We’re back today with Star Trek: Voyager author Kirsten Beyer, continuing our in-depth interview from earlier this week. TrekCore’s Dan Gunther checked in with Kirsten to talk about joining the Voyager story without Kathryn Janeway on board, and what’s coming up next for the Voyager crew.

TrekCore: We’d be remiss if we didn’t ask about the reappearance of Kathryn Janeway in The Eternal Tide. After her apparent death in Peter David’s 2007 book Before Dishonor, was there a sense from the editorial team that she needed to be brought back, or did you begin the Full Circle storyline knowing that you were building to her return?

Kirsten Beyer: No. When I was asked to develop Full Circle, my understanding from my editors was that the choice that had been made to allow Janeway to die in Before Dishonor was not intended to be reversed.

Yes, a backdoor had been left in that book – the readers of the epilogue saw a disembodied Janeway heading into the Q Continuum, so were that choice to be revisited, the bread crumbs were already there. But I was tasked with exploring how the loss of such a central character would impact those she left behind.

I embraced that direction wholeheartedly because it was something we’d never really explored in depth with one of our main crews before. Sisko’s “death” was always unclear to me and I don’t think I ever doubted he would be coming back. Didn’t he tell Kassidy he would at some point near the end?

Janeway’s death was an entirely different thing, in large part because of Voyager’s unique circumstances.  More than any other crew, Voyager’s was forced to become a family over the years they were separated from the Alpha Quadrant.  Her loss, and the particularly violent nature of it, was going to damage people deeply.  But it was also going to allow us to ask the questions of who these people could be in a universe where she was no longer there to lead them.

I think that turned out to be a question well worth asking. The choice to bring Janeway back in Eternal Tide actually began with the editors making a choice about Asfarah Eden that forced our hand.  The Eternal Tide was intended to be a big “event” sort of book.  These kinds of stories always shake things up and leave us fundamentally altered.  As part of that, the editors wanted to tie Eden to the Q.  Although that had never entered my mind when I was developing Eden, I could see the potential there.  I didn’t want to make her a Q. Been there, done that.

By making her essentially Q kryptonite, we could explore that dynamic and use the story to add to our understanding of the Q. But that epilogue from Before Dishonor was already out there.  To my mind, you were not permitted to write a Voyager story post-Before Dishonor that included the Q – without addressing the issue of what had become of Janeway.  We could still have made a different choice.  We could have used this story to lay Janeway to rest permanently with the Q.  But we couldn’t ignore it.

Kathryn Janeway’s death loomed over the series from the moment ‘Full Circle’ began.

After considering all of the options, it seemed wisest to me to embrace it, just as fully as I had embraced her death, and allow The Eternal Tide to become a story that explored the consequences of action and inaction, without shying away from the implications of those consequences.  It was also clear to me that Janeway’s potential to continue to develop as a character had been expanded tremendously by the events of Destiny.

We haven’t often seen Janeway wrestle with the consequences of her decisions.  She always had too much to do.  Except, I suppose in “Night“, when too much time on her hands led to some serious gut-checking.  Now it makes sense organically for the story and character to go there.  Yes, she is back. But nothing about her life now or the lives of those she once led is the same.  For me, this equals massive story potential and that’s always a good thing. T

he only regret here is that it meant the loss of Eden.  There was more story potential for Eden than I had time to develop.  But from the moment Janeway returned, the clock over Eden’s head was ticking.  Had she survived the events of Eternal Tide, whether they wanted to or not, every reader would be asking themselves when Eden would move on and how.

Writing Eden’s interactions with Janeway was interesting, and more could have been made of that. But it seemed pointless to prolong the inevitable. Once Eden became more than human, I had to let her go.

TrekCore: How has Janeway’s experience with death changed her? Will we see repercussions of her time spent “dead” in upcoming stories?

Kirsten Beyer: From Janeway’s point of view, her “death” never really happened.  She remained conscious of herself up to the moment the cube was destroyed and the next thing she knew, she was headed for the Q Continuum.  Fourteen months of real time happened for everybody else, but she never experienced that time.

That said, you don’t get assimilated by a cube, turned into a Borg Queen who then destroys several Starfleet vessels, hang out in the Q Continuum where you see your life and death over every possible timeline played out, choose to return to life and come within a hair’s breadth of witnessing the absolute end of everything, including the potential death of the man you love and the actual deaths of a fellow captain you respect and a godson you would have gladly sacrificed yourself to save, without repercussions.

I think the best way to describe Janeway’s experiences is that they have deepened her.  She is now conscious of several facets of herself and reality she never had cause to consider before.  And those she is closest to have grown considerably in her absence.  They have learned to live without her.  There is no way integrating all of that will be easy on anyone involved.  But as the story progresses, it must be done. It’s also not just one story.

