Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 80

Actually done! (For now)

Just a little while ago, I e-mailed the manuscript for Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures to my editor at Pocket. And a great sense of relief descended upon me.

I do wish I’d had a few more days to consider and refine things. But I was able to make some major improvements in the two revision passes I had time to get through. For instance, I realized that one character I introduced kind of disappeared afterward, but I didn’t have room to add another scene with him; but it occurred to me that if I put him in place of an associated character in a certain scene, it would actually make that scene work better in several ways, in addition to giving that character more “screen” time. Also, I realized I’d forgotten to make clear how one key decision in the story was a reaction to an earlier event, so I put in a bit of dialogue to tie them together better. And so on. I also had to trim some extraneous material to make room for all that, but I didn’t find much I could remove. I knew going in that I was under a tight word limit (80,000), so I was pretty concise throughout. Still, I managed to nibble away enough to make it fit, give or take a few hundred words.

And the timing is good, because my Star Trek complete soundtrack box set is out for delivery from my local post office, according to the tracking information, so it should be here within hours! Between that and finally being free from deadlines (at least for now), this is looking like a good day for me.

Interview on The Chronic Rift

Keith DeCandido’s interview of me from New York Comic-Con in October is now up on The Chronic Rift’s webpage:

http://chronicrift.com/node/3136

It’s mainly about Only Superhuman, but also covers my Trek novels, other original stuff, and my reviews on this blog, among other things. Naturally, the Star Trek project I couldn’t talk about then is Rise of the Federation.

Done! (Almost)

Just a little while ago, I reached the end of the first draft of Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures, with four days to spare before my deadline. That’s not as much time as I’d hoped to have for revision and refinement, but I should be able to make maybe 2-3 passes through the manuscript, get a feel for how it flows as a whole, and smooth out the kinks.

The manuscript comes out to just about the maximum of my target length range, so unless I do some serious trimming in the editing phase, I won’t have room to slip in another couple of things I was thinking about trying to add. But that’s okay; they aren’t strictly necessary, and I don’t have that much time to add things anyway. As it is, I had to streamline some things from the outline here and there — combine some scenes, drop a few others, particularly in the denouement — to get it to the target length. But it still accomplished what was important. In the event that there’s a sequel, maybe I can work some of the abandoned ideas in there.

This has been a very stressful month or two for me, since I was late getting started on the manuscript and at times was having a lot of trouble getting in gear, so I was worried about being able to finish on time. Which combined with my worrying about the performance and critical reception for Only Superhuman, so I was doubly stressed. Even when it became clear to me over the weekend that I would definitely be able to finish with time to spare, I was still feeling pretty stressed out. Once I reached that point, I just gave myself a day off, figuring I had the time — but then the next day I could barely bring myself to get back to work. I felt like I couldn’t even think about the book without anxiety. And I didn’t know why, because by that point I had no more cause for distress. I guess it was just a residual effect. Or maybe it was that I’ve also been dealing with some pain that I caused myself by over-exercising, and which was perhaps itself a consequence of being stressed out. But fortunately I could spare the time, so although I lost another day, I was able to get back to work the day after that, and it’s gone smoothly since then. It always goes faster once I reach the climax, and it’s just downhill through the denouement. Actually there was one major sequence, the climax of one of the main plotlines, that I didn’t really get a handle on until this morning, but I wrote it then, and the rest just kept coming from there. I managed around 5400 words today, which I think is about the maximum I’ve managed in a single day on this project, though I managed to get in nearly as much on the day just before I took that break (which was why I felt it was safe to take the break at that point). That pretty much makes up for the time I lost — although it would be nice if I had more time to refine the manuscript.

And this morning, I felt much better than I have in a while. Perhaps because I realized I was finally in the home stretch, combined with the pain subsiding, but I’ve been in a much brighter mood today. And now I had to go and depress myself again by writing about how stressed I’ve been up to now. Nah, that’s okay. I’m sure it’ll pass. I’ve met my deadline, the burden is eased (aside from revisions), and in a few days I’ll be able to relax and be free of obligations for a little while. And shortly after that, I’ll be receiving my copy of the Star Trek: TOS Soundtrack Collection, aka The Greatest Thing Ever — a 15-CD box set of every note of music ever recorded for the original series, even some that wasn’t used and has never been heard before (or at least everything that counted as soundtrack rather than dialogue; Kevin Riley’s rendition of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” is regrettably, or perhaps mercifully, absent, but all the other songs and source music are there). And now that the cloud of stress has lifted, I’m finally able to feel giddy and excited about that, as I should’ve felt all along.

