An A to Z Overview of the Danab Cycle...
Back in 2013, I composed a series of posts on another blog for an A to Z challenge covering the Danab Cycle as it was at that time. Here's what it looked like:
Collider
Book 1
One of the things I did early on with the Space Corps saga was begin developing the backstory, a process that ended up informing far more of the evolving story itself than I ever intended. Space Corps is an epic science fiction saga. Sigmund Alexander rebelled against humanity's entrance into the Galactic Alliance. He first appears in Collider in a capacity very similar to what might be seen in an episode of the original Star Trek series, and as such is indicative of how the Space Corps saga began. Yet the more Space Corps progressed, the more it diverged from the Star Trek template. It's fair, therefore, to represent the first A-to-Z entry in this Space Corps primer with a character who evokes both the derivative and original aspects of the saga. If you know Star Trek much, Alexander might be considered the Space Corps equivalent of Colonel Green (or John Frederick Paxton, from the excellent "Terra Prime"/"Demons" Enterprise two-part episode). Sigmund Alexander becomes much more significant in Book 4, A Tremor of Bones, when it becomes apparent that his legacy very much lingers in the form of the xenophobic Alexandrians, who continue to infest Earth centuries against his failed efforts. [Once I actually wrote Collider, this character does not end up appearing, but remains a crucial element of the backstory.]
The Feud We Keep With Space
Book 5
Last month I finished writing Seven Thunders, the story that lies at the heart of the Space Corps saga. It's not included in the greater Space Corps sequence (partly because without it, the cycle holds at seven, much like the book's title), as it stands apart, the eye of the hurricane as it were. The neat thing about Book 4, however, is that it's as close as anything else in Space Corps to Seven Thunders. There are any number of parallels, including a strong emphasis on politics. And yet there emerged something more important to it. I began plotting The Feud We Keep With Space at the start of the millennium. Its central location is New York City, and the main element, and the only time I've done anything like this in my fiction, is the NYPD. Kela Bogh is second in command, although in many ways she's the real cop on duty, as her superior, Ian Kaufman, is more concerned with the way Earth interacts with the rest of the galactic community. Now, if you were paying attention, you may hazard a guess as to something very important that happened while I was plotting this book, something incredibly relevant not only to the setting of the book but the real world as I figuring out the shape of the story. 9/11. These things tend to happen when I'm writing. And I invariably shape the story around my reaction. New York is faced with a terrorist attack in Feud as well, and it shifts the course of events, and Kela is central to how everything plays out. Her relationship with aliens is one of the defining elements of the book, and she proved continually fascinating to explore, one of my favorite characters in the entire saga.
Owen Casper
Book 3
Owen Casper is the first but not the last of the Caspers to pop up in the Space Corps saga. He shows up late in the Lady of the Horde story, part of the new generation forming around the end of Robert Drummond's adventures. Drummond is one of the central characters in Seven Thunders, which I recently completed writing after a fifteen year gestation, and one of the interesting things that happened while writing it was filling out the supporting cast. Among them was none other than a character named Yoshimi Casper. After Owen Casper's creation, I realized that the Caspers could be a link through the saga, the human equivalent to Lord Phan, who manages to make appearances in virtually every story. Adrian Casper, for instance, is Owen's son, and he's reflective of the family dynamic that's central to the whole saga. Percy Casper appears in Dead Letters. I'm certain that as I write the books more will appear. Yoshimi is the sister of Askre Casper, who only appears thanks to a short story I wrote earlier this year. None of the Caspers are central to any of the stories, but together they're more than the sum of their parts.
Robert Drummond
Seven Thunders
Book 2
Lady of the Horde
Book 3
Here's one of the truly big characters of the entire Space Corps saga. He's not only one of the core seven characters in Seven Thunders, the book that gestated for fifteen years and lies at the heart of everything, but the lead in Lady of the Horde, which chronicles his later career and incidentally how the Danab conflict from Seven Thunders is finally resolved. Drummond is named after one of my favorite teachers, who with all due apologies to The Big Bang Theory is the reason I know or care about Schrodinger's Cat (he actually had a box, and rumor had it that there was a skeleton inside of it). He's the best friend of Lance Nolan, the star of Seven Thunders, the moral compass who is always discovering that when push comes to shove, it's much harder to live with the decisions you have to make than it is to make those decisions in the first place. Drummond and his predecessor Jacques Mendez (you meet him on M Day) are starships captains like you see in Star Trek, and theirs are the earliest stories I plotted in the overall narrative. Knowing so much about Drummond made it easier to write Seven Thunders, which will in turn make it that much more interesting to write Lady of the Horde, which as it stands looks to be the longest of the Space Corps books. It's pretty epic. But Drummond helps keep it at a human level.
