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Our Celebration Anaheim Interview with John Jackson Miller

While at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim, we had the chance to interview Star Wars author John Jackson Miller. We talked about not just Star Wars, but also his recent work with Star Trek and his work in his original sci-fi setting Overdraft.

This may be taboo but I’d like to ask you first about your latest novel Star Trek: The Next Generation: Takedown. What kind of prep work did you have to do for this novel?

Well I certainly needed to be aware of where the characters were relative to the other novels that Pocket Books had out. I also needed to get some sense of the specs of Enterprise relative to Aventine, which is the ship that they’re chasing throughout the book. I also got out my copy of Star Trek Star Charts and got a good idea of where all of the locations were in my story. So basically ever place that they go is some place they could reasonably get to.

Character voices can be hard to capture, but Senator Bretorious really leaps off of the page. How did he come about?

Well I think the notion was that I wanted to show that for a Romulan it was…it’s common for Romulans to have to try to claw over each other to become at the top level of their society. With Bretorious I wanted to show someone who had very limited prospects who had advanced as far as he was going to go and was on the way down. I wanted to show particularly, as the events of the story unfold, what happens when somebody of his limited abilities is put into the position that the opportunities of the book provide him. It’s difficult to get too much into this book without revealing some of the secrets, but certainly pitting Riker against Picard, they’re certain friends, but they’re on opposite sides of the situation. Riker, now being an admiral in the book chronology, provides some interesting story opportunities. Then of course pitting Riker against Bretorious, we got to see their two different personalities clashing there, too. I had a lot of fun with the book and it was very well received. Continue Reading Our Celebration Anaheim Interview with John Jackson Miller…