Book bits

Following the reveal of part of the 2014 prose schedule recently, some of the authors have been talking a little about their new books. On his Facebook page, Jeff Mariotte gave a couple of hints about his TOS novel, Serpents in the Garden, including indication it wont be a five-year-mission adventure:

The book is about Rear Admiral Kirk trying to set straight some unintended consequences arising from one of his most difficult decisions during his original five-year mission.

He also mentioned the title should give a hint of a connection to a TOS episode. My immediate thought when I first saw the title was perhaps some sort of connection to The Apple (no confirmation on that yet though). UPDATE: Mariotte has now also commented that the connection is to a quote from an episode, rather than a title. One of my readers, commenting below, has found a likely candidate, suggesting a follow-up to A Private Little War.

Meanwhile on the TrekBBS, Greg Cox has been talking about his novel, No Time Like the Past, the other TOS book in the first third of 2014. It will be a five-year-mission story, and Cox has confirmed what one might assume from the title, as well the intriguing possibility of connections to Treks beyond TOS:

Oh, it's definitely time-travel-y . . . and may just have a connection to one of the latter-day series.

For more immediate reading, a recent episode of TrekFM's Literary Treks included an interview with William Leisner, regarding his recently released TOS novel, The Shocks of Adversity. Part of the book apparently actually come from an idea he had for (a very cool sounding) Voyager story; a thought experiment in the latter years of Voyager's run, considering how he might have focused the show:

If I were gonna run the show, I would have them run into another large governmental entity, life the Federation. That they had to get across this large area of space, that they had to create an alliance with this native government. My idea was to see that relationship between Voyager and the native throughout the course of a season, do a season long arc with that.

When it came to doing his new TOS novel he took that idea, and transplanted it into the unknown regions being explored at the edge of Federation space, to create the Doege Domain.

In 23rd century terms one-hundred light-years away is pretty much the equivalent of the Delta Quadrant. I transplanted this new suedo-Federation into the Goeg Domain, to just see how the Enterprise would interact with these people, creating this alliance, and then realising, these probably aren't the best people to be in bed with.

You can listen to Leisner discuss many more elements of his new book on TrekFM's Literary Treks.