David R. George III

I have a suggestion. You know the links in the heading of every page on the site (Member Map - Forums - Search - Members - Calendar - Live Chat - Gallery)? Why not add a link called "Trivia," which links to the Trivia threads?

Is there anyone here that could not participate or would be less likely to do so on a Sunday versus a Saturday?

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Me. Much to my chagrin, I would likely miss numerous Sunday sessions. Of course, that's just me, and I recognize that we must do what's best for the group as a whole.

I'd prefer the session to remain on Saturday, but would of course bow to the...uh, let's say the needs of the many. Of course, I'd as likely as not have to miss many of the Sunday sessions.

Multiple trivia sessions sounds like a nifty idea, for everybody besides George and Mike. These two guys already put in a great deal of work in producing their respective trivia contests, and I can't imagine asking them to take even more of their time in doing so. I do think that George might be on to something, though, when he speaks of getting the word out in more places than just StarTrekFans.net. Perhaps a few well-placed banners would bring in some new blood.

I also have another trivia suggestion, a variation of which I made to Mike a while ago. Since we now have two Super Qs, how about distinguishing the top trivia competitor in some way? Perhaps the upper echelon of trivia ranks could remain Super Q, but the very top trivia competitor could be given the additional designation "Great Bird of the Galaxy." (Or we could do it the other way around, with the highest level being Great Bird, and the number-one person being Super Q.) Just a thought.

Sorry this didn't work out, George. I attempted to send a few newcomers your way, but apparently to no avail. I'll try to come up with some other strategies.

Whatever you think is fair is fine with me.

After this weeks questions are closed down on friday, I'm taking a much needed break from the trivia. No worries..New trivia questions will be back on the board before you know it.

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I'm sorry to hear that we'll be taking a break from the trivia, Mike, because I enjoy it so much, but I've always been mindful of how much work it must take to stage the competition each week. I appreciate all of your efforts, as I've thoroughly enjoyed playing. I'll miss the trivia over the next few weeks, but will take heart that you are taking a well-deserved break.

Thanks, Master_Q!!  Congrats, David!

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Back at ya, Indy!

I'm still not done, but I really love it thus far.  Excellent work.

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Thanks for the kind words, Kate!

I'm reading Mission Gamma: Twilight....

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And there was much rejoicing! :P

Nice one, Mr. George!!  "A Piece of the Action" has always been one of my favorite TOS episodes.

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Thanks! And please, call me David.

I'm reading several "Star Trek" novels as I write them. Does that count? B)

I too am enamored of the Bajorans. They have an interesting, textured culture. I thoroughly enjoy writing Bajoran characters too.

Since this is the 'Romulan embassy' and the Romulans were so important to the story line of "Serpents Among the Ruins", I was wondering about your views regarding the Romulans and how you approach the task of writing Romulan characters. How did you 'fill in the blanks' of their culture and back grounds?

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I approach writing Romulan characters in much the same way as I approach writing characters of any species. While the fact that a character is a Romulan--or a human or a Klingon or whatever--can tell you some things about that character based upon the social and cultural milieu in which they were raised or in which they reside, they are still individuals. I think it is far more interesting to see differing viewpoints within the same society than it is to see a monolithic group of conformists. I liked being inside Gell Kamemor's head, for example, to learn that she considered the attitude of Romulan superiority of many of her people to be immoral. Far more interesting to me than all Romulans feeling that all other races were inferior to them.

I'm curious, was the Tomed operation a product of only Star Fleet Intelligence or was Section 31 also involved? Was Captain Harriman an operative of Section 31?

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There was no indication in Serpents that the Tomed operation was anything more than the brainchild of Captain Harriman.

I don't know if anybody here reads the novels that continue the "Deep Space Nine" saga forward from the final episode, but in them, we meet up again with Opaka.

You can call me Stephanie, or Valeris, or whatever flys your warbird. It is probably not as bad as... never mind.

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If the name Stephanie works for you, then it works for me.

