Before we start… my mother-daughter queer fantasy novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster is out in paperback now! Get it from Bookshop.org or a signed copy at Green Apple.
Star Trek is the story of the future.
Humanity masters particle physics and engineering enough to allow us to flit between the stars and hold our own in the face of both cosmic wonders and nightmares. But even more than that, we grow up. We let go of the selfishness, aggression, and need for domination that have held our species back for so long. Star Trek, at its heart, makes the case that technological progress is worthless unless it goes hand in hand with social progress. There are no billionaires in the Federation, no private corporations, no strongmen.
I have loved Star Trek for as long as I can remember. Literally, somewhere there exists a photo of me aged seven or eight wearing my homemade Starfleet uniform — which I probably wore to school, let’s be real. I’ve also been a massive fan of Star Trek tie-in media forever. Star Trek is how I first became a fan of the legendary Vonda McIntyre and the iconic John M. Ford. I will always consider Diane Duane’s Rihannsu novels to be the definitive version of the Romulans. I still have a collected edition of the Gold Key comics that I defaced as a small child with lots of terrible doodles and scribbles. I have a complete set of Peter David’s New Frontier novels, along with a smattering of his other Trek books and comics. And last but definitely not least, I’ve been absolutely blown away by everything IDW has been doing with the Star Trek comics for the past few years.
More than any other big science fiction or fantasy universe1, I’ve always seen Star Trek as being at least as much about the novels and comics as the TV shows and movies.
So yeah — when I was approached to write a Star Trek comic, I was over the moon. Especially the opportunity to start a title from scratch, with a brand new ship and a mostly new crew, including a few characters from existing TV shows, felt like a massive gift. The comic I’m writing is called Star Trek: Zero Point and the first issue is out October 14. However, if you want to make sure your local comic book store sets aside a copy for you and you don’t lose out, you only have until September 7 to request it. This is a weird quirk of how comics work — they’re non-returnable, so if you really want to read something, you absolutely need to ask for it over a month before-hand.
Star Trek: Zero Point takes place five years after the end of the Picard TV show. It’s a companion title to the main Star Trek comic, which is being written by genius MVP Christopher Cantwell, and which features Captain Seven of Nine in command of the USS Enterprise, along with all of the younger characters who were introduced in season three of Picard. And in Zero Point, Seven of Nine’s wife Raffi Musiker has been given command of her own starship, the USS Endeavour, on a very unusual mission.
In a nutshell, Starfleet has gotten tired of unpleasant surprises — of which there were many over the three seasons of Picard, as well as the TV shows that preceded it — and they’ve decided they would like to be proactive for a change. To that end, they have constructed a supercomputer named Sybil with a brain the size of a planetoid, hidden in a big asteroid belt. Sybil has access to every source of information that Starfleet can get its hands on, and the computer can forecast future threats to the Federation before they become a crisis. In theory, this should allow Raffi and the Endeavour’s crew to solve problems early, when they are still manageable. In practice, it leads to a lot of dicey situations.
Raffi is an incredible character. She’s one of the few characters who appears in all three seasons of Star Trek: Picard, and she has so many amazing layers. She’s a total badass who’s learned from the best, but she has a lot of damage, in part because she’s usually been the only person who saw trouble coming. She’s always tried to warn everybody else — only for nobody to listen to her until it was too late. She is basically the Cassandra of the Star Trek universe, and this mission represents a chance for her to be on time to prevent tragedies for a change, instead of arriving five minutes too late.
Raffi’s first officer is D’Vana Tendi, last seen on Star Trek: Lower Decks. This is twenty-five years after the end of Lower Decks, meaning that Tendi is much older and a bit less giddy, but she still loves science. And she’s still not interested in the following the path that was laid out for her back home on Orion. Tendi has immediate concerns about the wisdom of creating a an all-knowing computer — because that’s gone so well in the past.
Raffi and Tendi carry on an ongoing debate about the ethics of their mission overall, and the best way to approach situations that arise. One of the things I love most about Star Trek is that you can make space for conversations about ethics, including arguments where nobody is necessarily right or wrong, and I’m finding opportunities to write those scenes in droves. Over time, of course, Raffi and Tendi become ride-or-die friends and a solid team, but they get off to a slightly rocky start.
There’s a lot more I wish I could tell you about this comic — the supporting cast is so much fun overall. But I need to stick to what we’ve already revealed at San Diego Comic-Con and elsewhere. Suffice to say, there’s so much more to these characters than meets the eye.
One thing I do want to stress is I’ve worked hard to make Star Trek: Zero Point a no-homework book. It might be helpful if you had seen one or two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but even if you’ve never seen any Star Trek at all, it’ll read like a fun science fiction comic set in a complex but legible universe. Starfleet may have created Sybil because of the trauma from all the disasters that happened in Picard and other shows, but we don’t get bogged down in discussing the specifics of those traumas — all you need to know is that some bad things have happened. I recently wrote a scene in one of the later issues in which Starfleet’s Prime Directive is mentioned, and I’m very careful to explain what the Prime Directive is for anyone who isn’t already aware.
One thing I can tease about the opening storyline is that we’re visiting an eyeball planet! Long-time readers of my work will know that I am obsessed with tidally-locked planets, meaning planets where one side faces towards the sun and the other side is always locked in darkness. Many tidally-locked planets are believed to be so cold that they are covered entirely with ice except for a small dot of liquid water where the planet is closest to the sun — hence eyeball. To make this work, I ended up talking to four physicists and exoplanet scientists, including a former NASA scientist. I’m super passionate about including real science in this comic wherever I can.
Another thing I can tell you is that artist and colorist Isaac Sánchez González is utterly rocking my world with every page and every panel. His art regularly makes me speechless with delight, and there are a couple of pages of this comic that I might have to get tattooed on myself at some point. Letterer Jodie Troutman is also doing stellar — no pun intended — work, such that in one sequence, you can tell exactly who is talking even though it’s a long shot. Editors Cas Jones, Thea Cheuk and Heather Antos have also been an incredible resource and have helped make these stories so much stronger.
I seriously cannot freaking wait for you to read this comic book. I could not be prouder of it.
When I first pitched my idea for Star Trek: Zero Point, I picked it as a comic book about hope versus paranoia. Hope is why we’re out there in a thin metal shell, flying between the stars. Paranoia is why the ship has shields, a deflector dish, phasers, and photon torpedoes. You need both: but what happens when you let paranoia take the wheel? We’re all going to find out in mid-October, and I hope you’ll join us.
Reminder: You gotta tell your local comics shop to reserve a copy for you before Sept. 7! They probably have a way to do this on their website, or you could give ‘em a call.
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Before anyone says it… look, I love Doctor Who tie-in media too. I still have some of the old New Adventuresnovels, and there are some comics I adore. I’ve enjoyed some Big Finish audios. But for various reasons, I’ve never held the tie-in stuff quite as close to my heart as the TV show itself. ↩