I think I’ve earned the rest of the day off, and I have a Netflix DVD to watch tonight, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows — and with Elementary also on tonight, I guess I’m in for a Holmesian evening. Then I’ll start revising the MS tomorrow and continue over the weekend. Revisions always go much faster than the first draft, so I should be able to make at least a couple of passes through the book in that time. All in all, given how much I was delayed getting started, it’s turned out fine.

More vintage cartoons: Filmation’s Lone Ranger and Zorro

Lately I’ve been revisiting two more animated shows from my youth, Filmation’s The New Adventures of the Lone Ranger from 1980 andThe New Adventures of Zorro from 1981, which aired as part of The Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour.  Both are available on a combined DVD set (on alternate discs); however, Netflix only has the second Lone Ranger disc in stock at this time, so I’m having to settle for only seeing half the series. These shows date from the two years just after Filmation’s classic Flash Gordon, when their production values became more sophisticated.  They, along with Blackstar, were the final adventure series produced by Filmation under producers Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott together; after 1981, Prescott left and Scheimer continued alone.

As you can see from the titles mentioned above, Filmation at this point was heavily into adaptations of classic adventure heroes, and both Lone Ranger and Zorro were fairly faithful interpretations. The New Adventures of the Lone Ranger starred actor/announcer William Conrad (star of the TV series Cannon) as the voice of the Lone Ranger and the announcer of the opening titles, which faithfully recreated the narration from the original radio and TV shows, and used the standard William Tell Overture as the theme music.  According to the special features, Conrad did the role out of love for the Lone Ranger but didn’t want to be credited by name (perhaps because he was a big star by then and didn’t want to be associated with kidvid, or perhaps as a more benevolent gesture so Filmation didn’t have to pay him as much as his name was worth), so he was billed pseudonymously as J. Darnoc — just his surname in reverse, with the “J.” probably an homage to Jay Ward, producer of shows such as The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right, which Conrad narrated. (At least that’s what I’ve always assumed; one of the people interviewed in the bonus features said it was Conrad’s middle initial. In fact his real name was John William Cann, Jr., so it would’ve been his first initial.)  Tonto was played by Native American actor Ivan Naranjo; Filmation was generally pretty good at inclusive casting, making sure that “ethnic” characters were played by actors of the same ethnicity.  The rest of the cast was… variable.  Again, I’ve only gotten the second half of the series, but in the first few episodes on the disc, all the male voices other than the Ranger and Tonto are by Scheimer himself, and the female voices are by his wife Lane and his daughter Erika.  All the Scheimers often did supporting voices in Filmation shows, but Scheimer was no Mel Blanc; he had a relatively wide repertoire of character voices, but they weren’t different enough that he could really carry an entire cast all by himself, so it quickly grew tiresome.  And the female Scheimers simply weren’t very good actresses, especially the shrill-voiced Erika.  Fortunately, the great Frank Welker took over as the main male “guest” voice after a while — a bit surprising, really, since the prolific Welker didn’t do much work with Filmation over the course of his career, except for a brief period from about 1979-81.  Another few uncredited voices showed up here and there, including Alan Oppenheimer (Ming on Flash Gordon, Skeletor and Man-at-Arms on He-Man).  Some of the Native American characters had a voice I recognize from the ’70s show Lassie’s Rescue Rangers, an actor who played a regular Native American character on that show; IMDb credits Hal Harvey in that role, but I’m not sure how much I trust that attribution.  And there’s one guest role whose voice I’m almost certain belonged to Mission: Impossible star Greg Morris!

Anyway, Ranger followed a formula that probably wasn’t too different from the original television series, with the Ranger and Tonto travelling the West and nonviolently helping people in danger.  The Ranger carried his gun and used his silver bullets, but only for precision shooting of ropes, branches, playing cards, and other inanimate objects.  (In fact, silver bullets would be terrible for precision shots; the soft metal deforms easily and the bullets tend to spin or fragment.)  He’d usually catch bad guys with his lasso.  And the bad guys were often exceptionally bad for Filmation; usually Filmation antagonists tended to be misunderstood and readily reformed when shown a little kindness, but these were unrepentant scoundrels.  In one episode, a pair of cattle rustlers/land thieves get their lives saved by the homesteader they were trying to rip off, and I expected them to apologize and repent their sins, but instead they remained the same lily-livered varmints they’d always been.