That was one thing that you did exceptionally well- not stereotyping. I know that I for one did not expect the Federation to be the ones responsible for Tomed, even if it did only kill a few people after all. Vokar and Linavil are pretty much the stereotype that Federation people expect, but some of the others, like Kamemor, added a whole new angle. James and I were commenting on how Romulans needed to be shown less as just "the bad guys" and more with a personal side- the Romulan that cares for his family, that wants what is best for his Empire. Not that I minded Vokar and Linavil. They fascinated me; they were two of my favorite characters.

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Thanks very much for the kind words. It's very important to me to attempt to draw characters as individuals, and not as stereotypes. For me, the most appealing aspect of "Star Trek," in all its incarnations, is its message of inclusion, acceptance, and tolerance for all.

I did like the various scenes of the characters taking over Tomed though. That was a brilliant piece of strategy.

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Again, thanks for the kind words.

David, you have written for the post-series DS9 book line, have you any plans to write for the post-series voyager line?

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I have no current plans to write within the post-series "Voyager" continuity at the moment, but you certainly never know. Right now, though, I have my hands full with my TOS trilogy.

Can you give us any details about your TOS trilogy?

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I can, but then I'd have to kill you.

Actually, I'm in the nascent stages, so I really can't even offer hints at this point. But stay tuned.

Are you aware of any plans to expand the Star Trek line, perhaps with original creations of your own, like Peter David's New Frontier series?

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I know of a few things going on in the "Trek" publishing line. As for my own plans, I am, as I've mentioned, busy with my trilogy. After that, who knows? I have had a thought or two about returning to the Enterprise-B, either under Harriman's or Sulu's command (or even both). Again, stay tuned.

Thank you, David. I regret that I cannot write or read as much as I want because of school, but I do as often as I can.

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Nothing to regret about school. I'm sure you're doing plenty of reading and writing, just not involving "Star Trek" at the moment.

And welfconfed, you are right about the interesting character relationships. That is one of my favorite parts in stories. I was fascinated by the scenes at the Algeron diplomacy table. I like seeing into the different groups' minds and how they think about the various events- Universe, Tomed, etc. Though I am not much a diplomat myself, well written arguements fascinate me. I like the tension build-up too.

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I'm glad you liked these scenes. I did too. One thing I made sure to do was to portray even the various negotiating teams as not being monolithic either. On the Klingon side, we had Ambassador Kage, working for Azetbur's goal of prolonged and stable peace, which was also the goal of Romulan Ambassador Kamemor. At the same time, there were also a Klingon (Ditagh) and Romulan (Vreenak, later in life featured in the "DS9" episode "In the Pale Moonlight") who were working against this goal, seeking instead a position of superiority for their respective people. (The Federation team was not as fully explored, since the UFP point of view was being shown through Captain Harriman.)

By the way, my given name is Stephanie. I hate it though, so I use the internet to choose a name that describes my personality.

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If you prefer me not to use your name, then I won't use it, but like James, I think Stephanie is a lovely name.

You brought up a interesting point, the diplomatic chess game was just as fascinating as the more action packed scenes.

I would have loved to have seen the Algeron scenes expanded, but I don't believe that the average reader would have been happy with a book that focused only on a bunch of diplomates sitting around a table.

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I try to include a balanced mixture of drama and action. If anything, I think I tend to favor drama over action in my writing.

As someone who has written both Trek novels and an episode of a Trek T.V. series, (The Voyager episode "Prime Factors", season 1 episode 10) I was wondering if you would compare the two experiences? Were you satisfied by the final episode? Any interest in future T.V. work? Enterprise perhaps?

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Writing for television and writing a novel are very different experiences. Writing for television is far more collaborative, and the writing is essentially much more spare; a fifty-six-page teleplay, filled primarily with dialogue, requires a different discipline and mindset than, say, a 135,000-word novel. The schedule in television also tends to be much more demanding, or at least much more condensed.

I like both forms of writing. I will say that the five-page story I cowrote for "Voyager" remains probably the most difficult writing I've ever done. It didn't take me as long to write as, say, the thirty-four-page outline for Twilight, or the 200,000-word novel itself, but it was excruciating. In fact, my narrative outlines are always the most difficult part of my process.

