Product Description

This illustrated reference, aimed at "Star Trek" fans, brings together all four TV series: "Original", "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager", plus the nine films. It contains over 5000 entries, including alien races, planets and stars, weapons and tools, as well as inside jokes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20111 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 752 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
This new version of the Star Trek Encyclopedia is a reissue of the 1997 edition plus a 128-page supplement of additional material that updates Deep Space Nine to the end of its run and Voyager to midway through season five. It also covers the movie Star Trek: Insurrection. The supplement is as meticulously detailed as the rest of the volume, listing such fascinating trivia as chadre kab (Seven of Nine's first meal), "Kahless and Lukara" (a Klingon opera) and voraxna (a Cardassian poison), as well as all the new characters and species. Appendices include illustrations of starships, cast and crew listings, a historical timeline and a bibliography. All photographs and illustrations (except a few historical shots) are in colour. The encyclopedia was devisedin part to help production staff on the various Star Trek TV series keep up with the ever-increasing level of detail generated by over more than 30 years of creative effort. It is an excellent reference volume and, whether you want to settle an argument or write a novel, this book will answer your questions. But beware: The extensive cross-referencing leads to curious time-distortion effects, in which the unwary reader, dipping in to settle a single query, encounters an irresistible urge to browse further, during which hours of normal time can pass in the wink of aneye. --Elizabeth Sourbut

Customer Reviews

Very informational and helpful.
The Star Trek Encyclopedia is an exellent source of information for Star Trek fans, especially those who are die-hard. I liked the book because it has very good information on ships, characters, and more. The book also has information on bloopers and other parts that actors played. For example, the book pointed out that In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Khan said he remembered Chekov from "Space Seed", unfortunatly this is impossible because Chekov's character was not yet created.

The is book is also good to get information on broad subjects, like ship classes and planets etc. For example, the book has lists of all the named ships, their classes, and what they did in relevance to Star Trek.

The book doesn't tell info on the books, but it is good in all other areas, episodes included. I would recommend this book to all Trek fans who ever wanted a place to look something up.

This book is much better than any other Star Trek info book I've ever seen, it also comes with free blueprints of the USS Enterprise D, so its a must.

Star Trek from A to Z....(up to 1994 Trek, that is)
It's hard to believe that Star Trek -- in all its incarnations -- has been around for nearly 40 years. Indeed, it's hard to remember American pop culture before Gene Roddenberry's now-iconic TV series and its legendary characters -- Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, Uhura and the Starship Enterprise -- came to life in the fall of 1966. Now, of course, Star Trek is a huge force in the entertainment universe; it has spun off four television series, 10 feature films, hundreds of hardcover and paperback novels and dozens of reference works.

The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future, written by Star Trek staffers Mike and Denise Okuda with Debbie Mirek, is one of a triumvirate of reference books (the others being The Star Trek Chronology: A History of the Future and The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual) that focus on the Star Trek universe.

Unlike Allan Asherman's The Star Trek Compendium (essentially a guide to the original series' episodes and feature film incarnations), the conceit of these books is that they are presented as though the Star Trek universe really existed. Written from a "24th-Century point of view," the entries read as though they had been composed by historians chronicling the events and scientific developments in Federation history. As the introduction explains, "we have assumed editorially that both authors and readers are residents of the late 24th century" a few years after some of the latter series' (Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first 1994 edition) runs.

Although the Okudas considered using "facts" from some of the many authorized Star Trek novels published by Pocket Books, they decided to limit their entries to data taken directly from The Original Series, the feature films and the various television spin-offs. Thus, while there is an entry for Zarabeth (who appeared in TOS episode "All Our Yesterdays"), there is none for Zar, the son Spock fathered during his brief fling with her on Sarpeidon (and who appeared only in A.C. Crispin's novels Yesterday's Son and Time for Yesterday). It would have been difficult for the compilers of the Encyclopedia to choose which "facts" to include and which ones to exclude, so all the entries are about people, planets, weapons, life forms, civilizations and starships seen on film or video. (NBC/Filmation's 1970s Star Trek animated series is also excluded because it was not produced by Paramount.)

As in Steven Sansweet's 1998 Star Wars Encyclopedia, the entries are presented in alphabetical order from A ("A&A Officer") to Z ("Zytchin III"). Many entries are short and to the point; there are no long, detailed articles about the workings of a hand phaser or the intricacies of the transporter (that's in Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda's Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual). The longer entries focus, appropriately, on the major characters (such as Kirk, Spock and Picard). All the actors who portrayed onscreen characters are properly credited in parentheses, and the episode or film where data points are derived from are also identified.

In addition to still photos from episodes and feature films, The Star Trek Encyclopedia is replete with charts, graphs and line drawings of starships, uniforms, equipment, weapons, and Starfleet signage and insignia.

Even more enjoyable are the authors' "real-life" observations that, like their text commentaries on the new Collector's Edition Star Trek feature film DVDs, give the reader insights that are both informative and amusing. The entire series of "official reference works" has these little gems that reflect the wonder and genuine affection that the authors -- and the fans -- have for the various incarnations of Roddenberry's optimistic look at the future.

Excellent, but a little disappointing
This is SOOOOOOOOO BRILLIANT if you are a Star Trek fan and you want to know everything about Star Trek. The first editions of the encyclopedia were pure excellance, but this one is slightly different, or should I say, the same....with a bit added at the end!!! This edition is virtually identical to the last edition, only it has a supplement at the end that covers the latest seasons of DS9 and Voyager. I would have thought that the Okudas would have printed any new information in with the older stuff, so you don't have to read about something and finish off reading information on that subject at the end of the book. Perhaps the Okudas will do this next time round, I hope...