Star Trek Host: Hello and welcome to the first Online Star Trek Book Club chat event!

Today we'll be chatting with Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels, authors of "The Sundered: The Lost Era 2298." Also in our chat today will be Pocket Books' Marco Palmieri, Senior Editor for Star Trek related projects.

Star Trek Host: How does it work to write together? Do you trade off writing chapters?

Andy Mangels: Mike and I will usually get together for drinks and onions rings and plot out a whole bunch of different ideas and we kind of ping pong ideas off each together until they get into a coherent form.

Michael A. Martin: What Andy said. We sit down together and work the story out until neither one of us remembers who contributed what, then we figure out which author is going to write which chapter. But not always.

AM: Then once the story gets approved, assuming the story gets approved, when we have it broken down into chapters, each of us will write the chapters we've chosen and because we know what the next chapter is going to be and where the characters are going to go we can therefore be fairly consistent with what happens when we write. Then once we're done with that, we trade chapters. Then each of us goes over the other's chapters to check for inconsistencies, for things we want to add, take away, grammar mistakes, etc.

MAM: We also look for bits of action that don't match up. Maybe someone took his jacket off in chapter four, and he's still wearing it in chapter five. Continuity.

Question: How do you maintain stylistic integrity when there are two writers?
db

MAM: Andy does everything I say. Just kidding.

AM: And Mike does everything I say. Actually we developed early on, when we were writing comic books together for Marvel, both of us have a similar writing style. Mike likes to use bigger words than me, but we have a similar enough style that it compliments each other. Often I go through months later and read stuff we've done and I can't tell what's his and what's mine.

MAM: Sometimes I have to look back to look at the spreadsheet to make sure who actually wrote which chapter, because half the time we can't remember who contributed what.

Q: How did you come up with the concept for "The Lost Era"?
multitronic

MP: "The Lost Era" as a concept, doing stories in that period of time between Kirk and Picard, has been kicking around for years. We were waiting for the right time and format to undertake it. Once the studio decided to focus on Enterprise, didn't concern itself as much with the later eras, we felt there was less of a risk of stepping on toes creatively. So we had more creative freedom than we would have had if 24th century stories were still being done by the studio.

AM: For about 15 years the fans have been asking for a line of "Captain Sulu/Excelsior" books, so I think what "The Lost Era" does is — because we're already signed to write another Sulu book — this is the pilot episode. If the books do well, then fans will get their wish and see further adventures of the Excelsior crew.

MAM: I second the motion.

Star Trek Host: Do you prefer writing established characters, like Sulu and Chekov, or new characters like the Burgess and Lojur?

MAM: Well, I think this book represents both camps pretty well. There's a whole quarter of the novel that's devoted to people and places no one has seen before. I like to give a balance of both.

AM: What I've found is that the writing of characters that I've grown to know and love or hate over the years is always an exciting thing to do if you get to explore cool things with them. However, writing new characters that interact with them seems that you're a little more in control of their fates and their personalities. Burgess, as an example, was an extremely conflicted and at times unpleasant character, but hopefully when we wrote her, we make it clear that in her mind she was doing what she felt was best and even going back to our first ST novel, "Rogue," when we dealt with Section 31, we dealt with the same kind of issues there - people were taking actions and making decisions based on what they truly felt was the correct thing to do, not because they were evil but because they were going with their conscience. That said, I should note on "The Sundered," that I really enjoyed writing sections with the Tuvok character.

MAM: It's really hard to show off the established characters to the best advantage unless we successfully create new characters and new places for the established characters to explore, new characters for the established characters to interact with. So not only the handling of the new and established characters ... both are equally necessary.

Star Trek Host: Henrik H. asks: What led to the decision to use the Tholians and the Nausicaans as "secondary" villains in "The Sundered"?

MP: The Tholians were chosen because nothing had been done on screen or in novels for a number of years. This was an opportunity for us to delve into a species in some detail that had not been done before. The Naussicans, Enterprise had already established early contact, so we could utilize them in a way that was consistent, and it let us get away from the usual familiar adversaries (Klingons, Romulans) and show less-seen aliens in a slightly different context. It's interesting to note that since we made the decision to use the Tholians in "The Sundered," we learned that Enterprise was going to use them in an episode. We watched that episode carefully, looking for continuity issues, and were pleased to find that the episode tracked consistently with what we were doing.

