YMMV / Star Trek Novel 'Verse

• Complete Monster: See here.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Torvig Bu-kar-nguv of Star Trek: Titan.
  • President Nanietta Bacco, who went from a "the president resigned last book so we need a new president" character to a popular character carrying her own West Wing-style political novel, Star Trek: Articles of the Federation.
• Fridge Logic: One of the more infamous is the desire to make sense of the Tamarian language from Darmok. A very popular episode, but great amounts of Fridge Logic result, for the books to eventually deal with. For example, how do the children learn the legends? Answer: Probably not unlike how Chinese speakers learn the four word idioms. English too has plenty of strange expressions with obscure origins, but speakers understand the meaning from the context. In fact, the metaphorical meaning tends to become the ordinary meaning over time; for example, English "understand" no longer refers to standing under anything but has become a dead metaphor. Or perhaps the children are taught the stories via some visual medium, like movies or plays.
  • Fridge Logic #2: To build starships, one needs language more precise and less ambiguous than metaphors. But this too is all explained in the Star Trek Novel Verse. Tamarian mathematical and musical notations are very closely linked. Tamarian engineers and programmers sing equations, transferring instructions through music. Even in ordinary speech, numerical information can be conveyed through the pitch of a Tamarian’s vocal harmonics, though it can be hard for untrained Human ears to discern the nuances, just as it can be hard for an English speaker to learn to hear Chinese tones.
    "This answers the infamous question one linguist posed to illustrate the apparent limitations of Tamarian as a practical language: “Mirab-his-sails-unfurled factor what, sir?”
  • Fridge Logic #3: Why the universal translator even translates their language in the metaphorical way in the first place, when we know the UT works on some kind of technological telepathy. If when they say "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" they mean "alliance", then why doesn't the UT just translate it as "alliance"? Answer: It wouldn't work in real time. "Computer: Cross-reference: Darmok, Jhillard, Tanagra." Computer tells the story, they go "Ah!" This would resemble the footnotes commonly seen in anime subtitles (see case 3A under Translation Style Choices). But explaining Tamarian legends to a foreigner is a slow process. And besides, it loses the more subtle information about what kind of alliance is meant: in Tropese, it'd be close to Enemy Mine.
  • It even loops right back around to Fridge Brilliance: English "set" has over a hundred meanings distinguished only by context, and Mandarin Chinese can be just as bad with its homophones and four-word idioms. Likewise, there's so many possibilities for a particular Tamarian phrase, it requires an incredible intuition to determine the intended meaning, one normally honed through a lifetime of speaking such a condensed form of language. The universal translators are notorious (Depending on the Writer or perhaps the make and model) for having difficulties with some of the more 'quirky' or abstract parts of languages.
• Nightmare Fuel: The new and improved Borg.
  We are the Borg. You will be annihilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness have become irrelevant. Resistance is futile... but welcome.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Hadlo's death. "Oralius! Prophets! My love is for you both!"
  • Owen Paris' last message to Tom in Star Trek: Destiny.
  • Kieran Duffy's death.
  • Garak: "There is no home anymore! Can't you see? It's gone!!"
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Killing off Kathryn Janeway in Before Dishonor and wrecking much of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants in Star Trek: Destiny (along with even more losses) was pretty serious stuff in its own right, but the Trek novel universe has proceeded to veer quickly and deeply into Crapsack World territory with the destruction of Deep Space Nine and the Bajoran Wormhole in Typhon Pact and the gradual collapse of the Federation as of The Fall. The Conflict Ball and Apple of Discord now fuel the novel series to such an extent that the Alternate Continuity of Star Trek Online, for all of its own constant warfare, is actually Lighter and Softer by comparison.
  • As an alternative view, Janeway returned, the wormhole reopened, Bajor is a powerful and prosperous Federation member, a second more advanced Deep Space Nine replaced the lost one, the same devastating conflict in Destiny also liberated the Borg and freed billions from oppression, and in doing so removed the biggest blight to Trek 'verse civilization, the Federation has held together, rebuilt and reaffirmed itself in spite of everything, and inspired the Typhon Pact nations to start to overcome their histories of xenophobia and isolation on top of that, the Andorians are cured of their genetic problems, the Cardassians and Ferengi have the best governments they've ever had and are now official allies of the Federation, the Romulans have a moderate and diplomatically adept government, the Federation has slipstream drive and is penetrating all four quadrants, and Starfleet is starting to turn back to exploration again. Also, political instability and uncertainty isn't, others might say, anywhere near "Crapsack World" - especially when war has been consistently avoided (Borg aside, and they're more a force of nature than a nation).
    • In short, an Author's Saving Throw, for now. However, at the very least, that moderate and diplomatic new Romulan government is going to get torn to pieces as soon as the Novel Verse's continuity catches up to the Hobus supernova destroying Romulus and Remus.
    • Thankfully, that's not going to happen for a long time (in part because Pocket Books doesn't actually have the license to anything introduced in the Abrams movies, only the Prime universe, so they're decelerating strongly on the push to 2387).
    • ... and now the Trek novelverse has largely been overwritten in the televised canon of Star Trek: Picard, rendering the novels an Alternate Continuity.