David Mack and Star Trek

Veteran television writer and NYT bestselling author, David Mack, converses with On this Stardate host Bryan Cain about his Star Trek fandom, his work, his experiences of writing for Deep Space Nine and Voyager. David's new book, Star Trek: The Original Series: Harm's Way is in bookstores now, listen to David discuss his latest work and his approach to writing the characters that we love.

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Transcript

David Mack and Star Trek

Bryan Cain

 0:22 

 Greetings, people. I'm Bryan Cain. On this Stardate, I'm pleased to bring you all my conversation with a longtime member of the Star Trek creative community. Before we get into who this gentleman is and his contributions to Star Trek, let me tell you how I define the greater Star Trek creative community. From the very first star date that Penn was put to paper on the original pilot, the cage, there's been an innumerable amount of people that have contributed to this large canvas, whether it's canonical television film or the disputed legitimacy of whether the animated series should be considered canon. For your information, I think it should be. But I'm not CBS, and let's look at fan films and fan series. Even though those aren't canon, I include those, and they're creators. How can you deny shows like Star Trek Continues and Star Trek: Phase Two? They are clearly very good shows. The largest contribution to non canon material would probably come from the novels and the comic books. Hundreds of them. Thousands have been published over the years, many of them written by and illustrated by fans, and many never crossover into the canon world, although there has been some crossover. My guest, a New York Times bestselling author, has contributed to the canvas of Star Trek immensely with two episodes of Deep Space Nine, one episode of Voyager, multiple entries in the Star Trek comic book universe, and over three dozen novels with his latest novel, Star Trek The Original Series, Harm's Way hitting bookstores December 13. Folks. My guest is David Mack. We discuss how his life and career is uniquely intertwined with his love of all things Star Trek, and we get a unique insight into how David approaches writing the characters we love. But first, before we get to that conversation, let's take a deep breath. 3s 2022 has been quite a year. Whether you're a Star Trek fan or if you just happen to be living on planet Earth, our world is going through some scary and challenging times. And right now, for those of us who are fans, we're lucky that Star Trek has been there to help us as fans address these challenges. Whether or not today's challenges have been adequate, completely confronted in the current Trek shows, that's a whole other discussion. But in a time of noisy blockbuster movies wrought with dystopian stories, a little optimism here and there between the ensuing thread of galactic destruction is always welcome. Wait. Was I talking about Star Trek or real life? Anyway, we got the chance to say hello to new characters in the Star Trek lexicon while pretty consistently going back and checking in with some familiar vases. We unfortunately had to bid farewell to some of our Trek family. Louise Fletcher. David Warner. Catherine Hays, who played Gem on the Empath in the original series. Marva Hicks, who played Tuvoc's wife on Voyager. Greg Jein, the legendary model builder who contributed not just to Star Trek, film Kirstie Alley and our beloved queen, Nichelle Nichols. The long awaited Strange New Worlds debuted, bringing us back aboard the NCC 1701 No bloody A, B, C or D, or, for that matter, E or F, which will be in the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard. I'm hoping that our beloved next gen family finally gets a worthy swan song, and then you have Discovery. Discovery continues to take greater risks and pushes the boundaries of what types of Star Trek stories are being told. And Lower Decks and Prodigy are paving the way for a completely new era of fans without compromising the principles of Star Trek. And we have a new family member joining the fold. Carol Kane is joining the cast of Strange new worlds. The chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise. The comedy legend Carol Kane. On the movie front, to a lot of people, seemed like Star Trek Four was back on. 1s Until it actually wasn't, if it ever actually was to begin with, which I think it wasn't, to be honest. I'm not unhappy about that. I don't think that we need two iterations of the original Star Trek on streaming and on the big screen at the same time. That's too much. And on a personal note, my grandfather, who was my father, I lost him to Alzheimer's this year. And on a happier note, I got to marry my best friend, and she's the executive producer of this podcast. So that's 2022 in a nutshell, or at least part of it. Take another deep breath. I know I am. As we get ready for my conversation with David Mack, I felt it important that you know that as a fan, I've really been kind of lax on the Star Trek novels and comic books. Aside from a handful of novels and movie adaptations from over the years, I never really ventured far into those. The Star Trek books I always bought and still buy when I can find them are the reference books, the technical manuals, behind the scenes, the companions, stuff like that. I especially loved books on the history of Star Trek a great period for those kinds of books and lots of other Star Trek books. I'm finding it in the 1970s, when we had only one Star Trek, there hadn't been any movies yet, and we had The Animated Series and our reruns, and that's the same time period during which our guest, David Mack became a fan. I found and ordered a couple of his books his newest, of course, Star Trek the Original Series, Harm's Way, and a really neat book called The Starfleet's Survival Guide. 