As for the episode itself, I was largely pleased with how it came out, although I might have done some things differently too. With a feigned Vichy accent, Jeri Taylor once said to me, "And what is a Frenchman doing in that part of the galaxy anyway?"

I am interested in other television work, but I haven't yet had the time to pitch to "Enterprise," although I continue to consider doing so.

My favorite is the print edition of the Deep Space Nine Companion. The book is just filled with fascinating behind-the-scenes items, as well as the rationale behind the creative choices of the producers, writers, actors, and the like. Very involving, very interesting.

I noticed you were talking, Mr, George about the SNW contest. I too would love to throw in my own stories (trust me I wake up at 3am with the ideas) however, I can't enter the SNW contest, I don't live in the States or Canada. How now do I get involved in the Trek book 'verse??

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First, please call me David. (And what's your name? Nobody around here seems to want to sign their posts with their given name. )

Second, yeah, I'm aware that the Strange New Worlds contests are currently open only to residents of the United States and Canada (though not Quebec). The reasons for this come down to legality, as I understand it. At any rate, that unfortunately means that you won't be able to enter the contest.

If you are interested in writing "Trek," though, then you always can dabble in fan fiction, as you currently do. If you want to write "Trek" professionally, then you really need to become a professional writer first, and then attempt to tackle "Trek." I know that's not an answer you probably wanted to hear, but it reflects the reality of the situation.

I'm glad you enjoyed the novel, James. For me, most good fiction is character-driven, and I think that is certainly true of "Star Trek" and its successors. I endeavored in Serpents to explore various relationships, and you hit on two of them. In particular, the difficult father-son dynamic between Blackjack and John was important (in my estimation) not only because it allowed me to explore such a relationship, but also because it help explained how the man we saw as captain of Enterprise in Generations could have believably achieved that position and behaved the way he did, and yet still be ultimately worthy of his captaincy.

The long-distance but very deep romance of Harriman and Amina Sasine also provided me an interesting (I hope) dynamic to explore, and also permitted me to take the good captain where no other "Trek" captains have ever been taken, so far as I know.

My Demora Sulu short story (and it ain't that short) will appear in the Tales from the Captain's Table anthology, due out next June. As for revisiting the Enterprise-B crew again, either under Harriman or Sulu, I'd think I'd like that, but I first have to finish the original series trilogy I'm penning. Thanks for the encouragement!

Hello. I am so honored to meet you, and thank you for discussing your book here.

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It's my pleasure. I enjoy talking with readers and fellow fans. I also appreciate your kind words about Serpents. I enjoyed writing it.

By the way, how can one actually get to the level where one can be published in the Star Trek universe?

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Practice. That might seem like a glib response, but I don't intend it that way. It is my feeling that there is an art and a craft to writing, and like any other art or craft, it requires work and determination to advance. If you want to be a writer, then write. Commit to yourself that you'll write an hour every day, or ten hours a week, or two hours every Sunday, but commit to something and then stick with it. In my experience, the second most difficult thing for a writer to do is get started on a project; the most difficult thing for a writer is to complete a project. If you can get yourself doing those two things with regularity, then you will be ahead of most other people who claim to want to be writers, and you'll be well on your way.

I'd also suggest reading a lot (which I'm sure you do). The same way that a painter can learn different techniques from observing, say, the brush strokes of a painting, a writer can learn a great deal by reading the writing of others. You should and will find your own voice, of course, but you can help yourself do this by reading.

As for specifically writing for "Star Trek," the usual route is to become a professional writer first, then make proposals to the publisher. A different way, though, is to enter the Strange New Worlds contests, which have been occurring anually for the past seven or eight years. This is an anthology contest run by Pocket Books, open to all writers with, I think, fewer than three published works. If you can get a short story in there, you also stand a good chance of being allowed to make proposals of your own. If you're not familiar with SNW, check out the volumes on some bookseller site, and if you're really interested, pick one up, read it cover to cover, find the latest set of rules, and go to town writing "Trek" stories and mailing them in.

