I've always salivated on the raw number of genre books whilst losing myself in the local Waldenbooks, a B.Dalton, Borders or Crown. I'm no spring chicken, so I can tell you how fantasy, for example, which popularly started with Tolkien, ramped up from two shelves with no label (falling, generically, under 'fiction') to taking up two entire bookshelves, then onto an entire row. Star Trek (ST) and Star Wars (SW) novels are no exception to the rapid expansion across store shelves. As ST preceded SW by a decade (the first ST novel was January of '67), it obviates that those novels were readily available. By the time I was a little lad, they were in easy rotation at the used bookstores (Book Baron, Anaheim, was a favorite and a weekly habit). SW would first come out in advance of the movie in 1976 (SW the movie would come out in May of the next year).
The first marked difference though is that ST novels first came out as compendiums, or a combination of short stories. This was the fashion of the time, culling the works of several authors per consolidated novella. The very first of these were meant for young readers - equating, again at the time, for readers 'of age' (maybe as early as 10 but up to 17).
SW novels, contrarily, started as straight novelizations of the movies: populist for the most part. However, quickly shifting with extensions of its universe by 1978 with Splinter of the Mind's Eye. From there, demand exploded with subsequent extensions of the universe, including the exploits of smuggler extraordinaire Han Solo and he ..at Star's End. It was of these popular novels that the affinity for Solo appeared to strengthen above the Skywalkers.
Now for the raw numbers...I was reveling in the picture I took at Barnes & Noble last weekend, and simply wondering how many books have come out for SW (and then ST)...from there I used GoodReads as the foundation for the count:
There are 251 Star Trek novelizations overall.
There are 376 Star Wars novelizations overall.
That's a whopping 125 book difference, despite the decade lead on SW.
Yes - I acknowledge the differences of each respective zeitgeist. I would also make an argument in the quality of those novels. I have found, over many a year reading them, that ST is much more cerebral than SW. It's more 'hard' science fiction (if there is such a thing, knowing it is a loaded definition), then the populist trappings of what could be assumed as fantasy more than science with SW.
Out of either series, I personally recommend the first 12 of the ST novels, probably avoiding number one and going straight into any other number. For SW, I am enjoying the latest canon books by James Luceno (Catalyst, Darth Plagueis).
Also pitching to support your local bookstore, so I'm throwing in links for Anaheim:
BOOKTOWN: https://www.yelp.com/biz/booktown-usa-anaheim
POP COMICS: https://www.yelp.com/biz/pop-comics-and-culture-emporium-anaheim
PHAT COLLECTIBLES: https://www.yelp.com/biz/phat-collectibles-anaheim-2
PS - for Shlitz and giggles, I had to look up the most prolific series and came up quickly with the Perry Rhodan series - Wikipedia states, As of April 2017, more than 2900 booklet novels of the original series plus 850 spinoff novels of the sister series;plus over 400 paperbacks and 200 hardcovers have been published, totalling over 300,000 pages. Having sold approximately two billion copies worldwide alone, (including over one billion in Germany), it is the most successful science fiction book series ever written. The first billion of worldwide sales was celebrated in 1986."
Wowzers - never heard of Rhodan.
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