As a Trek fan since TOS, I have read almost every book on the making of the Star Trek universe I could find. The Center Seat is a great read, sharing a ton of background info on the production and making of TOS through the new streamers. If you are a Trek fan or just a fan of learning how TV programs and films are made, this is a terrific read.

I loved this book. I’ve been a Trekkie my whole adult life and this book does justice to the franchise. The scope of content was amazing, spanning from ST:TOS through to ST:Enterprise and the movies from ST:TMP to ST:Nemesis. I loved reading the inside stories. I knew a lot of them before (what Trekkie doesn’t) but reading the interviews brought these stories closer to home. I watched the documentary and the book is a great addition to that information. Thank you to Netgalley and NacelleBooks for the digital review copy.

What we have here is a collection of interview clips, collected chronologically and nearly universally from the production crew. There are a few interviews with actors but really the lionshare is from either a producer or a writer. As such, this might be a differentiating piece from other Star Trek 'behind the scenes" treatments. The story is easy to follow and non-Trekkies will find it as easy to understand as Trekkies undoubtedly will. But this is also not an in depth analysis and the only insights provided are those from the people quoted, most years or decades after the events they are describing.

The focus here is on the series and the movies: it finishes with the end of the ill-fated Star Trek: Enterprise series. Because this is a lot of subject to cover, you can imagine that the infobits are going to be somewhat shallow and not gone into too much detail. But then, there are plenty of books with that information and here the focus is just on memories from various people involved with the franchise. The reboot movies from Abrams and the two new series of Discovery and Brave New Worlds are not covered. As such, this is really targeted at those who loved the original 'classic' era of Star Trek outputs, when the people working on those products had some involvement with Gene Roddenbery.

This advance reader copy was riddled with typos/editing issues. I expect those will be fixed for publication. Reviewed from an advance reader copy provided by the publisher.

A must read for all Trekkies. This book covers the entire Star Trek universe with information I was not aware of.
I voluntarily reviewed an advance reader copy of this book.