What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write it?

Hi all,

Ever since discussing artistry in ficton with Christopher the other week, I have been wondering about what Treklit would look like if written by authors who had never written it before, and indeed would be unlikely to do so.

I ask, in part, because many of the Trek authors who have written over the past decade and done wonders stylistically and with genre tropes are people who perhaps would not have been imagined writing it in the 1990s (people such as David Mack, Una McCormack, etc).

So I have to ask what writers you would like in a hypothetical world to write Trek lit? And why? If possible can you link to extracts of their works, or link to websites on them?

Secretly I have been imagining a world where Gene Wolfe, Zadie Smith, Sebastian Faulks, Alastair Reynolds & Margaret Apwood had written Trek fiction: authors I cannot imagine ever doing so, and each arguably unique and brilliant 'voices', varyingly profound and powerful, who deconstruct various aspects of society and gender in excellent manners.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Jack McDevitt and Neal Asher, no question.

I'd also love to see the latter do Dr Who.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Tom Clancy

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Stephen R. Donaldson.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Kim Stanley Robinson and Kevin J. Anderson.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

It strikes me as funny that you'd say no one would have imagined me writing for Star Trek in the 1990s.

I started writing and submitting spec scripts to Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1988, while I was in film school at NYU, and even as I collected rejection slips, I continued sending in more scripts — something I continued to do after Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered.

Also, while banging my head against the brick wall of spec-script submission, in 1993 I started exploring the possibility of writing a Star Trek novel for Pocket Books. My college pal Glenn had at that time recently met John Ordover, who was looking to pick up freelance writing work for magazines, and I was a magazine editor. Chocolate had met peanut butter, as Glenn said.

After Glenn introduced us, I started working on my first Star Trek novel pitch. Then John gave me the writers' guidelines. I saw that my pitch had violated all of them in one proposal, so I burned my sample chapters and outline to make sure they'd never be found and embarrass me. In the months that followed, that act of professional courtesy cemented my friendship with John, and we started writing together. In 1995, we made our first sales, to Star Trek Voyager and DS9. During the years that followed, as we wrote comic-book scripts and spec screenplays together, John encouraged me repeatedly to take another shot at writing a novel, but I insisted I was a screenwriter.

All through the '90s I was a regular in the Pocket offices, working for the editors by reading slush manuscripts and writing reference materials, which is how I finally got the invitation in 2000 to write my first Star Trek book, The Starfleet Survival Guide, for Margaret Clark and Jessica McGivney.

So the idea that no one in the 1990s could imagine me writing Star Trek books makes me laugh — because more than one of the line's editors obviously did, and more than twenty years after I started myself down this long road, here I am.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Kim Stanley Robinson
Alistair Reynolds
Dan Simmons

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Would love to see Alan Dean Foster do original Trek novels.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Hey David, so sorry to say the wrong thing (though glad to make you laugh)! Lol, I didn't realise you had such a close relationship to the franchise in the 90s other than your tv scripts. Thanks for sharing.

But I guess I meant more the content and formal qualities of what you write. if that makes sense You - along with many other writers in the past ten years - have written Trek Lit in a manner very different from the majority of 90s lit (as is of course expected - but in a good manner).

I was just thinking off the top of my head in naming you both, sorry to everyone else I didn't shout out to!. Why I did was that both of you, as well as many other authors, write in a mainly superior manner - and I would argue a more ambitious and often artistic manner - than the writing that I grew up reading in the 90s in Trek lit. *

I guess I was thinking of the comparison of her wonderful Pasternak-esque style and entirely non-traditional The Never-Ending Sacrifice, and to a lesser extent Hollow Men ** & her DS9R book, and your own various texts (from the duology of I]A Time to Kill/Heal[/I] ***, which were the first Trek books I read and enjoyed as an adult, to Vanguard, to Destiny to Zero Sum Game to your mirror texts), all of which are constant in their attempts to push the envelope of what Trek fiction can represent, what generic styles can be incorporated and how formally or stylistically ambitious Trek lit could be.

* I won't say that about the 80s, however, since that was a much wilder time with far less 'canon', of course, nor am I claiming absolutely that Trek Lit of the 90s was limited in ambition.

** I know you are not 'in charge' of S31 characters, but in HM McCormack used two agents who seemed to be allusions to the 1985 BBC drama Edge of Darkness. Would you ever use another authors' created characters like them, or would you leave them for that author?

** I find it sad that these two seem often forgotten, since they are such excellent examples of ambitious plotting and thematic unity. Though ostensibly seperate books, you depict a wonderful claustraphobia that doesn't relent with the end of book one, though you transition into a very different narrative. Starting with Riker's dream, continuing throughout Kill's ticking clock deadline, depicted in the use of the cannons' many enclosed spaces and the dungeons and rooms of politicking & spying on Kronos & Earth. Then the many dismal no-hope situations once the 'occupation' had begun, the claustraphobic nature of fickle fortune in the continual terrorist attacks, Riker's imprisonment, etc. What wonderful novels! Were you actually making a novel about Iraq too?