That reality, like the reality of every other character as they have progressed through these stories will be honored and continue to evolve as they confront new experiences.

Janeway spent her fourteen-month ‘afterlife’ in the Q Continuum.

TrekCore: Can you offer any hints about what’s to come in your next Voyager book – Protectors, currently scheduled for an early 2014 release? Perhaps the return of runaway hologram Meegan McDonnell, or maybe a trip to check in with Neelix on New Talax?

Kirsten Beyer: Protectors picks up right where The Eternal Tide left off, but it does cover more time than my books have up to this point, with the exception of Full Circle. It has a lot of ground to cover.  In addition to beginning Janeway on her new journey, the reality of the fleet’s new circumstances must be addressed.

They started out as nine ships.  Now they are three with one more back in the Alpha Quadrant and a big job still unfinished. There is a new mission and lots of new discoveries that will continue to play out as the stories continue.  Neelix does make an appearance.  And no, I haven’t forgotten about Meegan, nor has the crew.

The Eternal Tide changed so much.  One of the main tasks of Protectors is to show how those changes play out for all of the characters who started the journey of Project Full Circle, to bring closure to some of them, and to set the stage for resolutions yet to come.

TrekCore: We know you’re probably still working to finish Protectors right now, but should you have the opportunity to continue with the Voyager series, have you developed ideas for new areas you’d like to cover going into future books – or unresolved stories from the television series to which you’d like to return, such as your follow-up to Borg Cooperative (from Season Three’s “Unity”) in The Eternal Tide?

Kirsten Beyer: Protectors is all but done.  We have a few more rounds of edits, but the heavy lifting is over and the story is almost in its final form.  There was no way to begin the new book, however, without thinking long-term. Luckily, my editors embraced this possibility, which is great for a number of reasons.  It allowed me to think big, while knowing that I would have the time to develop those thoughts into a cohesive narrative.

There were issues already established prior to The Eternal Tide that need to be addressed. The massive alteration of the status quo came first, but also had to set the stage for what is to come.  To do that, I had to know what that was going to be.  Now, I do.

Although the paperwork has yet to be completed, so nothing can be stated to an absolute certainty, I am now in the process of outlining the book that will follow Protectors along with one more that will tie up currently dangling threads and stuff that is about to start unraveling with Protectors. This will include the return of some familiar faces, along with the introduction of lots of new ones.

TrekCore: Aside from Protectors, are there any other projects you’re currently working on? Anything you have coming out between now next January that you’d like our readers to know about?

Kirsten Beyer: For better and worse, Voyager has consumed my writing time since 2008.  I’ve had little breaks between Unworthy and Children of the Storm, and another short one before starting Eternal Tide, which felt like it took forever to write.  I started on Protectors last October and haven’t taken but a few days off since then and the end is more than a year away, assuming all goes as planned.

Before I started on Full Circle, however, I was working on an original novel, a sort of urban fantasy/paranormal romance thing that I go back to whenever I can. It’s had its own evolution and kind of defies categories now, but that’s okay. I think it will be pushed further into the future, however, by yet another original novel idea that showed up a few weeks ago, is pretty timely, and clearly has no intention of leaving me in peace until I write it.

How I will manage that while continuing my work on Voyager, I don’t yet know.  But when the muse hits you over the head with a sledgehammer, you sort of have to pay attention.

There’s still plenty more of the Voyager story to tell – starting with 2014’s ‘Protectors’.

TrekCore: Dan particularly loves your take on the Star Trek universe and the ideas of exploration and peaceful coexistence that are at the heart of Star Trek’s vision. What does Star Trek represent to you?

Kirsten Beyer: For me, Star Trek has always been the version of the future I’d most like to see made real.  If technology could take human beings beyond our solar system, that would be fabulous.  I have no doubt that one day it will.  But what really excites me is to imagine that technology will also help humanity evolve beyond the parochial, territorial, greedy, self-obsessed, and fearful place in which we have been mired for far too long.

As Trek shows us, some of those things don’t go away just because we have replicators, artificial gravity, phasers, and can cure a lot of diseases that right now limit our life span.  Some of that is just part of how we’re wired. But Trek posits that given enough time, we will eventually learn not to allow those things to define us.  We have the potential to move beyond what divides us now, to see ourselves as a single species, as one world, and to use the power that awareness would grant us to make our lives more purposeful.