David Mack

 6:25 

 That was my first book I was ever hired to write. Yeah, I mean, it was written around the time that it was a book called the Worst Case Scenario Survival Guide. And they wanted something in that spirit, but for shit. They could only happen to you in the Star Trek universe. Yeah. The idea is that what do you do if you get attacked by a Mugato? How do you react if you find out you're slipping through parallel universes, things like that. 

Bryan Cain

 6:52 

 That has been most of my reading as a fan. Like, I've always read all of the reference books, 2s even dating back to the making of Star Trek checkoffs Enterprise. And I've kind of dabbled in and out of novels and movie adaptations, but just over the last year have really started to dive in deeper into not just the online fan community, but also the whole world of Star Trek novels. There's just so much rich material out there that. 3s Honestly, I'm really late in discovering that a lot of it is more interesting than the television. 

David Mack

 7:35 

 Well, I mean, it's certainly richer and more complex. 

Bryan Cain

 7:39 

 You're a consultant on Star Trek: Prodigy which I think is fantastic right now. Are you able to discuss at all what your role entails as a consultant? 

David Mack

 7:52 

 Certain degree. I can't give out specific details. Certain things are considered proprietary information. I mean, my Star Trek career is sort of interesting in that it began on television back in the started out writing for Deep Space Nine and then transitioned into books around 2000 with the Starfleet Survival Guide. From there, progressed into the ebooks and then into novels, and then came full circle and back around to acting as a consultant and still hoping that before Star Trek finishes its current run on modern television, that maybe I can still get my foot in the door somewhere before it's all over. 

Bryan Cain

 8:34 

Do you see it going away in the same way that it did after that 90s apex 

David Mack

 8:39 

 period? I don't know. It's hard to say just because I'm not a fortune teller. And 1s Star Trek certainly seems to have a certain renewed energy and vitality to it with the great range of shows that are currently in production. That said, nothing lasts forever. No show lasts forever. 1s Some last longer than others. Look at Lawn in Order, multiple spin off things been on the air for what, 20, 30, 40 years at this point, and it just won't quit. You can't kill the thing. So who knows? Perhaps in the right hands, star Trek could exhibit that same sort of longevity. Maybe not in a single series, but as a franchise, as a universe. 1s Capable of supporting many different kinds of series, many different visions, but all sort of working together toward that concept of a unified whole, of a better future. Maybe it could stay on TV indefinitely. Maybe it'll outlast me. Who knows? 

Bryan Cain

 9:51 

 It seems like it's going to outlast all of us.

David Mack 

 9:53 

 Well, I think if it's here in 50 years, I think a lot of the credit will go to Prodigy. I think a lot of folks who are going to be middle aged in, say, 40 years or 50 years are going to say they came to love Star Trek because their first experience was Prodigy. And from Prodigy, they're going to venture out and experience the sort of greater universe of Star Trek as they get older. I think Prodigy is going to be the onramp for a new generation of Star Trek fans, for younger fans to find an accessible onramp. So I think in that respect, prodigy is going to be a great boon to the Star Trek universe. 

