Star Trek: The Q Continuum (61 page)

KD:
[laughs] I noticed that you worked it into a line of Q’s dialogue, when he calls it the Beta XII-A entity and says that is the name given to the being in the Starfleet database. That’s also the name it was given in the
Star Trek Encyclopedia
[by Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda].

GC:
Well, logically, it was not going to call itself the Beta XII-A entity. So I had to come up with a name for it, and Paramount was very nice about letting me do that.

KD:
But that’s the only reference like that. In the book, you use (*) to represent the concept to the reader. I guess it doesn’t matter what you call it as long as the reader knows what’s going on.

GC:
Given that we’re in a book in which one of the characters is named Q and one is named 0, the bar had been raised for weird, extraterrestrial names. The problem is that it has come back to bite me, sometimes. When you find yourself doing a live reading somewhere, sometimes you think, “Oh good God, what have I done to myself? How am I going to pronounce this?” Or worse yet, you get a call from the audio book people wanting to know how to pronounce such-and-such. “Uh, I have no idea. I just typed it.”

KD:
[laughs] And given what you have to work with—a swirl of colored lights—I think that would have been much harder for you to get a grip on that character’s motivation and action. It just sat there and spun.

GC:
Again, I just tried to be consistent with its M.O. [method of operation] in “Day of the Dove” and basically escalate things.

KD:
And that was your approach with The One as well?

GC:
Here, it was a case where I thought it was very logical to revisit the idea because of the nature of the two barriers: The galactic barrier on the rim of the galaxy and the Great Barrier in the center of the galaxy. It seemed that if I was dealing with a creature on the other side of the galactic barrier, I ought to deal with the one on the other side of the Great Barrier, particularly to the extent that the same people who banished 0 beyond the galactic barrier would also be involved with however the god-thing from
Star Trek V
was trapped.

KD:
Let’s look at the centerpiece of the books, which obviously is Q. What in your mind is the appeal of Q, not just as a writer but as a fan. Why do writers keep coming up with reasons for him to show up on the
Enterprise?

GC:
For one thing, he’s very, very fun to write. I was amazed at how easy it was to get into that voice.

KD:
And when I read it, I can’t help but hear John de Lancie’s delivery.

GC:
You always want to do a literary impression, if you will, to try and capture the voice of the character. I remember noticing within a paragraph or two that Q was really easy to get into. And yes, it sounded like John de Lancie in my head, too. One of the fun things about Q is that he’s got this snarky sense of humor and he allows you to say all of the things that you really want to say but can’t. He can make all of these snarky comments about
Star Trek
that otherwise couldn’t be made—stuff about Troi’s psychobabble or Riker’s macho posing or whatever. He in some ways is poking gentle fun at the franchise just to be a little wacky and silly. Lord, he’s also easy for scene transitions. You need to get from point A to B? Bang, you’re there.

KD:
See, you have no worries at all about distances from one barrier to the other.

GC:
[laughs] Not when you have Q involved, no. I do remember going back and watching all of the Q episodes, so I could throw in references to them, such as his one and only visit to
Deep Space Nine.

KD:
When he gets decked by Sisko. It was the punch heard ’round the galaxy.

GC:
[laughs] I think he makes this snide comment like “Dismal place. I’m never going back.” I wanted that to allude to his popping up once and never appearing again.

KD:
Do you think that part of the appeal of Q also is his interaction specifically with Picard?

GC:
Oh, yes. He and Picard have this weird, quirky relationship. In
The Q Continuum
books, there are great chunks of time when it’s just the two of them wandering around in time and space, but that works because we have seen it before. I also try to remember the fact that Q occasionally can be dangerous and has gotten
Enterprise
crew members killed. That’s easy to forget about because there are a number of lighter, clown-ier Q episodes. But if you go back and look at [the
ST: TNG
second-season episode] “Q Who,” he does, in fact, get people killed when he throws them up against the Borg.

KD:
It’s an interesting dynamic. There are some moments when he plays the all-powerful buffoon, and others when he borders on malevolence. Do you think Q works better as a comic foil or as a true villain?

GC:
Ideally, you want to keep an edge of danger to him. Picard always seems to take him seriously. They may be out palling around, but he knows there’s some potential for getting into serious trouble. That’s what makes “Q Who” one of the great, all-time Q episodes. Q is funny; he has a great sense of humor, but ideally you want to keep that edge of danger to him as in [the
ST: TNG
series finale] “All Good Things…” or “Q Who.”

KD:
Do you think that [the
ST: TNG
sixth-season episode] “Tapestry” is in keeping with that edge-of-danger premise, too? I’m thinking in terms of his ability to shape history and change Picard’s life.

GC:
Yes, that is one of the more intense ones, too. I’ve always thought that you could look at these books as sort of the flip side of “Tapestry.” In the episode, Q takes Picard into Picard’s past and confronts him with his mistakes. In the books, Q takes Picard into his own past and we get to view his mistakes. Here, it’s time for the guided tour of Q’s past.

KD:
So, do you think that Q and Picard might ever become friends?

GC:
I don’t know. Picard is always wary of Q; he always sees a potential for things going awry. And Q seems somewhat cozier and more friendly with Janeway, which was, in fact a problem because I never could figure out entirely why he didn’t just send them all home. The Q episodes on
Star Trek: Voyager
were fun but to watch them, you had to sort of take away the whole issue of “Q could get them home in five seconds. Why doesn’t Janeway really seem terribly interested in this prospect?” They usually would create a threat to distract her when getting home should be number one on Janeway’s agenda. If you remember, the episodes always ended with Janeway helping out Q, so why she didn’t go ahead and twist his arm a little and have him send them home, I don’t know. It was a different relationship even though Janeway can find him just as exasperating.

KD:
Maybe Janeway handled Q the way Kirk might have handled Q?

