CAVEAT: The events described in this
recollection occurred nearly 30 years ago. To paraphrase a mirror I
recall seeing, “Objects in reality may be more distant than they
appear.”
In the mid- to late-1980s, I heard from
my agent, Joe Elder, that Pocket Books was looking to sign up some
more Star Trek novels written for the classic series. Since I’d
previously written one for Bantam (Trek to Madworld), he
wondered whether I’d be interested in writing another one. Since I
was currently working with my wife, Mary Mason, on what became the
Jade Darcy books, I talked it over with her and we came up with an
outline we liked. The premise was roughly as follows:
The Federation in the classic series
was underlain squarely by Gene Roddenberry’s 1960-style liberalism.
Fellowship between all the different alien races, that sort of thing.
What would happen if the conservatives, building on a base of
hate-filled bigots, took over power in the council? Their
conservative agenda could wreak real havoc in those long-established
liberal principles. (I know this is purest fantasy and could never
happen in real life, but hey, it’s only a novel, right?) The
conservatives could play off the hatreds of one group for another,
starting small brushfires that would escalate and have different
groups at each other’s throats. The Enterprise would be
ordered to take part in an ugly skirmish that violated all the good
things Kirk and the crew stood for, leading them, and a growing
number of other ships, to mutiny. Eventually the mutiny would grow so
large it undermined the conservatives and the good old liberals would
recapture control of the Federation.
One thing Mary is justifiably proud of:
In the history of Trek, there has never, to our knowledge, been an
economic basis for how the Federation holds together. Mary devised a
system based on the availability of dilithium crystals and the supply
thereof. The Federation would control the use and distribution of
dilithium crystals, much like deBeers does on Earth with diamonds.
This would regulate who was able to participate in space flight. It
made a lot of sense.
Anyway, we wrote up our outline and
sent it in. In due course, we heard back from Joe Elder that the
editor at Pocket (whose name I can’t completely remember, I’m
afraid; David something, I seem to recall--he was a nice young kid)
liked our outline, but there was a weird sort of problem. One of his
other Trek writers, Diane Carey, had also submitted an outline about
a mutiny in Star Fleet, and he, the editor, also had an idea
along similar lines. He wanted to reconcile this so all the books
could be published, so he suggested it as a trilogy; Mary and I would
write the first book, Diane Carey would continue it in the second,
and his own book would conclude it. Pocket Books would pay for all of
us to travel to New York for a weekend and hammer out the plots, then
we’d all split up and work on our sections separately.
I have to say I had serious doubts
about this scheme. I’ve worked on collaborations before; they’re
hard enough to do when the various parties live in the same city and
can communicate easily. Having three different groups in three
different sections of the country (Mary and I lived in Sacramento,
CA, Diane Carey was in Flint, MI, and David was in New York) would be
an enormous challenge—especially in an age before easy email, when
communications had to be either by expensive phone calls or slow
physical letters. Still, this is what the editor wanted to do, and
I’ve never turned my nose up at a free trip to New York. . In due
course, Mary and I were winging our way eastward and ensconced in a
New York hotel, compliments of Pocket Books.
I honestly remember very little about
the plotting, other than the fact that very little of it was actually
accomplished. Mary and I described our premise, Diane said very
little about hers, and David virtually nothing about his. The others
sort of agreed that Mary and I should write our section the way we
wanted and the others would pick up from there. We could have done
all that at home and saved Pocket Books a whole lot of money.
One thing, though—the weekend
confirmed my opinion that New York editors know how to pick good
restaurants. The first night we ate at a fine Chinese restaurant, the
second at a good Italian restaurant. Unfortunately, I think the
Careys—who considered themselves some of Flint, Michigan’s,
intellectuals--were sort of overwhelmed by the food choices. At the
Chinese restaurant, Diane told us her husband didn’t eat rice
(though he complained he did, but only if potatoes weren’t
available). At the Italian restaurant, we had a appetizer of fried
calamari rings with a spicy dipping sauce. Diane’s husband actually
dared to try one of the calamari rings, and pronounced it was OK, but
rather bland. Mary and I pointed out that was what the dipping sauce
was for. I don’t recall him bothering to try it. Given the wealth
of Italian possibilities on the menu, the Careys ordered steaks.