The Feud We Keep With Space
Book 5
The Second Coming
Book 7
Elster is unquestionably one of my favorite minor characters in the entire Space Corps saga. In fact, he's one of the featured returning characters who appear in the continuity-hopping Book 7, The Second Coming. His initial appearances in Book 4, The Feud We Keep With Space, are mostly connected with Kela Bogh (featured recently on B Day), and are key in expanding that particular character's significance beyond strictly NYPD activities, but what truly distinguishes Elster is that his entire species exists out of regular time, not so much like the Prophets in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but literally as individuals for whom the normal temporal flow doesn't exist. It may suffice to say that they exist in 4D, or as a people are similar to the comic book characters the Linear Men. Anyway, Elster doesn't exploit this ability so much as use it to give Bogh some perspective. In fact, while most of the characters in Feud are about gaining sobering perspective, it's Bogh who's the best conduit of this and it's Elster who's her best conduit. His first appearance remains one of my favorite moments in the entire saga, and that alone would have given Elster claim to E Day.
Randall Flint
Collider
Book 1
The Second Coming
Book 7
As you'll recall from the Caspers, I love a generational feel. Randall Flint was an early attempt on my part for that element in the Space Corps saga. He's Jacques Mendez' mentor (Mendez is the central character in Collider), but his role evolves from there. When it came to the continuity-hopping The Second Coming, I saw it as an opportunity to see Flint in action in his prime. In order for me to feel like I knew what was really going on in the complete saga, it was necessary to know what was going on around the specific points that I had originally begun with. It's never enough to have a story. If the author doesn't know the story better than the reader, then the reader will get the sense that there's very little substance to the story. Sometimes readers are perfectly okay with that. Sometimes it's just about an escape. And yet even escapist material should have a little meat to it. And then it's not just enough to plug in a bunch of additional stories. They have to have meaning. Flint is a product of a simpler time. His career begins when there isn't much conflict with the Danab, when humans are free to assert their role in the Space Corps. Actually, come to think of it, calling it the Space Corps saga maybe isn't enough. I haven't even properly conveyed that a large theme in the saga is humanity's role in the Corps. Humanity isn't central to the Corps. Humans didn't invent the Corps. They came later. So there are stories in the saga that are all about the arc humanity takes within the greater galactic community. Flint is one of the few to experience an unabashedly positive period. And then things get worse. The Danab become antagonistic again. Flint's still there. He attempts to guide the next generation, but is he really prepared for such a role? So that's something that can be done when you're looking at the broader scope of things.
Odin Gram
A Tremor of Bones
Book 4
It was someone else who called out A Tremor of Bones as having the coolest title in the series (pretty sure it was Maurice Mitchell) and I guess I agree. The other reason why Book 4 stands out for me in all my notes on the Space Corps saga is that it was the point where the storytelling structure really opened up and the characters started to grab me. Though the Danab featured prominently in Lady of the Horde notes and were subsequently edited to more prominence in Collider, they emerge as more fully dimensional in Bones, and really that's true of everything. There are many parallels in my love for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Everything Star Trek got better in that one. So I was pleased that I got a similar effect in what could sometimes seem to me as my version. You'll meet the two lead characters on H Day and V Day (not "victory" or "visitor"), but for now you get Odin Gram. That's not his name as it originally appears. One of the benefits of working on notes before stories is that the names can if necessary be improved. His was one of several that always bugged me. Odin is a Danab. The Danab and their relationship with humanity is the whole story of Seven Thunders, the book I spent fifteen years preparing to write and finally did and completed last month. There's a huge thing about the Danab that I didn't figure out for years and could talk about here, but I'm always debating whether or not it's better to find out in the story. It's a lot to do with the psychology of how I dealt with Vader finally unmasking in Return of the Jedi. Even though we knew at that point exactly who he was, it was still a big deal to see his face. New generations of Star Wars fans will have that moment more than the more famous one in The Empire Strikes Back spoiled for them. Anyway, Odin is a Danab, and that's a big deal. The Danab are more traditionally considered antagonists in the Space Corps saga, but in A Tremor of Bones, one of the big points about Odin is that he's very much a friendly character. This was part of a whole process that eventually affected how I wrote the Danab in Seven Thunders. Lesson learned: nuance comes to everything.
