I can't wait to get this novel, Una McCormack's are always something I look forward to reading.Nice to see the mention of Ezri Dax and the Cardassians,
And you know what people would say: "This was a perfect opportunity to focus the Enterprise-E crew as well."
Isn't it a bit strange that no cover has been released for this yet, with just four months to go? I wonder if it will be closer to the "character" covers of the earlier Typhon Pact covers or go the Plagues of Night and Raise the Dawn route and have a CGI cover.
Hi Paper Moon! Yes, I do sometimes drop by, and it's lovely and very encouraging to see so much enthusiasm for the book. Hope you all enjoy it!
well Brinkmanship is now aviable for preorder on the nook color I am so looking forward to it. I LOVE your books.
Sounds very interesting. Tzenkethi, Cardassians, and Ferengi... that's quite a mixture of races there. I'm also a big fan of both the Enterprise-E and Aventine crews, so there doesn't appear to be a single element of this book that I'm not looking forward to reading about.
Hi Una, I think NES was a wonderful book, which I recommend to everyone who might be interested. I don't know if you would want to return to Rugal, whose wonderful, tragic Zhivago-esque tale seems mostly complete, but I was wondering if any exploration of the concepts and supporting characters from it, The Lotus Flower or Hollow Men are on your horizon, be it the exile Cardassian politicians you have introduced, the relief groups that added some reality and grist to the post-Dominion War canvas, the Maquis characters and the Cardassian genocides alluded to NES, or the S31 agents in Hollow Men (and can I ask, were they an allusion to Edge of Darkness's Craven and Jedburgh?). Merci beaucoup!
What? You being positive about a Star Trek book? Is it a full moon or something? Have the planets aligned?
Heh, I do actually like a lot of Trek stuff but there already so many people blowing smoke up the authors' asses I don't generally feel the need to join in.
Thank you, timothy! Jarvisimo, thank you for your kind words about TNES. If there's any character whose story I wish I'd had a chance to explore in more depth, it would be Penelya. I'd like to know what happened to her during the Dominion War. Jedburgh in Hollow Men is indeed an allusion to Edge of Darkness. Enderby is named after a character in Le Carré's Smiley's People. And Marlow is an allusion to Heart of Darkness. I must have had a reason for giving Chaplin that name, but I can't for the life of me remember why now (not for Charlie).
Thanks for answering; I have never read (though I own) Smiley's People, nor seen it. I have youtubed him, and am shocked to find that Enderby is an exact copy an excellent archaeologist I worked for! When you (and other authors) include allusive names, are you informed by the depiction or portrayal of such characters in your own writing? I thought your Jedburgh had certain similarities to Joe Don Baker, but was this deliberate or simply my interpretation of him? In contrast your Marlow is not at all like Conrad's Marlow, be it HoD or Lord Jim. In that case are the allusions simply placement of Hollow Men in the canon of British(/Polish) spy literature? Finally, Peneyla would be a lovely character to consider, partly as female Cardassians are rarely point-of-view characters (or even depicted concretely, especially outside of the many different women in TNES). But she was a wonderful conflation of idealogue and individualist, trapped by circumstance and belief, an opposite to Rugal? Whereas Rugal was always outside the system, and benefited from his family, she was caught within the system, and her development away from it remains (deliberately?) undepicted.
Yes, I think Jedburgh is something of an homage to Joe Don Baker. Enderby was simply a name that went well with Jedburgh. Smiley's People is amazing, btw, both book and TV adaptation; and so is Tinker, Tailor... Alec Guinness is astonishing. The allusions on the whole are nothing more than nods to influences. I find naming characters incredibly difficult, so it helps to set a theme and work from that. Marlow was simply another name-check. I thought of the character as a hollow-man-in-the-making: he's at the start of his trajectory while Roeder is what comes out at the other end. (Like Shepherd Book and the Operative in Firefly and Serenity.) Garak is at the other end too, but not by choice. And of course he's desperate to get back into the game. Marlow is Guy because of one of the epigraphs at the start of Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men": "A Penny for the Old Guy." (The other epigraph is "Mistah Kurtz - he dead!") Which makes the book about decaying empires, and the empty men that do dirty jobs to prop those empires up, and how those men are made and what happens to them. And I wanted to give London and the Thames a place in the Trek universe and that future. Greasy old London, it will never die! I used to work in the part of London between the Strand and the river where Roeder and Garak go on their night walk. I'd like to think that Penelya's narrative remains undepicted for such good narrative reasons! That's a wonderful reading of her. Mostly her story is undepicted because I didn't have space, and I needed the suspense element. The other female Cardassian characters that Rugal meets on Ithic are there partly to make Penelya's survival seem plausible. The uncomfortable trio-at-the-end-of-the-world dynamic was inspired by the late John Christopher's brilliant Empty World.
ZoeJhang, I hadn't heard of The Quiet Earth, but a New Zealand set post-apocalypse is surely worth reading!
Have you given any thought to pitching post Romulan War Enterprise if the chance came about ? I think it needs a new direction - would it interest you ?