If none of us had to worry about where our food or fuel came from, if each of us were free to choose to spend our time doing what we found fulfilling because survival was no longer at issue…well, it’s a  nice dream. But it’s also the place we’re going to have to reach as humans if we are going to survive.  The things we throw our time and money at right now limit us tremendously.  But for most of us, our choices are few.  W

e may create lives where we don’t have to choose between what fascinates us most and what we do all day long.  But everybody also needs to eat and keep a roof of some sort over their head.  Our struggles to obtain these basic necessities drive us now.  And our inability to bridge the imaginary borders drawn on maps, to see every other human being as “us” rather than “them” may yet prove to be our undoing. In Trek, that has become our past.

In Trek’s future, so many things we argue about now are taken for granted as settled. People don’t work to acquire things.  They work to develop their own potential and the potential of humanity. They have come to accept that peaceful coexistence is the ultimate goal, the only framework from which every individual alive can thrive. Trek’s characters get to think bigger, to worry about more interesting things, and see themselves as citizens of the universe.

I want to live in that world, which is probably the biggest reason I keep writing about it.

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For almost ten years, author Kirsten Beyer has been the lead author on the Star Trek: Voyager novel line – including the post-series books commonly called the ‘Voyager relaunch’ – and we thought it was far past time that we shine a spotlight on her work keeping the Star Trek: Voyager story alive.

TrekCore’s Dan Gunther checked in with Kirsten via email in late July, and we took a look back at how she joined the ranks of the Trek literature team.

TrekCore: After first joining the Voyager novel series as part of 2005’s tenth-anniversary publications, you’ve been the only author assigned to this wing of the franchise for nearly ten years now. How were you first drawn into the Trek literature arena? Was there anything that attracted you to the Voyager storyline in particular?

Kirsten Beyer: Like a lot of things in life, I was drawn into writing Star Trek novels sideways. It was never a stated goal or anything I pursued to the exclusion of anything else.  It was one of many placed I had directed effort and intention and the first one that clicked.

I never planned on being a writer. But what I know now is that as long as I’ve been able to speak, I’ve been telling stories.  What began as play, I eventually studied, first through dance and then through acting. Telling stories has always been the essential way I connect with the world.

I realized a long time ago that I am wired to create stuff and depending on others to allow me to do so…to hire me to act, for example…was never going to be enough.  The down time between projects makes me crazy.  But no one has to hire me to write.  In fact, no one did, for the first ten years I spent learning and honing what craft I possess.

But Voyager was critical for me because it was the first thing I ever tried to write.  I started watching when it premiered.  I was just out of graduate school and bored.  I knew some folks who were working on it and I initially tuned in to watch their work.  A few weeks later I was tuning in just to watch the ongoing story. A few months later, I had an idea for a story and began to study the show more than watch it.

I taught myself to write teleplays by studying every aspect of Voyager; character, plot, pace, tone, dialogue, visual descriptions, etc.  Then Voyager taught me how to pitch professional projects.  Four years into the show, I was invited to meet with the writers to pitch story ideas. None of mine ever sold, but the experience was invaluable, as was the opportunity to interact with the folks who were doing the work I thought I wanted to do.

I had moved onto writing my own original teleplays and screenplays by the time Voyager ended. Novels had not occurred to me.  Strangely enough, though, I had bought and read all of the Voyager novels as they were released, primarily because I was developing my own Voyager material at the time and didn’t want to repeat anybody else’s ideas.  I was in the middle of pursuing screenplay work when a writer I had become dear friends with was offered her first Trek novel.

Beyer joined the Pocket Books author lineup during the Voyager 10th Anniversary in 2005.

That writer was Heather Jarman and the novel was This Grey Spirit. She suggested I send some samples to Pocket Books and gave me the contact information. I did, and a day later, I got a call from an editor there who wanted to work with me.  She left shortly thereafter, and with no obvious way forward, I went back to my other projects.

The following summer, Heather told me I should come with her to Shore Leave, a fan-run convention near Baltimore that really highlights Trek books. She introduced me to her editor, Marco Palmieri, and he was kind enough to ask me for some writing samples.  About three months later, I was offered a short story in the Distant Shores anthology and the second book in the String Theory trilogy.

That was a good day. That was the first time anyone offered to pay me to write anything.  And it only took ten years of work on Voyager and fifty other ideas. But the key is, as with many things, when the opportunity finally presented itself, I was ready.  I’d done my homework and developed the skills required to do the job.

I’m not sure what really attracted me to Voyager beyond the characters, which I enjoyed tremendously, and the potential of the premise.  But I invested an incredible amount of time and energy into learning every aspect of the show.  I know it now, far better than anyone probably should.  I love all of the Trek series for different reasons.  Voyager is the one that has my heart, though.  It’s like a relationship I’ve nurtured for almost twenty years now.  And it’s been an incredibly fulfilling one, both personally and professionally.

