Pre-FYM stories
- Thread starter lawman
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Haven't seen this thread until now. Just to supplement your modern day recollections, her are those from MIchael and yourself from our 2011 interview about the novel
:"A Choice of Catastrophes is “set in early 2268, so smack-dab in the middle of the original series”, as Michael discloses. “The main character is Doctor McCoy, and he has one entire thread almost to himself, whereas Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the landing party have to share theirs,” in which “they get enough danger and action to make up for it.”
Getting a bit more into the specifics of the book’s narrative, he adds that “while McCoy has to find a way to save the lives of a handful of people that have inexplicably fallen into a coma as well as the lives of everybody aboard the Enterprise when the ship is threatened by a destructive space phenomenon, Kirk et al. are exploring a mysterious planet that seems abandoned by the civilisation it was once inhabited by. What they discover is a terrible crime in progress, and they will need all their skills to put a stop to it and capture the perpetrators before they escape.
“Also, our cast includes Commander Giotto,” he laughs. “You can’t go wrong with Giotto.”
How did McCoy’s prominent role in the novel come about? “A Choice of Catastrophes was pitched as a story that was intended to be a ‘nuTrek’ story, but could work in the Prime timeline, too,” Steve explains. “This was obviously before we’d heard the nuTrek line was all being indefinitely postponed! The reason for the pitch that became A Choice of Catastrophes was that Karl Urban as Leonard McCoy was my favourite character in the new film, and I wanted to do a story that would explore him. It ended up being a Prime story in the end, but that was fine by me, as DeForest Kelley is even more awesome.”
“McCoy has almost half the entire novel to his own,” adds Michael, “which certainly classifies this as McCoy-centric. There aren’t enough such novels out there, but those that exist are usually a great pleasure to read. It is our — admittedly ambitious — goal to add another one to the list.”
“McCoy never really has any big stories of his own,” Steve laments, “but his little moments in any given episode always shine, and he has a backstory, largely unmentioned on screen, that has a lot of potential for drama. He fascinates me because he has a tendency to run away from his problems — he joins Starfleet to get away from his ex-wife, he quits Starfleet to give Kirk a lesson — but he obviously also has a real passion for both space medicine and space exploration. Plus, anyone who knows me in real life will understand my attraction to seemingly crabby characters who are actually quite affectionate!”
Thanks to the longevity of the line of original series Star Trek novels, which go back as far as the original standalone Bantam novels in the 1970s, there are a lot of different takes on the series out there. Were there any authors whose work influenced how Michael and Steve portrayed the characters, McCoy in particular, in A Choice of Catastrophes? “For McCoy’s backstory, Michael Jan Friedman’s Shadows on the Sun was probably the biggest influence, but I ignored a lot [of] it, too,” admits Steve. “David R. George’s McCoy: Provenance of Shadows and Carmen Carter’s Dreams of the Raven were also in the back of my mind, but I didn’t reread either. Outside of McCoy, I can’t think of any direct influences, though Dave Galanter’s Troublesome Minds and Dave Stern’s The Children of Kings were both recent stories whose standalone, adventuresome nature I wanted to emulate to some degree.” "
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