So maybe Filmation was a little less determined to be wholesome at this point, but they still strove to make the show educational, by having the Ranger and Tonto constantly get involved with real events and people from the Old West, including Mark Twain, Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, Belle Starr, the James brothers, Matthew Brady, Nellie Bly, etc.  I actually learned a lot about history from watching this show back in the day.  The problem is that these events range from the brief run of the Pony Express in 1860-61 to the Oklahoma Land Rush in 1889, and yet the Ranger, Tonto, and their horses remain ageless and unchanging over this span of nearly three decades (which is not presented in any kind of chronological order).  So in the course of teaching history, the show played a bit fast and loose with it.

Filmation’s limited animation at this point had reached the stage where they created some fluidly animated movement sequences — in this case, mainly involving riders mounting, dismounting, and riding horses, horses rearing up, etc. — and kept using them over and over and over again, often several times an episode.  The highlight here is a rather nice shot of the heroes riding away from the camera, with Silver’s and Scout’s tails sweeping in to fill the frame with white and then rather gracefully swishing away while the riders recede into the distance.  It’s a lovely bit of animation, but it does get a bit tired when you see it five times in eleven minutes.  As usual for Filmation, though, the background art is superb — lush vistas of Western landscapes and towns, rendered in a painted-line-art style that’s unusual for Filmation but is quite elegant and beautiful.  Some of the background art looks like it may have been traced from vintage photos or illustrations.

Zorro was a moderately faithful adaptation of Johnston McCulley’s creation, featuring characters from the original book — not just Don Diego/Zorro (one of the models for Batman, a masked hero who hides behind a foppish, dissolute facade), but his corrupt rival Capitan Ramon, the bumbling Sergeant Gonzalez, and his father Don Alejandro.  Although they replaced Diego’s deaf/mute servant with Miguel, who’s basically the equivalent of the Green Hornet’s Kato — a servant who fights alongside the hero and has no nickname of his own (Zorro just calls him “amigo,” leading me to wonder how many non-Spanish-speaking kids thought that Amigo was his hero name). Most of the episodes were written by Arthur Browne Jr., a veteran writer of TV Westerns for decades, including The Rifleman, Gunsmoke, The Virginian, and The Big Valley. They did a good job capturing a classic adventure flavor, and Zorro’s personality as a dashing gentleman thief and Errol Flynn type, though the stories could be fairly simple, and quite repetitive if watched back to back on DVD. The remaining episodes were by Robbie London, who would go on to work on many later Filmation shows (notably He-Man) but who was just starting out here. His first episode, “Fort Ramon,” is an incoherent mess: Ramon takes over a mission and somehow manages to turn it into a fort with high stone walls in a matter of hours; then Zorro and Miguel plant explosives to blow it up but are discovered and driven off, yet it never occurs to Ramon to search the fort and find the explosives in plain sight; etc. Fortunately they weren’t all that bad.

What makes this show unique in Filmation’s canon is that it wasn’t animated in the US.  This was the only time that Filmation gave into the trend of outsourcing the animation work to Asia, since the abundance of other work they had in 1981 required sharing the load. But they had the good sense to go with the best animation studio in Japan, Tokyo Movie Shinsha (who made Akira and did fine work on plenty of other US animated shows including The Real Ghostbusters, Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, the ’90s Spider-Man, etc.).  The storyboard and layout work was still done in-house at Filmation, though, as is usually the case.  The show thus looks very different from Filmation’s usual work.  On the one hand, the animation is much more fluid and less repetitive, though it still depends heavily on stock rotoscoped animation of swordfighting moves, with different characters traced over the same set of movements in different episodes/scenes.  And it has some of those nifty little touches that make TMS work so expressive, like what I’ve come to think of as “the TMS run.”  Most animation houses give running characters a pretty basic, regular motion cycle, but when TMS characters run, they often move irregularly, flailing and off-balance, their pace syncopated and uneven, and it just gives it such a sense of character and energy and naturalism.  So overall, the animation is a great improvement on Filmation’s usual work. (It was rather amusing to hear Scheimer in the special features complaining that TMS’s work was below Filmation’s usual standard.)  Yet on the other hand, TMS’s drawing and painting style at the time was rougher and messier than Filmation’s — the lines less clean, the background paintings more impressionistic.  It doesn’t work as well for me, and it just doesn’t feel like a Filmation show.

