I mean, the easiest way would be to read the novels by publication date… I don’t think there’s a short cut around that.
That said, having full context is… not always worthwhile. Sometimes just knowing that something happened in the past is more enjoyable than reading it in practice.
Yeah, I assumed so too, but I don’t know which novels are particularly relevant to the continuity I am actually interested in. Continuity and canon are very important for me since I hold the Trek universe dear to my heart and it is “real” to me to an extent - so obvious continuity errors are jarring and dejecting. There’s hundreds of TOS novels for example that don’t have any bearing on the DS9 relaunch series.
Which ones do I read by publication date? Are the numbered Pocket Books TNG novels relevant or not? The TNG relaunch? Titan?
The numbered books tend to only have anything resembling continuity if the same author is involved. Peter David and John Vornholt come immediately to mind as ones to do that.
A Stitch in Time (By Garak’s actor) also gets referenced, but that book is an extra special case in the franchise.
Outside of the authors referencing their own work, sometimes New Frontier gets referenced: mostly in the form of Zak Kebron (The BEST character to ever happen to Trek) being Worf’s old academy roommate, or in the form of a major disaster hitting the entire quadrant and you get little cuts to various ships…
But every single The Fall novel is written by someone else. Characters like Blackmer or President Bacco are important in the books I read even though they originate in completely different novels. It seems to me like they are all vastly interconnected.
The fall was published after Nemesis, and the rules on novels were changed from being self contained to interconnected, and they abandoned the numbered novel system.
Instead of rare bursts of continuity, you get random bursts of discontinuity, as the authors have different opinions on how to portray shared OCs, or takes on an event or its significance.
I’m not sure that they would want to give that much of a spoiler for Coda, or may be like many of us and decide that we’d rather pretend it didn’t exist.
I think Mack, Swallow and Ward are super writers, and understand why they thought Coda was needed, but it’s brutal.