In 2008, it seemed like Michael and I had a
Star Trek writing career that was going somewhere. Our
S.C.E. novella
The Future Begins had come out in 2006; the
Next Generation anthology
The Sky's the Limit had contained a pair of linked short stories by us in 2007. We began noodling around with novel pitches.
At that year's Shore Leave convention, we approached Marco Palmieri asking if we could talk; he was one of the editors at Simon & Schuster assigned to Star Trek fiction, and had been our editor on The Sky's the Limit. Marco is a very supportive and nurturing editor; I mean, he tells you absolutely when something doesn't work, but he is keen to develop new talent. A couple of the best moments in The Sky's the Limit had come from him.
We had lunch with Marco (I remember this being awkward, because we were awkward; Marco was great; I hope I am much better conversationalist-with-relative-strangers now than I was at 23). We ran one of our ideas past him, which was a novel set on the original Enterprise between Star Treks I and II, when Spock was in command. (I think when it was a training ship?) The Enterprise would come to a new planet of squid aliens.
Marco said that original-series novels set outside the bounds of the actual original series were tough sells if there wasn't something about the premise that made it uniquely suited to the era; classic five-year-mission stories were preferred. But he liked the idea of squid aliens (because of what he'd seen in the documentary The Future Is Wild, about possible future paths for evolution on Earth), and he invited us to retool it as a Titan pitch. Titan was an ongoing series of novels about Riker's command, and they had a strong exploration focus, in contrast to the more political/galactic crisis mode of many Star Trek books in those days.
Sometime after we sent him the pitch (called, I think, either Look Closer or Arts of Speech) and were waiting to hear back, we heard that he was soliciting pitches for a third Myriad Universe volume as well. These were collections of three novels in one trade paperback, each about a different alternate timeline. The first two collections had featured premises like What if Spock had died as a child? and What if Earth had never joined the Federation? and What if no one had discovered the Bajoran Wormhole? We hadn't been asked to pitch, but had heard about from someone who had.
One day, shortly after the deadline, I had an idea pop fully formed into my head: What if the Vulcan Reformation had never happened? The Vulcans would just war among themselves for millennia; the Andorians would be the major spacefaring power of the 22nd century; Earth wouldn't meet the Vulcans in First Contact; the Klingons would have no warlike rivals to keep them in check. I came up with an idea set on the eve of a Klingon War (when "Errand of Mercy" took place in the "Prime Timeline"), with the original Enterprise (which would have an Andorian first officer, Thelin from the cartoon episode "Yesteryear" instead of Spock) visiting Vulcan.
I wrote about half an outline and sent it to Michael, saying I was probably crazy (the deadline was Aug. 1, and this was Aug. 13!), but could he take a look? Michael was on a trip, actually, and so could only suggest that Thelin had just played a significant role in Geoff Trowbridge's Myriad Universes tale, The Chimes at Midnight, and so I should go with someone else. He suggest Janice Lester. I wanted a nonhuman, though, to fulfill the "Spock" role, and ended up picking Gav, as the most prominent Tellarite we'd ever seen on the original show.
I finished up the outline myself and sent it off to Marco. Here it is: (yes I really did title it "Mirror-iad" on the document we sent Marco...)
Star Trek: Mirror-iad Universes
Errand of Logic
a pitch by Steve Mollmann & Michael Schuster
What if… the Vulcan Reformation had never happened?
The U.S.S. Enterprise is on a routine re-supply mission to Beta XII-A when a Klingon battlecruiser appears, claiming the planet as their own. Captain James T. Kirk is able to defeat the Klingon cruiser despite the fact that his first officer, Gav, is stranded on the planet below. The Enterprise is then recalled to the Federation’s capital—Andoria.
Kirk participates in a briefing by Admiral Shras: the Federation is about to experience the first war in its seventy-year history. The Klingon Empire has expanded about as far as it can go in every direction, and is now turning its sights on the United Federation of Planets. The Federation Guard is amassing its forces in preparation for an anticipated first conflict above Organia, but Komack has another mission in mind for the Enterprise, one that takes the ship to Earth. There, Kirk makes the acquaintance of a man called Sarek of Vulcan, from an insignificant prewarp planet orbiting 40 Eridani A. Sarek was an astronaut, on an orbital mission diverted from its course by a missile strike from a rival country. The expedition was fortuitously picked up by a passing Federation vessel, but could not return home—a nuclear strike had wiped out its country of origin. Sarek and the others resettled on Earth, and Sarek eventually married an Earth woman named Amanda Grayson, the linguist of the vessel that rescued him. The two eventually had a son named Spock.