Bryan Cain

 10:39 

 I'm very excited about what kids reactions are. I've been looking scouring the Internet, trying to look for something that discusses how kids are reacting to this and what the reception is. I've shown it to some of the younger children in my family, cousins, and they respond to it very well. And I've also shown it to my wife, my niece and nephew in laws, and they love it as well. But I'm eager to see because yours and I's first experience with Star Trek was vastly different. Mine was married Jen. 

David Mack

 11:18 

 Mine was original series. I grew up child of the grew up with Star Trek and syndicated reruns. 

Bryan Cain

 11:26 

 I've reacquainted myself with that time period. And it's very interesting because I don't know what that's like. There's been constant Star Trek all the way constant new Star Trek all the way throughout my life, really, with the exception of that period between Enterprise and JJ. Abrams first 

Bryan Cain

 11:42 

 film. Yeah, that six year gap from what? I think it's around 2003 to around or maybe it's only five years. It's 2004 with Enterprise, I think. Yeah, it's only about five years. Yeah, 

 Bryan Cain 

 11:53 

 just about. I mean, Enterprise I want to say Enterprise ended in either four or 5, 

 David Mack 

 12:00 

 may 4 or June 4. 

 Bryan Cain 

 12:02 

 Yeah, something like that. And it's a very short period. 

 David Mack 

 12:06 

 It wasn't that long a gap. I mean, whereas I had to live with the gap between when the show was canceled and 69. I was born shortly before that, and then it went into syndicated reruns, but there was no new Star Trek until 1979 with the first movie. And then I had the movies and whatnot, but in terms of Star Trek on television, 1s I had the syndicated reruns as a child that I enjoyed, but I didn't see actual new first run Star Trek on TV until the premiere of NextGen, which premiered the same month that I started film school at NYU. And 

 Bryan Cain 

 12:46 

 see, that was that's my first experience. And then from there, I discovered original series. My grandfather showed me the original series. That was first episode was Trouble with Troubles. 

 David Mack 

 12:57 

 A good place to start. Good place to start. Nice, easy on ramp. 

 Bryan Cain 

 13:02 

 My uncle showed me Wrath of Con, which just blew my mind. Do you remember your first episode of the original 

 David Mack 

 13:07 

 series? At this point? It's 50 years ago, so probably not, but I think it may have been the Galileo Seven. I mean, I have vivid memories of the Galileo Seven and the crew trapped in the shuttle craft and desperately trying to get rescued, and it made quite an impression. So I'm pretty sure Galileo seven had to have been. At least one of the first ones I saw in syndicated rerun. So this would have been around 72, 73 when I was a kid, planted in front of the TV. And 

 Bryan Cain 

 13:38 

 given the and given your career and the success of your career, at what point in watching Star Trek did you know you wanted to create this? 