Craig Hudson
A Tremor of Bones
Book 4
One of the elements that makes A Tremor of Bones pretty unique in the Space Corps saga is that it features the initiate archetype. I didn't really appreciate that until I realized that I'm currently reading that kind of book right now (Duncan Hamilton's The Tattered Banner, for the record). The initiate archetype is your basic introduction character, who helps guide the reader into the functional reality of a fictional world. Now, let me just briefly recap the specific order of books. So far we have Seven Thunders, the only book that has actually been written so far. It's the Zero Book. Then there's Collider, a prequel that ends with the same circumstances that begin Seven Thunders. Then there's Lady of the Horde, which is a sequel to Seven Thunders. That brings us to A Tremor of Bones, which thematically is a more or less complete break from the narrative that has so far been introduced. That's probably why I felt it was okay to do something different, perhaps a little more...expected? Craig Hudson is specifically being inducted into the covert operations Division of the Space Corps. He's tasked with doing the dirty work no one will ever know about, and he's teamed with a veteran, whom you'll meet on V Day, who's very much a grizzled veteran, who definitely didn't have all the lucky breaks Hudson gets to enjoy in Bones. (Isn't that how it is with these initiate types?) Hudson is surrounded by some of my favorite characters in the whole saga, and it was at this point that I started making each subsequent book feature more characters like that. Some of that had crept up in Fateful Lightning (there's a rogue named Lonestar who is not the Lonestar of Spaceballs but very much a rogue in his own right, more like the Han Solo who would have existed before he met Luke Skywalker). Following the arc of Hudson's budding career is the backbone of Bones, though it's always being contrasted by the fortunes of others. Good fun.
Iron Joe
Seven Thunders
Book 2
To be more accurate, Iron Joe comes from a prequel short story to Seven Thunders, which when I wrote it became one of the major impetuses to finally write the book itself. The story is all about the origins of Carrie Arosen, the third lead of Seven Thunders after Robert Drummond (who you met on D Day) and Lance Nolan (who you'll meet on N Day). Carrie was the toughest character for me to crack in the whole book, not because she's female and I'm, well, not. I write a lot of lead female characters in my stories. It's just something I do. Yet I knew from the start where Drummond and Nolan fit into the narrative. Carrie existed initially mostly because it's nice to have a female character in a story. It wasn't until I read about her surnamesake in a a book called The Unredeemed Captive that I started to realize who she was. In fact, much of the short story where Iron Joe appears is based on this inspiration. She turned into a surrogate Native American. I'm of the mind that Native Americans are deeply owed an apology for the rotten cards they've been dealt over the last few centuries. The character of Tekamthi in The Man Comes Around was my first attempt to reconcile my feelings in fiction. Carrie is another. I figure I've got another story in me, one I've started in the past about a character named Wounded Knee. Who's Iron Joe? The Danab she's accused of assassinating, and the only person in her life who ever seemed to grasp who she was. Appropriate in all the wrong ways...
Yen Jab
Book 9
The final book in the Space Corps sequence was the final set of notes I worked on before writing Seven Thunders. Do you remember Star Trek V: The Final Frontier? It's the one where Kirk asks, "What does God need with a starship?" (Although McCoy has a better line: "You don't ask the Almighty for his I.D.") Anyway, the one where we meet Spock's half-brother, released in 1989, two years before Star Trek creator and Great Bird of the Galaxy, Gene Roddenberry, died. It's the only part of the screen franchise he recommended be stricken from the record, much the way the 1970s animated series is rarely considered a part of the canon, except the episode "Yesteryear."