Indeed, despite the fact that Zorro was the only collaboration between two of my favorite animation studios, Filmation and TMS, I’m surprised at how lukewarm I am about it.  The production values are cool, but the stories don’t grab me.  It’s a very straightforward historical series where the threats are things like pirates and floods and the oppressive policies of the greedy governor-general, and I guess that just doesn’t captivate me.  And it has the usual problem of kids’ shows built around swordfighting, in that the fights always have to be inconclusive (see also Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog).  In the show, the fights always end with Zorro or Miguel disarming their opponents — which just makes me wonder why the opponents never just pick their swords back up. Although there are a few times when they do.

And one thing strikes me as odd about Zorro, watching it so soon after the 2012 presidential election. I’ve always thought of Filmation’s shows as socially liberal in orientation — promoting racial tolerance and diversity, peace over fighting, things like that. Yet Zorro‘s narrative of the corrupt government using taxation as a tool of oppression and theft, with the heroic outlaw returning the people’s money to them, feels like kind of a right-wing propaganda message, particularly considering that the show came out right after Ronald Reagan’s massive tax cuts were signed into law. I’m not saying that was the intent, and it probably wasn’t. Scheimer just picked up the rights to Zorro because it was an established property and an easier sell to the networks than an unknown concept, as he explained in the bonus  interviews. And it certainly never occurred to me as a kid watching in ’81 to think of it in those terms. Still, watching it in a 2012 political context, it comes off a little oddly for Filmation.

Still, as with Lone Ranger, Filmation deserves credit for ethnically inclusive casting.  The principal cast here was mostly Latino, headlined by Henry Darrow as Zorro/Don Diego.  Darrow was actually the first Latino to play Zorro, and this was the first of three consecutive Zorro TV series that Darrow starred in, interestingly enough.   Two years later, in the short-lived sitcom Zorro and Son, he played an aging Don Diego trying to train his bumbling son to take his place (yes, nearly the same premise as Anthony Hopkins’s The Mask of Zorro); and in the ’90s, Darrow played Don Alejandro opposite Duncan Regehr’s Zorro in the Disney Channel Zorro.  The rest of the cast consists of people whose names I’m unfamiliar with, though Sgt. Gonzales was played by Don Diamond, who had a recurring role in the 1957 Guy Williams Zorro series as the assistant to Sgt. Garcia, the Gonzales-equivalent character in that show.  So aside from Darrow, the only voice I recognize is Scheimer, who inevitably shows up doing various bit roles.

Both these shows are also from a new era musically; from about ’79 onward, Filmation stopped reusing musical cues from its earlier ’70s shows and its composers Ray Ellis and Norm Prescott (under the pseudonyms Yvette Blais and Jeff Michael) produced lusher, richer scores.  Both LR and Z still used score libraries rather than scoring each episode individually, but each show’s library cues were written specifically for it rather than recycled from earlier shows, though a couple of Lone Ranger cues were recycled in Zorro and both shows cribbed the occasional Flash Gordon cue.  Both scores are in a classy, rich orchestral style evocative of old adventure movies and serials, and are probably the best things about both shows.  Although each show just recycles the same cues over and over (and whoever was editing Filmation’s music around 1980 liked to jump between brief fragments of different cues, which can be quite jarring), the cues themselves are really good, among my favorites of Ellis and Prescott’s work.  Both shows’ scores are very reminiscent of the gorgeous Flash Gordon score, with the flavor of ’30s or ’40s movie and adventure-serial scores, but more tailored to their genres — more Western-sounding and Copland-influenced for LR, more Latin-tinged and Errol Flynn-esque for Zorro.  Repetitive though it is, it’s gorgeous music, and I deeply wish somebody would unearth the original master tapes for all of Filmation’s music, restore and remaster it, and put it all on CD.  Sadly, it’s unclear whether those masters even still exist. And there’s no telling what kind of clearance complications there would be, with so many of the scores written for licensed productions.

An excellent day’s work

I just wrapped up a really good day of writing on Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures. I started during breakfast and kept at it on and off throughout the day, finishing just now at about quarter to ten in the evening. I got more than 5000 words done and worked on six scenes encompassing two major plotlines, and several sub-threads within the main one of the two. And I even found time to go for a walk and pick up some groceries (though I forgot I’m almost out of cheddar).

This has been a reassuring day for me, given how close my deadline looms. The more days I have like this one, the more time I’ll have for revisions before the due date.

