Worlds in Collision (77 page)

KD:
Back then, I think that if it wasn't for Franz Joseph and Bjo, a lot of writers might have been lost.

JRS:
Yes.

GRS:
Yes, I remember our putting in things like the length of the nacelles and all of those fun details. But we heard, “No, no, we know what a nacelle looks like. Take out the measurements. You don't have to be that precise.”

KD:
Did your sitting down as fans with these characters in your hands for the first time prompt you to write things for your favorite ones?

JRS:
No, we treated them as our favorite ensemble, really.

GRS:
Any scene with Spock, Kirk, and McCoy, that's just gold. You could sit and write that all day. They're so well-defined, so it's always fun to put them together.

JRS:
That's a favorite. You can just hear their voices in their heads. Now, what was trickier was stepping outside the characters we had seen on screen to create new races, but not spending too much time doing that or getting too caught up in the “guest stars.” That's something I think a lot of first-time
Star Trek
writers have found. If you approach it like a fan, thinking there is something that would be fun to do with a character, or thinking about creating a certain kind of person you run the risk of spending too much time creating your own series within
Star Trek.
That was something we were quite aware of. We did realize how much we were relying on what we had seen, how easy it was to write the comfortable scenes because we knew that everybody knew what someone looked like or sounded like. In a way, a lot of groundwork had been done for us. Actually, this was a good thing for us to start with as a shared novel.

KD:
Rather than one of you having to explain to the other any nuance of an original character that you're trying to put forward, in this case, when Judy writes, “Damn it, Jim,” Gar can hear it and know what you're getting at.

JRS:
Otherwise, you're having to create, as a writer does, everything from the ground up. A science-fiction writer is a world-builder, and the world of
Star Trek
is already built. We had the luxury of going out into the corners that haven't been explained; we had that nice bulwark of the series that we didn't have to explain or even create a great deal of visual imagery for.

KD:
Perfect. It's like taking your first vacation together in a town you each have already been in.

JRS:
(laughs) That's quite right.

KD:
So once
Memory Prime
was finished, I presume you enjoyed the experience and wanted to try it again. Did you go to Pocket Books with additional outlines?

GRS:
Actually, this is where it gets convoluted.

JRS:
We had other writing projects going on at the same time, including
The Chronicles of Galen Sword.

GRS:
We told Pocket that we'd love to write another one. Judy said that with all this two or three hundred years of
Star Trek
history, starting with Zefram Cochrane through the original series to
The Next Generation, Star Trek
needed that James Michener–type of novel to span all that time. I think, sort of instantly, we said,
Federation.
We started working on a story that with time travel and time twists and things like that would get Kirk, Spock, and McCoy caught up in dealing with Zefram Cochrane and they would glimpse
The Next Generation.
We pitched it to Pocket, and they agreed to take a look at it. So we sent in the outline and we ended up rewriting it or amending it three times just so we weren't stepping on any toes at
The Next Generation
production. Pocket was so excited about this, Dave Stern and Kevin Ryan both basically said that they were having a lot of success with
Star Trek
hardcovers and that they were going to make
Federation
the third hardcover. They set a slot for it, we sent in the revised outline, they thought it was great. They sent it to Paramount and I think it came back within the hour saying, “Oh no, no, no. We can't combine the generations.”

JRS:
We had to set it aside.

GRS:
So here was Pocket, who had us slotted for a hardcover, and they had us work on this story, and we had refined it and it was a really neat story, and all of a sudden there was no story to go in there. So they said, “Can you come up with something else?”

KD:
(laughs) Oh, no problem.

GRS:
And I remember it was a cold day because there was snow on the ground in Toronto—

JRS:
And we went and took a nice, long, snowy walk.

GRS:
And we thought
Federation
was such a good title—

JRS:
And it was one of the prime concepts of the series, and unique to
Star Trek
—

GRS:
So we started going through all of the other neat catchphrases of
Star Trek.
“Prime Directive” was the one that stood out. And there had been a science-fiction story that we had been noodling about that concerned an alien race about to have a nuclear war. We thought, Wouldn't that be a great dilemma for Kirk? That had to be the dark side of the Prime Directive: To be orbiting a planet that was basically where the Earth was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and you're about to see an intelligent species wipe itself out with nuclear war…and you can't do a thing about it. Within about four or five days, we had the outline in at Pocket, and I don't think we had to rewrite it once.

JRS:
But again, it was
Star Trek
dealing with big issues through science fiction.

KD:
But this wasn't just a big issue story. It was one that was a crisis for the characters in the crew. All of our friends are in trouble. Everyone was split across the universe and you didn't know whether the family was going to get back together again.

