Kestral: The Trek that never was

Anyone who saw the short-lived TV series Firefly will feel a touch of deja-vu upon reading Berserker (or possibly suspect outright plagiurism), but rest assured I am using an original premise and characters, created in 2001. I am also using my original intention, which was to make the setting of Berserker similar enough to the Star Trek universe to be recognizable to almost anyone as a potential for a Trek series. And who knows? If this concept ever became successful in print form, it could easily be the blueprint for a new television series, movies, or other graphic formats.

For my initial story, I resisted the urge to take this ex-military freighter captain and civilian crew on a galaxy-shattering save-the-universe first adventure (yes, I did develop such an idea before storytelling common sense made me ditch it). Instead, they go through a series of events that help to define Carolyn Kestral, and why she's flying a small civilian freighter instead of a military starship for a living. Other characters are presented, but not fleshed out ad nauseam as is the penchant of so many stories and TV pilots... I wanted to save something for future stories, of which, there are potentially thousands. Hey, how much SF has been written about working stiff freighter crews going about their business and trying to avoid military campaigns, save-the-universe adventures and alien encounters?

As with most of my stories, this one was inspired by "what if?" ideas. In this case, the "what if" wasn't mine, but Paramount's.

Back when Star Trek: Voyager was looking squarely at the light at the end of the tunnel, Paramount was giving a lot of thought about how to continue the lucrative Star Trek franchise. They wanted a new series to carry on once Voyager had run its course. But they did not initially know what form their next series would be. Most of the Trek fans and faithful knew this, as well, and there were no shortage of ideas pouring in to Paramount's offices about what the next Star Trek series should be.

Of course I had my ideas, too, being one of the faithful from the original series. Foremost in my mind was the fact that, after over 30 years, the Star Trek franchise had become dog-eared, tired, formula. Worse, it was becoming even more commercial and less interesting than ever, Paramount's executives having reduced its episodes to bland sameness, diluted its messages with political correctness, and shamelessly courted the lucrative teen and young adult market by blatantly throwing babes in skin-tight outfits at them.

(To be fair, it should be noted that Paramount has had exactly this attitude towards Trek since 1966, and in fact, have never really understood what makes it successful in the first place. Given a complete lack of understanding about science fiction in general, and Trek in particular, they have simply thrown at it the same old gimmicks that have proven over the years to sell large quantities of records and laundry detergent. To date, and to their credit, I suppose, they've been very successful in selling records and laundry detergent.)

My take on the next series was that the Trek format had been too long obsessed with one element: Starfleet. Trek had followed their paramilitary-slash-exploration fleet everywhere, giving viewers an intimate look at what it meant to be in Starfleet's ranks, from Academy to Admiralty. And after over 30 years, it was beginning to feel as if the only thing there was in the future was starships, plastic walls, grand adventures, epic battles and exotic aliens.

But there was one area barely touched on, in all of those years of Trek. Sure, there were always tantalizing hints of its existence, but the viewer was never exposed to it for long. I'm referring, of course, to Civilian Life. Yes, apparently some Federation citizens stayed at home, worked in mundane jobs, paid for groceries and walked their dogs! Civilians piloted personal ships and freighters, vacationed, and traded with people from other planets! And civilians were the ones who remained after Star Fleet was gone, living their lives as best they could.

Even Trek saw potential in this idea once: During the run of The Next Generation, an episode called "The Outrageous Okonna" presented a freighter pilot in an adventure that would have made a good pilot for a new series. I don't know how much Paramount actually considered a spin-off for Okonna, and obviously nothing came of it. But the potential for exploring the civilian side of the Federation was there.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine came the closest to portraying how the other half lived in a Federation universe. Still, it was still set on a Starfleet-controlled space station, enbroiled in life-threatening galactic conflicts, and the only civilians that were present were either passing through or selling wares... sort of like a shopping center within a military outpost. Not quite a view of civilian life... more like shopkeeper's lives within hostile territory. Not quite the life of ordinary people.

I wanted to see the ordinary people. So I developed a Star Trek series idea of my own, with actually no intention of submitting it to Paramount for consideration—I knew they'd never even find my proposal, under the avalanche of material that was being submitted by fans every day—but hoping that it would be close to an idea that, if Paramount had any sense whatsoever, they would come up with on their own, or would glean from other proposals they did see.

Instead, we got Enterprise. More same-old same-old. (For the record, I have full recorded runs of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager at home. I stopped before Enterprise.) Enterprise just plain never had it, and it died the ignominious death of a series that even Star Trek fans wouldn't watch. Oh, well.

As I said, I originally conceived the Kestral stories to be set within the familiar Star Trek universe. However, before I wrote it, I knew that I needed a non-Trek setting for the story... after all, Paramount might never see it or show interest in it, but I still wanted to be able to present it to audiences if possible. So I set about creating a future universe that would have a similar feel to the Trek universe, but with notable differences.