Thoughts on HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

The Dreamworks movie How to Train Your Dragon just had its network TV premiere on FX, which is the first time I’ve seen it. I have caught the sequel TV series, which has the awkward although possibly AnneMcCaffrey-inspired title Dragons: Riders of Berk, and been underwhelmed by it; I found it okay but not very engaging. So I was curious to see how similar or different the movie was, but my expectations weren’t very high.

But it turned out to be pretty amazing. Well, it has a weak start — a big exposition dump with the hero narrating the backstory to the audience is kind of awkward. But the more I watched, the better it got. The story was pretty rich, with some good character dynamics and dilemmas, mainly between lead character Hiccup and his father the chief. There was some very good, subtle character animation, good music, a lot of quality stuff — and Jay Baruchel’s vocal performance as Hiccup was less annoying than it is on the TV series, because he had more subtle and multidimensional material to work with. And I really like the theme of the film — not only that there’s a better way to solve problems than violence and hate, but that intelligence, curiosity, and imagination are more powerful than brute force. But especially, the movie did an amazing job capturing the joy of flight. There were some moments of real visual grandeur and awe in the flying sequences, and I’m still a little stunned and breathless, even a bit misty-eyed as I think back on them.  Really, really well done.

I think I’ll probably give the show another chance now. Maybe having a better sense of the characters and background will help. I still don’t think it will come anywhere close to living up to the movie, though.

This would’ve been a great day for a bike ride…

Unfortunately I had to stay home this Thanksgiving rather than go spend it with family as I’ve done the past couple of years, since my deadline on Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures (or STEROTFACOF, I guess) looms near and I simply don’t have the luxury to take a trip. But staying here had its advantages, because it was a very nice day today, getting to an unseasonably high upper sixties. I went out for a walk this afternoon to do some thinking about the scene I had to write today, and as I saw how empty the streets were, I realized it would’ve been a perfect day to ride my bike over to campus. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten too much out of the habit of bike riding lately, and my tires are no doubt completely flat by now. Also, since I’m so out of practice at it, I feared that if I did go back, get my bike, walk it to the bike shop, fill the tires, and then ride around campus for a while, I’d be too worn out to write when I got back. Still, it would’ve been nice. I should really try to get back into riding again — I need to get back into better shape. It’s just that the streets around here aren’t very good for it. And the university’s only a good place to ride on Sundays or holidays when it isn’t crowded.

Still, I did at least walk over to campus, and took advantage of the near-total emptiness of the place to get some good thinking done. I revisited a place that used to be my favorite spot when I was in college, something I always thought of as “the Alcove,” though I knew that wasn’t the right word for it. I suppose it’s more properly a small courtyard. It’s a place that used to be a sort of a porch outside the eastern side door of the Old Chemistry building — I know because there’s a porch with the same architecture on the opposite side — but that was walled in when Brodie Plaza was built next to it decades ago, with the plaza level being a story above the porch level. So what was a porch became a sunken area, and what had been the steps down from the porch were walled off and turned into a planter, with a bench of thick wooden planks built across the gap where the steps were, and another bench along the side at right angles — plus a stairway going up to the plaza level. I always found it a nice place to sit or pace around and do some thinking by myself, or occasionally to hang out with a friend. I don’t get back there very often these days, but sometimes I like to go there when I need to do some thinking.

When I got there today, though, I was a bit saddened to discover that the benches were gone. I’m not sure when, but I’d say it wasn’t too long ago, since there still seemed to be a pattern of moss or residue or something on the top of the low stone wall that one of the benches was built around/over, conforming to the shape of its slats. And I’m not sure why they were taken out, but I’m hoping it’s just because the wood was rotting or something and they wanted to replace them. I certainly hope it’s not the first step in something more drastic. “The Alcove” has been a favorite spot of mine for over a quarter-century now, and I’d hate to lose it — even if I’ve only been there a few times in the past decade.

Anyway, I felt I came up with some promising ideas for how to resolve a key scientific/technical plot point in the novel, but realized that it would help me to do some more research, so I headed back home so I could use the computer. But on the way home, I questioned one of the assumptions I’d been making in my outline about how this subplot would play out, and I realized that the plot point I was trying to work out how to do — which involved figuring out how to use concept A as an analogy that would inspire a character to solve a problem with concept B — was actually unnecessary and even kind of hokey. And once I was free of the need to connect A and B, I realized there was a much simpler and less contrived way to resolve the problem with B. So by the time I got home, I had, in fact, solved my story issue by realizing I didn’t need it at all. Which saves me some work, and makes the story a bit better.

