Warning: contains spoilers for SCE 23-24: Wildfire and after
 
 
 
 
 

On the scientific side of the story, I decided to work in some ideas I'd put together about how to reconcile Trek physics with the cutting edge of modern physics.  The early warp theories mentioned in the story are real; see Marcelo B. Ribiero's Page for the original papers.  In the real theory of space warps, wormholes and the like -- all of which are derived from Einstein's equations of General Relativity -- spacetime is shaped by the distribution of mass and energy in the area.  This would make a spacewarp unstable if that distribution changed, unless it were stabilized by some kind of exotic matter.  This instability provided the main source of danger for the story.

I also brought in elements of string theory, postulating that "subspace" refers to the six or seven extra "compactified" dimensions predicted by the theory.  Altering the geometry of those extra dimensions underlying our spacetime would change the laws of physics, so I assume that a "subspace field" is actually a region in which that dimensional geometry is changed, allowing the physics-defying effects we've seen in Trek such as mass reduction, FTL signals in computers, and the production of exotic particles.

The other kind of "aftermath" that went into this story was the aftermath of  the death of Lt. Commander Duffy.  Keith tipped me off to this little fact in advance, giving me the chance to work up a story based on it.  He wanted me to concentrate on Gomez' depression, on her struggle to resist that tendency to give up and see things as hopeless, and to figure out how to move forward after a tragedy and get on with her life.  As it happens, I've had my share of experience with depression and with being in a rut.  So I was able to bring a lot of my own experience to bear here.  The depression issue and the presence of O'Brien also let me call back one of my favorite DS9 episodes, "Hard Time."

The timeframe of this story also gave me a remarkable opportunity: even though this was my first SCE installment, I got to introduce a major new character, Lt. Commander Tev.  Keith created the character, but I was the first one to write him, and got to invent a lot of details of my own, such as his appearance, voice and full name.  Keith's character brief was basically "Charles Emerson Winchester the Tellarite," brilliant, haughty, hard to like but worth the effort.  So I based his appearance and voice on David Ogden Stiers (though not specifically on Charles).  I also tried to figure out why he was the way he was.  I decided that Tellarites (or at least those of his subculture) are essentially honest to a fault, seeing tact and modesty as deceit.  What's polite to humans is rude to Tellarites, and vice versa.  Actually, though, I based him largely on my younger self, before I had learned much about tact and other social skills.

I also got to make up a couple of new security guards, Rennan Konya and Ellec Krotine.  The latter is named for an old friend from college (hi, if you're out there!).  Konya, meanwhile, was an attempt to approach a security character from a fresh perspective, not as a tough-guy fighter but a gentler, more empathetic type.

Fans of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda will probably notice a ton of in-jokes.  I was quite a fan of that show before the studio systematically got rid of everything I liked about it.  But since my in-jokes refer to the original writing staff and their ideas, I'm okay with their presence in the story.
 
 

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I actually based the main storyline here on an experience that a friend of mine went through in real life; for a time he, like Quark, lost track of his values in a controlling relationship.  Except in that case it was his partner who was the wealth-fixated materialist.  I've long since fallen out of touch with that friend, alas, but he was always a big Trekker and I'm sure he'd get a kick out of inspiring a work of Star Trek fiction.

That's not the only recycling I did in this story.  Some of the Odo-Quark exchange on p. 140 comes from a story I unsuccessfully submitted to the Strange New Worlds anthology contest some years back -- mainly the first paragraph and the line "Odo had few equals when it came to peers."  (I just couldn't let a line like that fade into oblivion.)  The name "Reletek" comes from the spec script that got me a pitch invitation to DS9 several years earlier, though it's the only thing I've so far managed to salvage from that script.  Alrakis (mentioned on p. 141) was home to a dangerous alien race in one of my old, abandoned concepts for my original SF universe.  Alrakis is the Arabic name for Mu Draconis, and is also spelled Arrakis, a name familiar to fans of Frank Herbert's Dune novels.  The name Alrakis is less frequently applied to Sigma Draconis, the star system visited in "Spock's Brain," which is more commonly known as Alsafi.  Although that system had two other inhabited planets besides the one visited in "Spock's Brain," I think it's more likely that these warlords hail from Mu Draconis.

The reference on p. 143 to Kira and Shakaar's upcoming visit to the Kenda Shrine is an allusion to the next episode after this story, "Children of Time," which begins with Kira saying that they visited that shrine and were told by the Prophets to break up.  In that light, Odo's words become ironic.