 David Mack 

 13:47 

 I mean, I loved Star Trek pretty much my whole life. Like a duckling that imprints upon the first moving object that it's I imprinted upon Star Trek, where I could say, Star Trek imprinted upon me at a very young age. So the whole ethos of Star Trek, the ideology of it, the vision that it carries for the future was something that was instilled in me pretty much from as early on as I began to form memory, probably from around the age of two or three, just planted in front of the afternoon television, soaking up reruns of Star Trek without even realizing what I was watching. The point at which I began to first realize that Star Trek maybe had something 1s to offer me or that I had some way to offer something back to Star Trek was around the second season, I believe, of Next Generation. They began having an open door policy for script submissions. They would accept unsolicited submissions of spec teleplays. For Star Trek the Next Generation couldn't be a story. Pitch had to be a complete teleplay, roughly 50 to 57 teleplay pages, improper format. And you'd sent it in with a disclaimer sheet. And it would go to the Paramount office, and it would sit in a room with a few thousand others, and somebody, some low ranking person, some new hire on the staff writing team would be assigned occasionally to go sit in 1s the Slush room and read through the Slush spec manuscripts. And most of them would get polite rejection letter for this or that or the other reason. The goal was to see if anything ever was good enough to pull out and produce on its own merits or something was good enough that even if they couldn't use it, they might say, well, this is a writer who we should at least invite into pitch. They seem to know what they're doing. So being in film school, being trained in screenwriting, at that point, I got it in my head, hey, maybe I could do this. So I started sending in spectacular plays starting around my second year of college. And I continued, and I never got out of the slush pile at Next Gen. I just got polite rejection letter after rejection letter, and I'd come up with a new idea that I would think was better, and I'd send that in. I'd get another one. They had the same policy at DS Nine, so even after I graduated film school, I was still sending scripts. Now I'm sending them to DS Nine instead of TNG. 1s And I'm collecting more rejections. And I kept up with that. And eventually, part of how I broke through it was a twofold thing. I had an advantageous encounter where I got to meet at a local convention in New York City. 1s Brandon Braga, Ron Moore, and Alita Fadja, who was the script coordinator on the other snyan at that time. And Brandon didn't seem to have much interest in talking with me. But Ron and Lolita were very nice, and they gave me some very helpful information, some good pointers. And then about a year later, I teamed up with a guy who was the editor of the Star Trek books because we had a mutual friend. And that mutual friend was telling me that I should try writing Star Trek novels and that he wanted to introduce me to this guy who edited and acquired Star Trek novels for Simon and Schuster, because wouldn't that be great? And it turned out that guy, John Ordov, had access to pitch to the TV show, but he had no experience or training and screenwriting, so he would be like a dog chasing a car. He could catch it, but he wouldn't know what to do with it once he got it, whereas I couldn't catch the car, but I knew what to do with it. Put us together, and you got chocolate and peanut butter. So chocolate and peanut butter got together, and we developed a working relationship. I knew what the rules would be. For instance, if you go in, you make a pitch, and they like the pitch, you get two weeks from whenever they approved the story outline. You have two weeks to execute a polished first draft teleplay and turn it in. So I told John that I didn't want to put ourselves I didn't want us to put ourselves in the position of pitching to the show until I knew we were capable of following through and taking the ball across the goal line. So he and I came up with a bunch of different ideas. We'd argue out which one was best. We developed the stories. We developed the story outline. We would say, all right, this is the story. This is good. Let's lock this down. Let's divide it into a beat sheet, which is where we do the break. We're you sort of figure out this is the number of scenes. These are the scenes for act one. This is the cold open here's where the commercial breaks go. And then I would sit down and write the teleplay. He would offer feedback notes act by act. And after we had done three of these in a row, each time coming in under the two week deadline limit. 1s I said to him, okay, I'm convinced we can pull this off. If we can get the job. Let's come up with a series of good story pitches and then set up the call. And so that's what we did. And he set up the call. And that first call we had was with Voyager, and that went well. We made a sale to Jerry Taylor right off the bat, and then the next call a couple of weeks later was to DS Nine in, and we made one more definite sale and one more they liked, but they weren't sure what to do with it. But they said they wanted to hang on to it. And because we had made the first sale at Voyager and our spec script was for DS Nine, we thought, well, we can't send a DS Nine spec to the DS Nine producers because they can't look at it. But as a writing sample, we can send it to the Voyager team. They can look at it. The DS nine guys can't So, because we had sold a story idea to Voyager, we sent Jerry Taylor one of our three spec scripts we had done. We picked out the one we thought was best and represented our capabilities, and we sent it to her as a writing sample just in case there was an opportunity to go from not just telling the story, but maybe getting the script writing assignment. She liked it enough that when she heard through the Grapevine, because at that time, all the writers offices were all in one building on the Paramount lot. They were all in the heart building. Back then, 1s she heard through the grapevine that we had made another sale a couple of weeks later to Irish Steven Bayer at DS Nine. She walked our spec script down to him. She said, I heard you bought a story from Mcintored over. He goes, yeah, we did. She goes, Well, I know technically, you're not supposed to look at this. She goes, but here's their spec. It's for your show. It's really good. You should consider giving them a script assignment. And so Jerry Taylor handed our spec script to Irish Steven Bear, and a few weeks later, we were told we were getting the script assignment, which almost never happens. Usually, your first sale to television, you sell a story outline, and then somebody a staff writer, somebody on staff, one of the producers will write the teleplay. 1s John and I got script assignment on our first sale at DS Nine. 