My makeshift Thanksgiving dinner was one I got the fixings for a few days ago at the store — the same 90-second turkey-and-stuffing microwave entree that’s one of my staples these days, but with a single-serve cup of microwave mashed potatoes and an ear of corn that I steamed in the husk — followed a couple of hours later by a bowl of Graeter’s pumpkin ice cream in lieu of pumpkin pie. Fairly simple, but good.

And now I’m sleepy.

Aren’t improvements supposed to be better?

The New York Times has just “upgraded” its crosswords page, and every change they’ve made is, from my perspective, a change for the worse. There’s no longer a one-click option for downloading puzzles in AcrossLite. You have to scroll much farther down the page to get to the bonus puzzles. And there’s no longer a list of archived puzzles right there on the page — you have to click to a different page. Every one of those changes makes it less convenient for me. The new format looks like it was designed to be more vertical, probably for compatibility with smartphones and mobile devices. But it’s not a change for the better from my perspective.

Meanwhile, the Opera web browser I use has been upgrading frequently over the past several months, and each major upgrade seems to introduce more problems. For the last few editions, there’s been a glitch in page scrolling that causes the progress bar at the bottom to scroll with the page, or causes glitches or gaps in the display. None of the upgrades since has fixed it. And the latest upgrade has disabled my ability to use Ctrl-key combinations to toggle bold, italics, or underlining on the TrekBBS, the main bulletin board I frequent. It still works fine here on WordPress, but not there.

Let’s see, have any other recent “improvements” made things harder for me? Well, there’s Facebook, but that goes without saying. And I’m annoyed that the 2007 version of MS Word I’m now using as my primary word processor has cruder, more awkward table editing tools than the 2002 version of WordPerfect I recently stopped using.

Anyway, that’s enough griping. Sorry the blog’s been so quiet lately — I’ve got a tight deadline on my novel.

ONLY SUPERHUMAN interview and giveaway on The Qwillery!

I’ve been interviewed by the book blog The Qwillery about Only Superhuman. Here’s the link:

http://qwillery.blogspot.com/2012/11/interview-with-chrisopher-l-bennett.html

There’s also a giveaway of a copy of the novel, which you can enter simply by commenting on the interview post. Details at the link.

Coming July 2013: STAR TREK ENTERPRISE — RISE OF THE FEDERATION

I’ve finally been cleared to announce the new Star Trek project I’ve been working on for the past few months, which is something entirely new for me and for just about everyone else. It’s called Star Trek Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures. The Romulan War saga of the previous Enterprise novels concluded with the founding of the United Federation of Planets in 2161. I’ve been chosen to tell the next phase of the story. How did an alliance forged in wartime become the peaceful union we know? How did its founding members balance their differing views of what the Federation should become? What did they each contribute to the UFP government and Starfleet? How did that Starfleet end up being so similar to the United Earth Starfleet, and what familiar elements owe more to the Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites than we might have realized? What challenges did this fledgling union face in dealing with neighboring powers unsure of its intentions or threatened by its unity? What new enemies arose in the wake of the Romulans?

This is a followup to the Star Trek Enterprise — The Romulan War duology, but it’s also a fresh beginning, picking up about a year after the Federation’s founding. The war is over, Enterprise herself is in mothballs, and Admiral Jonathan Archer, his former crew, and his allies including Shran and Soval have moved on to new phases in their lives, playing new roles in the Federation and its combined Starfleet. The novel will feature many familiar characters from the era, a few new crewmates for the familiar cast, and some unexpected names as well. It’s called Enterprise for branding/marketing reasons, but I see it more as a sequel to Enterprise — and a prequel to the original series.

