^For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of time travel stories either. Which is why I tried to do a different angle on the subject and avoid the cliches.
Official Description and Cover up for DTI: Watching the Clock
- Thread starter JD
- Start date
ST-One
Vice Admiral
The description of this book screams of continuity-porn and and a fair bit of retconning (which your Ex Machina, Christopher, relied on also), and that's what I'm not really interested in.
^That's fair. To be sure, in a lot of ways this is my most continuity-heavy book ever. But in other ways, it's my most original Trek novel ever, since the protagonists are either barely-developed one-shot guest characters or entirely original characters. And the Temporal Cold War stuff is just one of multiple "cases" that the DTI investigates in the course of this novel.
ST-One
Vice Admiral
You are not selling your book very well to this fan
But I liked your dialogues in Ex Machina (which was quite good overall, even though you made Uhura look like a complete idiot with her comment about play-acting the 'damsel in distress'), so I think may give this one a shot - if you built your dialogues for Dulmur and Lucsley on their rather dry conversations with Sisko and each other in 'Trials and Tribble-ations'.
Is there a possibility of this becoming a series or is only going to be a one time thing?
Huh? Is that worse than her actually being as cowardly as she seemed to be in TOS, saying "Captain, I'm frightened" all the time?
That was definitely my launching point, along with Bill Leisner's "Gods, Fate, and Fractals" in Strange New Worlds II (which is a fun Dragnet pastiche).
As usual, that depends on how well this one sells. When I wrote it, I intended it to be my only book on the subject. But inevitably, after having lived in the DTI's world and with its characters for a while, I've come up with some thoughts on where I could go next and wouldn't mind revisiting these guys.
I am Personally really looking forward to this one, As had been said b4 i am not a huge fan of time travel stories however i need something to take me away from the rebuild of the federation and the tyhpon pact for a few days b4 i get into the the last 2 typhon pack novels and then the 3rd Voyager installment. I have also enjoyed Christophers last 4 books so i would proberly buy it just cus its got his name under the title lol.
So, out of curiosity, is this kind of an anthology type book with several short stories of the DTI?
ST-One
Vice Admiral
I think it's made worse by her admitting that she did this deliberately.
It also casts a bad light on Kirk, or on her opinion of him.
Now that can't be right, can it?
Not exactly, but there is some element of that. My basic intent was to do a sort of a procedural tale with several parallel plotlines as various characters dealt with various cases showing the full range of the DTI's responsibilities. But it ended up with a more elaborate story structure than that.
But that's not the same thing as saying it makes her look like a complete idiot. That's what puzzles me. Saying it makes her look deceptive or devious, I could understand. But idiocy is just the opposite, isn't it? A complete idiot would be incapable of thinking deviously.
In this line of work, dealing with phenomena that can shatter your very notions of reality and threaten your sanity if you think about them too closely, too much imagination can be a liability.
See, I didn't want to make Lucsly and Dulmur over into traditional Star Trek action heroes. I wanted to embrace their onscreen portrayal as drab, by-the-book bureaucrats -- and to make it a virtue.
Kinda like how the CSI shows sometimes have different groups of characters working on separate cases?
^Well, yeah, or similar procedural shows with large casts of characters involved in various subplots.
Update: It turns out that what I thought was the tentative cover is the final cover after all. It was decided that the more elaborate cover design I’d seen sketches of, which would’ve featured the faces of the main characters as well as the clock image, wasn’t working out aesthetically, and most of the characters wouldn’t have been recognizable to book buyers anyway. So they decided to go for something more abstract. The “cast photo” approach was basically my suggestion, since I thought it would help to give the readers a visual reference for these mostly new characters, but I guess it would’ve been rather cluttered, and this purer image is probably a lot more striking. Cliff Nielsen is the artist.
As for the error in the blurb (implying that DTI is part of Starfleet), I’m told that will be fixed on the site, and if possible on the final cover.
As for the error in the blurb (implying that DTI is part of Starfleet), I’m told that will be fixed on the site, and if possible on the final cover.
Glad to see that he's still getting Trek work other than Titan, after the DS9R stopped commissioning new art from him.
I doubt it. I've never known a case where an unreleased cover was released after the fact. And I don't know if that cover concept went much beyond the preliminary sketch stage. After all, it never showed up as a placeholder cover online.
Nice cover. I'm actually glad it's not a "floating heads" one.
I love time travel stories too.