I happen to like the movie. I find it endlessly intriguing. One of the elements the film did screw up, as I'm happy to acknowledge, is the presentation of Nimbus III, the Planet of Galactic Peace. The Romulan delegate who shows up is about as effective a screen presence as the cat lady, the one whose boobs are obviously made of plastic (but come in threes, and thus predate the more famous ones in the Schwarzenegger Total Recall).
Still, I find the concept fascinating. It ended up serving as the basis for a colony world meant to try and make a go of humans and Danab living together. The planet's name is Wanethrex, a name I coined when I spent all my time bugging a co-worker named Sam Lane (mentioned on C Day). The story was originally named Firefly, but I knew I couldn't keep that one. When I briefly considered trying to pitch it as a comic book, when I was convinced that 2011's Green Lantern was going to make movie audiences love exotic tales with aliens again, the way Star Wars almost did, it became known simply as The Colony.
Now, as with every book in the Space Corps sequence, it's named after my favorite chapter title in the story. Anyway, Yen Jab was one of several characters who benefited from my attempt to convert it into a comic book pitch. I figured I needed to know the character arcs for everyone in the story, and that pushed me to figure out where everyone landed, including their defining moments. Yen Jab is a mystic, whose prophecies drive the story and motivate certain developments. She already had her moments, being so important to the story. She's also the beneficiary of a radical name upgrade, the way Odin Gram (from G Day) was. I'm of the mind that if a character's name is hard to grasp, it's difficult to penetrate their story. "Yen Jab" seems almost overly simple, but it's one I'm pretty sure you'll remember for longer than it takes to move to the next blog.
I happen to like the movie. I find it endlessly intriguing. One of the elements the film did screw up, as I'm happy to acknowledge, is the presentation of Nimbus III, the Planet of Galactic Peace. The Romulan delegate who shows up is about as effective a screen presence as the cat lady, the one whose boobs are obviously made of plastic (but come in threes, and thus predate the more famous ones in the Schwarzenegger Total Recall).
Still, I find the concept fascinating. It ended up serving as the basis for a colony world meant to try and make a go of humans and Danab living together. The planet's name is Wanethrex, a name I coined when I spent all my time bugging a co-worker named Sam Lane (mentioned on C Day). The story was originally named Firefly, but I knew I couldn't keep that one. When I briefly considered trying to pitch it as a comic book, when I was convinced that 2011's Green Lantern was going to make movie audiences love exotic tales with aliens again, the way Star Wars almost did, it became known simply as The Colony.
Now, as with every book in the Space Corps sequence, it's named after my favorite chapter title in the story. Anyway, Yen Jab was one of several characters who benefited from my attempt to convert it into a comic book pitch. I figured I needed to know the character arcs for everyone in the story, and that pushed me to figure out where everyone landed, including their defining moments. Yen Jab is a mystic, whose prophecies drive the story and motivate certain developments. She already had her moments, being so important to the story. She's also the beneficiary of a radical name upgrade, the way Odin Gram (from G Day) was. I'm of the mind that if a character's name is hard to grasp, it's difficult to penetrate their story. "Yen Jab" seems almost overly simple, but it's one I'm pretty sure you'll remember for longer than it takes to move to the next blog.
Alanna Kor
Lady of the Horde
Book 3
A major character in Ladsy of the Horde is the Danab liaison officer Alanna Kor. Like Worf in Star Trek, she's an outsider among her own people and her Space Corps work is one long thankless task to find some common ground between her two worlds. The interesting thing about plotting her course in the story was seeing that she could disappear for long stretches at a time and come back and still make an impact in new and interesting ways. She's also a big beneficiary of the name upgrades that periodically happen in the notes. I created her when I was in high school, part of the second set of story notes (although the first book, Collider went through a creative revision much like "The Cage" and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" as pilots of the original Star Trek) that I worked on in the saga. Lady of the Horde is all about the long road to peace between the Space Corps and the Danab Empire. Where Star Trek could always be a little vague and sporadic with the Klingons, never sure if they were that important (this changed in the movies and The Next Generation as well as later in Deep Space Nine, but they always shared the spotlight, and even when they were in cahoots with someone else, as with the Romulans, the relationships were never explicit), I realized that the Danab were central to the entire saga of the Space Corps, and it was thanks to the early role of Alanna Kor and Lady of the Horde, which reshaped Collider again and helped inform what Seven Thunders finally became.
