Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (99 page)

BOOK: Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages
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AFTERWORD

To tell you the truth, as regards the Rihannsu…it all started with
Coriolanus.

I have dearly loved Shakespeare since I first stumbled on his plays as one of the first books I was “allowed to read” after I’d read through everything in the basement children’s section of the library in the town where I grew up. (Though, to tell you the truth, I was already reading the upstairs stuff anyway, whether they allowed me to check it out or not; the librarian upstairs was usually too busy to notice when a kid crept up the cellar steps and into the stacks to liberate a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
or Hamilton’s
The Roman Way.
)

I still reread the plays at least once a year, straight through, to reground myself in a very special part of the English language and its history. I was rereading the plays again just after finishing my first
Trek
novel,
The Wounded Sky,
and at the time making an attempt to get friendly with some of the material I’d read years before but hadn’t much cared for. One of these plays was
Coriolanus.
On first reading, I liked that one about as much as I’d liked
Titus Andronicus:
not very. On earlier readings, the protagonist had seemed like an idiot, so desperately hung up on his own class-oriented sense of honor that he could turn against his native city, even his family, primarily for the sake of assuaging his pleb-bruised ego. On the post–
Wounded Sky
rereading, that opinion had deepened a little, but the play still didn’t particularly jump onto my top-ten list.

There were also other things going on. Having finished
Sky
and having been promptly invited by my then-editor at Pocket to do another
Trek
book if I liked, I’d been thinking about exactly what to do. The Klingon language had been making its first splash in the public consciousness around then, and I mentioned the possibility of taking on another of
Trek
’s favorite species in that idiom: the Romulans. My editor shook his head and suggested that there wouldn’t be much of a demand for a Romulan dictionary, as the initial Klingon one seemed to be running rather slow in terms of sales. “But if you want to do a novel about the Romulans…” he said.

I’d thought about that for a while, principally in terms of the challenge. From canonical first-series
Trek,
we knew little enough about the Klingons; we knew far less about the Romulans. “Can I do some culture building,” I said, “the way John M. Ford’s done with the Klingons?” My editor checked with Paramount, and a while later came back to me to say, “Sure, go ahead, knock yourself out.”

So I started thinking about what that people’s history might look like. There were some hints in the episode “Balance of Terror” (reinforced later in “The
Enterprise
Incident”) about a possible connection to the Vulcans, but beyond that, little to go on except a sense—as much conveyed by the actors’ performance as by script content—of an honorable people, dignified, private, even secretive, and somehow with an air of being strangely threatened; dangerous and powerful enough, but also seeming to prefer remaining in the shadows. That whole patchy gestalt began to churn around in the back of my head, in company with the basic question that every wise psychiatric nurse learns to ask herself about the motivations and actions of a client:
How do you raise someone so that they turn out like this?

It was in this context that I was immersed while I was reading
Coriolanus.
The connection I was hunting for, however, the key to the book I was about to write, didn’t happen immediately. After a few weeks I finished up with Shakespeare and went on to other reading, including a very favorite book, Ursula K. Le Guin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness.
And everything was going along as usual in the chilly and familiar territory of the planet the Terrans call Winter until the disgraced and exiled “prime minister” of the nation of Karhide, Estraven, finds himself in a situation where he thinks: “I knew it was time to turn to my enemies, for there was no more good in my friends.”

Click!

Sometimes a book will not coalesce properly in my mind until a core appears around which it can form. I had been looking for my main character, the one who could best express why Romulans were the way they were—tough work, when I wasn’t myself sure as yet. But suddenly the character was there, in generalities if not in detail: someone who was going to leave the Romulan Empire behind and turn to the Federation—and someone who would ironically be doomed forever after, even under the best of circumstances, to be considered a traitor not just by one side, but by both. And not too long after that, the character quite abruptly coalesced around the likeness of another of my early
Trek
editors, Mimi Panitch—a small, slender woman with long dark hair and sharp eyes.

That was that. That was Ael—though I didn’t know her name for a good while, as her world started building itself around her. Echoes of
Coriolanus
swiftly began to run all through that book as I outlined it—a sense of someone forced to turn her coat and change her loyalties, not because of ego issues or a desire for vengeance, but by her culture’s steady drift away from the certainties that had once made it a noble thing, despite the unease and fear that had driven it (as I pretended) from its original home.

I found myself with other problems, though. I have to admit right here that I hadn’t originally thought her character would be female. But there Ael was, and sitting in the center seat of the vessel which would oppose her and
Bloodwing
—on and off—was a man with something of a reputation among the ladies. How was James T. Kirk going to react to being thrown together with a woman who (for maximum effect) had to have come close enough to killing him at least once or twice? How was he going to like her sitting in his center seat, while
he
sat in the
Enterprise
’s brig? I kept finding myself muttering, as I wrote, “There’s gonna be
trouble

!
” Yet at the same time, there was the temptation to increase that trouble, to make Ael give him as difficult a time as possible. Too few women in
Trek
’s history had ever at that point given Kirk a real run for his money, either tactically, intellectually, or emotionally. It would be a lot of fun to see how it worked out….

