The Official Star Trek Fact Files (1997-2002)

The Official Star Trek Fact Files (1997-2002)

Authors: Various | Illustrators: Various | Page Count: 8512 (28 pp x 304 issues)

(Alternatively, 7904 not counting the cover + table of contents of each individual issue.)

Partworks - they keep making them, so there must be an acceptable profit margin in it for publishers, even though a huge percentage of folks will get pissed off with the duration and expense and give up buying the damned things before the final issue rolls off the presses.

The Official STFF ran longer than most, over five years, and anyone buying the bi-monthly issues was lucky if their copy wasn't dog-eared and coming apart at the seams, which were designed to come apart (they were perforated), but not, I think, before they even left the fuggin' store!

Information on what the Files contain is better documented on the dedicated Star Trek wikis (Memory Alpha, for example), so if you want a detailed rundown, I recommend visiting those.

What's below is just one person's thoughts on the publication. I didn't have the full collection, I stopped buying the issues when the store that I got them from failed to fulfil the request, but I'd a hell of a lot. I donated the entirety of what I had to a children's charity some years back, when moving into a smaller property, but I got years of enjoyment from them and am pleased that they also aided a good cause - and this post.

Issue 01 cost £1.99 in UK money. It's a pleasant surprise to learn that issue 304, the final one, also cost £1.99. A glossy publication with no price rise in over five years is pretty unusual. Of course, if you do the maths, the entire thing cost: £1.99 x 304 = £604.96. That doesn't include the cost of binders, which were £9.99 each, if I remember correctly; a quick calculation shows that around 19 binders would be needed to hold all pages. If considered as one volume in its entirety, is that a fair price for a packed 7904 page reference book? Opinions will differ.

The design is uniform, as you'd expect, and recognisably Trek, reminiscent of how things would display if you were looking at them on a Federation command console in the 24th Century, but the sheer volume of information given means it's often cluttered and ugly to look at, with various coloured gradient fills on text boxes that looked cheap and tacky even back then.

Images used weren't always high quality, specifically if they were captured from an actual episode. Although, the publication was produced years before HD video and costly OCN rescans were commonplace in home media, so maybe they used the best materials they had access to.

What's unusual about the work is that it's presented from an 'in-universe' perspective, not a standard real world POV. That means that everything included — besides impossible things like episode titles, for example, which aren't going to work in that regard — should be canonical. Except it isn't, because when the answer to something wasn't found in the television media, the creators pulled explanations from elsewhere. And yet, despite that discrepancy, references to The Animated Series are excluded completely because it wasn't regarded as canon at the time.

While it's outdated now and contained some divisive apocryphal content, if viewed as a single commercial publication, then it's surely the biggest collection of Trek facts on paper, so sincere credit to all the folks who compiled it. It's an admirable achievement. As well as info on Star Trek: TOS, Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: DS9, Star Trek: VOY, and the first nine feature films, they even included files for Star Trek: Enterprise, which wouldn't have been part of the original plan, seeing as how it only came to the screen in 2001, a year before the partwork ended. The most recent TV series to have aired when the Fact Files launched would have been VOY.

To end, a list of the sections and what they contain:

Section 1 - The Guide to the Star Trek Galaxy: Files 1–18: includes timelines, star systems, space phenomena, races and affiliations, etc.
Section 2 - Federation Starfleet: Files 19–32: vessels + starbases, etc.
Section 3 - Non-Federation Starships: Files 33–42: the Klingon, Cardassian, Romulan, and Borg Fleets; etc. Includes arrays and probes, and alternate universe vessels.
Section 4 - Personnel Files: Files 43–58: character information.
Section 5 - Equipment and Technology: Files 59–66: transporters, tricorders, phasers, etc.
Section 6 - Starship Log: Files 67–80: is a very large episode guide.
Section 7 - A-Z Access Point: Files 81–105: is an index + glossary of terms.

Note: There's some odd use of capitalisation in the section titles that I've not reproduced, but what's listed above (in bold text) is the wording of each section as it's written.