Helen Larkin
Lady of the Horde
Book 3
In the original structure of the Space Corps saga, I was modeling the stories off of the Star Trek approach insofar as they were based around starship crews with many of the same character archetypes. The archetype I drifted away from mostly clearly was the first officer. One of the most significant developments from Collider is the death of the first officer. In Lady of the Horde, the first officer again leaves the side of the captain (Robert Drummond, who you met on D Day). We're talking, of course, about Helen Larkin, who leaves because she becomes a captain herself, much as we have Kirk and Hikaru Sulu helming their own ships in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Very famously, Sulu actor George Takei was angered that a scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that would have seen his promotion a full four movies earlier was cut because William Shatner didn't find it interesting or relevant or something like that. (To hear the actors who portrayed the minor characters in the original ensemble tell it, this was typical behavior. They ended up hating him.) Anyway, Sulu's eventual command, the Excelsior, is introduced in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (I've long wanted to write a whole book about Sulu's career, and it would be named after that ship). Having Larkin suddenly in play as another captain introduced a lot of new possibilities into the Lady of the Horde narrative, and she becomes an increasingly memorable element of the story. Part of this is interesting to me because as I've said, the original notes for Collider included multiple captains, and this is something that ended up happening of its own accord in the notes for the next book in the sequence. I didn't consciously make this decision. It just happened.
Jacques Mendez
Collider
Book 1
In case my last name isn't a dead giveaway, I've got a French heritage (by way of French Canadians). On my writer's blog, I've written a little about what that means to me, which is a little more complicated than you might imagine. At the time I named Jacques Mendez, I wasn't really thinking about that, but it's a little hard not to believe now that it must have been rattling around somewhere in my subconscious, at least with that first name. The surname comes from my childhood family doctor. I just always liked it. Anyway, as I've discussed previously, Mendez came to the notes in the very first Space Corps adventure after a revision that placed him as the sole captain in the story, because previously there had been two others. The funny part is the only plot I remember from the original version was originally assigned to one of the other captains. Mendez was originally named Martin Rodzaski (spelling may no longer be accurate, but I tended to be pretty crude one way or another when I was coming up with names for other nationalities, so it hardly matters). He was very much a Kirk figure, but minus the womanizing and the bravado. He was simply a competent officer. His part of the Space Corps saga involves the heating up of tensions with the Danab Empire, where the Danab are constantly manipulating events, sometimes overtly and sometimes by subterfuge, very much a blend of Star Trek's Romulans and Klingons. Mendez has a powerful alien ally much like Kirk had Spock, who also went through an endless series of revisions in his name. You'll meet him on U Day.
Lance Nolan
Seven Thunders
Book 2
Lady of the Horde
Book 3
A Tremor of Bones
Book 4
Lance and his brother Christopher Moby (like Lincoln Burrows and Michael Scofield) are the central characters of Seven Thunders, the Zero Book of the entire Space Corps saga, which I spent fifteen years developing and finally finished writing last month. The entire plot of Seven Thunders revolves around the idea of the British impressment of American sailors that helped spark the War of 1812. It's Christopher who's taken by the Danab, because his mother was one of them. Yesterday at my writers blog I wrote about the idea of adopted thought in context of the Yoshimi Trilogy, but it's perhaps better explored with Lance and Christopher, who both have to deal with this idea in a much more immediate way. Christopher doesn't know if he should choose the life of a typical Danab because he's got that DNA or stick with the human family he's always known. Lance doesn't know if his entire quest to rescue his brother will turn out to be a waste of his time. He has an unwavering faith and devotion to his brother, but can he really be certain that Christopher, given the chance to have something that a childhood trip they shared already gave him a taste for, won't have taken the opportunity to embrace a completely different life? Lance always intrigued me as a character, because he was my shot at creating a new kind of hero. He's not a superhero, and he's not an antihero, but rather just a guy who's trying to make sense of a crazy situation, forcing himself into decisions that might have forced someone else to become more conventional. That's as much as why there has to be six other characters around him who define the rest of the story, starting with his own brother.