Now, Sarek fears that his homeworld is in the path of the Klingon invasion, and the Guard is stretched too thin to defend a nonmember planet. His hope is to return and unite his people, bringing an end to the constant war that has plagued them for thousands of years. He and Spock journey to Vulcan on the Enterprise. Spock’s Vulcan blood leads him to be passionate and violent to a fault, and he tries his best to subdue it with his human qualities, but his excesses often lead him into conflict with the Enterprise’s chief medical officer, Leonard McCoy. Spock wants no part of his homeworld or the mission, however.
Kirk, McCoy, and Sarek beam down to a village where Sarek has some distant family—but it is in a rival nation, and Sarek is knifed by someone who recognizes his accent and they return to the ship. McCoy struggles to stabilize Sarek, but his knowledge of Vulcan anatomy is limited and Sarek is dying. Spock, overcome by anger, promises to take his father’s place on the mission, but it is only a ruse to enable him to gain revenge on the man who killed his father. Sarek passes away soon after.
The landing party is working to trace Sarek’s family—while Spock half-heartedly preaches his philosophy of peace—when a garbled communication comes in from the Enterprise. It is under attack by a Klingon ship, and Commander Gav is dead. Kirk orders Sulu to do whatever it takes to protect the ship, and not to worry about the landing party—and to Spock’s surprise, he elects to continue the mission. It turns out that Sarek’s family no longer resides here, but has migrated to the other side of the Forge. And there is a man who can guide them to their new location: Stonn, the man who killed Sarek. Spock will have to postpone his vengeance if he wants to survive his time on Vulcan.
Kirk, McCoy, and Spock make their way across the Forge, guided by Stonn. To Spock’s chagrin, he finds out that they are being followed by a number of younger Vulcans, including Xon and Tal, fascinated by who he is and what he is saying—despite the fact that he does not believe it himself. He does his best to encourage them.
The Forge brings many dangers upon them and proves quite trying, but Kirk and McCoy always enable them to pull through—Spock soon realizes that humans are no less passionate than Vulcans. The difference between the two species is that humans have managed to subsume those passions into something else, not just giving into them at a moment’s provocation. They are attacked by raiders, but rather than fight back, Kirk and McCoy figure out what they want, and stop them peacefully.
Spock begins to actually believe the ideals of the Federation more and more. At one point, Stonn is attacked by le-matyas and Spock saves him, though whether out of genuine feeling or simply a desire to kill the man himself, he cannot say.
They finally reach their destination and make contact with T’Pau, the matriarch who is a distant relation of Sarek’s. It is their hope to use her influence to spread their message—Sarek had believed she would be sympathetic to their cause. She is indeed, but is not convinced that such a thing could actually work, and unwilling to endanger her own standing on something that could fail. Spock tries to preach peace and begins to gather a group of youth around him, but his turmoil is continuously increasing inside him, making it harder and harder, as is Sybok, a man who claims to be Sarek’s first child, and the leader of the local war clan.
But Kirk and McCoy support him with their own perspectives, Kirk’s a sublimated passion, McCoy’s a medical, clinical one. They too are coming to admire the keen insight of this Vulcan. But eventually, things reach a boiling point—he commits an act of violence against Sybok. McCoy realizes this is no simple anger and talks to the Vulcan healers, learning that Spock has entered the Vulcan phase of mating, the pon farr.
Spock must take a mate or die. He had known it could happen, but only distantly—Sarek had hoped his son’s human blood would spare him this. A young woman in Spock’s movement named T’Pring volunteers to become his wife… but she is betrothed to Stonn.
Stonn is supportive enough of the cause to let T’Pring marry Spock… but there must be a koon-ut-kal-if-fee if the switch is to be binding, and he has no desire to go through with that. Kirk volunteers to stand as Stonn’s proxy… and fight Spock. What Kirk does not know, however, is that the fights typically end in death. McCoy thinks this is emotional madness and tries to talk Kirk out of it, but Kirk enters the arena. He tries to give Kirk tri-ox, but Kirk refuses, pointing out that Spock needs to win. Of course, he is no match for his half-Vulcan opponent. He is beat to within an inch of his life, and McCoy pleads with T’Pau to end to fight, but she ignores him. It is Spock who finally snaps out of it, seeing his new friend so wounded, and he ends the fight.
