Editing Q (Star Trek) (section)

===Novels===
The similarity between Q and Trelane, the alien encountered in the ''Star Trek'' episode "[[The Squire of Gothos]]", inspired writer [[Peter David]] to establish in his 1994 novel ''[[Q-Squared]]'' that Trelane is a member of the Continuum, and that Q is his godfather (with it being all-but-explicitly stated that Q is actually Trelane's biological father, although the truth of this is kept an official secret).

Q's past is expanded on in the trilogy ''[[Star Trek: The Q Continuum|The Q Continuum]]'', which has Q and Picard travel through Q's past, witnessing Q's first encounter with the being that inspired his interest in testing other races. This being, known as 0, is similar to Q in power and abilities (although an injury of some sort prevents 0 travelling faster than light under his own power, even if he can still teleport short distances), but whereas Q has been shown to be more of a "merry prankster" throughout [[Star Trek canon|''Star Trek'' canon]], 0 is malevolent in his desires. Where Q always offers his opponents a sporting chance to win his challenges, 0 is ultimately shown to use his 'tests' as just an excuse to torture other races, to the extent that he basically changes the rules of his games so that the subjects will inevitably lose. The young Q ends up bringing him into the Milky Way galaxy through the [[Guardian of Forever]] while looking for something new to do with himself, and 0 assembles other seemingly omnipotent beings from the original ''Star Trek'', including Gorgan (the entity who turned children against their parents in "[[And the Children Shall Lead]]"), The One (the being who impersonated [[God]] in ''[[Star Trek V: The Final Frontier]]'') and (*) (the entity from "[[Day of the Dove]]", which thrived on violent conflict). However, although intrigued at 0's words about testing lesser races, Q loses his taste for 0's methods when 0's group provoke the Tkon Empire- an advanced civilisation millennia in the past- into decades of civil war and then blows up their sun just as they were about to exchange their dying old sun for a younger, fresher one, the Tkon having completed their Great Endeavour despite the war. 0's group was later defeated in a battle with the Q Continuum, though the [[dinosaurs]] were left extinct as a result when Q diverted an asteroid from one of the combatants so that it would strike Earth instead. With Q having abstained from most of the conflict, he was thus put in charge of watching over Earth and its inhabitants as a possible rehabilitation project, while (*) and Gorgan escaped and The One was trapped at the heart of the galaxy having been reduced to just his head. 0 in particular was banished to just outside our galaxy and the galactic barrier erected to keep him out; as Picard observes, with 0's crippled state preventing him travelling faster than light, 0 was essentially reduced to a shipwrecked survivor cut off from the nearest inhabitable land and millennia away from anywhere else. In the course of the trilogy, 0 is temporarily released from his banishment beyond the galaxy and sought revenge on Q, having manipulated a dying scientist to complete an artificial wormhole experiment intended to let starships breach the barrier that would allow 0 to regain access. However, 0 was defeated when Picard was able to convince one of 0's old enemies to join forces with Q so that their combined powers could stop his former mentor.

The novel ''The Buried Age'' {{mdash}} which explores Picard's life between the destruction of the ''Stargazer'' and his appointment to the position of captain of the ''Enterprise''-D {{mdash}} ends with a cameo appearance by Q as he meets an alien woman who recently met Picard before she chose to ascend to a higher plane of existence, her tales of Picard inspiring Q's own interest in humanity. This novel also establishes why Q chose his name, as he wanted something that would be simple for humans to remember, reasoning that, if he was ever asked why he was called 'Q', he could reply "Because U will always be behind me".

In the ''Voyager'' novel ''The Eternal Tide'', Q's son sacrifices himself to save the universe, inspired by the example of the resurrected Kathryn Janeway, prompting Q to declare himself her enemy. However, he swiftly gets over this hostility 'off-screen', and by the later novel ''A Pocket Full of Lies'', it is revealed that he acted to save the life of an alternate Janeway created during the events of "[[Shattered (Star Trek: Voyager)|Shattered]]".

In the ''Star Trek'' comic series based on the alternate timeline established in the 2009 film ''[[Star Trek (2009 film)|Star Trek]]'', Q visits that reality to take the crew of the ''Enterprise'' into their future. This allows them to interact with characters from the original timeline in the new history created by Spock's trip to the past. It also helps Q deal with a threat to the Continuum in the form of the Pah-Wraiths, which have all but destroyed the [[Bajoran Prophets]] in this timeline, the ''Enterprise'' crew retrieving a tablet containing the last Prophet and allowing it to merge with Q to defeat the Pah-Wraiths.