The 270th Rule of Acquisition (p. 145) is my own coinage.  One of the best things about writing a Ferengi story was the opportunity to contribute my own Rule of Acquisition!  (I chose 270 because rule 266, "When in doubt, lie," was on a similar topic.)  I also coined the Law of Conservation of Property and Exploits of the Nagi.

I don't know whether Quark's rendering of "Rom is confused" into Klingon is quite grammatically correct; indeed, I'm hoping it isn't.

The discussion of the physics of disintegration is based on my own musings about the subject, but it reflects an idea hinted at in the TNG Technical Manual on p. 136: "Cascading disruption forces cause humanoid organisms to vaporize, as 50% of affected matter transitions out of the continuum."

In the first paragraph of the scene beginning on p. 156, the sentence beginning "As Quark swaggered..." is taken almost verbatim from the script to "The House of Quark" -- a very inside joke on the déjà vu of the experience.

Quark's fight with Odo was loosely based on an event from my own life, when in ninth grade I jumped on a bully's back to stop him from stealing a ball belonging to a friend of mine.  My intent had been to knock him over with my momentum, but I barely budged him.  So I hung on for dear life and tried to trip him, but it's hard to trip someone who's standing still.  However, the bully had by now become aware of this little pest on his back and reached back to swat at it, thus letting go of the ball.  To my credit, once I saw that my task was accomplished, I immediately halted my aggression and let go.  However, I'd failed to take into account that I was suspended above the ground, and found myself falling back.  To my further credit and astonishment, I managed to turn my fall very deftly into a backward roll, and realizing that the bully might have vengeance on his mind, I came up smoothly into a defensive pose.  (I was probably thinking, what would Jim Kirk do?)  I had neither the strength nor skill to follow up on that pose if he'd called my bluff, but it must've looked mighty impressive, because he and his friends broke and ran through a nearby door.  ...Whereupon my friend angrily threw his ball at the half-closed door, bouncing it directly into the bullies' hands, and we never saw it again.  There's a lesson there....

In my original proposal, however, the scene went differently -- Odo morphed a mek'leth and sparred with Quark, defeating him handily.  Paula Block of Paramount Licensing reminded me that Odo would never use weapons.  I figured a fake weapon counted as an exemption, but on reflection I realized Paula's take was truer to the character and made for a better scene. 

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There's an original novelette I've been trying to sell for years.  It's a story that means a lot to me, and I keep getting rejection letters saying "This is a beautiful, poignant story, but it just doesn't quite work for us."  I've been encouraged enough to keep trying to revise it and get it to a sellable point, but I still haven't had any luck.  When I was asked to pitch to Distant Shores, I had just about given up on selling it, so I decided to develop a story around similar themes, building on the terminal illness of Lt. Marika from "Survival Instinct."  At least that way I could say the things I wanted to say.  As it happens, though, once I'd written this, I thought of a way I could rework that original story, take it in a slightly different direction and make it viable again.  I haven't sold it yet, but I'm still hoping.

The reference to the Ankari's far-ranging ships is necessary to explain the discrepancy in "Equinox" of how the Ankari could still be in range if Ransom's crew had been using their bodies for months to cover tens of thousands of light-years.  I also took the opportunity of Marika's exposition to explain a little more clearly how her triad managed to escape the Collective and reach Voyager.  Also, I attempted to provide a practical explanation for why Seven wore those catsuits.  Not that I ever had a problem with her wearing them....

The Three-Kiloparsec Arm is the arm closest to the galactic core.  It also rates a mention in Orion's Hounds.  This is where Voyager ended up after its transwarp journey in "Dark Frontier" and for the rest of the series.

When I saw the end of "Distant Origin," with Chakotay giving Gegen the globe of Earth as a souvenir, I was expecting that there would turn out to be hidden data files within it.  It just seemed to me that it should.  That didn't happen in the episode, but here I had the chance to make it so.

