‘Star Trek FAQ 2.0’ by Mark Clark is a comprehensive reference to Star Trek from the first Star Trek movie through Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This book, like the first one, delves deep into the lore of the series, providing in-depth information on characters, technology, alien races, and plot points. All of the movies through J.J. Abrams are discussed and ST:TNG is examined season by season and episode by episode. Along the way, I learned why all the even-numbered original movies were better.

As with the first, I enjoyed this book also. It’s a wealth of information and trivia. This book does not cover spinoff series like Deep Space Nine and Voyager except in passing, but there is still a lot of great reading here.

I found this an interesting read. I didn’t read it continuously but dipped in and out over several weeks – I see it as that sort of coffee table book. Only I 1) don’t have a coffee table and 2) have an ecopy. But if not for those two things that’s where I could see leaving this. I’d like to read the bit about each film before watching them again for example.

It’s not a true FAQ, that title is some what misleading. It contains a chapter for each movie and one for each series of TNG. In addition there are others on guest stars, awards, the actors and other key areas. It also starts with an introduction from Peter David which I found particularly exciting because he is my favourite Star Trek author. The behind the scenes wrangling and almost at times fighting surprised me but I’m not sure why. The other thing that really came across was that Gene Roddenberry may well have been a bit of a nasty piece of work. I’d always had this idea of him as a really brilliant, nice person but not anymore.

I’m glad I read this. I felt like I learnt a lot about a fandom that’s been a huge part of my life. But I think there are probably better books about Star Trek out there. The formatting isn’t great in several places (although I’d hope that would be corrected in the finished version) and I’ve heard there are some factual errors. I spotted at least one which took me 30 seconds on google to find a Wikipedia article which confirmed the error. That’s poor in my opinion and coloured my enjoyment of the rest of the book.