AM: Boy did we have a couple of sweaty weeks, afraid that it was going invalidate the half-written novel!

MP: But that of course is a risk that the books have been living with for decades. We just don't let it stop us from trying to tell good stories.

MAM: Regarding the choice of the Naussicans, Enterprise has shown that humans and Naussicans have come into contact with each other very early on, and since we know how aggressive and nasty the Naussicans can be they struck me as appropriate as vehicles to illustrate a first contact situation that will go awry for the humans. The Naussicans to me represented a way of illustrating that the utopia that humanity grew into with the Federation was by no means inevitable.

AM: And previously we had only seen the Tholians as essentially a head on stick, a helmet on a blurry screen.

MP: Actually, we have an UNLIMITED special effects budget!

AM: So what we tried to do with them, because we don't have a makeup of special effects budget, was to have the strangest and creepiest kind of alien under that helmet on a stick. One of the nice things about Star Trek's long legacy and many of its character which have been around so long is that you never know when a concept will pop up again. Many authors and editors grab onto concepts and characters and say yes, we want to do more with these, witness the Tholians in this book.

Q: How as authors do you feel knowing that in the future if someone makes an episode or movie with a different direction than your books about the same subject, it's the tv/movie that is going to be seen as the real chronology?
new_frontier

MAM: That's just an occupational hazard.

AM: It may invalidate the continuity of the book, but it won't invalidate the ideas and prose of our book.

MP: A good story is a good story, regardless of whether or not it's ever contradicted by some future television or movie production.

MAM: The hard cover novels, "Dark Mirror," by Diane Duane, some aren't true anymore because the latter half other DS9 universe took the mirror universe in a different direction. Still, kind of a cool book.

Q: As a Voyager fan it was a treat to see Tuvok handled really well in "The Sundered." Are there any plans of including him in future Captain Sulu novels?
TMara

MP: If we do more Captain Sulu novels, the timing of the story will determine if Tuvok is on the ship.

MAM: It's going to depend on what period of Star Trek history the story is good in.

AM: We're also in discussion on future novels that may or may not include many characters, so you never know, until it's announced, who will be used in the future.

Star Trek Host: I especially enjoyed the Capellan Security Officer Akaar, having remembered when he was born in "Friday's Child," has he appeared in any other Star Trek books, or were you responsible for resurrecting the character?

MP: Leonard James Akaar was first reintroduced in the DS9 novel "Twilight" by David R. George III. He appears as a fleet admiral in that time period, set after the conclusion of DS9. He's been a recurring character in the DS9 novels since then.

Q: You've worked with the crews from TNG, DS9, and Excelsior ... Which group was the most fun to write for?
OmahaStar

MAM: That's a hard question, because they're all so different. I'd say probably the Deep Space Nine milieu is most fun, because it strikes me as the most realistic part of the Star Trek universe, as far as characters having deaths, and families, and so forth.

AM: I think, for me, it was not as much which series did I most enjoy writing in, because each of them has special things about them and each book, being our creation, was immensely fun to work on. There are characters I really enjoy writing, I enjoyed Picard, I enjoyed writing Ro in the DS9 books, I enjoyed writing Tuvok, but it doesn't mean I enjoy writing some any less, there are characters I feel better slipping into their voice.

MAM: It's really hard for us to compare one book to another, or one series to another because our work on each of the series .. . each book is so unique. It's such a one-off creation.

AM: Given that it takes about 9 months to produce a book, it's kind of like asking which of the children you've birthed do you like best.

Q: Guys, I loved "Orb of Opportunity," but it seemed you tried very hard to make Kai Winn a likable character, one who is doing what she does for the good of her people. Why did you choose to portray her as sympathetic, contrary to what has been shown on-screen?
OmahaStar

MAM: I'm not sure it was so much an effort to try and make her sympathetic as much as to show that she has dimensions to her personality besides being a melodrama villain.

MP: Every character should have layers, and the more layers they have the more interesting they are.

AM: This harkens back to what I was saying earlier about characters who believe in what they're doing and Kai Winn is a perfect example of someone who believes ultimately what she's doing is right. Whether it's best for her, best for Bajor, she believes she's right. So we can look from the outside, like we do at politicians of today and see their actions as villainous, but that doesn't mean they see their own actions as villainous.

