Self-indulgent post on the site's forthcoming tenth anniversary

I don't know the exact date, and I'm not even sure about the month, but the Complete Starfleet Library is damn near ten years old. The oldest backup CD ROM I can find right now is from March 2000, and the first version of the website logo there is dated December 14, 1999. Maybe I should go with that as the official date.

My first Trek web content was a page on the then almost completely forgotten Mack Reynolds novel, Mission to Horatius. In 1995, the Pocket reprint was still a few years in the future and it sometimes seemed, from usenet discussions about Trek books, that I was the only person online who remembered it. So I created a page. It's still online here, last updated in 1999.

In 1997, I decided to do a page on something else that wasn't really covered anywhere online: Gene Roddenberry's unpublished Star Trek novel, The God Thing. And if I was going to have two pages, why not more? And the Lost Books page was born. And Star Trek: The Forgotten Books. The few Trek book-related sites that existed pretty much covered only Pocket's books, and not even all of them; a number of early books had somehow faded from Pocket's institutional memory. The first version of the Forgotten Books page covered those Pocket books; basically, any Trek book from 1979 to 1987 or so that wasn't a mass market paperback novel was unlisted on the official Pocket site.

By 1999, the Forgotten Books page had expanded its purpose: "This site includes officially licensed Star Trek novels, adaptations, and nonfiction books from Bantam and Ballantine, early Pocket books not listed on their website, and dozens of unauthorized Trek books. As of October, 1999, there are over 250 books described here." But as I added more content, it seemed obvious that the site should cover everything, not just the stuff not covered elsewhere. And by December 1999, the madness had begun in earnest...

It's not like the site started ten years ago, was quickly developed and completed, and just gets the occasional book added to it now. Every year there's new developments. There have been a few feature articles (SF Media Tie-Ins: A Brief History; Stardate 7600, or what a Trek fan's website might have looked like if there'd been a web in 1976; From Star Trek to Star Wolf: David Gerrold's Worlds of Star Trek; and the Fanzine Gallery). This year I added the schedule page and improved the FASA page and I may yet finish the short story and essays/articles indexes. One of these days I'd like to have something on Star Fleet Battles. There's always something.