I have to admit to philosophical
differences on top of other problems. I tried reading Diane Carey’s
previously published Star Trek novel. In it, she had a human
character describe her very objectivist political philosophy. OK, I
could stand that. But when Carey had a Vulcan proclaim that was the
only logical way to govern, and the Vulcan race had ruled themselves
that way for many centuries, I literally threw the book across the
room and never bothered to finish it. Diane Carey has the right to
hold any foolish political beliefs she wants, but it was Gene
Roddenberry who created the Vulcans, and Mary and I both believe he
did not intend the entire Vulcan race to be devotees of Ayn
Rand. For Diane to claim otherwise was arrogantly presumptive.
We got home and started work on our
book, and were immediately floundering. As the set-up for the
trilogy, we had to know what we should put into the novel to
establish what should come next—and we got little to no advice from
either of the other parties. We did, however, get a strange and
disturbing notice from the Paramount licensing department.
The dictum came down to us, via David,
that Paramount declared there was, and could be, no bigotry or
prejudice in the Star Trek universe—people had evolved beyond all
that by then. This, of course, struck at the very heart of our
premise. I phoned David and pointed out to him how many times we
heard McCoy say something like, “Spock, you pointed-eared Vulcan,
your goddamn logic will get us all killed.” (I think it occurred at
least every other episode.) Now, I told David, try changing a couple
of the words: “Spock, you hook-nosed Jew, your goddamn stinginess
will get us all killed.” And McCoy was a highly trained,
well-educated professional who would never dream of discriminating
against Spock in job placement or social interaction. Oh, you can say
it was all good-hearted japery or satire, but satire doesn’t exist
unless there’s something in reality to satirize. There damn well
was prejudice, or at least the remnants of it, in the Federation.
David gulped, but had to give in to Paramount licensing.
[Note: This wasn’t the only
stupidity I’ve encountered from Paramount licensing. Years later,
when I was working for the computer game company Spectrum Holobyte on
a Star Trek cartridge game, some of the company’s artists had
depicted non-humanoid aliens. Paramount came down with another
dictum: There were no inteligent non-humanoid aliens in the Trek
universe. Everyone at our company, all being Trek fans, went
ballistic. What about Hortas? we asked. The only reason Gene
Roddenberry hadn’t included non-humanoids wasn’t because he was
prejudiced against them, but because there was a noticeable dearth of
non-humanoid actors capable of speaking lines in Hollywood. I don’t
remember the ultimate resolution, but I did come away with the strong
impession that the drones at licensing never watched the show.]
So Mary and I labored in a vacuum, and
in time we produced a very, very, very rough draft. We knew it was
rough. We said as much. We also knew it wasn’t very good, and we
were disillusioned with the whole project. But we dutifully turned it
in, hoping for the sake of our reputations that it wouldn’t see the
light of day. Eventually, we got a call from my agent: “I’ve got
good news and bad news.”
“What’s the bad news?” I asked,
since I always like to get that out of the way first.
“Pocket turned down your book.”
I blinked a couple of times. This was
bad news? It was what I’d hoped for. “What’s the good
news, then?”
“They’re paying you the
on-acceptance money anyway.” This made the novel theirs, and they
could do whatever they wanted with it—like sit on it till the end
of time. Which is what they’ve done.
On the whole, it was a disappointing
experience. Yeah, I got paid for writing the book and I got a free
trip to New York. But I also lost many months of writing time, time I
could have spent on a better project. And I still think Mary’s and
my original idea would have made a fascinatin story.
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I'd like to announce I've started work on a new YA novel called Into the Out, about a group of high school kids on a field trip in the California desert. They stumble across a buried starship, and before they realize what's happening it takes off, carrying the group into interstellar space. It's an homage to one of my all-time favorite books, Andre Norton's Galactic Derelict. I hope to have a lot of fun with it. With any luck, it'll be finished next spring. More news to follow as work progresses.
