Star Trek: The Lost Era Star Trek: The Lost Era Star Trek: The Lost Era is a series of novels that take place during the time period between the 23rd century events of the film "Star Trek Generations" and the first season of the television series "", set in 2364. Editor Marco Palmieri selected the authors for the series, and worked with some of them to develop ideas. "The Lost Era" was designed to be similar to the "" miniseries of novels produced by Pocket Books two years earlier. The idea was to fill in a period of unknown "Star Trek" timeline between Captain James
Star Trek: The Original Series show. "Star Trek"s first-season ratings would in earlier years likely have caused NBC to cancel the show. The network had pioneered research into viewers' demographic profiles in the early 1960s, however, and, by 1967, it and other networks increasingly considered such data when making decisions; for example, CBS temporarily cancelled "Gunsmoke" that year because it had too many older and too few younger viewers. Although Roddenberry later claimed that NBC was unaware of "Star Trek"s favorable demographics, awareness of "Star Trek"s "quality" audience is what likely caused the network to retain the show after the first and second seasons. NBC