Hope this helps.

And you can call me David.

Hello, everybody. My name is David R. George III, and I actually wrote Serpents Among the Ruins. Poster welfconfed sent me a personal message and told me about this thread, then asked if I would like to add my two strips of latinum. Well, here I am.

Let me tell you my intentions in penning Serpents. As always, I wanted to write a good, dramatic novel. In this case, I was handed the keys to the Enterprise-B, crewed by Captain Harriman and First Officer Sulu, and I was pointed toward the mysterious Tomed Incident. That's all I started with.

Now, when I write, I genrally like to explore various themes. In this case, I thought the millieu in which I'd been asked to work provided a solid framework in which I could explore the gray areas of politics, diplomacy, brinksmanship, and terrorism. I also assumed that most fans, having heard that the Tomed Incident resulted in the deaths of thousands of Federation citizens and the isolationism of the Romulans, believed the incident simply to be a battle of some sort. I wanted to stand that on its ear.

What I ended up with was a 115,000-word novel (short by my usual standards, but actually long for a "Star Trek" novel), with which I was pretty satisfied (it made the New York Times bestseller list, which made me very happy). I've seen several very negative reviews of the novel by a few readers, though, primarily because they dislike that I had the "good guy" (in this case, Captain Harriman) do something they consider immoral. In a way, the posters in this thread are saying much the same thing; some appear to like that the Federation was portrayed as duplicitous.

Now, here's what I think might be missing from both of those analyses. The Federation is no more monolithic than the Romulan Empire, no more than any group identified by race. Not every Federation citizen is good, not every Romulan citizen is bad, and vice versa. People are indviduals, and their individual actions should be judged on that basis. In the case of Serpents, there are some Federation characters portrayed as basically being good (Demora Sulu, for example, and Amina Sasine), and some Federations characters portrayed as bad (Blackjack Harriman, for example). At the same time, we see good Klingons (Kage and Azetbur) and bad Klingons (Kaarg and Ditagh), good Romulans (Kamemor and Elvia) and bad Romulans (Vokar and Linavil). And when you get down to it, individuals themselves are often both good and bad.

As far as the events of Serpents go, Captain Harriman formulated a risky plan to avert a war, and in so doing, save the lives of billions...billions of Federation lives, and billions of Romulan lives. Was what he did right? Did the noble end justify the deceptive means? For me, those are the central questions I wanted to raise, and which I left for the reader to determine their own answers. In Harriman's defense, he believed that the Romulans were going to go to war eventually, and he had good reason to believe that. The Romulans had illegally placed a base on Devron II, then later occupied a peaceful, unaligned planet. Harriman also knew that there were people like Admiral Vokar in the empire who believed in the superiority of the Romulans, and who wanted to wage war. Against Harriman, he ended up having to kill several innocent Romulans, as well as several guilty Romulans; further, he perpetrated a fraud on the whole of the two peoples, both Federation and Romulan. Was it worth it? Should he have found another way? Should he have sat back and allowed war to come, in which the impact on both sides would have been devastating? Good questions, I think, and not necessarily easy to answer.

Anyway, I'm delighted that you read and enjoyed the book.

I have to agree that, although a new chief science officer must have been assigned to the station, we simply did not see them during the show's seventh season. In the novels that continue the story forward from the last episode, "What You Leave Behind," the new science officer is a young Andorian named Thirishar ch'Thane.

By the way, in the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I actually have written two of the dozen or so "Deep Space Nine" novels that take place after the last episode of the series. Still, I read the other works because I'm a big fan of the continuing storyline.

I don't know if anybody here reads "Star Trek" novels, but it might interest some of you to know that "Deep Space Nine" has been carried forward, in the books, from the final episode of the series. I mention that because Ezri Dax continues as a main character in those works, and she undergoes what I think are some interesting changes. We also get to know her better (even as she gets to know herself and her symbiont better).