 Bryan Cain 

 20:53 

 That is that's amazing. And that was Starship down. Correct. 

 David Mack 

 20:56 

 That was starship down. 

 Bryan Cain 

 20:58 

 Yeah, which was a great episode. And it's only a paper. Moon is one of my favorite of all Deep Space Nine episodes. 

 David Mack 

 21:06 

 Yeah, it's sort of funny. In that Paper Moon, it went through a long evolution, a long story development process. And even though John and I only have credit for story by on paper Moon, more of our actual story ideas and in fact, more of our actual words from, say, the story document itself more of our actual words. Made it into that episode than did into Starship Down, on which we are credited solely as written by Starship Down went through many, many rewrites by Renee Cavaria for many reasons related to budget, practicality timing, and then just changing assumptions as they went along. Whereas the outline we turned in at the end after being contacted about the final sale and final sort of shape of the story for Paper Moon, 2s that story outline, Ron Moore took that and he executed the teleplay almost exactly as we'd planned it. And there were very few revisions. It it just sailed. It went right through the production process with minimal overhaul so that the finished episode very, very closely resembles the original story in a way that the episode for Starship Down does not resemble our original work in any way, shape or form. But that's me writing for you, 

 Bryan Cain 

 22:35 

 that episode. And it sounds to me like, you know, as I am getting ready to read Harm's Way, which is coming out December 13 for everyone to buy it flood stores and and get this or I listen to the unabridged audio book coming out on the same day, 

 David Mack 

 22:51 

 the. 

 Bryan Cain 

 22:53 

 I'm seeing a connection in the harm's way is dealing with the aftermath and the trauma of dealing with what these characters, Kirk and Spock, and the crew of the Enterprise just dealt with. And 

 David Mack 

 23:08 

 you 

 Bryan Cain 

 23:10 

 helped write one. In my opinion, for my money, one of the most accurate depictions of what someone in Star, our fleet, can go through 1s with 1s how Nog was coping. In Paper Moon, 

 David Mack 

 23:25 

 you're talking about post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD? 

 Bryan Cain 

 23:29 

 Yes, sir. And it's just something that I don't feel 1s is represented enough in Star 

