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Unlike the Star Wars Expanded Universe or various other media tie-in lines, no Star Trek novel, comic, or game is considered canon. Even those written in conjunction with the new, most recently in-production series. However, that doesn't take anything away from the quality of the material or its ability to entertain. Even as Star Trek has returned to the small screen and the Simon and Schuster novel continuity has mostly drawn to a close, the inter-connectedness of the novels will likely continue in some form, as it has for the majority of Trek history.

The complete Lit-verse consists of a continuity web of more than 1200 stories. That is more than one third of all Star Trek fiction ever published. In addition to the majority of the novels which have been released over the past three decades, many older novels have been referenced in this continuity as well. Available to the left are reading lists for each of the series. Don't be overwhelmed by the length of some of the lists. All anthology short stories and many comic issues are listed individually, so it's not as much reading as it seems to a newcomer. Not all connections are noted, only the ones which form the branching out of the lists. Author annotations can be found for many stories to provide more extensive references.

       My placement of a story in the Lit-verse is not intended to imply that there are no continuity discrepancies included in the material. There are definite contradictions in the lists I've compiled. The fact is, not even the shows themselves are free of continuity errors, some quite large. The older novels do not always agree in every detail with the Lit-verse, or even with modern canon. Indeed, even the newer novels, written with the modern continuity in mind, sometimes contain a few mistakes. The majority of all this can be ignored, or explained away by a creative mind. My goal here was to include every link possible and leave the continuity problems up to the reader to resolve. If you don't want a book in your personal continuity, then just ignore it. Don't become so invested in continuity that you forget to enjoy the stories themselves.

Reading List Structure

Each Star Trek series is given its own reading list page. The major Lit-only series, New Frontier, Starfleet Corps of Engineers, IKS Gorkon, Titan, Vanguard/Seekers, Department of Temporal Investigations, Theseus/Defiant, Mirror Universe, and Myriad Universes also have their own pages. The easiest way to include Stargazer, The Lost Era, and certain other like-period pieces was to create an Early 24th Century reading list containing them all.

Suggested Reading Lists

I then have many simple suggested reading lists broken up by series and topic, including a Simple 24th Century Series Era Reading List, and a Simple Post-Nemesis Reading List. These two are lists of the major Lit-verse stories grouped into "chapters". A more detailed timeline of the stories following Star Trek: Nemesis is given on the Post-Nemesis: Month-By-Month page. Note that these stories were published in the years before Star Trek: Picard premiered, and the authors were given free rein to explore the late 24th century. Things do "eventually" lead back into the modern television continuity now shown in Star Trek: Picard and other series, but tell an alternate history of the intervening years that only makes sense in relation to the canonical storyline at its conclusion in the Coda trilogy.

Additional Resources

Also available is my personal version of a month-by-month breakdown of the Five Year Mission. The Complete Simon and Schuster Novel List updates the novel list as given in the back of Pocket Books novels in years past, before the list became so long that it was considered impractical to include in every book. I also have a list of all the ebook exclusive Trek stories which have been published and never been released in print. Then there's a vast examination of the minutiae of Klingon date keeping systems, including an automatic Klingon date calculator. I've keep an exact count of every Star Trek story ever published, updated with each new month's releases, and a count of just how many stories have been told that take place in the Five Year Mission. And for the first two seasons of Discovery, I kept an examination of the dating of each episode. Don't miss pictures of my 1:5000 scale Star Trek ship model collection, and a page where I log all the updates to the site, for those interested in seeing what is new and what has changed.

Future Plans

Forthcoming is the Complete Lit-verse reading list, which will include every story from the main reading lists in chronological order. Also to come will be more specific reading lists (character specific lists, species specific lists, storyline specific lists). Someday I will develop an explanation of my own personal continuity and a list of what it includes. And I have other plans down the line.