Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The High Country by John Jackson Miller

It's totally okay. I burned half an hour this morning wrestling with a Wordpress problem that appeared because of nothing I did — and vanished because of no fix I tried. That could have been a page of a novel written!

 

Tonight I recorded an hour for the Route 51 show on Wisconsin Public Radio where I was interviewed alongside Robert Petkoff and January Lavoy, performers of my Star Trek audiobooks. That episode will air Dec. 30 and I will post the link to the audio when it is online. A great talk about the form, and also touching on THE HIGH COUNTRY.

 

I dug The Enterprise War to bits and I’m counting the days ’til this ‘un.

 

It's my birthday, and my gift is to you: news! When I heard last April that my Strange New Worlds novel was delayed til this February due to supply chain issues, it was a bad day. Then I realized we could use the time to add something fun. And we did. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The High Country, releasing Feb. 21 from Gallery Books, has pages with maps!

The novel takes place on a single VERY strange new world, where Pike and crew are cut off from technology; they rely on maps generated by the locals. And now you'll see them, too! I'd already drawn up my own maps of High Country's action; from there, my pal, game designer James Mishler helped me winnow them down into what we used. We included maps in three different styles, reflective of how the locals see their world; and a tryptych follows the action.

The folks at Gallery and Paramount helped make the maps happen for the book — and and after Trek narrators Robert Petkoff (who narrates the audiobook) and January LaVoy suggested to me it was possible to include the maps as a supplemental PDF with audiobook purchases, S&S is making that happen, too. Everyone can follow along!

I don't know if it's the first Trek novel to have maps — I'm just glad we've got 'em. This strange new world is real to me, and I want it to be to everyone. Best birthday gift I can get is a lot of preorders (I have a page with links here) — let's get this book to open big!

 

It's my birthday, and my gift is to you: news! When I heard last April that my Strange New Worlds novel was delayed til this February due to supply chain issues, it was a bad day. (Believe me. I wandered the streets, lamenting!) Then I realized we could use the time to add something fun. And we did. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The High Country, releasing Feb. 21 from Gallery Books, has pages with maps!

The novel takes place on a single very strange new world, where Pike and crew are cut off from technology; they rely on maps generated by the locals. And now you'll see them, too! I'd already drawn up my own maps of HIGH COUNTRY's action; from there, my pal, game designer James Mishler helped me winnow them down into what we used. We included maps in three different styles, reflective of how the locals see their world; and a tryptych follows the action.

The folks at Gallery and Paramount helped make the maps happen for the book — and and after Trek narrators Robert Petkoff (who narrates the audiobook) and January LaVoy suggested to me it was possible to include the maps as a supplemental PDF with audiobook purchases, S&S is making that happen, too. Everyone can follow along!

I don't know if it's the first Trek novel to have maps — I'm just glad we've got 'em. This strange new world is real to me, and I want it to be to everyone. Best birthday gift I can get is a lot of preorders (I have a page with links here) — let's get this book to open big!

 

That's great! I'm getting the audiobook (and will add a text version later), so I'm really happy to get to enjoy this treat as well.

I was waiting to put my order in, but I will wait no more. Today's the day- happy birthday!

 

Oh wow. The last novel I read was "The Cartographers" by Peng Shepherd, I love a good map based story.

Normally I buy kindle versions (although the above was a hardback), as it means I always have them, and they're much easier to read in a spare 20 minutes rather than doomscrolling, but for a real printed map it might be worth going for the hardback.

(Come to think of it I think last dead-wood trek book I read could well have been The Enterprise War)

 

As far as I know, the maps will also be in their proper places in the digital versions — depends on how they save the files. But I would personally find the paper versions more fun to flip back to.

Don’t know whether anyone will do it again, as this was a special case and my notion — but I always like adding value if it can be done. The LOST TRIBE OF THE SITH book I did for Star Wars had maps, and I think it’s part of why it still sells.