 David Mack 

 23:36 

 Trek. Yeah. I think that one of the things that I liked about being able to get into characters heads in the novels is, for instance, the aftermath of the events of an episode like the original series episode The Doomsday Machine. We never really in the original series, from week to week, they would simply forget what happened last week, and they would just tell a new adventure, and each one was very much this self contained entity, and they would very rarely address anything from another episode, if they ever did. Whereas it seems to me something like The Doomsday Machine would have lingering emotional and psychological effects for both Kirk and for Spock, and to a greater degree, for Spock. The episode and the events of the episode amok time where he has the pond far. He has to go home to Vulcan, he gets betrayed by Dupring. He thinks he's killed as captain. This is also, I think, going to have a lot of lingering effects. And part of what happens with post traumatic stress disorder is repetitive thoughts, a near obsession with going over the same argument again and again, but trying to find nuances, trying to find your way out of this sort of circular reasoning that you've trapped yourself in. And so you keep revisiting the same debate in your head over and over, and you question yourself, and you start second guessing yourself. You start recontextualizing everything you're doing, all the decisions you're making. You're suddenly reviewing them. 2s Through this lens, this retroactive lens, and comparing them to what has happened before. But now you don't trust yourself, so now you're sort of just revisiting everything. Or in Jim Kurt's case, as you'll see in harm's way, what he's dealing with is also survivor guilt. He has lost his friend Matt Decker. He's seen Decker break down and sort of lose himself in the grief of having lost his crew. And there's a lot of things that are weighing on Jim Kirk's mind as a young starship commander, seeing what happens when someone he considered a role model breaks, just shatters completely. And it's scary for him. It's a shattering of the confidence. It's not just a role model, but also a friend. So, for instance, he's thinking about the fact that because he was there at the end with Matt Decker, because he was a witness to Matt Decker's death. Although the official responsibility for, say, writing the letter home to the surviving family of Matt Decker would technically be the duty of an admiral, let's say, who is in command over Decker. 1s Kirk feels a personal obligation. He's like, I was there. This was my friend. I'm a friend of the family. I owe them at least a personal communication of condolence, but what am I supposed to say? And so this is weighing on his mind. It's not that he has an official duty to reach out to Decker's family, but he is now consumed by this thought that he he should reach out because he was there and because this event, this trauma, has marked him. And so those are the sort of ideas we're in the midst of what is otherwise an action oriented 2s story of harm's way down on the planet. We're dealing with the shadai from Vanguard. So we got monsters and we got natives and we got action galore. Up in space, we have a cat and mouse game, which, on its face, seems like not a lot happens. But when you really dig into it, you realize what you have is a Cold War slow motion chess match between two captains who have both been told by their superiors, don't do anything stupid. 1s Don't start a war. And if you do, make sure that you have an excuse for why it's not your fault. So you've got two guys who really would like to face off, but they're both wary. They both know if you do this wrong and you don't give yourself plausible denial, you're going to pay for this. So they're both being very cautious. This is not a case of two hotheads is going to run in and start shooting lasers at full. This is a Cold War scenario where the wrong move by one starship captain could plunge two cultures into war overnight, and neither one wants to be that guy. So this is another thing where it's a Cold War standoff in orbit and then two strike teams, a landing party and a Klingon strike team down on the planet's surface caught up in their own drama. So you've got these two parallel storylines. 

 Bryan Cain 

 28:38 

 It sounds exciting. I hear the doomsday machine. I hear balance of terror, and then I also hear what PTSD again, like what you said about how it consistently and constantly repeats in your mind what it has you question, and we've seen and Kirk do that within the confines of an episode. You know, it's not just me. I've got 430 other people I've got I've got to think about, too. Do you remember your experience with Star Trek novels prior to writing them? And. 

 David Mack 

 29:13 

 I grew up reading The Blitz with Trek, with Trek books. I first started reading the James Bliss novelizations of both the original series episodes and the Animated Series episodes, which were the Star Trek logs. So I read the Bliss books when I was young. I didn't read too many of the Star Trek novels during my youth or during my teen years. I read some of the Star Wars ones, especially the Allende Foster stuff and Admiral Thrawn and whatnot. I read a couple of Star Trek novels, I think maybe during my college years, but what really got me interested was sort of finally made me sit up and take notice, aside from my friend trying to get me to write them, and a former Star Trek books editor telling me that I should. I had sort of felt like I was keeping it at arm's length because I still had this dream of writing for the TV shows. But then I picked up a copy of Msadi by Peter David, and it was just phenomenal. The story blew my mind. The scope of it, the scale, the way that he was able to bring so many different things to the table. Interior monologue, interior point of view, time travel. The idea that he found a way to tell this grand, epic love story and time travel story. And then at the end, he found a way to put the toys back in the box in a way that makes it fit with the TV show continuity, doesn't disrupt it, but adds to it, enriches it, and has told a self contained story that is moving and thought provoking and ultimately just mind blowing. And I read that, and I said, wow. Okay. If a Star Trek novel can be like this, if this is the kind of potential that they allow to come to fruition, then, yes, this is something I want to do. This is the kind of storytelling I'm interested in. So partly blame Peter David for the damage I've done to the tree universe, as they would say, and part of it lies with my friend Keith De Candido, who preceded me as a Star Trek novelist and then actively helped pave the way to bring me into the fold. Now, do you think that being a Star Trek novelist has. 1s Made it more or less challenging for you to find your way into back into the fold as a television writer because you wrote you got 

 Bryan Cain 

 31:43 

 street thread. You have two really great episodes of Deep Space Nine under your belt, 

 David Mack 

 31:48 

 but they're old. They're 30 years old at this point. 

