Posts Tagged ‘Seekers’

Star Trek: Seekers covers debut in USA Today (#SFWApro)

This morning, readers of USA Today‘s “Book Buzz” section were treated to the first public reveal of the covers for the first two novels of Star Trek: Seekers, an all-new original literary series by myself and the writing team of Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore.

seekers1 seekers2_cropped

The angle of the story is that it marks a first for Star Trek, in that the series was inspired by the digital illustrations of artist Rob Caswell, who had envisioned in his DeviantArt gallery an alternate reality in which Gene Roddenberry produced a 1970s-era sequel to the original Star Trek called The Seekers.

seekers_5_by_arcass-d4qs35pJust as episodes of the original Star Trek had been novelized by James Blish, Caswell imagined that the adventures of The Seekers would be novelized in the same style — and he crafted six brilliant, retro-style covers for these books that never were, and made them look like well-loved (and stained and stamped) library editions.

In March of 2012, just after the final novel of the Star Trek Vanguard series had been released, I was talking with Dayton about what we wanted to work on next. We were interested in developing another series on which we could alternate writing duties, as we had done with Vanguard, but we weren’t sure what form that series might take.

seekers_2_by_arcass-d4poik3Then I showed him Rob’s work on DeviantArt. Rob had used the original Archer-class starship design by our Vanguard illustrator Masao Okazaki as an element in his faux Seekers covers, and he had styled the covers with the 1970s-era typography and design that had been used on the classic Star Trek novelizations that Dayton and I both had devoured as young Star Trek fans in the ’70s.

When we saw Rob’s cover illustrations, Dayton and I agreed we wanted our new series to be exactly what we saw there: an homage to classic Star Trek, right down to the retro look and feel of the art and the type on the covers. We also knew that we wanted to call it Star Trek: Seekers — and that we wanted to bring Rob aboard as our creative partner on the new series, since it had been his imaginative leap that had brought the vision into focus for us.

One of the best moments of my career as a Star Trek writer was the afternoon when I got to be the one to call Rob and tell him that his work had inspired us to make his imaginary series a reality in prose — and that we wanted him to join our team and work on it with us.

Now, thanks to the support and hard work of a great many people at Simon & Schuster and CBS Television Entertainment — including editors Margaret Clark and Edward Schlesinger, publicist Juliana Horbachevsky, and licensing executive extraordinaire John Van Citters — that dream is about to come to fruition.

Star Trek: Seekers, Book 1: Second Nature, by David Mack, will be released July 22, 2014. Star Trek: Seekers, Book 2: Point of Divergence, by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, will be released August 26, 2014. Pre-order both books from your favorite retail sites, or directly from simonandschuster.com.

 

#SFWApro

 

Star Trek: Seekers #1 is away!

As of last night, the manuscript for Star Trek: Seekers #1 – Second Nature has been delivered to its editor. Now begins the waiting and the wondering: “What if the editor doesn’t like it? What if she asks for a lot of changes?”

In case you’ve ever wondered what it feels like for a writer to surrender a manuscript to an editor to begin the process of line editing, copy editing, and revision, it feels like this.

(I’d have embedded the video, but for some stupid reason the “start at [X] time” function doesn’t work when embedding on my blog, even though it works on Facebook and Twitter. Stupid blog.)

Time to distract myself with holiday planning….

Star Trek: Seekers is primed for liftoff…

As my literary co-conspirator Dayton Ward reported earlier today on his blog, the first two books of Star Trek: Seekers, our new (hopefully) ongoing series set in the era immediately following the events of the original series, have been listed on the Simon & Schuster website for pre-orders. Sort of.

I’ll let Dayton explain, with this excerpt from his blog post:

Star Trek: Seekers #1 – Second Nature, by David Mack – July 29th, 2014

Star Trek: Seekers #2 – Point of Divergence, by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, August 26th, 2014

Now, there’s a few things to note about these:

First, they’re listed as being only available in Kindle e-Book format. For those wondering, rest assured that the books also will be available as mass market paperbacks, along with all the various other e-Book formats.

Next, they’ve appended “Star Trek: The Original Series” to both titles. I suspect this is just related to whatever sales/marketing copy was sent out, as “Star Trek: Seekers” remains the series title. For whatever it’s worth, they did the same thing with Harbinger, the first book in the Star Trek: Vanguard series.