Sybok, who has been observing this entire time, is outraged at what he thinks is a farce of Vulcan ideals, and he enters into the fight against Spock. The two brothers battle, and Spock, depleted from his first conflict, fairs poorly. Stonn realizes that Spock’s words have been influencing him more than he thought, and intervenes to stop the fight—his right as the challenged. But Sybok refuses, and a confused three-way fight breaks out, Spock barely recognizing who is who in the throes of his bloodlust. He manages to incapacitate both of them, but T’Pau pronounces that someone must die if the ceremony is to be completed.
Spock looks between them: he can kill Stonn and gain his revenge, or he can kill Sybok and eliminate his greatest enemy in his cause. His Vulcan half wars with his human half. His choice hangs there, until a comment from McCoy makes him realize that his greatest enemy is nothing other than himself. He must not kill at all. He submits himself to the mercy of Stonn and Sybok.
Sybok is flabbergasted—he has never seen such a thing. And he is intrigued by an idea so powerful that it could overcome a Vulcan in the bloodlust. He and Stonn make an appeal to T’Pau, who agrees—the marriage can go forth without a death.
Thus Spock is married to T’Pring, and Spock’s peace movement begins to take shape. The Enterprise manages to make it back to Vulcan, and Kirk and McCoy depart, noting in their report to Starfleet that Vulcan might make a candidate for Federation membership one day, if the peace movement were to succeed. And perhaps an army of battle-hardened Vulcans could come in handy in the war against the Klingons…
BACKGROUND
If the Vulcan Reformation never happened, not only would the Vulcans not be logical creatures, but the Romulans would have not come into existence either. I think it was Duane who observed that just as the Vulcans subsume their passions into logic to stop from destroying themselves, the Romulans do the same with their games of treachery and honor. So, without Surak as that catalyst, the Vulcans would just war among themselves for millennia.
Without Vulcan assistance to clean up the postatomic horror, Earth took about twenty years longer to really expand into space. Still Cochrane in 2063, of course, but the NX-01 didn't follow until the 2170s. With no Vulcans to conflict with, the Andorians dominated "local space" at that time. The Federation is still formed, but in the 2190s, and not out of war, but simply an idealistic desire for cooperation. Its capital, however, is on Andor.
Without a Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons have much more room to expand (into the planets that are "really" Romulan), and there is never open conflict between the Klingons and the Federation. In fact, the Federation never engages in a war of any sort.
But by 2267, the Klingons have reached their point of maximum expansion in most directions and have turned their eyes onto the Federation. There are thousands of Klingon worlds, teeming with warriors, and the Federation Guard has little experience in combat.
Spock still exists in this world, however. Sarek was a Vulcan astronaut, whose capsule was sent adrift by a missile attack from a foreign country. It was rescued by a passing Earth ship, but Sarek could not return home because his home nation had also been destroyed, by those who feared that his capsule was an attack of sorts. (The Federation has a Non-Interference Directive in this universe, but it is not as strict as "our" Prime Directive.) He fell in love with the ship's linguist, one Amanda Grayson, and eventually they had a son named Spock.
The Enterprise exists in this universe much as it does in ours. Kirk and all the others are still there, maybe just a few small differences. McCoy in this reality is much more reserved, allowing him to spar with Spock, just the other way round than what we are used to.
The first draft had Admiral Komack, by the way; I replaced him with Shras at the last minute, but apparently missed a reference.
Marco got back to us about a week later, on Aug. 25, rejecting both pitches. Of Errand of Logic, he wrote:
The Myriad Universes pitch has a great premise; your historical extrapolations are interesting, the themes you propose to explore are great . . . but I think there’s too much “The more things change, the more they stay the same” going on. (The Enterprise and the human characters being essentially unchanged; the paralleling of “Amok Time,” etc.) I can’t help but feel that the lives of these characters, and indeed, their civilization, ought to be much less like the mainline universe, given the premise. And in some ways, what you have here is a little too reminiscent of A Less Perfect Union [Bill Leisner's story from the first Myriad Universes volume], in the sense that you have the political course of known space hinging on the TOS crew and their adventure with an atypical Vulcan expatriate.