To begin with, the concept of humanoid aliens all over the galaxy was one I discarded right away. It seemed to be a lot more likely that, as we explore space, we would find practically or literally no life that we could communicate, live or work with, but a lot of planets that we could live on, given some work to “terraform” them (a familiar concept in science fiction, and one which I decided did not need to be overly described in this story). So I populated my universe with humans on these different planets. I postulated that some planets would be tough to terraform, requiring the humans there to undergo some extent of genetic, chemical or physical alteration to be able to survive there. This gave me my “aliens,” actually altered humans, which also made more sense as far as their being able to communicate, breathe our air, eat our food, and function with humans.

And finally, I did create one alien race, the Raians. I gave little detail about them in this story, which was intentional… I wanted to convey the impression that a civilian might have about them, a strange race that clearly didn't like us. I also gave them a reason to dislike us, namely, the idea that human “manifest destiny” and our ability to alter planets for our own use was a threatening concept to them.

This was intended to be a story about people, not technology, so I tried not go into serious detail about any of the other technological trappings involved in the story. I input just enough to make clear the pacing of the story. It can be difficult to justify humanscale time frames alongside the incredibly extended timeframe of spatial distances. Writers invented faster-than-light space ships to attempt to compensate for these issues… and to be honest, I believe this to be the greatest fiction in science fiction. (Okay, maybe the second after matter transporters, but the two are close.) However, as this was to be a Trek-style story, I used it anyway, with the expectation that readers will forgive me my storytelling weakness this time.

All of this gave me a sci-fi setting that managed to stand on its own inside of modern conventions, with the added benefit of making more sense than more “traditional” sci-fi setting populated with hordes of exotic aliens and weird planets, and the unlikelihood that humans would be able to visit them at all, much less to coexist with the many life forms they would meet. I had a setting that could provide a rich landscape for storytelling, and allow me to show readers the universe from an everyman's point of view.

The Mary in profile diagram, used to establish an overall layout and establish proportions for the space freighter.

Depiction of the Mary created for the cover of Berserker, based on the profile diagram.

Then, to my surprise, came a new series by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Firefly was about an ex-military man who now captained a space freighter and a small band of mildly-dysfunctional people around the galaxy. When I first saw it, I had to laugh... other than the mildly dysfunctional crew part, there were so many similarities with my idea for the next Trek show that I almost felt Whedon and I were tapping into the same alternate universe!

Of course, Whedon went in a very different and original direction for his series, stretching the metaphor "the Final Frontier" to its limit (although not quite its breaking point) and giving it a post-civil-war American West look and feel. He also removed aliens from space, and populated it exclusively with humans on terraformed planets. It's a concept that sounds strange at first, but which actually makes a lot of sense, and which works on screen... especially under Whedon's control. Although he sometimes took the western motif a bit too far in my opinion (somehow the old west's bad grammar doesn't seem to work), overall it paints a wonderfully rich and well-fleshed-out picture. If you haven't seen it (and Fox did a great job of hiding it from you), go get the DVD set and prepare for a treat.

It's a shame that Firefly did not last on air, but considering it was the victim of the same lack of appreciation that that has plagued science fiction TV for... well, forever... it's no surprise.

To put that another way, TV execs are well aware that the Trek franchise has pointedly avoided running new episodes on prime time Friday nights for over a decade, and the Trek franchise is now one of the longest running SF franchises in history. No SF show scheduled on Friday prime time has ever been successful on any network... even the SciFi Channel has trouble holding ratings of its premier shows on that night. Therefore, any TV exec that schedules a science fiction show for Friday prime time is purposely throwing it away.

Firefly was placed squarely at primetime Friday night. End of series. Also not surprising that they would do so, since Firefly was so obviously not Star Trek, that I'm sure it weirded out the Fox executives no end. (Cattle rustlers and space ships?!? And I don't see no Klingons!! What the !%@$*&!%&#!! is this?!?)

Anyway, I finally decided to commit my version of a Trek series to paper (or electrons, as it were). I almost wrote it as originally intended, using clear Star Trek names and references. But in the end, I decided to set it in its own universe, for two reasons: One, I wanted the project to have a chance of life outside of the Trek universe that didn't seem too interested in it; and two, if anything did come of it, I didn't want to be sued by Paramount!

As it turns out, in crafting my opening story I did not quite involve as much of the details of civilian life as I had expected to. On the other hand, I was trying to write a story that would potentially fit into a 1- to 2-hour introductory movie or television production, so an opening epic was out of the question. Of course, the story of Kestral's crew isn't over, so there is plenty of room to embellish in future stories, to more heavily concentrate on civilian stories, to better define the point of the setting, and the overall theme. The point of the project, of course, was to set up a series that would explore in detail the lives of these civilians in a military-dominated galaxy, and to get a look at how the other half lives. You don't have to do all of that in one book. There is a lot of ongoing potential here, potential that I may try to pursue in other venues besides text.

Nothing may ever come of it. On the other hand, if it manages to gather popularity, I might have a long-term SF series project on my hands. And I can think of worse things to do than to write about these characters for a living.

  Buy Berserker