data:STvSW (Trek Novel Count vs Wars)

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.

...Leonard Nimoy, Writer and Photographer...(1931-2015)...

I did not grow up as a Trekker (or Trekkie, depending on the era or the preferred parlance), but I knew of Star Trek by the Filmation series.  I would not get interested, really, until the films came out and my friends patiently turned me on to the series.  I find, today, the superior nature and true science fiction, especially compared against the space opera of Star Wars.

I fell across I am not Spock by Leonard Nimoy in seventh grade.  For some reason it had made its way to the Brookhurst Junior High Library.  I volunteered my time in putting books away, so I was familiar with every shelf.  Spock happened to be near the south-west corner of the rectangular building, about four shelves from the corner, two shelves from the top.  Colored me intrigued, which was a color I was often back then, and I read it.

[Remember, pre-Internet, there was a time of the 'word of mouth'.  Spock was one of those controversial books, only surprising if you weren't around in the 70s.  There was heated discussions on Nimoy's gall in writing such a book.  No kidding and why my intrigue.]

Having little context of Spock or Nimoy, other than knowing the latter played the former, it was a confounding read.  Come to find later my confusion was not ill-placed: the title was meant to be provocative, not by Nimoy, but by the publishers.  It wasn't even really about Spock, more about Nimoy.  So, um, there it was.

What was more interesting, when revisiting the late actor's books and photography, he had a writer's mind.  Having watched In Search Of... with a fanatical mind of a prepubescent child, his fascinating narration bespoke of someone who had a scientific curiosity, if not some desire for the supernatural.

He wrote poetry.  He was fascinated in the female form.  He craved mythology.  A provocative culmination of these, is his 2002 Shekhina.  It is the visual representation of the God of Moses and Elijah as woman.  Powerful and passionate - these are women as deity and divinity.

He would pen two autobiographies and seven books of poetry.  He wrote three screenplays, including 1981's Vincent and Star Trek IV and Trek VI.

And for the artistry, poems, recitations, my personal feeling is we never truly got the intellect behind Spock.  I've always felt that Nimoy perhaps felt that he couldn't live up to the gravitas of the character and only passively skirted at the fringes of intellect, never delving in and coming back from that journey.

...Allusions of Horatio Hornblower and James Kirk...

     "A screen had been hurriedly run across the after part of the frigate, and the table and chairs replaced.  The brigadier [of the Spanish ship] sipped with increasing and astonished appreciation at the glass of wine offered him.  Inevitably several minutes passed in desultory conversation - Spanish was the one language the three had in common - before the brigadier began to discuss business.
     'You have a beautiful ship here, milord,' he said.  'I regret much to find you in company with a pirate.'
     'You mean the Bride of Abydos, señor?'
     'Naturally, milord.'
     Hornblower saw a trap opening before him.
     'You call her a pirate, señor?'
     'What do you call her, milord?"
     'I am waiting to hear your opinion, señor.'  It was important not to commit himself.
     'Her actions call for explanation, milord.  She has captured and plundered a Dutch ship.  That can be interpreted as an act of piracy.  On the other hand it might be said she is operating under a so-called commission issued by the rebels in Venezuela.  In the one case Captain Van der Maesen will seize her as a pirate.  On the other, if she is a privateer, I will seize her as an enemy of my country.'
     'In neither case, señor  has a court of law determined her status.  In the meanwhile, gentlemen, she is in my possession.'
     Hats were in the ring now.  Hornblower met the eyes of the others with the least expression he could manage.  Of one thing he was certain, that whatever might be eventually decided regarding the Bride of Abydos neither the British government nor the British public would approve of his tamely allowing her to be taken out of his hands."
     - Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, 1958, page 180

     There are few genres that play into the minds of young men better than those of sea-faring adventures.  They can be of heroes or scoundrels - either way, the milieu of the sea, of wood, rope and the bare essentials that pushed men and ships to the edges of the world.  A boy can start with adventures in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure or Boxcar Children, on to Stevenson's engaging series, then move on to a Frank Yerby or C.S. Forester novel.
     With punctuated reading through Forester's novel last night, a passage which I came across (above) struck me with parallels to Star Trek and its captain.  Doing a quick Google search and sure enough, Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Trek, cites that the original pitch for the series was based upon Forester's hero.  [As Hornblower was an amalgam of historical heroes, Lord Horatio Nelson and Lord Cochrane.]  Trek, in effect, was 'Hornblower in the stars'.
     And, in many of these gun-ship novels, the high art of warfare, of honor, and the strategies and hard truths that were required of these men are those that Kirk must face some thousand years later aboard his ship.  A captain would put faith in his crew, put them at risk and drive them to the brinks of exertion to fulfill the mission.  The ship was the world: you literally would live or die by its success or failure.  If you look at the statistical survival of such ships, the latter was the most likely.

     This is why a capable commander was required, a Renaissance man of sorts.  He was surely schooled, but had to have a functionary knowledge of a ship and how all the men and their tasks interwove to make it run.  Navigation, thus astronomy, arithmetic, etc. was absolutely required.  A function of the times was that he would have definite working knowledge of all of the mechanical processes aboard the ship.  He relied upon a crew of his choosing.  The other men must be exemplary in their fields.  The medic, the smithy, the sails-master, the cook - they all were integral to a well-run operation.
     Apart from Hornblower in contrast, Star Trek's dependence on the first- and second-mates relationship with the captain plays a much larger role than the Forester novels.  Hornblower's command has an interchangeable crew of coxswains and mates - which was, as far as I can tell with my knowledge only derived from a breadth of fictional accounts, probably closer to the reality of that time.  I would find it difficult to believe that, even in the world of Trek, that first to third-mates in a crew would stay their entire career with a single captain.  After first blush, I think the reality is Spock would have left many missions prior to that - it would reflect the nature course of ship exploration or warfare.
     Friendships would remain and evolve, surely - but all of Kirk's crew would be radically different in three to five year increments.  It is necessary for a healthy interplay across Starfleet as it would be in the modern Navy.
     What is consistent with the novels based upon the 'golden age of ships', is that the ships of the line were known, spoken about, characteristics maintained in the mind as modern day sports enthusiasts would with their favored team.  Rear Admirals must have kept close count on the 'technologies' (I'm sure the word 'strengths' was used) between nations and any and all advantages provided a full rigged ship.  Captains of the sea and their ships were spoken by government officials and the people's that relied upon their efficacy for survival.  Forester's take (as well as Yerby, slightly less (to me) of Stevenson) sees this microcosm as essential to the "exceptionalism" of his titular hero.
     If you get deeper into the Trek novelizations, where there is more time to explore the parallels: Trek offers this concept, which would have been too much minutiae for television and film.  Instead, Roddenberry offers a much less realistic viewpoint to concentrate on the singular set of characters across time.  It assuredly has its place (and popularity) - although it would be much more spirited to see changes that would make Kirk develop much differently over time.  It doesn't necessarily make for entertaining television - but it would make for an interesting one (Doctor Who anyone?).