Customer Reviews
A must for all you Trekkies! - By: R. K. Harvey, 04 Jan 2006 
A brilliant book if you're a fan of Star trek, or a brilliant present for anyone who likes star trek. Filled with plenty of facts, biographys, pictures that will keep you looking through for hours.
The Ultimate Trekkie Book - By: , 04 Sep 2005 This is an absolutely brilliant book for any star trek fan. It is jam packed with just about everything ever featuredin the star trek universe.
There are detailed crew biographies, ship descriptions, episode descriptions, & even Neelix's favourite foods. Not only this, it is also filled with thousands of detailed colour pictures & background & production information.
The only real downside is that, having been publishedin 1999, the information included does not include seasons 6 & 7 of voyager, star trek nemisis or any of the enterprise series. Although this is a bit of a dissapointment, I still think that is a great book.
I would say that this is the ultimate trek book & any hardcore fan really should have it. I really enjoyed reading it. I can only hope that they release an updated version with all of the more recent details.
A Must for Trekkies - By: Capt Sisko, 20 Jan 2004 I bought this excellent book for my son (and me) for Christmas.After reading through it, I wonder how I ever followed the various Star Trek adventures without it. It is filled with information pictures & drawings. My son is using it as a referance guide for his college assingnment, & he admits, even with his vast knowledge of Star Trek he would be lost without it. Uniforms,Weapons are all covered along with insignia & the ships.All series are covered from Original to DS9 & Part of Voyager, an update would be nice to finish the Voyager series & "Enterprise". Altogether a really great book that is well worth the money, & a neccesity for anyone remotely interestedin Star Trek
Star Trek from A to Z....(up to 1994 Trek, that is) - By: Alex Diaz-Granados, 26 Dec 2003 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 & its legendary characters -- Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, Uhura & the Starship Enterprise -- came to lifein the fall of 1966. Now, of course, Star Trek is a huge forcein the entertainment universe; it has spun off four television series, 10 feature films, hundreds of hardcover & paperback novels & dozens of reference works.
The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future, written by Star Trek staffers Mike & 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 & 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 & 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 & scientific developmentsin Federation history. As the introduction explains, "we have assumed editorially that both authors & 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 & the various television spin-offs. Thus, while there is an entry for Zarabeth (who appearedin 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 onlyin A.C. Crispin's novels Yesterday's Son & Time for Yesterday). It would have been difficult for the compilers of the Encyclopedia to choose which "facts" to include & which ones to exclude, so all the entries are about people, planets, weapons, life forms, civilizations & starships seen on film or video. (NBC/Filmation's 1970s Star Trek animated series is also excluded because it was not produced by Paramount.)
Asin Steven Sansweet's 1998 Star Wars Encyclopedia, the entries are presentedin alphabetical order from A ("A&A Officer") to Z ("Zytchin III"). Many entries are short & to the point; there are no long, detailed articles about the workings of a hand phaser or the intricacies of the transporter (that'sin Rick Sternbach & Mike Okuda's Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual). The longer entries focus, appropriately, on the major characters (such as Kirk, Spock & Picard). All the actors who portrayed onscreen characters are properly creditedin parentheses, & the episode or film where data points are derived from are also identified.
In addition to still photos from episodes & feature films, The Star Trek Encyclopedia is replete with charts, graphs & line drawings of starships, uniforms, equipment, weapons, & Starfleet signage & 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 & amusing. The entire series of "official reference works" has these little gems that reflect the wonder & genuine affection that the authors -- & the fans -- have for the various incarnations of Roddenberry's optimistic look at the future.
A must read!!! - By: , 07 May 2002 This is the best information source for star trek fans that I have ever read. It covers all aspects of the film, ships, characters & much much more. I would rate this 10 stars if I could but obviously not!