At the moment, Kevin is listed as the sole author of Book #2, which is just another example of how Amazon tends to dick up entries with more than one author. I imagine this will be updated/corrected in due course.

Eagle-eyed readers who remember the original pitch for the Seekers concept might be scratching their heads right now. Because Dayton and I have already been asked about this on Twitter, I might as well address the inevitable inquiries now. SEEKERS_promo_with_klingonsWhen we first announced the series, our vision was that the books would not have regular titles, only numbers, in order to evoke the retro look and feel of the old James Blish anthologies published by Bantam in the 1970s.

Long story short, we were overruled on this by the publisher. I’ll spare you the book-industry technobabble, but the simple explanation is that we were told the automated, meta-tagged, keyword-driven sales system that connects publishers, wholesalers, and retailers, would have suffered some kind of cyber-seizure if we had denied it titles. So, the books will now have titles. Win some, lose some.

In other Seekers-related news, we have been working during the past few weeks with artist Rob Caswell, whose mock covers inspired this whole project. We’ve prepped the cover templates for Simon & Schuster’s art department, and now Dayton and I are collaborating with Rob on the content and design of the cover art for the first two books.

For my own part, I expect to have a first draft of the book one manuscript completed in a couple of weeks and turned in to the editors before Thanksgiving, comfortably ahead of schedule. Then I can help my wife sort out our holiday obligations, and then I’ll get to work on my next Star Trek novel, Section 31: Disavowed, which will be a direct follow-up to A Ceremony of Losses, my just-released installment of The Fall.

Onward and upward, Trek fans!

 

TrekCore Asked; I Answered

I recently granted an e-mail interview to Dan Gunther of the TrekCore blog. Last Friday, while I was away from home, that interview went live.

It’s a substantial Q&A that spans my early years as a writer, my acclaimed Star Trek Destiny trilogy and my New York Times bestselling trilogy Cold Equations, my soon-to-be-released novel Star Trek: The Fall — A Ceremony of Losses (and the entirety of the The Fall miniseries), the new Star Trek: Seekers series, and my upcoming projects.

Here’s a small excerpt from the interview:

TrekCore: You have always brought a certain gravitas to Star Trek. Many of your stories are huge in scope, such as the Destiny trilogy or your Mirror Universe stories. persistenceAt the same time, you are very good at handing the smaller character moments that lend a verisimilitude to the stories you write. How do you go about finding the right balance between the sometimes huge, epic plots and the needs of the characters?

David Mack: It’s just something I do by instinct, to tell the truth. Much as I love the drama of tales in which people are swept up in the tide of grand events, I never forget that what makes those epic moments resonate for a reader is seeing them through the point of view of a character in whom they have an emotional investment. The horror of being on a blood-soaked battlefield will not carry as much impact filtered though the perspective of a character we don’t know as it would if depicted through the eyes of a character one has come to care about.

What it really comes down to for me is that I see war, disaster, and other epic calamities as catalysts for the exploration of character. Unlike movies, which can dole out spectacle for its own sake in a visual medium, I use action and tragedy to push characters to their limits, so that we can discover who they really are, what they really care about, and see how far they are willing to go to persevere or triumph when the odds are against them.

Go read the rest of my interview with TrekCore here.

Announcing … Star Trek: Seekers

SEEKERS_1_PREVIEWFor a while now, on various social media platforms and in Star Trek literature-related discussion forums, I’ve been dropping hints about a new Star Trek book project I have in the works. Having just unveiled the project to the audience at Shore Leave 35 in Hunt Valley, Md., I can now post the news here for the rest of the world to enjoy.

Coming next summer, Star Trek: Seekers will be an all-new sequel series to the Star Trek Vanguard saga. I will alternate writing privileges on this new series with my Vanguard creative partners, writing duo Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore.

Seekers will feature ships, characters, settings, and situations from the Vanguard saga, but it will also chart a very different course from its predecessor. Whereas Vanguard was described by many as “Star Trek meets the new Battlestar Galactica,” Seekers represents a return to the more classic style of Star Trek adventure: “strange new worlds, and new life-forms.”

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