GRS:
Yes. And that's why the very first part of
Prime Directive
is called “Aftermath.” We wanted to start with the characters in the worst possible situation. They're disgraced. They have done something horrible, or appear to have done something horrible.

JRS:
And we did it so effectively that we received some of the most vehement fan mail we've ever gotten. People said, “I began this book and I couldn't get past the first two pages. How could you do that to Kirk?” Well, if they had only read on, it does get better. (laughs) We got one book sent back to us with the eyes poked out of all three individuals on the cover and a note reading “This is what you have done to my heroes.”

KD:
(laughs) Oh no! Was there a secret part of you that enjoyed setting this up? I mean, I thought the career of every single one of them was over.

JRS:
Well, these things happen. The Prime Directive caused conflict in the original series and it came up continually. In
Next Generation,
things have moved to a different style. It's like the maturation of a large company, and it has become consolidated. In
Prime Directive,
we liked the fact that we could take everyone, throw them all around, explore how each one of them attacks a crisis, and then bring them back together.

GRS:
Memory Prime
is like an expanded episode. It is a single story and it takes place in one location; it's contained.
Prime Directive
is a story that can be told only in a novel. It takes place over months, and it really forces the characters to go through hard times. It's not the sort of thing that could have been a one-hour episode or a two-hour episode. It would be very difficult to compress even into a movie. I think this is the first time that we got into the richness of a
Star Trek
novel; instead of just being an episode we wish we had seen, this is a story that could exist only as a novel.

JRS:
I think the process of going through the story outline for
Federation
got us in that mood. If you look at the stories,
Memory Prime
is self-contained; moving up to
Prime Directive,
which went over months;
Federation
then spans hundreds of years; and then
Millennium.
(laughs)

KD:
One of the appeals to me of
Prime Directive
is that we got the chance to see Kirk in the private sector. Was that something you thought was fun to portray?

GRS:
Absolutely. One of the most interesting events of my early teenage years was when we lived in a house that was about ten houses down from the entrance to a big freeway. One night, my father and I were home and all of a sudden these bright headlights shone through our living-room window. Somebody had pulled up to the house late at night. I looked, and there was this Jaguar parked on our front lawn. My dad went out, and there was this pilot. He was looking for the freeway, and he had had too much to drink. So my dad invited him in. Talking to him, my dad learned that this guy was a commercial air pilot and he had just had his physical that day, and he had just received a downgrading, so he could no longer be a pilot for passengers. Now he was going to fly cargo planes. And it was the most devastating thing that had happened to him. I was basically just a kid meeting this fellow who had lost his career. He had lived to fly. I remember being completely taken in talking to my dad about it afterward. Here was someone who was driven to do one thing; he had achieved that and now had lost it because he was dependent on this huge infrastructure and all these rules. He had fallen afoul of the rules, and it had destroyed him.

JRS:
When we were looking at Kirk, we were thinking, What is the worst thing that could happen to him?

GRS:
And it is to take the starship from him.

JRS:
He wouldn't care about his reputation, but if you took the starship from him—

GRS:
He would do everything in his power to get it back. The guy who ended up driving onto our front lawn, he had given up that day. But Kirk wouldn't quit.

KD:
I remember really enjoying as I was reading the moments of Kirk's being charming, resourceful, and able to handle himself just fine without all of the comforts and privileges afforded to a Starfleet officer.

JRS:
They were separated from where you normally saw them. That made you concentrate on them more as individual characters.

GRS:
That's one of the really nice things about writing a
Star Trek
novel, and it really hit home with
Prime Directive.
It isn't a story you could tell in that length of time about brand-new characters in a brand-new setting. The strength of it is that, at that point, we have lived with those characters for more than twenty years. Virtually anybody who picked up that book would know that Kirk was the guy in the center chair of a starship, and then we could tell the story from there. There was no need to introduce the character; we all know this guy, now let's really push him.

KD:
Another thing I really enjoyed was the relationship between Sulu and Chekov. How were you inspired to depict that?

JRS:
Again, we're looking at areas not fully developed onscreen. We often felt as viewers that we wanted to see more of the ancillary characters beyond the “top three.” We wanted to see more of them and more of their working together.

KD:
And as for the others?

GRS:
When the story emerged, we knew exactly what Kirk would be doing. I don't remember writing down the characters' names on a sheet of paper and listing what they would be doing.

JRS:
It was more like figuring out what their first inclinations might be, who they might seek out as allies, what would be an option for them. It worked so well to separate them. You see them as an ensemble onscreen, but to separate them, especially the secondary characters, was interesting because we weren't sure what to do with them that would feel satisfying. There hadn't been much attention paid to them in the series.

GRS:
But the common theme is that none of them have given up.