The thanks must commence with editor Marco Palmieri, who conceived The Lost Era and has shepherded it into existence. Marco is expert at taking the seed of many of the best stories (“Wouldn’t it be cool if …?”) and nurturing it into the most beautiful flower—or, in this case, a six-rose nosegay. (Hey, c’mon, people say my prose needs to be more florid …) I also must thank Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who wrote the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “The Way of the Warrior,” thus providing me with the basis for this novel in a conversation between Bashir and Garak about the eighteen-year Betreka Nebula incident between Cardassia and the Klingons.
My fellow Lost Era authors, Michael A. Martin, Andy Mangels, Jeff Mariotte, Margaret Wander Bonanno, and especially the ones on either side of me, David R. George III and Ilsa J. Bick, are all deities among scribes. David and Ilsa had several characters and situations in common with me, and both were a joy to work with. Our cooperative efforts have made our stories more coherent and, I hope, more enjoyable for the reader, which is, after all, the primary goal.
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Also of tremendous use were various Star Trek reference tools, particularly The Star Trek Encyclopedia by Michael and Denise Okuda, with Debbie Mirek; Star Trek Chronology also by the Okudas; The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Okrand; and especially Star Charts by Geoffrey Mandel.
The Lost Era books in general and this book in particular had to weave stories from little dribs and drabs of information that the various TV shows and movies provided at many different stages. In addition to all those onscreen references (far too numerous to list here), I need to acknowledge the contributions of several works of written fiction that provided useful background material for some of the political, social, and physical forces at work in the Federation, the Cardassian Union, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Star Empire during this period: the comic book Enter the Wolves written by A.C. Crispin and Howard Weinstein; Peter David’s young adult book Worf’s First Adventure; the Dark Matters trilogy by Christie Golden; the two-part Martok biographical novel The Left Hand of Destiny by J.G. Hertzler and Jeffrey Lang; the Garak biographical novel A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson; Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz’s Vulcan’s Heart; and Lesser Evil by Robert Simpson.
I make a habit of thanking the actors who play the characters I portray in the text, which is a bit more of a challenge than usual in The Art of the Impossible, since so many of the folks herein are either of my own creation, or never appeared on-screen, or did so but briefly. However, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the contributions in providing voices, faces, and mannerisms of the following: Michael Ansara (Kang), Frank Owen Smith (Curzon Dax), Majel Barrett (Lwaxana Troi), Theodore Bikel (Sergey Rozhenko), Georgia Brown (Helena Rozhenko), Amick Byram (Ian Troi), John Colicos (Kor), Charles Cooper (K’mpec), Paul Dooley (Enabran Tain), Michael Dorn (General Worf), John Fleck (Koval), Danny Goldring (Legate Kell), John Hancock (Vance Haden), Richard Herd (L’Kor), Thelma Lee (Kahlest), Mark Lenard (Sarek), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), Tricia O’Neil (Rachel Garrett), Christine Rose (Gi’ral), Alan Scarfe (Tokath), Gregory Sierra (Corbin Entek), and Ben Slack (K’Tal).
I’ve always had a great fondness for the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and one of my favorites is William Blake. It is from his America: A Prophecy that I took the titles of this book’s sections.
The continued support of the online community has been especially heartening, and I must thank all the good folks at the Star Trek Books Bulletin Board at PsiPhi.org, the Trek Literature Board at TrekBBS.com, Simon & Schuster’s discussion board at StarTrekBooks.com, the Star Trek Books and Deep Space Nine Avatar Yahoo! Groups at groups.yahoo.com, and the Federation Library at StarTrek-Now.com.
The usual gangs of idiots: the Malibu crowd, the Geek Patrol, the Forebearance (in particular GraceAnne Andreassi DeCandido, a.k.a. The Mom), and especially my writers group CITH, who have put up with truckloads of pages dumped on them at once and still managed to go through and make those pages better.
Last, but never least, heaping dollops of thanks to the love of my life, Terri Osborne, as well as our cats, Mittens and Marcus, all three of whom were always there to provide love, affection, and a desire to be scritched. (Okay, maybe I’m sharing too much here…)