Telling the Story…

I just started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl and I had a thought…

I’ve been working on the Danab Cycle for decades. It started as a Star Trek pastiche. Plain and simple. Long, long before John Scalzi started poking around. So the books that I worked on didn’t start from the beginning. I didn’t know the beginning. I didn’t know it was the Danab Cycle. I didn’t figure that out even when I was developing what I knew was the story I considered the most important one, Seven Thunders, which I wrote more than a decade ago and pursued legitimate publishers for years trying to reach readers. At one point I serialized it on Wattpad, but still found no readers. 

I never approached this like Matt Dinniman. Dinniman comes very much from contemporary fiction. He’s very interested in making an immediate connection with his readers. 

So I went a different route. Listen, Star Trek is sixty years old. It started with a story that had no idea what its origins were, either. Gradually the concepts of the Eugenics Wars, and WWIII, were dropped in. And in sixty years we still have yet to see either of those formative building blocks in the forefront of a story. Sixty years!

Part of that is certainly that the creators themselves have been far more interested in following the original template, either with Kirk himself or a variety of other Starfleet captains and their crews. In my Danab Cycle stories, I verged away from that template in my third narrative, which borrowed elements of Deep Space Nine but eventually was far more interested in continuing the digression than leaning away from it.

(That’s A Tremor of Bones, which is the fourth book in the series, by the way.)

By the time I actually wrote the first book in the series, Collider, I realized I was very little interested in retaining the Star Trek template. The resulting book is about as far from Dinniman as you can get, and yet it’s now officially the first Danab Cycle book in the series. At some point I will add Seven Thunders, and begin writing Lady of the Horde, and gosh, the stories continue for a while, inspired by so many Star Trek fans over the years insisting the narrative be pushed ever onward…

And then I realized, I needed to truly complete the cycle. So I sketched out The Danab War, the story of how humanity first met the Danab, and then A Soldier of Distant Stars, about how the Danab were created…

Knowing this lore, I dropped in generous helpings of it in the A to Z tale. And for the book version I’m writing two additional stories, one of which will be “Space Opera Sam,” which will be a different take on the Danab War, a Dinniman take. I may decide to share some or all of that , here.

I knew I wanted to retain what I began developing, because it’s the whole tapestry that matters, not just the story of humans and the Danab, that deepens the portrait, in ways that I found fascinating as I wrote Collider, that I was only beginning to realize as I wrote Seven Thunders, drawing on the real world to introduce a true sense of scale. Part of that is also listening to all the Star Wars fans out there who like to complain that Star Wars isn’t just the Skywalker saga, but to date, no story has remotely approached the grandness of the Skywalkers, which is explored throughout each of the three trilogies. Through the Skywalkers everything that is important to Star Wars is explored on its grandest scale.

Star Trek always billed itself as the human adventure. In the Danab Cycle, I expand on that concept by keeping the stories as intimate as possible, and by suggesting everyone in these stories has a story to tell. Collider explores that in ways I hadn’t thought possible. That’s why I hoped it could still intrigue readers (though I have yet to see confirmation of this) despite its complex storytelling. It’s not Dinniman. It’s Star Trek as seen in legend, as if Star Trek, with apologies to all the fans insisting this today, really were Star Wars now, Star Trek as if Homer had written it…