MAM: Nobody thinks of himself as a villain. A considerable amount of that story was told from Winn's point of view, therefore you're going to see the world through her eyes. Through her eyes, she's only doing what's best, however it may look from the outside.

Q: What other projects are you two working on now?  Can you reveal anything?
Jon

AM: Our next project we're working on is for "Worlds of DS9, Book 2," we will be writing a Trill novella for that.

MAM: Potentially a short novel.

AM: Bigger than a novella, like a short novel.

MP: It's half the size of a regular book and it follows up on the events of the DS9 hardcover "Unity," as do all the "Worlds of DS9" trilogy.

MAM: The other big project will be plunging into about the same time, is about Captain Sulu, tentatively it's titled "Forged in Fire" and it relates how Hikaru Sulu becomes captain of the Excelsior. It also sheds light on DS9 continuity, started in the episode "Blood Oath," in which we learn that Kurzon Dax has a history with Kor, Kang, and Koloth, arguably the most famous Klingons in all of Star Trek history.

AM: Beyond that we have been in talks with several of the Star Trek editors about writing future Star Trek projects and we are also in talks with other licensed editors about writing other licensed properties, including shows that are currently on the air. And we have proposals out for original series, not as in Star Trek, but original book series that are our own creation.

Q: Marco, how do you decide when to release a new book? Do you just pace them out so as not to have too many published at the same time?
Tony

MP: The way books are scheduled depends a lot on how fast the author writes, where there's room on the schedule, and whether there are events that it can be aligned with. For example, we've done a lot of DS9 this year because of the tenth anniversary. We hope to do projects observing Voyager's tenth in 2005, TOS 40th anniversary in 2006, etc. We also have to give authors time to actually create the books.

Q: Does Paramount have a say in what you write (publish)?
beachgirl

MP: Paramount does not attempt to influence our creative direction or publishing program. Paramount is very supportive of our creative efforts, and looks to approve what we do, not to generate ideas for us.

AM: I've worked with numerous licensing companies in the last 18 years of writing, and of all of them, Paramount has been one of the best and most supportive of its authors. If you're looking for the dark side or evil empire ... (laughter) it's not Paramount!

MP: (laughs)

MAM: So far in the 7 years Andy and I have been writing Star Trek stories, we've never had any huge problems getting stories approved. In fact, they're open to be persuaded if they're a little bit unsure about something that we propose initially. They're very open to persuasion, and it's been a joy.

AM: As long as we can back things up with either hard science or continuity or both.

MAM: To give an example of that in relation to "The Sundered," the whole story Neyel depended upon the existence of orbital colonies during the time of Zefram Cochrane. Initially that notion was met with a little bit of trepidation, because it doesn't appear anywhere int he continuity, but I was able to persuade Paramount that something like orbital colonies or factories would have been necessary for Zefram Cochrane to conduct a successful warp flight, as depicted in "First Contact."

Q: Marco, are there any Voyager relaunch novels and more Enterprise books in the future?
shuttlepod_one

MP: There are more Voyager re-launch novels planned. We're looking to see if the author can have them ready to publish in 2004 at the earliest. As for Enterprise, we are doing more. The novelization of "The Expanse" is coming out in October. December will see the publication of "Daedalus" by Dave Stern. There will be more Enterprise books in the months to follow. We are also planning to do more Voyager books set within the timeframe of the series, not just after the series.

Q: Do you have a special character, timeline or series you prefer to explore?
new_frontier

AM: It was great that our first effort, "Section 31 Rogue," was on the best seller list and was well received, and we would like to re-explore that again. Beyond that, we have between the comic book stories we've written, and upcoming novels, we have written just about every time period for Star Trek and I think fans should look for some very cool Star Trek projects in the future.

MAM: I hope we get to explore all of them!

AM: I wanted to point out one thing we forgot to mention - for those people who are technologically non-impaired, we have two Starfleet Corps of Engineers books eBooks, available for download at SimonSays.com and there is more information on all of our projects together at my website, which is www.andymangels.com.

beachgirl: Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Stuart R.: What a brilliant book I loved it! With the Vanguard1 it was very clever as well. Using people from past Star Trek and Future Star Trek, i.e. Sulu and Tuvok.

Alyson: I must say your continuity was the best I have ever read with the 2060 stuff on.

multitronic: Thanks!

Ripper714: Thanks for chatting with us!!!

CmdrClow: Thanks, have an awesome day.