Star Trek has a very interesting relationship with time, and not just because the franchise is turning 60 later this year. Aside from thousands of years of history presented across every Star Trek show as normal, the franchise has now given us a whole multiverse of realities born from myriad timelines, from more traditional parallel universes like the Mirror Universe to branching deviations like the Kelvin Timeline. It can be pretty confusing even for the dedicated follower of a temporal mechanics class at Starfleet Academy—so it’s a good job our timeline is getting a big fancy new book to cover it all.
This week DK announced Star Trek Timelines: A Visual Voyage Through Generations of History, a new reference book coming later this year. Written by Derek Tyler Attico, Kelli Fitzpatrick, and Star Trek Adventures scribes Michael Dismuke and Jim Johnson, Timelines will chart the known chronology of Star Trek‘s universe, literally from the Big Bang to its death, covering the events of every Star Trek show and movie from its first 60 years, from the golden age of space exploration in classic Trek to the far-flung future of Starfleet Academy.
But what makes Timelines even more of an interesting project is that it’s not just doing a potted linear history of the prime Star Trek universe. It’s taking into account the ways time travel has wreaked havoc on that chronology too, the way it’s helped spawn different realities like the Kelvin Universe (the divergent Mirror Universe will also be included, even if its roots don’t come from temporal manipulation) to the many aborted timelines we’ve seen over various Trek stories, like Voyager‘s Year of Hell, or the future visions seen in things like the TNG finale “All Good Things.”
It’s about as complete a guide to Trek up to this moment in time that we’re going to get any time soon (although who knows, it probably doesn’t contain anything from Strange New Worlds‘ fourth season, due sometime this year, and almost definitely not anything from Starfleet Academy‘s final season). But with Trek on TV seemingly about to take another break again, it’ll be good to have a mostly complete guide to its history to pore over while we wait to see what the future holds for the franchise.
Star Trek Timelines: A Visual Voyage Through Generations of History is set to hit shelves November 3.
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