So in that book went, and a while later, there came a request for a sequel. That was the story that became
The Romulan Way,
a novel famously written extremely late (I really hadn’t expected to get involved in story-editing a cartoon series that year, but it had happened; nor had I expected to wind up writing an episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation,
but that happened too…) and written at great speed, during my honeymoon (I really hadn’t expected to have marriage provide me with a fellow writer who could so accurately ace my style; there are still people who aren’t sure which parts of that book Peter wrote and which I did, which suits both of us fine. The outline was mine—that’s all you really need to know). The title probably makes it plain that Edith Hamilton’s great cultural examinations
The Greek Way
and
The Roman Way
were still on my mind. As a sort of homage to Hamilton, I threw in another female character, Terise Haleakala-LoBrutto—a lady willingly immersed neck-deep, and perhaps dangerously deeper, in an alien culture she has come to love.

After that book went in, there followed something of a hiatus at the Rihannsu end of things, partly due to relocation overseas and an increased concentration on book and television work on the European side of the world. While I had long planned the end of Ael’s story—and after
TNG,
was already thinking about ways in which her worlds could be reconciled with the image of the Romulan worlds which was then becoming canon in TV
Trek
—I’d come to assume that there would be no particular interest at either Paramount’s or Pocket’s end in continuing the series. It came as something of a shock, therefore, when yet another
Trek
editor, John Ordover, emailed me and asked me to come in one more time and finish Ael’s story. I started that process, but once more life intervened: film work yet again threw the wrench so thoroughly into all my other writing that it was a number of years before I could get back to grips with Ael,
Bloodwing,
and the significantly escalated problems of the Rihannsu Star Empire. I do at least have something to show for that interference: the miniseries that Peter and I were working on almost constantly between 1999 and 2005,
Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King,
will have aired on the Sci-Fi Channel by the time anyone reads this. But I want everybody who waited so patiently (and sometimes not so patiently) to understand how thoroughly I regret the long delay between the publication of
Swordhunt
and
Honor Blade
and the story’s conclusion in
The Empty Chair.
Lennon was absolutely right, and would probably forgive me the paraphrase: life is indeed what happens when your publisher’s made other plans. I just want to thank Marco Palmieri once again for his help and thoughtfulness while he took one arm and I took the other and we dragged Ael (figuratively, at least) kicking and screaming into the Senate chambers and her people’s history.

So now, with regret, it becomes time for me to say my last goodbyes to these characters. They’ve been excellent companions through many hours spent in that dark place in the back of the writer’s brain, where drama plays itself out in a hundred different forms before finally suffering itself to be pinned down on paper. I’m going to miss them. But it’s time now for them to be out on their own…so keep an eye on them for me.

And the only thing that remains to be said is this:

No, I will
not
tell you what “Jim” means. Because if you just spend a little time thinking about it…you’ll know.

Diane Duane

County Wicklow, Ireland
the Nones of March, 2006

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Diane Duane
has been making her living writing fantasy and science fiction for more than a quarter century, and has written for
Star Trek
in more media than anyone else alive. Born in Manhattan, a descendant of the first mayor of New York City after the Revolutionary War, she initially trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse; then, after the publication of her first book in 1979, spent some years living and writing on both coasts of the U.S. before relocating to County Wicklow in Ireland, where she settled down with her husband, the Belfast-born novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood. Her work includes more than forty novels—a number of which have spent time on the
New York Times
bestseller list—and much television work, including story-editing stints on the DiC animated series
Dinosaucers
and the BBC educational series
Science Challenge,
a co-writer credit on the first-season
Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode “Where No One Has Gone Before,” and (most recently) another on the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries
Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King,
written in collaboration with her husband. When not writing, she conducts an active online life based around her weblog (http: dianeduane.com/outofambit), her popular “Young Wizards” novel series (http:www.youngwizards.com), and her European recipe collection (http:www.europeancuisines.com), while also stargazing, cooking, attempting to keep the cats from eating all the herbs in the garden, and trying to figure out how to make more spare time.

 

Peter Morwood
was born in Northern Ireland, and has been writing fantasy and science fiction for more than twenty years, with one solo Star Trek novel,
Rules of Engagement,
to his credit—this possibly making him the only
Trek
novelist with fighter-pilot training. His first fantasy series,
The Book of Years,
was reissued in the U.S. in 2005; his first live-action miniseries,
Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King
(co-written with wife Diane Duane, in association with director Uli Edel) aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in March of 2006. He’s currently working on the fifth volume of
The Book of Years,
the third in
The Clan Wars
series, as well as a new fantasy-historical novel and screenplays for a feature film and a second miniseries.

BOOK: Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages
8.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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