Odlaw
Dead Letters
Book 8
By the time the notes hit Dead Letters, they've taken a considerable leap forward. Space Corps being space opera, it already takes place, naturally, in the future (of course, if you're Star Wars you take place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"). Dead Letters is about a period where all the rules have been broken. The Space Corps, in fact, doesn't exist. Humans have become considerably marginalized. The Corps has been replaced by the Vodrantine Thalassic, and Odlaw is a captain in this fleet in much the way Mendez and Drummond (you remember them from M Day and D Day, correct?) are captains in the Corps. He's not a lead character in Dead Letters, but his role reflects the kind of choppy waters this particular era features, where you never know who to trust and there's one big surprise after another. His name doesn't come from Where's Waldo's evil doppelganger, it's just something that sounded awesome to me, especially when phrased as Captain Odlaw. He sounds like he should be in a web series like Voyage Trekkers, but he's not a comedic character, unless when I get to writing this one he turns out to be someone who could be played by Edward Norton...
Lord Phan
The Feud We Keep With Space
Book 5
The Second Coming
Book 7
This guy may in fact be the star of the entire saga. He's the bogeyman who seems to appear everywhere you look. He was there at the founding of the Galactic Alliance, and he's directly responsible for the Danab, and yet the first time he comes across in my Space Corps notes, he appears to be just another nefarious warmongering villain in The Feud We Keep With Space. Yet the conclusion of that story nicely reflects the greater scope of the character. When we catch up with him again as a major character in The Second Coming, we learn exactly what he's been up to in his long life. When I was working on Seven Thunders late last year and earlier this year, there was a period where I was having trouble continuing. I ended up writing several short stories set in the Space Corps realm, including one that caught up with what Lance Nolan (who you met on N Day) was doing during a bleak period in his life. I realized Lord Phan could make an appearance. He has no great role in Seven Thunders, but since he'd already appeared a couple times in the stories, I realized he could do it again. And chances are, this would happen in the remaining stories where he currently has no role. He's the bogeyman at the heart of the saga, after all.
Seven Thunders
Book 2
This particular character wouldn't have existed without the A-to-Z Challenge. True story. I was hedging whether or not to do it again earlier this year, and in fact at one point simply wasn't because I thought I would be doing something very much different this month. That didn't happen, and so I signed up. I started planning. Now, maybe I have another character whose name begins with this letter. I don't have all of it indexed yet. But at the time I was also writing Seven Thunders, which as I've discussed I finished writing last month after a gestation of fifteen years. I conjured Qatar out of thin air to fill this void. Like some of my names, Qatar has a fairly obvious origin. It happens to be an Arab state, an unusually peaceful one, familiar to American soldiers shipping in and out of Iraq during the last decade. Qatar in Seven Thunders isn't Arab. He's an alien space cab driver, and in his case having a name that evokes a familiar human touchstone is no accident, because all of his kind have been doing that since our kind entered the galactic community. It's actually his character that allowed me to give them more depth than I had previously, and that's pretty awesome, because Seven Thunders is all about depth. So, thank you, A-to-Z Challenge.
Mackenzie Reyes
Collider
Book 1
I've mentioned before that Collider was the very first story developed for the Space Corps saga, and that the notes took a revision before they started taking a form that I was satisfied with. Well, after I was further ensconced developing everything, I realized that even the revised notes, from a time where I was still pretty young, weren't up to snuff with what I had subsequently accomplished elsewhere, so I went back and revised again (this would still not be the last time, but it got me to the point I needed), even going so far as to do those biographical sketches I was badmouthing yesterday. Mackenzie Reyes ended up serving as a pretty fruitful springboard for some world-building elements that I hadn't previously considered. Part of his background is the time he spent at the Roscoe Research Institute. Aside from being named for a particularly memorable anthropology professor I had in college, its location proved more interesting. For the purposes of the exercise, I devised the Francisco Keys. As anyone ought to know, California has some significant fault lines that makes it prone to earthquakes. If you're Lex Luthor you'll give them a little help, but if you're simply patient I'm sure they'll do their job on their own. I don't wish ill for current or future residents, but anytime you live somewhere with natural conditions like that you're asking for trouble. That's just a fact. The Francisco Keys, then, are the result of this phenomenon, the remains of San Francisco that just happen to give a nod to famed poet Francis Scott Key (which turns out nicely for events in Seven Thunders, especially if you remember the song Key is known for, and the circumstances in which he composed it). Incidentally, I'm not the only writer who envisions interesting things for the California coastline. In some Aquaman comics from the early years of the new millennium, there existed Sub Diego.