There are some things I quite like about the pitch, but he was of course utterly correct.
A lot of my e-mails from 2008 are gone, so I don't know exactly what happened next. I do know that we e-mailed Marco another pitch on Sept. 7, so we must have spent a couple weeks rethinking. I am pretty sure the new take was basically all Michael's idea, as was the idea to send it off even though we knew his deadline had been Aug. 1! The new version was about a parent and a child, both Starfleet officers, the child being stationed on Vulcan as an observer, and the parent commanding a starship that comes to the rescue. The new Vulcan wouldn't be called Vulcan; the starship would have a predominantly Andorian crew. Both of these would allow us to play up the new universe more.
Of course this was Matt and Will Decker.
(Matt Decker is the doomed captain from "The Doomsday Machine"; Will was the intended commanding officer of the Enterprise in The Motion Picture, who gets pushed aside by Kirk's ego. Their father-son relationship was intended, but never stated on screen.)
This was the element that gave me pause: surely the appeal of Myriad Universes was unfamiliar versions of familiar characters? Did anyone want to read about alternative versions of two guest characters? But we wracked our brains for other classic-era parent-child Starfleet pairs and came up with nothing, and so sent it off. I don't seem to have a copy of this version, called Warring Passions, anymore.
Marco got back to us very quickly, accepting the pitch with a couple suggestions, the biggest being, "I’m okay with your using the Deckers as your main characters, but the brief mention of Sulu made me wonder if the reader would be more invested emotionally if you set the story three decades later and made the protagonists Hikaru and Demora?"
This seemed very obvious to us once he made the suggestion, and I think is a big part of the reason the final story works as well as it does. As I think I will discuss in a future post now, I wrote the Hikaru sections, and my way into the character was based on the fact that in the second pilot, Sulu was actually the Enterprise's astro-scientist; he apparently transferred to helm when the series went into regular production. I liked this idea of a guy who had wanted to be a scientist, to go into space for knowledge, but had ended up doing something different and more "practical." Prime Sulu seems fine with this-- but what if a Sulu in a more Andorian-centric and thus more martial space fleet was not so much?
He made a couple other suggestions we were happy to adopt, including replacing our invented Vulcan philsopher with a character from the show; we opted to use Soval, the Vulcan ambassador from Enterprise. He also worried about a line from Spock in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," that Vulcans would have gone extinct without logic, so how could they have survived another two thousand years of war without Surak? We suggested this workaround:
Let's say they very nearly crossed the brink 2,000 years ago. Perhaps a nuclear war erupted (as we saw it sort of did in the flashbacks in ENT's Vulcan trilogy) and devastated a lot of the planet, and the species spent its time pulling its way back up - and is now on the brink again. It may have taken them that long to populate the planet again, with some isolated clans still living simple lives in the desert. Radioactive contamination probably prevented them from spreading out for a long time, and only recently they managed to solve that problem.
Finally, he thought the title was too obvious. My first idea for a new title was The Fires of Vulcan, but that's also a Doctor Who story. I liked the idea of a mythological angle, though, and I discovered Eridanus (Vulcan's real astronomical designation is 40 Eridani A) was a mythological Greek river made of tears, and thus came up with The Tears of Eridanus.
Some small elements of the original pitch did have an influence: Gav remained the Enterprise's first officer in backstory, and I think we killed off Amanda in the new version specifically as a contrast to the original. Instead of marrying a Vulcan, she was killed by one!
Also there was an Aug. 15 e-mail where I wrote Michael, "There definitely needs to be a scene where Kirk is fascinated by some Vulcan's use of this substance vel-kroh." (The Enterprise episode "Carbon Creek" had established that velcro was brought to Earth in secret by a Vulcan in the 1950s.) And yes, I wrote the scene were Demora is amazed by the idea of velcro in the final version. It's so dumb, I love it.
One of the benefits of the Star Trek Adventures format is that it accommodates absences easily. "Oh, he didn't beam down this week." "Oh, she's away at a space conference." "Oh, they've got the anatid space flu." And then next week they can be back! Much more flexible than D&D, where you need to explain why the guy who was in the dungeon with you last week suddenly isn't this week. (Or, more likely, he's suddenly not there.) So mostly I don't worry about absences and my group plays every week unless I can't make it, and people's characters pop in and out, but we can work it in easily.