I was intrigued when my editor at Pocket offered me this opportunity, since the early Federation era is virtually untouched. We have very limited information about this period from canon, and only one book, Starfleet: Year One, has ever been set in this era. But that novel was soon superseded by Enterprise, and its focus was principally on Starfleet and not the wider Federation. (The only other novel that’s even come close was Killing Time by Della van Hise back in the ’80s. It gave us a brief glimpse of a version of the Federation’s founding ceremony, but that was it.) So the period is very nearly a blank slate, which is both a great opportunity and a great challenge for me. Worldbuilding in Trek fiction is usually relatively easy since there’s so much backstory and continuity to build on, but in this case it was a lot more challenging to strain out the tiny fragments of information we have about people, events, and institutions from this period. I’ve had to do a lot of extrapolation. But I’m picking up some threads from ENT, the series, that I felt were worth expanding on, and I’m building toward the Trek universe as we know it in the original series, so at least I know my starting and ending points. The worldbuilding has been a lot of fun — figuring out how the early UFP government was organized, how the member races cooperated in the joint government and combined fleet, and what the various member races contributed to Starfleet and how it evolved toward the form we know, in terms of design and technology. I’ve even come up with a design for the original Federation Starfleet uniform. Plus, of course, there’s the challenge of moving the ENT characters (regular and recurring) forward in their lives and careers. There are a few whose futures we have some foreknowledge of, but the rest are blank slates.

Another cool thing about this is that it completes my grand slam: I will now have written tie-ins for every onscreen Trek series, as well as several book-only ones. At first, admittedly, I was a little wary about taking on Enterprise, which I was lukewarm about in its first run. But upon rewatching the series as research for this book, I’ve gained a much greater appreciation for it. When I watched ENT in its original run, my perceptions were filtered through “Oh, that’s not what I expected” or “That’s not how I would’ve done it,” and that colored my reactions, as I think it did for a lot of us. But on revisiting the series, I was able to accept that this was how it was and evaluate it on its own terms. And I think it held up pretty well overall. It certainly has its share of duds and mediocre episodes, but overall I like how it turned out. The first season does a great job at conveying a flavor of exploration and discovery, a sense of wonder and novelty and fascination with the unknown. Sometimes the characters were a little too naive and reckless, but I liked the sense of experimentation, of pioneers trying everything for the first time and figuring stuff out as they went. Few Trek series have ever done as well at capturing that feeling of exploring the strange and unknown. And I appreciate the first-season producers’ attempt to take the storytelling in a smaller, more intimate and character-driven direction, going for an “everyday shipboard life” flavor in much the same way the early first season of TOS often did. (It often felt they were emulating M*A*S*H, with things like movie night and Dr. Phlox’s letters to Dr. Lucas.) There’s also a nice sense of an arc in the first season, a number of evolving plot and character threads that tie it together; the relationship of Archer and T’Pol and how it evolves from mutual hostility into deep trust and friendship is really quite engaging. The second season was weaker overall, maybe because the producers gave into pressure to do more actiony and high-concept episodes, and didn’t have as much of a sense of direction or focus, but it still had its share of satisfying episodes.

I have mixed feelings about the Xindi/Expanse arc of season 3, since it brought in a lot of implausible and fanciful ideas, but it was an admirably ambitious undertaking to tell one grand season-long epic, and the overall story it told was complex and compelling. In particular, I think it handled death more maturely than any other Trek series. In previous shows, captains would sulk over the deaths of redshirts for a few moments and then be laughing and joking by the end of the hour — or at least we wouldn’t see the effects of the crew losses in any later episodes. But when crewmembers died in ENT’s third season, it was always a big deal, something that stayed with the other characters and whose impact was really felt. The first two seasons were implausibly devoid of crew deaths, but that was because the writers didn’t want to trivialize it, didn’t want it to happen unless they could really face its consequences and give it the solemnity it deserved — which they did very successfully in season 3. They really are entitled to high marks for that.

As for season 4, it was impressive as well, though like every other season it had a few duds. I loved its innovative mix of 1, 2-, and 3-parters, allowing a lot more flexibility with the storytelling and letting them do novelistic mini-sagas that were as long as they needed to be. And it did a good job with the continuity porn, showing the beginnings of the Trek universe we know. My main problem with it is that there was hardly any exploring in it; nearly the whole thing was about NX-01′s crew dealing with diplomatic or political crises or battling criminals and terrorists. What I’m hoping to do in Rise of the Federation is to continue season 4′s emphasis on worldbuilding and laying the foundations of the TOS era while also bringing back season 1′s focus on exploration and the pioneer spirit, as well as its focus on character development.

Naturally I’m hoping Rise of the Federation will be a multi-book series, hence the subtitle A Choice of Futures for this volume. But for now it’s just the one book, which does tell a complete story within itself, yet also sets the direction for potential sequels. The book is scheduled for July 2013, so it’ll be out in time for next year’s Shore Leave convention.

Now I just need to finish writing the darn thing…