TrekCore: With several key players essentially removed from Voyager storyline – Tuvok serving on the Titan, Neelix living on New Talax, Janeway presumed dead – you’ve had the chance to really shine a spotlight on some of the other characters left in the background during the television series, like Harry Kim and Chakotay. How did you approach growing them into more well-developed characters?

Kirsten Beyer: It’s not that different from how I approach all of the characters, but I think it is more obvious with Chakotay and Harry because they needed to come so far.  In every case, I’m starting with my instinctive sense of who these people have already shown themselves to be, and then I place obstacles before them that will reveal what I know of them to the reader and allow them to continue to develop.

Chakotay and Harry had both been underserved, in some ways, beyond the show.  Chakotay was given command of Voyager in The Farther Shore, and despite the fact that this was where the fans wanted to see him if they couldn’t still have Janeway in the center seat, I was troubled by the sense that in some ways, he hadn’t really earned that position.  We needed to see that he wanted it as much as we wanted it for him, if that makes sense.  By going deeply into his personal relationship with Kathryn Janeway, allowing him to finally be broken by events beyond his control, I was able to show the strength I’d always seen there as he pulled himself out of his despair and began to chart his own course, separate from Janeway.

With Tuvok, Neelix, and Janeway out of the series, Beyer had the opportunity
to strengthen the other characters in the cast – like Chakotay and Harry Kim.

Harry was, in some ways, still being portrayed as the same naïve ensign we met in “Caretaker“. He was completely taken in by his former girlfriend, Libby, who had gone from being a musician to a Starfleet Intelligence operative, and supposedly optimistic enough to stick it out even when she refused his marriage proposal.  Again, we needed to see him begin to define himself apart from that relationship.

Libby played an integral part in that, by finally admitting the truth to him, but the conflict with his best friend, Tom Paris, was also important.  Harry’s world has been turned upside-down.  He doesn’t know who to trust and his instincts do not seem to be serving him well. By forcing him to confront this reality, we see him start to wrestle with tough questions he should have been asking years ago.  In addition, he had been moved from operations to tactical/security, essentially Tuvok’s old job, and we needed to justify that.

TrekCore: In addition to the original Voyager characters, you’ve also spent a great deal of time creating brand new members of the crew, such as Afsarah Eden and Hugh Cambridge. What was your process in developing these characters and integrating them into the cast?

Kirsten Beyer: In Eden’s case, I knew from day one that the fleet was going to need a new commander.  It wasn’t until I was well into developing Full Circle, that Admiral Batiste was created as a source of conflict for her. As someone who knew here well, he was uniquely able to reveal her character.  I wanted her to be capable, but also needed to establish her as more than a replacement of Admiral Janeway.

The mystery of her heritage was part of that, as well as her sense that by joining the fleet, she might someday be returning home.  That desire had defined televised Voyager. It was such an important theme. In Eden, I was initially looking for a new way to incorporate that theme without running the risk of falling back on the series’ premise.

The addition of Cambridge was also mandatory from the beginning.  If there was ever a Starfleet vessel in need of a permanent counselor, it had to be Voyager. Christie Golden had obviously seen this too, and created a character to fill that spot in Counselor Astall.  But the more I looked at Astall, the more I realized that she was constitutionally incapable of conflict; her species was happy, by definition.

Hoping that the series would continue beyond Full Circle, I decided I needed a character who could challenge our main characters more.  I also wanted to see a counselor unlike any previously portrayed.  He had to know and be good at his job, I wanted him to be less sensitive than say, Counselor Troi.

Several new characters were brought on board to fill out the Voyager crew.

From the moment I started writing him, I knew his was a voice we needed.  He has no patience for pretense, but also comes with his own blind spots.  Some people liked him instantly.  Others have grown to see his value over time.  Some just can’t stand him.  He is my most complicated original character and has done a lot to bring out some much needed development from some of the others like Chakotay and Seven.

Though I don’t always do this, in the case of Cambridge, I’ve always had actor Hugh Laurie in my mind when I write him.  His character, Gregory House, is the obvious inspiration – minus the drug problems – but really, Laurie’s entire body of work informed Cambridge’s creation.

The key with original characters, however, is that they must earn their position.  You can’t just say, “look, isn’t he/she fabulous?” and expect the readers to buy it.  Previously unnamed officer we saw in the background a few times can’t suddenly be revealed to be best friends with the main cast.  If we didn’t see it happen on the show, we need to see it happen before our eyes on the page.  Otherwise, it’s just too hard to swallow.

Eden and Cambridge were built from the ground up.  We saw them create the relationships or significance they now enjoy with the more familiar characters. It takes time away from the central cast, but the real trick is finding a way to balance that development with the ongoing needs of the other characters and the plot of any given story.

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