Ott Sader
The Feud We Keep With Space
Book 5
I've described The Feud We Keep With Space as a sort of rephrasing of Seven Thunders, and as it now stands, I think that may be more true than when I first realized that. Seven Thunders is the book I finished writing last month, the one I obsessed over for fifteen years. During that time I developed the rest of the Space Corps saga, and as with anyone else, I realized there were certain parallels that emerged, patterns that helped as I wrote the first book-length adventure. One of the surprises was that one of the characters I was sure would be a fairly straightforward antagonist ended up having the same kind of nuances as everyone else. His counterpart in Feud will theoretically be able to remain on the crooked and wide (as opposed to straight and narrow) thanks to the fact that he has at least one well-defined accomplice, Ott Sader, a Space Corps officer gone bad, in the pocket of a weaselly politician. Surprisingly the majority of the characters I chose to spotlight in this A-to-Z sketch were protagonists. Rest assured there are plenty of villains as well.
Tsan
Dead Letters
Book 8
Besides Lord Phan, the only notable Tikanni in the entire saga is Tsan. This is a little odd because as far as the mythology goes, there's probably no alien species more important than the Tikanni, who were responsible for bringing the more arrogant Omoxians to the notion of forming what became the Galactic Alliance. Because they were overshadowed, however, the Tikanni retreated from further involvement in the community. It's only fitting, then, that Tsan should be significant in Dead Letters, because it represents an entire era where the traditional relationships between species have been turned upside down. He operates as a financier to the ship captained by the gal you'll meet on W Day.
Udon
Collider
Book 1
Udon Thani is a city in Thailand, and the location of a U.S. military base where my father was stationed during the Vietnam War. Udon is a central character in Collider, who took on this name after many unsatisfactory previous attempts to come up with an acceptable, distinctive name to begin with the letter "u." It should be understood that unlike Qatar (you met him on Q Day), Udon's name and presence in the Space Corps saga was well-established well before the Challenge. He showed up in the original Seven Thunders writing sessions last fall, nicely mirroring how his story ends in Collider. He's the key ally of Jacques Mendez (whom you met on M Day), and also one of the parallels in the entire saga, representative of an alien species with whom he frequently clashes, something that happens in Star Trek a lot (think Worf or T'Pol or even Quark, another topic from Q Day), but I felt could be better integrated into the overall plot given more of a chance. Udon is a Welborn, the most welcoming of humans in the entire Galactic Alliance, and themselves a relatively recent addition to the fold, yet even their relative stability has problems with that most common of maladies, the ego.
Leonard Veitch
A Tremor of Bones
Book 4
Veitch rhymes with "beach," just so you know. Sometimes people try to confuse pronunciation on me, change the laws of physics, but that's how I've been pronouncing it for more than a decade, and recently I confirmed it for myself. Leonard Veitch has increasingly become my surrogate. He's a bit of a sad-sack case, hard-luck and constantly belittled, Craig Hudson's veteran partner (you met him on H Day). By all accounts he's a more than capable officer in the covert operations Division of the Space Corps, and yet like Rodney Dangerfield he gets no respect. He's the heart of A Tremor of Bones, even though there's a lot of moving parts around him and I've already identified Hudson as the classic initiate figure for the reader. I sometimes view my entire life as bad breaks and diminishing returns. Veitch is a way for me to keep in mind that no matter how pathetic it can seem, maybe there's some worth to it after all.
Miranda Weaving
Dead Letters
Book 8
Captain of a ship in a veritable lost era, she makes her own agenda (at least when Tsan from T Day isn't interfering, much less other developments), and although Weaving is the main character of Dead Letters that doesn't mean that she makes it to the end of the story. Bona fide spoiler, yo. Lots of craziness surrounds her, lots of betrayal, yet Weaving maintains her integrity throughout all of it, which makes her one of the characters I most regretted having to say goodbye to, but also one of the easier, because it couldn't have been any other way.