GC:
I don’t know. I imagine that Kirk would be fairly antagonistic toward Q because Kirk never liked weird, glowing balls of energy coming in and messing with his crew. One of the dangers [of a Kirk-Q story] is that you would end up doing [the original series episode] “The Squire of Gothos” again. Trelane really is sort of like an early draft of Q.

KD:
And some of those issues are addressed in Peter David’s book
Q Squared.

GC:
I went back and read the other Q books as well as watching the episodes, if only to try and avoid contradicting them. It’s not mandatory, but I didn’t want to shamelessly contradict anything. I see why we would not want to get too self-referential because then it feels like a closed universe and too club-ish. I would have liked to mention Trelane in my books at some point, but it didn’t work out. There were certain subjects that I was told were off-limits in terms of Q’s past.

KD:
Oh really?

GC:
Yes. At one point, I wanted to reveal how he met Guinan for the first time, but Paramount preferred to keep that mysterious for the time being. I think I also was going to bring in Wesley Crusher, who at that point was somewhere off traveling the universe, and again was asked not to deal with that right now. I think there’s a throw-away reference somewhere when Dr. Crusher asks Q to keep an eye out for her son.

KD:
Yet again, that harkens back to your desire as a
Star Trek
writer to tie up the loose ends that are left dangling. Is that part of the appeal that keeps you going back to writing
Star Trek
books?

GC:
Oh yeah. You’ve got 400 or 500 hours of stuff here in this great, big universe that you can flesh out and make connections. It always seems redundant to invent a new race of energy beings when there’s sixteen other races of energy beings already running around the Alpha Quadrant. Besides that, there’s sort of a nifty, fannish appeal of “Ooh boy oh boy, I managed to tie that one in.”

KD:
I know you do a lot of research for your writings. The whole process must be fun for you, especially at that “a-ha” moment when you see something and think, “I can put this over here.”

GC:
I love looking for loose ends and holes and realizing that they never did resolve what the issue is between Guinan and Q, you know, and that there’s room for a book there. I’m bad about it. [laughs] It’s gotten to a point where I’m watching this stuff, let’s say
Star Trek Nemesis,
and Shinzon mentions that he and his Reman buddies fought in the Dominion War, and I’m thinking “Hmm, book idea. File that away.” I’ve got a file in the back of my head for
Star Trek
loose ends, such as “Whatever DID happen to Geordi’s mother, whose mysterious disappearance never has been explained?” You sort of keep these packed away for dreaming books out of one line of dialogue.

KD:
There are a lot of unknowns to explore in the printed side of
Star Trek
storytelling.

GC:
Speaking of unknowns, and bringing us back to
The Q Continuum,
one problem I had writing was that at that point in the
ST: TNG
series, I did not know who the security officer was on the
Enterprise.
At that point, Worf was on
Deep Space Nine,
and whenever it was time for a movie, Worf conveniently would be dropping by.

KD:
[laughs] “Well, what brings you back into this neck of the woods, Mr. Worf?”

GC:
“Oh, well, I heard you guys were shooting another movie.” [laughs] We just didn’t know at this point in the continuity who the officer was; he or she had not been named. I remember asking John [Ordover] just who the hell was the security officer when Worf was not dropping by for vacation. John said, “Go ahead and make someone up, Greg, but he has to be dead by the end of the trilogy.” And that’s how we dealt with that.

KD:
[laughs] Do you remember other potential problems?

GC:
I remember living in mortal fear while I was writing the trilogy that
Voyager
was going to run a Q episode that would contradict my entire plot. The third-season episode “The Q and the Gray” was the most recent episode when I was writing the books. That’s the one that introduced “Mrs. Q” played by Suzie Plakson. Incidentally, I was not to call her “Mrs. Q.” It got very clumsy calling her “the female Q,” but contextually I was able to write around it. I have heard some fans refer to her as “Suzie Q.”

KD:
Very clever.

GC:
Yes. So as last seen, Q had gotten married and had a kid. And as far as the trilogy books went, thankfully,
Voyager
left Q alone for a year and a half. So it fits in very nicely. There also was a bit of a problem in that the books were set on the
Enterprise
-E, which at that point I had seen for all of four scenes here and there in a movie. There was a lot we didn’t know about the
Enterprise
-E. Occasionally, I’d get a note back from Paramount with something like “There is no Ten-Forward on the ship.” Oh, well, that’s news to me. I also had a daycare center in the book, but then found out that there are no children on the
Enterprise
-E. I think I invented a holographic daycare center just to keep those scenes alive. That’s a difficulty with the weird universe of
The Next Generation
when we see that universe for only two hours every three years.

KD:
I’m guessing that can simultaneously inspire and hamstring a story.

GC:
It’s easiest doing classic
Star Trek
because that’s finished; it’s done and we all know that. Then again, there’s always time travel and they can do the episode where Nichelle Nichols guest-stars on
Enterprise.
My doing
Deep Space Nine
and
Voyager
were interesting because I had to write the books while the show was just starting up and we all were still learning just who the hell Sisko was.

KD:
If you had to make a choice, would you be able to pick a favorite crew to write?

GC:
I’m not sure. Obviously I’m showing my age, but I always seem to end up going back to the original series and dragging in Hortas or Mugatos or Isis the Cat. But there are things I haven’t done yet, pieces of
Star Trek
I haven’t touched. I have yet to do a Seven of Nine book because my
Voyager
book was back in the Kes era. Kes is actually on the cover. I think I got one of the last “Kes-centric” novels in right under the wire before she left the ship.

KD:
Your strategies just underscore, at least to me, that there’s nothing that cannot be blended in
Star Trek
in a good story.

GC:
Oh, yeah. Sometimes, it seems very, very logical for it to be blended.