Here, as in "...Loved I Not Honor More," I chose to make my story occur simultaneously with an episode of the series.  This is because I don't like a season to get too cluttered; I feel there should be downtime between adventures as much as possible.  I also think it adds depth and believability to a universe if you know that different people are leading their own independent lives simultaneously.  But in this case, having the story overlap "Barge of the Dead" allowed me to fill in some of the gaps in that episode.  I was able to explain what the multispatial probe was trying to probe, why it was so important to retrieve it, and what happened to it afterwards.  Most of all, though, I was able to answer my biggest nagging question: why the Doctor would have consented to B'Elanna's request to be "killed" a second time.  That was a scene that, in my view, needed to be told, and Marika's perspective provided the key.  (Ironically, though, making the story work meant reducing the downtime between "Survival Instinct" and "Barge of the Dead" to less than a day.  The final Seven-Naomi scene of "Instinct," apparently taking place after Voyager has left the outpost, would have to come several scenes into this story, after the log entry.)

Meanwhile, the scene with Neelix in the mess hall let me work in a reference to my favorite character, Kes.  Originally his tale was told in flashback, so that Kes actually appeared in the story.  Alas, it ran too long that way, and I had to change it.

My description of the Markonians is based on one of the numerous species appearing in "Survival Instinct," though the episode never specified which species they were.  The species I chose appeared in two different scenes (the bridge scene at the beginning and the corridor scene with Seven and Naomi), but with a different skin color in each scene, pinkish in one and blue in the other.  Presumably Markonians, like humans, come in a variety of hues.

Originally, since Marika had a whole month to live, I thought of tying this into "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" as well.  However, I decided it worked best if I cut her lifespan even shorter than expected, so there was no overlap.  I considered at least having Marika, say, suggest to the Doctor that he take up daydreaming, but that would've been veering a bit too close to Mary Sue territory. 

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When I went back to college to study world history, I came to realize that there were a lot of simplistic assumptions underlying the Prime Directive, particularly as expressed in the later Trek shows.  It's naive and somewhat condescending to think that any contact with a less advanced society will automatically destroy them; really that's just a way of letting imperialist Europe and America off the hook for aggressively trying to destroy those cultures.  But Europe itself was once a primitive backwater that came into contact with the advanced technologies of the Far East -- things like stirrups, lateen sails, the compass, movable type, and gunpowder -- and far from being culturally devastated, Europe embraced those technologies and used them to assert its own culture globally.

It's also anthropologically naive to think you can understand a culture by watching it in secret.  Even immersion anthropology works best when you can tell the people around you about your worldview and what you don't understand about theirs, so that a comparison is possible.  Without that level of communication, misunderstandings are inevitable, because neither you nor they knows what unspoken assumptions they're using that you haven't thought to ask about.

So I wanted to do a story that was a satire of the Prime Directive, specifically a role-reversal story that challenged the smug Starfleet observers' assumption that they were qualified to judge the whole situation better than the people they were watching.  I wanted someone to be watching them.  Also I wanted to touch on various alternative approaches to clandestine observation that other species might employ.

That contributed to my idea for the structure of the story, switching between different observers' points of view.  This format was also heavily influenced by the opening sequence of Serenity, the feature-film sequel to Joss Whedon's prematurely cancelled series Firefly.  That sequence was constructed in a brilliant nesting-dolls fashion, moving out from one perspective to another, each time revealing that what we thought we were seeing was actually just part of another reality -- an opening expository voiceover is revealed to be a lecture in a classroom, the classroom is revealed to be a dream, etc.  I tried in my hamfisted way to achieve a similar series of progressive reveals, pulling out from one viewpoint character to another who was watching the previous one unawares.  But a couple of the transitions were tricky to time right, and in retrospect I wish that the transition from Nerrieb's POV to Damala's had come one paragraph later.

The idea behind the Redheri's method of infiltration is one I originally conceived for my original SF universe.  Well, actually the idea of telepresence robots came to me first, as a way my heroes could do the Trekkish trope of going undercover as aliens in a universe without humanoid aliens.  This was before I rethought my assumptions about the Prime Directive and clandestine contact.  But along the way, I had the thought that another species could use the same methods to subtly nudge a race toward readiness for contact.  If I'd ever written that story, it would've been along the lines of the contact that Nerrieb briefly recalls here -- using science fiction to prepare their target culture for the real thing.  Unfortunately the premise of this story made it impossible for me to explore that prospect in depth.  But who knows -- the Redheri are still out there.  Maybe I can revisit them in some later work.

