Star Trek has novels almost from the beginning, and then expanded into comics and video games. Unlike Star Wars, where the whole EU was more or less one continuity, Trek has been licensed to multiple companies with each having their own continuity. The lack of a coherent continuity is partly because of Trek's history, where giant gaps of time between canon material gave authors plenty of time to make up their own stuff, which usually contradicted what the actual Trek writers came up with. After Gene Roddenberry declared that anything and everything that wasn't a film or TV show was not canon, Trek EU settled into a regular format. Much like the TV shows at the time, the novels and comics would setup and resolve conflicts within the same book or multipart series. Continuity and references confined to the source show and earlier works by those authors, which was a good thing, because some of the books during that era weren't that great. A lot of the early TV show novels suffered from the authors only being supplied scripts and character descriptions because the shows hadn't been filmed or aired yet. Towards the end of Deep Space 9 and Voyager, there was more and more experimentation with continuity and standalone Trek novel series like Peter David's New Frontier and the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series. But during the decline of Trek and the recession, things took a turn for the worse. Mega-crossovers involving crews from several shows and even the novel original series started getting common. Section 31, the most competent and pragmatic people in the Federation, started getting cast as incompetent and malevolent extremists along the lines of Cerberus from Mass Effect. Not only that, but the Andorians were given four genders in order to contrive a reproduction crisis to explain their absence in the post-TOS series. But the problems really started coming apparent with the "A Time to..." series. Directly leading up to the events of Star Trek: Nemesis, the novels cobbled together a Federation political crisis to bring The Next Generation crew back together. Things only got worse from there. The Borg came back twice; their first appearance is infamous for having a Supercube (yes, really) absorb Pluto, while the second involved the Borg blowing up planets and being beaten by a newly introduced race with absurd nanotechnology and mental abilities. From that point on, the post-Nemesis novels aside from New Frontier entered a near default state of mega-crossover, with big event series happening almost annually and anything about exploration or optimism marginalized. After the Borg invasion arc was the introduction of the Typhon Pact, an anti-Federation of minor unseen bad guy races from the TV shows, a good idea spoiled by bad timing in the context of the Trek. Even worse, writers made the Andorians join the Pact for an insane reason the Federation refused to give them some information that could solve their reproduction crisis, while Section 31 refused to take the information and give it to the Andorians. As for the comics and games, they tend to be a bit less ridiculous than the novels, although the DC TOS movie era comics, the IDW Abrams Trek comics, and Star Trek Online come close. While the DC comics had to keep resetting their storylines to fit the movies (resulting in Spock loosing command of a ship and Kirk going from the Excelsior to the Enterprise-A), the IDW Abrams Trek comics include an entire miniseries based on an absurd deleted subplot from the 2009 film. The Nero comics revolve around the idea that Nero and the Narada were in Klingon custody for the 25 years between the opening scene of the film and when Spock Prime emerges from the black hole, and that the Klingons got nothing from studying the ship for all that time. This idea was so absurd that the writers had Kirk call it out during the Mirror Universe two-parter in the Star Trek Ongoing series, right before taking the Narada to Vulcan to blow it up because of racism. What about the games, you ask? For the most part, it's not too bad a bit heavy on combat focused stories, which isn't surprising considering that most Trek games aren't RPGs. It does say a lot when the only Trek RPG Star Trek Online decides to not only have ancient evils awaken, but further undermine the end of Yesterday's Enterprise by having the Enterprise-C show up in the future. While it's admirable that they want to explore all the dangling plot hooks left by the writers that came before them, you have to wonder how far is too far and whether the admiration for the past is getting in the way of telling new stories in the Trek universe. The lesson of the Star Trek EU? Fanboys can ruin things as badly as bad writers and/or clueless executives can.
Living in Florida, enjoying the weather when its good, writing for a living. TV, Film, Animation, and Games are my life blood. Follow me on Twitter @xbsaint. Just try not to get too mad when I live tweet during Toonami.
Star Trek has novels almost from the beginning, and then expanded into comics and video games. Unlike Star Wars, where the whole EU was more or less one continuity, Trek has been licensed to multiple companies with each having their own continuity. The lack of a coherent continuity is partly because of Trek's history, where giant gaps of time between canon material gave authors plenty of time to make up their own stuff, which usually contradicted what the actual Trek writers came up with. After Gene Roddenberry declared that anything and everything that wasn't a film or TV show was not canon, Trek EU settled into a regular format. Much like the TV shows at the time, the novels and comics would setup and resolve conflicts within the same book or multipart series. Continuity and references confined to the source show and earlier works by those authors, which was a good thing, because some of the books during that era weren't that great. A lot of the early TV show novels suffered from the authors only being supplied scripts and character descriptions because the shows hadn't been filmed or aired yet. Towards the end of Deep Space 9 and Voyager, there was more and more experimentation with continuity and standalone Trek novel series like Peter David's New Frontier and the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series. But during the decline of Trek and the recession, things took a turn for the worse. Mega-crossovers involving crews from several shows and even the novel original series started getting common. Section 31, the most competent and pragmatic people in the Federation, started getting cast as incompetent and malevolent extremists along the lines of Cerberus from Mass Effect. Not only that, but the Andorians were given four genders in order to contrive a reproduction crisis to explain their absence in the post-TOS series. But the problems really started coming apparent with the "A Time to..." series. Directly leading up to the events of Star Trek: Nemesis, the novels cobbled together a Federation political crisis to bring The Next Generation crew back together. Things only got worse from there. The Borg came back twice; their first appearance is infamous for having a Supercube (yes, really) absorb Pluto, while the second involved the Borg blowing up planets and being beaten by a newly introduced race with absurd nanotechnology and mental abilities. From that point on, the post-Nemesis novels aside from New Frontier entered a near default state of mega-crossover, with big event series happening almost annually and anything about exploration or optimism marginalized. After the Borg invasion arc was the introduction of the Typhon Pact, an anti-Federation of minor unseen bad guy races from the TV shows, a good idea spoiled by bad timing in the context of the Trek. Even worse, writers made the Andorians join the Pact for an insane reason the Federation refused to give them some information that could solve their reproduction crisis, while Section 31 refused to take the information and give it to the Andorians. 