Xanthus
Lady of the Horde
Book 3
As I've mentioned several times already, Space Corps began as a pastiche on Star Trek, though the narrative started developing its own flavor soon enough. Lady of the Horde has already been discussed as branching out by way of the role of the first officer (back on L Day), a trend that continued with Robert Drummond gaining Xanthus under his command. Yet Xanthus was no great replacement for Helen Larkin. He was a rat bastard, another bona fide villain in the saga, although in the grand scheme of Lady of the Horde itself he's still not one of the most prominent. Take that, Xanthus! Although as far as this archetype goes, the turncoat, he resembles a favorite character from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Michael Eddington, who started out as the rare Starfleet security officer who didn't loathe Odo. I don't know that many fans remember Eddington, but he was an instant favorite, even before he betrayed Sisko to join the Maquis (the Federation rebels featured heavily in Voyager, though not rebelliously enough for some). For a real treat, catch the episode "For the Uniform," in which Eddington becomes Sisko's white whale.
David Yates
The Feud We Keep With Space
Book 5
I've referenced previously how The Feud We Keep With Space took a good portion of its shape from 9/11. With the recent Boston explosions we were once again confronted with terrorists who were anything but the WASP archetype that still dominates the American social landscape. I seriously entertained the possibility that it was just a regular Bostonian who was responsible. From Oklahoma City to the presidential assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and Kennedy (McKinley sort of counts, too), plenty of homegrown monsters have preyed on the public, not to mention all the school shootings or serial killers. Anyway, David Yates exists as a reflection of this rather than the paradigm shift. Jack Bauer need not investigate. The interesting thing about Yates is that he's exactly the reverse of the new template. Like John Frederick Paxton in Star Trek: Enterprise (watch the two-part episode "Terra Prime"/"Demons," especially for the last spotlight on the Trip/T'Pol relationship with an incredible emotional climax), he's a xenophobe (so he's also an ideological descendant of Sigmund Alexander, whom you met all the way back on A Day) who violently opposes aliens on Earth. There are some great Superman comics from Geoff Johns where he visits the future with the Legion of Super-Heroes and confronts this issue, too.
Zeppelin
The Universe and You
Book 8
Zeppelin is part of The Universe and You as a representation of the colony on Wanethrex's past. The colony as you may or may not remember is my pastiche on one of the elements from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, one of the least popular movies in that franchise. It's the focus of the story that ends the Space Corps saga, a prequel, because it returns the heavy focus to the relationship between humans and the Danab, which is also the focus of Seven Thunders, the manuscript I finished last month. (As for where that manuscript actually ends up, who knows? It's not the only one I've got sitting around.) Zeppelin only shows up when everyone realizes that the problems of the present are reflective of the problems of the past. And that's the whole point of everything, really.
Here's a way to remind yourself of everything I've yammered about in the Space Corps saga this month:
Iron Joe (I Day)
Lord Phan (P Day)
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Later retitled Collider.
Book 1
Sigmund Alexander (A Day)
Randall Flint (F Day)
Jacques Mendez (M Day)
Mackenzie Reyes (R Day)
Udon (U Day)
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Book 2
Robert Drummond (D Day)
Lance Nolan (N Day)
Qatar (Q Day)
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Later retitled Lady of the Horde. Numbering of series changes once Seven Thunders reinserted.
Book 3
Owen Casper (C Day)
Robert Drummond (D Day)
Alanna Kor (K Day)
Helen Larkin (L Day)
Xanthus (X Day)
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Book 4
Odin Gram (G Day)
Craig Hudson (H Day)
Leonard Veitch (V Day)
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Book 5
Kela Bogh (B Day)
Joaquin Elster (E Day)
Lord Phan (P Day)
Ott Sader (S Day)
David Yates (Y Day)
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Book 6
Odlaw (O Day)
Tsan (T Day)
Miranda Weaving (W Day)
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Book 7
Joaquin Elster (E Day)
Randall Flint (F Day)
Lord Phan (P Day)
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Book 8
Yen Jab (J Day)
Zeppelin (Z Day)
(Also: A Soldier of Distant Stars, Book 9, and The Danab War, Book 10, and the novella Terrestrial Affairs.)
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