The Star Trek Encyclopedia
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Image:Starterkenc.jpgThe Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future is an encyclopedia of all things related to Star Trek. The Encyclopedia was written by Michael and Denise Okuda, with Debbie Mirek, and illustrated by Doug Drexler. Three print editions have been published, in both hardcover and paperback: the first edition (ISBN 0671886843) was published in 1994; the second (ISBN 0-671-53607-9), in 1997. The most recent edition (ISBN 0671536095), published in 1999, includes material through the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the fifth season of Star Trek: Voyager, as well as the movie Star Trek: Insurrection. All editions were published by Pocket Books; Paramount Pictures holds the copyrights.
The Encyclopedia features very detailed information about characters, planets, technologies, ships, and "inside gags", as well as brief synopses of episodes and movies. It is replete with illustrations, many of them in color (in later editions), from examples of different writing systems to the evolution of uniforms and shuttlecraft.
As a rule, the Encyclopedia covers only canon, which, in Star Trek, includes the television shows and the movies. Although Star Trek also includes an animated series and an immense amount of literary fiction, these do not have canon status and are, thus, not covered by the Encyclopedia. This is in contrast to other 'semi-canon' reference works, such as the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, which makes detailed speculations about Star Trek technology, written from a 24th-century perspective, and the Star Trek Chronology, which makes many interpolations about specific dates in Star Trek history that, although reasonable, are not generally established within canon.
The print version was later complemented by a similar electronic version, the Star Trek Omnipedia.
The first edition, at least, was designed with desktop publishing software, as was the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual; and that edition's inconsistencies in typography are common among products of word-processing software, especially those of the early and mid 1990s. The inconsistency lies mainly in the matter of whether the punctuation at the ends of bold-faced and/or italicized passages is in a matching face or not.
Given the recent decline of Star Trek, as highlighted by the performance of Star Trek: Nemesis and cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise, Pocket Books has no plans to issue a new edition of the Encyclopedia.