Even the most casual glance at television and streaming services will tell you that we’re in a golden age of science fiction. Shows such as Star Trek: Picard, The Mandalorian, and Doctor Who are so popular that they’ve expanded beyond the edges of our viewing screens and into the pages of fiction. Media tie-in fiction—fiction based on already established worlds from other media such as television, film, and games—is not new, of course. It’s been available for decades. It has survived a bad reputation that is undeserved. Yet media tie-in novels are not only surviving; they’re thriving by tapping into the latest visual science fiction worlds.
Fans are loving the new series Star Trek: Picard,which depicts one final mission for the former captain of the USS Enterprise. In the Picard prequel novel The Last Best Hope (Pocket Books/Star Trek, Feb. 11), Una McCormack introduces readers to the characters and events that led up to Picard’s last mission. Fans of another currently streaming show, Star Trek: Discovery, should check out Dead Endless by Dave Galanter (Pocket Books/Star Trek). Set about a decade before the events of the original 1966 Trek series, the crew of Discovery find themselves trapped in the subspace realm they are traveling through. To get out, they must solve the mystery of a being who looks human, but may be a similarly trapped alien trying to escape at Discovery’s expense.
Speaking of the original series, The Higher Frontier by Christopher L. Bennett (Pocket Books/Star Trek, March 10) reunites James T. Kirk and Miranda Jones, who fans will recognize as the blind telepath from the 1968 “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” episode. (Nerd alert: Jones was played by Diana Muldaur, who also played chief medical officer Katherine Pulaski during the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.) Jones and the telepathic Medusans are victims of faceless, armored hunters whose extradimensional tech makes them unstoppable killers. On the lighter side of Trek fandom is Star Trek: Kirk Fu Manual: A Guide to Starfleet’s Most Feared Martial Art by Dayton Ward and illustrated by Christian Cornia (Insight Editions, March 3), defined as an “unabashed celebration of Captain James T. Kirk’s singular fighting skills.” The peek into Kirk’s personal log is entertaining, but Cornia’s engaging illustrations really make Kirk’s signature moves, such as “The Box Lunch,” pop.
In a literary galaxy far away is where you’ll find Star Wars media tie-ins. Viewers who wanted more than what J.J. Abrams included in the last film should pick up The Rise of Skywalker novelization by Rae Carson (Del Rey, March 17). Working from the original script, Carson’s book includes additional content that never made it to the film, as well as expanded scenes of parts that did. Meanwhile, one of the biggest hits of Star Wars tie-ins, Timothy Zahn’s series about Grand Admiral Thrawn, has more books on the horizon. The original trilogy, which appeared between 1991 and 1993 and depicted a comeback for the Empire against the New Republic, was hugely popular among fans. A second trilogy was published between 2017 and 2019, a prequel series that showed Thrawn’s rise to power. Soon, Chaos Rising (Del Rey, Oct. 6) will be published, which starts a third trilogy called Thrawn Ascendancy, continuing the story of Thrawn’s origins.
If you can’t get enough of superheroes, media tie-ins have you covered there, too. Superman: Dawnbreaker by Matt de la Peña (Random House Books for Young Readers, March 3), part of the DC Icons Series of stand-alone young adult novels, is a coming-of-age story of Superman, the world’s first superhero. Clark Kent knows he’s not like his peers, and it’s continually more difficult to keep his secret. When he stumbles upon a mystery—people around Smallville have been disappearing—Clark is determined to get to the bottom of things and, with Lana Lang’s help, save the town.
Warhammer and Warhammer 40K are riveting tabletop fantasy and science fiction war-games played with miniatures. Similarly engrossing are the plethora of novels set in these richly imagined worlds. Black Library, the publishing arm of Games Workshop, is a seemingly unending machine stamping out thrilling SF/F stories for readers to devour. One new title on the fantasy side is Ghoulslayer by Darius Hinks (Black Library, March 31), which offers more exciting adventures of the axe-wielding dwarf slayer Gotrek Gurnisson, this time alongside Maleneth Witchblade, as they roam the Realm of Death. On the 40K science fiction side, there’s The Great Work by Guy Haley (Black Library, March 17), an adventure of Belisarius Cawl, member of the tech-worshipping Adeptus Mechanicus faction and one of the ruling lords of the Priesthood of Mars. In it, Cawl travels to an abandoned world which hides a long-buried secret and an ancient evil. Black Library will also satisfy your short fiction hunger with collections such as Sons of the Emperor (March 3), an anthology of Primarch short stories set during the Horus Heresy. For bargain hunters, there’s a new omnibus called Sagas of the Space Wolves (Black Library, March 31), a collection of three novels and numerous short stories depicting the nonstop adventures of the Space Marines chapter from the planet Fenris.
Media tie-ins are indeed thriving. Which ones are your favorites?
Science Fiction/Fantasy correspondent John DeNardo is the founding editor of SF Signal, a Hugo Award-winning blog. Follow him on Twitter @sfsignal.