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

He wrote one, Refugees, set in the nuTrek timeline. It was later placed "on hold" by Pocket Books along with three other nuTrek novels.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Clive Cussler.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Till when?

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Nobody knows, but most are guessing "indefinitely". While I don't think it has ever been officially confirmed, the general assumption is that Bad Robot (the production company behind the 2009 film and the upcoming one) asked Pocket Books not to release them to avoid colliding with Bad Robot's storytelling activities in the new timeline (which aside from the films also includes the comic projects that the film writing team supervises themselves).

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Although he's sadly no longer with us, I loved Michael Crichton, and I'd think he could write very interesting Trek.

Or perhaps Terry Pratchet.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

I think Chrichton would probably actually be a terrible Trek author with his partly anti-technology stance. There half a chapter in The Lost World about how the internet is a terrible idea, with a character painting an analogy along the lines of "two people in a room can be effective, 20 in a room are a confused mess, now we're trying to connect everyone and it will end in disaster". I later read an interview where he was asked whether this was his personal opinion, and he confirmed it to be. And then you have his oddly agenda-driven anti-global-warming State of Fear that was full of crappy science, etc.

I realize you think Chrichton would be a good choice because he's a competent author of techno-thrillers, and he is (I greatly enjoyed Airframe at the time). But I think his world view and that of Star Trek clash considerably. Chrichton has a very pessimistic outlook on technology, Star Trek doesn't.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Maybe they will come out after the new movie.

I would like James Luceno to do a continuity-heavy book, Timothy Zahn to write a Hazard Squad series, Matthew Stover should do a book about a Hirogen, Klingon fighting eachother in the Delta Quadrant, Dan Wallace Star Trek Essential Atlas, Michael Stackpole should do an USS Kelvin series with the Robau.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Yevetha - a fan of militaristic sci-fi?

So far we have:

• Kevin J. Anderson (tie-in SF author mainly - Dune, SW)
• Neal Asher (space opera/cyberpunk orig SF author)
• Margaret Atwood (poet & literary author, inc. SF)
• Tom Clancy (techno-adventure writer)
• Michael Crichton
• Clive Cussler (adventure writer)
• Stephen R. Donaldson (Thomas Covenant, fantasy/SF)
• Sebastian Faulks (Birdsong, etc - literary historical & contemporary-set stories; one Bond tie-in novel)
• Alan Dean Foster (SF orig & tie-in writer)
• Kazuo Ishiguro (contemporary literary author, concerned with memory, some SF)
• James Luceno (Star Wars writer)
• Jack McDevitt (orig SF writer)
• Terry Pratchett (Discworld, Nation - fantasy & satire)
• Alastair Reynolds (Hard SF, space opera, PhD)
• Kim Stanley Robinson ('literary SF')
• Dan Simmons (hard SF, Hyperion)
• Zadie Smith (literary, postcolonial)
• Michael Stackpole
• Matthew Stover
• Dan Wallace
• Gene Wolfe

Lots of interesting points from this. (i) many of these writers are SF writers, many particularly space opera writers? (ii) A trend amongst this is that there are also a number of tie-in authors, principally of Star Wars.

> Is this because such books are trekbbs users' dominant reading interests, or rather because we compare Trek lit to other licensed and original space opera (and the ambitions contained especially in the latter)?

> So why so few other-genre writers?

(iii) There are so far only two female authors - Smith and Atwood, both my own suggestions. These aren't just random, Atwood wrote speculative fiction for which she won the Arthur C Clarke prize, Smith is a magnificent post-colonial aesthetic writer, whose abilities of deconstruction and human comedy are wonderful.

> Why no other women?

(iv) A dominantly white, all-English language reading list too.

Finally, if you can say why you would like someone to write, that would be great! [though do we have to avoid story ideas, like Yevetha?]

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

Asher- writes exciting accessible SF action adventure
McDevitt- writes fascinating space epics that really capture interstellar travel and yet get things believable, and exciting.

Didn't list any women because all the ones I'd love to see do a Trek, already have done!

As for non-English language, I wouldn't say no to something from Koji Suzuki or Natsuo Korino (actually, she's a woman, so negates the above paragraph!) or Victor Pelevin

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

I've said in a number of interviews over the years that A Time to Kill and A Time to Heal were written as a commentary on the 2003 U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq — though the symbolism and parallels between reality and fiction are nowhere near so black-and-white as many readers assumed, and many critics have also confused the depiction of certain events with the endorsement of such events, which is patently untrue.

 

Re: What authors (who do not write Trek lit) would you like to write i

I'm in the midst of reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré (after seeing the masterful film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, based upon his novel, twice), and I find myself thinking it would be wonderful to see le Carré tackle Star Trek.

Of course, in a way, we've already got that -- the wonderful Zero Sum Game by David Mack reminds me, in retrospect, of a le Carré novel, as does Hollow Men by Una McCormack.

I don't think they've ever written fiction, but I think it might be interesting to see the worlds of Star Trek through the eyes of Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, and the late Howard Zinn.