 Bryan Cain 

 31:52 

 But we keep that's where we keep going to for material is 30 years ago, 30 years ago, 

 David Mack 

 31:58 

 respectively. All some of it, I think certainly the fact that I have stayed active as a Star Trek professional storyteller for close to 30 years now, going back to 95, I'm 27 years in as a professional Star Trek storyteller. I've written for Star Trek on television, in novels, short fiction, comic books, video games, I've written reference materials, I've written technical books, I've written academic material about Star Trek. I've been a TV series consultant now for lower decks and for Prodigy. I was an unofficial consultant on the first season of Discovery. Gave a lot of notes on that. 1s And to someone who was sort of paying attention to the details, it's pretty clear that my work has had influence beyond just the printed page. One of my novels, a Section 31 novel called Control many of the elements of that book wound up inspiring, apparently. The second season of Discovery. I think that the fact that I've made contributions consistently over 27 years gives me some hope that if there is eventually a chair open in a writer's room, my friend Kirsten Byer managed to get in the door a number of years back when they were staffing up for Discovery to sort of begin the process. And she's gone on to become a co creator of Star Trek. Picard. She's been in the room for Star Trek's strange new worlds. I believe she's going to be part of the Star Trek Star Fleet Academy series that's coming down the pike, so she's managed to stay in the mix in the TV side of things now for, wow, close to six years. She's been on the inside now for a while, working her way up to the executive producer level. Pretty soon. 2s And my hope is that one of these days, she'll be in a position to throw me a lifeline and pull me a board and say, you know, here, have a chair. Let's get to work. That's the dream. I mean, maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't, but, you know, you got a dream big. Why dream small? Cause dreams are free. That's it. That's it. I got to ask you because you've written all throughout the Star Trek universe, the original series, Next Gen, Deep Space Nine, the Mirror universe. 

 Bryan Cain 

 34:33 

 What is your favorite universe to write within character wise and timeline 

 David Mack 

 34:38 

 wise? I mean, it's hard to say that I have one favorite among all of the canon universes. If there's one particular sub niche of Trek that's my favorite, it would be the one that I co created, which is Star Trek Vanguard, which is what ties in with original series in my new novel, Harm's Way. Vanguard was this terrific thing that just knew it was like lightning in a bottle. I co created that with editor Marco Palmieri. He brought me aboard to work on this in 2004 after my first pair of Star Trek Next Generation paperback novels came out. And he had some basic ideas. He wanted it to be a board of starbase. He wanted it to be 23rd century original series era, but he wanted something more nuanced, less black and white, less campy. He wanted something more serious, grittier, 1s and more representation, more representative. He wanted greater representation across the board than what we saw in Tos, which come on was very white and needed a lot of help. I mean, they made their token gestures, but come on, it was very white. They needed help. 1s So he brought me aboard to work on Vanguard, and I did the series bible, and I developed the whole thing. And then I eventually ended up alternating books on that, where I would write the odd numbered books, and my pals Dayton Ward and Kevin Domore would write the even numbered books, and we would keep bouncing ideas off each other and trying to one up each other. And it developed a really terrific creative energy of a kind that we just have not been able to replicate since. That's why I call it Lightning in a bottle. It was one of those magical moments of alchemy where you just you had the right people with the right idea, the right zeitgeist at the right time, and it just clicked. And Vanguard became just this fabulous thing that continues to continues to fascinate me, and I continue to be proud of it. 1s Well, that's 

 Bryan Cain 

 36:43 

Well, that's the epitome  of creative fulfillment right there, right when you have something that you've been able to spin off from something that you love, and it's made an impact with people without giving away your idea, because we all have ideas. That for a TV series, the dream TV series we would do, somebody gave you the keys to the car and told you you could have a series, obviously without giving away too much of the goods. In case you're able to do this. 1s What can you tell us? What would be that dream Television series by David Mack? 

