Hey everyone. In the next few weeks I will be interviewing Kirsten Beyer for Priority One, a podcast on Trek Radio! A special interview dedicated to her wonderful books and I want you (the fans and readers) to come up with the questions! Ever wanted to ask something about the Voyager book series? About what it's like to write for Star Trek? Really anything you can think of! I will then select a few of the best suggestions and put them to her on air! Priority One is a fan driven podcast and blogging site. We all work volunteer and make no money from the show. We're just Trek fans who are happy to be involved any way we can be. If you want to be involved bang up those questions for the lovely Miss Beyer! Thanks guys Dec xdx http://priorityonepodcast.com/wordpress/
Miss Beyer, as a fan of your Voyager relaunch books, I must ask: How challenging did you feel the task of filling the gap from "Spirit Walk" to "Destiny" in the very amazing "Full Circle"?
If you were to go back in the Voyager storyline instead of forward, what storyline or gap would you choose to elaborate on?
At what point was it decided to resurrect Admiral Janeway? Did the online petitions have any impact in the decision at all?
Why did you half destroy Quirinal and have it rebuilt in Children of the Storm only to destroy her and three other starships in The Eternal Tide?
Is the whole story arc you begun with full circle well defined to the end or do you write it on the spot, improvising with each added book ?
Was the ultimate fate of Captain Eden planned out in advance, or did the story demands of Eternal Tide change things?
If she ever wrote a Voyager story that was set completely between Caretaker and Endgame, which era would she set the story in? The Kes era or the Seven of Nine era?
I'd think she HAS to answer no to this one, even if it did have an impact. Otherwise, she loses control of things, it's shown that you can influence her process, and it becomes a series written by committee. Plus, she said in the afterward that she wanted to make it clear that she WASN'T influenced by it.... THIS is one I'm really interested in, and thought was one of the more disappointing parts of TET. Spent so much time developing the fleet, and that ship in particular, and then just wiped it out in the next book. Sure, the transporter trick will show that we saved all the named characters from the ships, for the most part, but still just felt like a waste after the previous book. If there were too many ships to wield easily, why did she write so many in to start from? If that wasn't the problem, why not only blow up 1 ship or so, to show there's danger there, rather than taking out half the fleet at once. Would love more digging into that situation.
Especially since we know it was not an author decision to kill Janeway in the first place. But I also agree, Kirsten Beyer has to answer no to the question.
Might be an interesting road to go down, though. Was the decision to bring her back Kristen's, or editorial? Assume Kristen had pretty complete control of the HOW in the story, but was the Bring Back Janeway directive given to her, or did she pitch the idea of doing it (and the how), by laying out where she wanted to take things from there. Puts an interesting light on the subject, knowing whether it was her idea and this is the way she'd prefer the storyline to go, or if it was handed down to her, and this is the spin she decided to put on the story given that direction.
Would be interesting to see who made the initial call, since I recall that Peter David mentioned shortly after Before Dishonor came out that the publisher had told him to put that little bit with the female Q and Janeway at the end so that if CBS or Paramount ever wanted too reuse the character in the future, CBS would just have to tell Simon & Schuster "Hey, we need you to bring back Janeway because Paramount's going to be using her in the upcoming movie." I wonder if JJ Abrams might have a scene with Janeway and a few others talking about what occurred to Prime Spock in the new Star Trek movie, and they wanted to make sure that Janeway was back.
Of course not. That doesn't make any sense for a variety of reasons, paramount among them (no pun intended) that the movies have always been free to just ignore what was happening in the novels. The novels are read by such a tiny fraction of the moviegoing audience -- 1 to 2 percent -- that it really wouldn't matter what the novels did. There's also the fact that the whole point of creating the alternate timeline in the first movie was so that they could tell stories in a new continuity that was unburdened by ties to the old one. Now that they've established that universe, their goal is to make it stand on its own, to move forward independently of what came before. These guys aren't going to keep the training wheels on and keep clinging to the old continuity. Naturally they're going to focus on their own creation, their own version of the universe. And of course there's the most conclusive disproof: The movie's been done filming for months, and a pretty full cast list is known even if many of the character names aren't. If any major Trek actors from past series had been cast in the film, we would've known about it long ago.
Wonder if it's to late to submit questions but: When writing The Eternal Tide, did you have to go back and read you're previous work or was all this planned outalongside the others?