Star Trek Books
More than fifty years of Trek in prose, across a handful of publishers and a paperback line so large it has been called the biggest run of fiction in the history of Western publishing. Every era, every series, the novels, the adaptations, and the odd historic one-off.
Trek fiction began in 1967 with James Blish’s episode adaptations and has barely paused since. The licence moved from Bantam to Pocket by the end of the 1970s, with Ballantine and Whitman adding their own pieces along the way. Each publisher page leads with the major lines and landmark books, with reviews and reading orders added over time.
The first publisher to take Trek into prose. James Blish adapted the episodes into a dozen slim paperbacks, then wrote Spock Must Die!, the franchise’s first original novel. Pulpy, brisk, and occasionally written by someone who had not actually seen the show.
Explore this publisherHome of Alan Dean Foster’s Star Trek Logs, which novelised the Animated Series and quietly expanded several of its half-hour episodes into something richer than the cartoons had room for.
Explore this publisherA single entry, but a historic one. Mission to Horatius was the first original Star Trek novel ever published, aimed at younger readers and now a genuine collector’s piece.
Explore this publisherThe giant. From the Motion Picture novelisation onward, Pocket built one of the longest continuous runs of tie-in fiction anywhere in publishing, covering every series and a long shelf of original lines. This is where most of the reading is.
Explore this publisherSimon & Schuster’s imprint that took on Trek’s hardcover and trade fiction when Pocket reorganised in 2009. The smarter-looking shelf of the modern line.
Explore this publisherAbout the Books Hub
This hub maps Star Trek’s prose fiction by publisher, from Bantam’s first paperback adaptations in 1967 to the modern Pocket and Gallery lines. Each card leads to a publisher page covering its major lines, landmark titles, and the place it holds in the larger story of how Trek fiction was written and sold. Novels, episode adaptations, original crossover lines, and the occasional historic one-off all sit here. Reference, technical, and art books are kept separate on the Reference Books page under Resources.
Organising by publisher rather than by series reflects how the licence actually moved over the decades, and why the books from one era read so differently from another. Bantam and Ballantine shaped the 1970s, Pocket has held the line since 1979, and the imprint a book came from often tells you as much about its tone and ambition as the series printed on the cover.
The hub is a living reference. Reviews, reading orders, and features are added to the publisher pages as they are written, and scores fill in against individual titles over time. Nothing here is meant to be the last word on a line that runs to many hundreds of books, but it is a reliable map of where to start and what matters.