TIME TO HEAL, the 7th & 8th books in a nine-book series.

I really shook things up in A TIME TO KILL and A TIME TO HEAL. The two books were a Star Trek critical allegory of the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. There was some really dark stuff, especially in the second book. And it had lasting consequences for our characters.

In the years since then, I've penned 28 Star Trek novels, and I have continued to weave ongoing story threads through many of them, even ones set in different centuries and series of Star Trek. Consequently, I was able to link TNG, DS9, SCE, Titan, and Section 31 tales.

Now, after 18 years, many of those storylines are converging in one novel: COLLATERAL DAMAGE, which follows up on the fallout from my Section 31 novel CONTROL, as well as the events of Dayton Ward's TNG novels HEARTS AND MINDS and AVAILABLE LIGHT.

So what might you want to read before jumping into COLLATERAL DAMAGE this October? You don't =need= to read anything, since I explain in-text what you need to know to follow the story. But you'll get more out of it if you've read some or all of these books:

TNG: A Time to Kill (the Tezwa crisis)
TNG: A Time to Heal (the Tezwa coverup and its aftermath)
TNG: Cold Equations, Book I: The Persistence of Memory (Data’s reincarnation)Titan: Fortune of War (the Riker/Sarai/Batanides subplot)
Section 31: Control (the Section 31 controversy)
TNG: Hearts and Minds by Dayton Ward (the Section 31 fallout)
TNG: Available Light by Dayton Ward (more Section 31 fallout)

I hope you'll pre-order your copy of COLLATERAL DAMAGE, coming Oct. 8, 2019. (But if you think this is the end of the current continuity ... let's just say we Trek scribblers have a few rabbits left to pull from our hats…)

The other newly released cover if for the 40th Anniversary Edition of the novelisation of The Motion Picture, written by none other than Gene Roddenberry of course, and also due in October:

And that segways into the final update today, which is the curious appearance of JM Dillard's novelisation of First Contact. An eBook edition of this book is now set for December release.


To keep track of all the latest releases, hit the prose or books buttons on my 2019 schedule page. You can also find series reading lists and author bibliographies on my dedicated Star Trek lists site.