Without DeForest Kelley’s fantastic performance, Doctor Leonard McCoy would have been a much lesser character—and this novel would have had much less to go on. Credit must be given to Kelley for creating such a fun, irascible, enduring character. We should also acknowledge the many other actors, from big stars to background performers, who played the various other characters who populate this novel: Jeanne Bal (Nancy Crater), Majel Barrett (Christine Chapel), Michael Barrier (Lieutenant DeSalle), Booker Bradshaw (Doctor M’Benga), Richard Carlyle (Karl Jaeger), Frank da Vinci (Lieutenant Brent), James Doohan (Montgomery Scott), Victoria George (Jana Haines), Jim Goodwin (John Farrell), Deirdre L. Imershein (Lieutenant Watley), Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov), Perry Lopez (Esteban Rodriguez), Cindy Lou (Zainab Odhiambo), Blaisdell Makee (Lieutenant Singh), Patricia McNulty (Tina Lawton), Sean Morgan (Ensign Harper), Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura), Leonard Nimoy (Commander Spock), Eddie Paskey (Lieutenant Leslie), Naomi Pollack (Lieutenant Rahda), Bill Quinn (David McCoy), David L. Ross (Lieutenant Galloway), Barry Russo (Lieutenant Commander Giotto), William Shatner (James T. Kirk), George Takei (Lieutenant Sulu), Woody Talbert (Bobby Abrams), Maurishka Taliaferro (Yeoman Zahra), Joan Webster (Cheryl Thomas), John Winston (Lieutenant Kyle), and Grant Woods (Lieutenant Kelowitz).
We drew on the work of a few other authors when writing this novel, for both backstory and inspiration: Carmen Carter (Dreams of the Raven), Diane Duane (Doctor’s Orders), Brad Ferguson (Crisis on Centaurus), Michael Jan Friedman (Constitution and Shadows on the Sun), David R. George III (McCoy: Provenance of Shadows), Vonda McIntyre (Enterprise: The First Adventure), and Howard Weinstein (The Better Man). Thanks for the bits we pilfered, and we hope you don’t mind that there are bits we ignored.
Others here and there provided help where we needed it: fellow Trek scribe David A. McIntee gave us some assistance in Scottish dialect matters. Michael Bellos and Christopher L. Bennett provided us with some much-needed quantum physics knowledge. Several books were also useful in this regard, especially The God Effect: Quantum Entanglement, Science’s Strangest Phenomenon by Brian Clegg, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe by Lynne McTaggart, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Michael A. Nelson and Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Communication: Theory and Experiments by Mladen Paviĉić, and Quantum Computing: A Short Course from Theory to Experiment by Joachim Stolze and Dieter Suter. Of course, any errors were made completely intentionally for purposes of dramatic license, and not because these dense books threatened to do our heads in. Camilo José Vergara’s American Ruins inspired some of the early scenes on Mu Arigulon V.
One book we must give thanks to above all others is Isaac Asimov’s A Choice of Catastrophes: The Disasters That Threaten Our World, from which we brazenly stole a title. Someday we might even read it.
Special thanks must be given to Steve’s fellow members of the Storrs Eight: Jared Demick, Gordon Fraser, Chantelle Messier, Hayley Kilroy Mollmann, Zara Rix, Christiana Salah, and Jorge Santos, plus auxiliary members Angela Demick and Phill Messier. Once again, without your recommendations, repasts, and rapport, this would have been a much lesser work.
Last of all, Steve must thank Hayley, whom he married between the first and second drafts of this novel, for her patience and support. Our own adventure is just beginning.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael Schuster is not owned by a cat, but he calls himself a writer anyway. He has co-written four previous Star Trek stories with Steve Mollmann, from the Starfleet Corps of Engineers eBook novella about Scotty, The Future Begins; to two short stories in the Next Generation anniversary anthology The Sky’s the Limit; to The Tears of Eridanus, a short novel about an alternate Hikaru Sulu and his equally alternate daughter Demora in the third volume of Myriad Universes, titled Shattered Light. A Choice of Catastrophes is the duo’s first standalone novel, and the first to feature all the classic characters. Michael lives in Austria, where he spends his days working in a bank and uses what’s left of the week to think up stories. He has been making up stuff since childhood, but he never imagined he’d ever get to write about Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the gang. That just goes to show that life rarely turns out the way you think it will.
Steve Mollmann is owned by a cat, but he suspects the cat would prefer otherwise. In addition to the abovementioned credits, he’s the author of a short story in the anthology Wildthyme in Purple with a title too long to print here. He’s also published academic nonfiction in venues such as Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction and English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. He lives in the “quiet corner” of Connecticut, where he studies science in nineteenth-century fiction, tries to finish his grading on time, attends talks solely for the free food, and tries to commit Robert’s Rules of Order to memory. Most of all, he tries to carve out some free time to spend with his wife, Hayley.
Visit them both on the web at
http://www.exploringtheuniverse.net/
Star Trek®: A Choice of Catastrophes Page 29