The name "Redheri" is swiped from an old Voyager pitch, a race that would've been a red herring in the story.  I guess they vaguely play that role here, but mainly I just went with the name because it was available.  Their anatomy is based loosely on  the extinct Anomalocaris, which I had seen recreated in the Discovery Channel's Before the Dinosaurs (aka the BBC's Walking with Monsters) while writing this story.  Their names are anagrams of European explorers: Nerrieb is from Jacques Bernier, who wrote Travels in the Mogul Empire in 1663; Yanslet is from Henry Morton Stanley, famous for "Dr. Livingston, I presume" but infamous as a leading agent of King Leopold II's brutal conquest and exploitation of the Belgian Congo; Hudalliuc is from Paul DuChaillu, the first European to encounter gorillas, who invented and popularized the myth of gorillas as vicious fanged killers in order to justify his habit of shooting them; and Glysinek is named for the redoubtable Mary Kingsley, whom I got to know rather well when I did my senior thesis on her.  Admiral Deyin's lines on p. 169 about trade as a universal language are a paraphrase of Kingsley (the original is quoted in my thesis), though I think Mary herself would not have spun it quite so condescendingly.

Sigma Niobe would be in the same (fictional) constellation as Beta Niobe, which went supernova in "All Our Yesterdays."  I assume that Beta and Sigma Niobe are in roughly the same region of space, so it's possible that this story.takes place close to "All Our Yesterdays" in the timeline.  But since I was specifically asked for a standalone story with minimal continuity ties, its timeline placement is deliberately vague.

The proper names on Sigma Niobe II are taken from one of the only two ST fanfiction stories I ever wrote.  In that story, I had four alien councilmembers: Lean-Yiamed-Ba, Deyin-Kaiyel-Ned, Noan-Ayem-Sud... and Noin-Padnaifasdan-Ilaiyendamalawangliaph.  (I figured she was from a different country than the others.)  I've always been fond of that name and couldn't just consign it to oblivion.  There are characters in Orion's Hounds named Podni Fasden and Wangliaph, and here I got to use up the rest of the name with the Ilaiyen Archipelago, Damala, and Captain Nohin (spelling changed to make the pronunciation clearer).

It does seem like rather a coincidence that all these clandestine observers are watching each other at the same time, but I tried to address that in the story.  The Yemai, the Redheri and the Coalescence are all there for the same reason, namely to study and identify Ilaiyen's healing properties.  Kirk's party is there following the Yemai.  And Chaane is there because of the extraordinary circumstance of all these other societies converging on a single place, mutually spying on one another -- a rare situation that a time-travelling historian would want to observe firsthand.  Additionally, I'd suggest that the Redheri may have learned of Ilaiyen during a preliminary survey of Yemai culture, that the Coalescence probably learned of it through infected agents in the Redheri Consortium, and that they may have used other agents in Starfleet to get the Enterprise and Errgang sent to Sigma Niobe at this time.

More specific textual annotations for "As Others See Us" and other stories in the anthology may be found at Star Trek: Constellations: The Annotations, hosted by fellow contributor Allyn Gibson.

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TNG: "Friends With the Sparrows" notes
Contains spoilers for story

Since there are so many specific continuity references here, I'll do these notes the way I do my novel annotations, with page-by-page references and discussion. 

 In writing this story, I was walking a bit of a tightrope between what I wanted to say about Data and what canon insisted upon.  I always felt it was ethnocentric to assume that Data had no emotions just because his responses were not recognizably human; as Deanna discusses on p. 260, Data's responses could be defined as a distinctively android kind of emotion.  (This discussion was based on a scene I originally wrote for a TNG spec script.)  The emotion chip felt to me like an easy fix, a way to facilitate his misguided pursuit of human mimicry over his exploration of his own unique identity.

To a degree, the later movies helped with this, for they essentially abandoned the emotion-chip storyline: in First Contact, Data could turn it off at will; in Insurrection, there was a throwaway line saying he hadn't taken it with him on the mission; and in Nemesis, its existence was totally disregarded and Data was his old self. These developments have been explained elsewhere in Trek fiction: how Data gained the ability to turn off the chip is explored in an installment of the TNG: Slings and Arrows eBook miniseries, and its permanent removal prior to Nemesis was explained in A Time to Be Born and A Time to Die by John Vornholt.  In this story, I tried to set the stage for those progressive steps away from the emotion chip by having Data learn not to define himself, his worth, or his ability to grow based on the presence of the chip.  This let me get across some of my own dissatisfaction with the idea of the emotion chip.  However, I tried to establish that he still valued the chip and what he could learn from it, in order to stay reasonably consistent with previously published tales such as A Time to Be Born/Die and Immortal Coil by Jeffrey Lang.