Strangers From the Sky

B
EING THE FIRST
to do anything has its risks. It’s especially dangerous to be assigned to tell the first version of a particular story in an ever-expanding universe. This is not to say it isn’t exhilarating to take that one small step for a writer, but only if you’re willing to accept the likelihood that the story you’ve told might become outdated and/or preempted by a later story.

Strangers from the Sky
was written some nine years before the release of
Star Trek: First Contact
. The discrepancies between the two stories are obvious from the very first pages, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ll explain why in a bit. To begin, though, let me tell you how
Strangers
came to be written.

Following the release of my first
Star Trek
novel,
Dwellers in the Crucible
, in 1985, there was a new editor, Dave Stern, in charge of
Star Trek
novels at Pocket Books. Now, no one’s ever accused me of being shy. I immediately called Dave to congratulate him on his assignment, and just sorta kinda hinted that I was ready to write my next
Star Trek
novel, thank you very much.

One of Dave’s goals as
Star Trek
editor was to launch a series of “Giant” novels, somewhat larger both in page-count and in concept than the standard
Star Trek
novel of that era, in the hope of appealing to a broader audience and drawing in a larger readership. These Giant novels were also intended to do something that I love best about
Star Trek
novels, i.e., fill in some of the gaps before and between the Original Series episodes with the kinds of stories that there was simply no time to fit in onscreen.

Dave had already contracted Vonda McIntyre to write
Enterprise: The First Adventure
, about Kirk’s first mission as the ship’s captain. He was looking for a concept that would fit into the chronology just before the events of “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

I, meanwhile, wanted to write a Vulcan story. And I had a specific—much earlier—era in mind.

Some years before, I’d been loitering in Forbidden Planet, then the quintessential SF bookstore in Lower Manhattan, when I came across a big ol’ trade paperback entitled
The Star Trek Space Flight Chronology
, written by Stanley and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, in the same era as those indispensable volumes for the serious
Star Trek
fan, Bjo Trimble’s
Star Trek Concordance
, Franz Joseph’s
Star Fleet Technical Manual, The Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual
(Eileen Palestine, editor), and my particular favorite, Allan Asherman’s
Star Trek Compendium
. One entry in the
Chronology
grabbed my attention. It was about the crew of an Earth ship helping to repair a disabled Vulcan scoutcraft trapped in the Sol system and sending it on its way home in the year 2045, even though the official First Contact between Earth and Vulcan—according to the
Chronology
—did not take place until twenty years later.

That was the story I wanted to tell.

I ran the idea past Dave. He asked if I could work it into a frame story about Kirk, Spock, and Gary Mitchell on
Enterprise
not long after Kirk takes command. Obviously the only solution, we agreed, was a time travel story. And because I’m an English major who’s been faking my way through physics for my entire adult life, I made the culprit responsible for the glitch in the time line not a mad scientist or a wormhole or a rogue star or a temporal anomaly, but a hapless Egyptian sorcerer who, like T.H. White’s Merlin, had the dubious fortune of having been born backwards in time.

And, to further complicate matters (let me never be accused of writing a simple, straightforward narrative), I wrapped the Kirk/Spock/Mitchell frame story—which was already wrapped around the Vulcan First Contact with Earth story—in yet another frame story, that of a historical novel that Dr. McCoy happened to be reading in his off hours just prior to the events of
The Wrath of Khan
.

So if you’re looking for a simple action/adventure novel—exploding starships and great battle scenes on every fifth page—this may not be the book for you. But if you’re up for a story within a story within a story within a story featuring our favorite characters in both the TV-Trek and movie-Trek eras, confronting one of those forks in the cosmic road in
Star Trek
history where Everything Is About to Go Horribly Wrong Unless the Crew of the
Enterprise
Can Fix It, you’ve come to the right place.

And if you’re still ready to argue that
Star Trek: First Contact
renders this story outdated and no longer interesting, hold that thought for a moment.

Yes, in the strictest sense, the time line in
Strangers from the Sky
is no longer precisely correct. It’s been refuted by what was established in the first season of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. In addition, according to
First Contact
, Zefram Cochrane is originally from Earth, not Alpha Centauri.

But given the sheer magnitude of
Star Trek
lore—onscreen, in print, and in the collective consciousness of its fans—it’s little short of miraculous that ultimately so much of it tracks so well. Because if you look at it closely,
First Contact
has Cochrane meeting the Vulcans in 2063. The
Star Trek Space Flight Chronology
, from which I took my cue in
Strangers
, gives the year as 2065. Given the fact that, according to the revised Gregorian Calendar, Jesus was born in 4
BC
, maybe we can allow for a little leeway.

As for Cochrane’s being from Earth, he does eventually emigrate to Alpha Centauri (before ending up, apparently in an entirely different body, on Gamma Canaris N in the episode “Metamorphosis”). If we can accept Cochrane’s complete physical transformation without saying “Yeah, but—” what’s a little change of venue among friends?

Ultimately, once you’ve gotten to the end of
Strangers from the Sky
, I think you may find that it does not so much contradict
First Contact
as complement it.

Because, really, isn’t the goal just to suspend one’s disbelief and enjoy a good story? You the reader are the final arbiter of whether or not what you’re holding in your hands has achieved that goal.

Meanwhile, speaking of time travel, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the notion that
Strangers from the Sky
was first published almost twenty years ago. As with all of my best experiences in writing for
Star Trek
, it was a serendipitous confluence of the skills of both writer and editor and, from the feedback I’ve gotten over these—Holy timewarp, Batman!—nearly two decades, it seems to be high on the list of reader favorites.

It was, and is, an honor to have been given the opportunity to write the “first” First Contact story in the
Star Trek
universe, and it’s the essence of cool to see it reissued for
Star Trek
’s fortieth Anniversary. I hope you’ll find as much joy in the reading of it as I did in the writing.

Margaret Wander Bonanno

September, 2005