 

And I really do thank everyone for the preorders. The one benefit of the February launch is there’s not much competition, so we can make a bigger splash. The first Picard novel came out in February as well and made the Publisher Weekly chart.

 

Sounds cool. DS9's A Stitch in Time had maps of Cardassia's capital city, but I don't know if an earlier novel had. On the subject of DS9, do you have any plans to write a DS9 novel Mr Miller?

 

One of Diane Carey's "Piper" novels had an appendix with pictures and specs on the ships, but I don't know of any maps (and I'd forgotten about the maps in A Stitch in Time).

 

Thanks, that's why I was hedging — I never saw a copy of A Stitch in Time. I couldn't imagine there had never been any maps before.

After I did the puzzle symbols in Rogue Elements, I realized that if they could include those, we might be able to go bigger. To be a bit more specific, the maps just appear on pages in the book, so it's not a fold-out kind of thing. The good news then is they'll never get separated!

I've never been asked about a DS9 novel, and during the anniversary I thought some about why Worf and Ezri are the only characters I've written: to a great degree, it shows how satisfied I was with the DS9 ending, and how everyone's stories wrapped up. I get scared to break things in those circumstances. For the same reason, I never did anything for Star Wars in the post-Jedi frame (apart from Canto Bight, which uses no characters from the trilogy) -- I just didn't think I had anything to add. Not so for Ezri, in particular, whose story had only started — so she's in Takedown and the Prey trilogy.

I'd never say never, though, and come to think of it, there was early on a significant place for O'Brien in the earliest plotline for Prey, before we started thinning it out. At the start of a 300,000-word story, you never quite know how it will evolve.

 

I appreciate the redirect, and you landed exactly on the reason — I don't look at ongoing threads expecting to find announcements, and I expect that's a common dynamic. I looked first to see if I could change the thread title to give it a "1/12/23 Update" prefix — I'm able to do that on some other services, but couldn't find it here.

I guess I could have tried to stealth-market it — start a thread about maps in novels, with the news in the first post — but I figured that would get a bit transparent, especially after the second or third attempt!

The problem these days — and this is the authors' problem, not yours — is we're in a bookselling world where the whole game is preorders. Barnes & Noble's new ownership has cut way back on paid display spaces and guaranteed minimum orders; instead, what gets to appear face-front, on the endcaps, and on tables is based on locked-in preorders, plus the interests of the staffs. By the time a book comes out, it's too late for marketing to have much effect. So we need fans who intend to buy announced books to send that message, if they're in a position to.

This explains why on the other services you've probably lately seen me and my fellow authors banging the drum more often, making news — and Twitter and Facebook threads — of whatever we can come up with before books are released. (David's great at it — much better with Photoshop than I am!) A lot of the things I used to do the week of release I'm pushing earlier and earlier. We're 40 days out from this one — ten years ago I would have waited until the Friday before!

Again, not your problem — and I understand the reason for the rules. No offense taken, I swear! I would just advise everyone that if you're seeing authors posting a lot in a thread about a book that's not out yet, it may be worth checking for updates. I can't guarantee we'll be announcing maps or variant covers or special editions, but we'll sure be trying to make those things happen!

 

Long since pre-ordered it.

 

Thanks -- it is how it is. Actually, Barnes & Noble is in much better shape under the new management, and tying display spaces to preorders and manager choices is better than the previous supermarket-style method, where whoever pays the most money gets their stuff displayed in the high-traffic areas. At least this way, the readers can make a difference!

 

Headed to my local bookstore to pre-order!

 

Thanks! And literally today, having written about this, there's another report of a Trek-centric fiction endcap at Barnes & Noble. I've asked a B&N manager about a previous one that had appeared and was told they weren't coming from corporate as part of any national or paid promotional scheme, but were coming from the managers themselves, using their own generated signage.

Don't know how much of that is correct, but certainly any sightings of the novels outside just the regular spine-out shelves is worth sharing.