 David Mack 

 37:15 

 Are you talking about Dream Star Trek TV series or just dream series? 

 Bryan Cain 

 37:19 

 Dream Star Trek series and then your dream series

 David Mack 

 37:21 

Okay, all right. Dream Star Trek series. I would want to do Vanguard. I would want to bring Vanguard to television because I think it would be a perfect successor to Star Trek strange new worlds. And I'm hoping that maybe someday Kirsten Buyer and I will be in a position to actually propose this and pitch this. I've got a pilot for it, a pilot script that's written that she's been helping me with, and I've got a whole pitch package together for it. So hopefully someday we'll get to use it and maybe try to sell alex Kurtzman. The other thing I would love to do is bring to television my Dark Art series, which was contemporary fantasy set. The first book is set in World War Two. The second book is set in Cold War era 1950s, and the third book is set right after the Kennedy assassination in 63. And the general idea behind those is black magic is real works the way it says it does in 15th century grimoires. So you've got these ceremonial magicians who have these incredible powers that are all derived from summoning and controlling demons. And that's how magic works. And they're involved behind the scenes in war, in politics, in power struggles, in economic struggles. And the Dark Arts series, although it's got this trappings of sorcery 1s as sort of the general milieu, what that series is really about, in a word, is power, because there's so many ways that power manifests. It manifests as military strength. It manifests as dynastic wealth, the ability to alter public perception through propaganda is power. 1s Lies can be power. Information, knowledge can be power. So the series as a whole is about power. It's about how. 1s People go about acquiring it, how they use it, how they abuse it, and how power corrupts and essentially how corruption affects the people that it touches and how difficult it is to do good things with power that is derived from evil sources. So it's about sort of the moral struggle. To acquire power often requires a ruthlessness that we would consider evil. And so if you go into it wanting to use power for good or for noble ends, how do you reconcile that sometimes with the terribly immoral things or amoral things, I think I should say, that one must do to acquire and maintain that power. So I think that series has a lot of potential. I think it would be great for, say, Netflix or Amazon or something like that. I've even got, like, an ideal showrunner of mine that's another one. I've already written the pilot script. I have a whole pitch package. And I'm working with a friend of mine who's a producer. 2s We're trying to line up financing. We're trying to find venture capitalists. There's a showrunner, in fact, for it that I think would be perfect who I'm asking him to go out and try and get in touch with. So that's the dream that Dark Arts would make it to TV and I would have my thing, my concept, my book series makes it to TV. I would love that. And I would love to see Vanguard as a Star Trek series. So I think either one would have me over the moon. 

 Bryan Cain 

 40:52 

 Special thanks to David Mack for talking to us about his career. His new book, Star Trek the Original Series, Harm's Way, in bookstores right now, so go and get it. He can be followed on Twitter at DavidAlanMack. That's A-L-A-N. We didn't get to touch too much on David's work as a story consultant on Star Trek Prodigy, but I just have to give a serious shout out to that show and their team for winning the Emmy and for, frankly, being the most creative and daring of the current Star Trek series on the air. It pays immense homage to the history of Star Trek, and it's aware of the shoulders upon which it stands, the way Star Trek and its core principles and values, that it's become known for its optimism, its embrace of each of us and our differences, particularly in the journey The Dal is on. To find out who he is all of that is just amazing. And I hope that kids can see this and acquire from it the same valuable lessons that many of us fans took from Devil in the Dark or A Measure of a Man. David Mack said that Star Trek Prodigy represents the future, and he's right. And many thanks to him for his contributions to those stories. You know, Chancellor Gorkon called the future the undiscovered country. Okay, don't get me started. Prodigy. Make sure you don't sleep on it. I am Bryan Cain, and I can be followed at IamBryanCain on Instagram and Twitter. The show can be followed at on this start date on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Please rate us five stars on Apple podcasts and subscribe. Share it with your friends and family and hit me up on Twitter. Let's keep the conversation going. Thank you all for listening. Take care, and we'll talk again soon. Jolantru