Myriad Universes 02_ Echoes and Refractions - Keith R. A. DeCandido [210]
BRAVE NEW WORLD
In the author’s note to my previous novel for Pocket Books, X-Men: The Return, I mentioned that I had been researching the project for the last twenty-five years. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I have been researching for this story even longer.
I don’t remember a time before Star Trek. I was born a little over a year after “The Turnabout Intruder” aired, and I started watching the reruns early enough that Trek has been for me an almost constant presence in my life for as long as I can recall. I watched all the reruns, the animated series, read all the Gold Key comics, played with the Mego action figures. When Pocket Books started the line of Star Trek novels in the early eighties, I was there in the front row. I’d read the Alan Dean Foster novelizations, and a few of the Bantam originals, but it wasn’t until I read those early Pocket novels that I realized not only what Star Trek could be, but what science fiction itself was capable of being. Books like Diane Duane’s The Wounded Sky, A. C. Crispin’s Yesterday’s Son, and John M. Ford’s The Final Reflection brought a level of sophistication to both the storytelling and to the speculative aspects that I hadn’t experienced in any novels before, Star Trek or otherwise, and which the televised Trek had only rarely approached. Those books were, in a very real sense, my introduction to real science fiction, and probably played a bigger role in my becoming the writer I am today than I even realize.
In the years that followed, as Trek returned to television, in so many ways finally realizing the promise of those Pocket novels in the best episodes of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise, I read more widely, both within the genre and without (along the way finding time to join several Star Trek fan clubs, to say nothing of being a card-carrying member of the Klingon Language Institute). Whenever possible, though, I checked back in with the Pocket Star Trek line, to see what was new, and to see if the high level of quality I’d found in those early years was still to be found. In the exemplary novels of writers like Peter David, Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Greg Cox, and Christopher L. Bennett, I’ve been happily far from disappointed.
As I’ve said, Trek has been a constant presence in my life for as long as I can recall, but for some two and a half decades the same has been true of the Pocket line of Star Trek novels. To have the opportunity to contribute to that line, in some small way, has been a longtime ambition of mine, and many thanks are due to Marco Palmieri for allowing me to fulfill that dream, and to Jennifer Heddle for introducing us in the first place. Thanks are also due to Memory Alpha, for proving an invaluable resource, and to Michael and Denise Okuda and Rick Sternbach, whose Trek reference books have been on my shelves for years, and which I’ve finally and at long last put to good use. And more than anyone, thanks are due to Gene Roddenberry and all those who came after him, too many writers and producers to name, for providing a world in which I’ve lived in my thoughts for so many years.
About the Authors
Twenty years ago, GEOFF TROWBRIDGE wrote an arrangement of Alexander Courage’s Star Trek theme for his high school orchestra, and conducted the piece at his senior concert. This represented a victorious confluence of