The Seekers to become real books!

One of Rob Caswell's original The Seekers covers

A year or two ago I posted a couple of interviews with artist Rob Caswell, who had produced an amazing series of new cover designs for James Blish's TOS novelizations, and then followed that up with a series of covers for novelizations of an imagined TOS spin-off called The Seekers, featuring the Archer class from Vanguard. Pleased to have helped spread the word about some particularly awesome fan art I continued on my merry way.

Imagine my delight when I come online today to discover Seekers (minus the the) is to become a real book series! David Mack and Dayton Ward have announced they will be writing the series, along with Ward's regular writing partner and fellow Vanguard author, Kevin Dilmore. They will be using the same ping-pong style as the Vanguard series, with releases alternating between Mack, and Ward and Dilmore. The series will be a follow-up to Vanguard, featuring the small Archer class USS Sagittarius, and the Constitution class USS Endeavour, familiar to readers of the series, as they return to the Taurus Reach on a mission of exploration. Each book will also alternate between featured starships, with Mack's books focusing on the Sagittarius, while Ward and Dilmore will be taking the helm of the Endeavour.


Keen to give Seekers a different flavour to Vanguard, the series will be focused more on stand-alone exploration stories, Ward summarised their approach on his blog:

Unlike the Star Trek: Vanguard saga, Seekers is not intended to be a sweeping, serialized tale. Instead, most books would be “stand-alone” stories within the shared continuity, though the premise will allow for occasional “team-up” or multi-book adventures. Our intention is to bring to this new series the same “TOS-plus” storytelling style that made Vanguard so much fun, also while serving up a broader range of stories with an emphasis on exploration and discovery as characterized by the original Star Trek and, more recently, the Star Trek: Titan novel series.

Also, whereas Vanguard by design was intrinsically linked to the “canon” and even specific events and episodes of the original Star Trek, Seekers has for its playground the period following the original series (starting in 2269) as well as the largely untapped early movie era of 2270 and beyond.

In a homage to the original TOS novelizations, and Rob Caswell's covers, the series will not have titles, just numbers, and fittingly Rob Caswell will be producing the cover designs! Both authors posting about the series, posted this new cover design, which Dayton Ward noted is a mock-up, not the actual cover for Seekers 1:

The first two books in the series will be release in consecutive months next year, David Mack's Seekers 1 in August, followed by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore's Seekers 2 in September.

Check out Dayton Ward and David Mack's site's to see their announcements. Mack also posted a presentation about the series, which he has shown at the Shore Leave convention; the other images on this page come from that.

I for one am very excited by this! A Vanguard sequel, Titan-style exploration, stories taking us into the TOS movie era, and awesome retro titles and covers. Moreover I'm elated to see Rob's idea become real books!

UPDATE: Little note from Rob: The USS Rama, the Archer class ship that featured on his original The Seekers covers, has apparently been added as one of the Archer class ships in the Seekers series bible, so while it wont be the star of the show, it has been worked into the Trek-lite fleet. Neat!