Debriefing
with the Fleet Commander
Mike P. Kube-McDowell maps the battle
plans for the "Black Fleet Crisis"
Interview by Dave Phillips
5/20/96
Mike
P. Kube-McDowell (the "Kube" is pronounced like the letters "Q-B"
spoken) is the latest author to delve into the realm of our favorite universe - Star
Wars. His first book in the "Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy," Before the
Storm, has been met with rave reviews from fans and critics alike, which have been
reflected in heavy sales. Regulars in CompuServe's SFMedia Two Star Wars section
might also recognize him by the nickname of "K-Mac," which he uses as a sign off
when posting messages and emails. I recently had the privilege of interviewing K-Mac for
this edition of Echo Station to discuss the writing of Before the Storm and the two
coming books in the trilogy: Shield of Lies and Tyrant's Test, both due out
later this year.
ECHO STATION: There's an awfully short span of release times on these three books - all three in the same year...who's decision was this? Was this your decision as a writer to get them all out so quickly, or was it LucasFilm's decision to get them into the marketplace?
K-Mac: It was a Bantam/LucasFilm decision. These three openings in the publishing schedule were apparently created when the (film) release of Episode One got pushed back a year. That created three openings in the paperback publishing program and, I think, one in the hardcover schedule. So the publishing schedule for these books was pretty much carved in stone before anyone had been signed to write them.
ES: Has it been difficult writing all three so quickly, going through the drafting and editing processes in a more rapid fashion than is normal? Especially with your hectic schedule?
KM: In a word: yes. I received my welcome-aboard package from Lucasfilm and Bantam in September of 1994; I'll deliver the third manuscript sometime in the next couple weeks, in May of 1996. In those 20 months, I not only did my research, wrote three outlines, and wrote three 100,000 word novels, but my wife and I moved and had a baby. It's been intense. I haven't had much time for myself for almost two years. That's much faster than I've typically written my own books--
The first three were written one per year, the next three one every two years, and I was three years into Vectors when I put it down to write "The Black Fleet Crisis." Oh, yes, and we have a second baby due in a month. So I'm racing more than one deadline.
ES: Congratulations AGAIN, then! How does writing in the Star Wars Universe compare to writing with your own original characters and settings?
KM: The writing itself isn't very different--and I think people who've read my other books will recognize my voice and my sensibilities in the Star Wars books. The biggest differences are before and after you sit down to write.
ES: Before and after....how so?
KM: I needed to get outline approval from Bantam, from Lucasfilm, and from George Lucas personally--that meant writing three outlines, where ordinarily I would only write one.
I also needed to be conscious of where the ground had been tread before -- the scope of the post ROTJ storylines contained in the other novels and, to some degree, the other licensed materials. Ordinarily, I get to just make everything up -- here, I had to respect the canon. Afterwards, again, there's an extra level of review, with another set of eyes to please. I've been very happy with my dealings with Lucasfilm. They let me take the story where I thought it needed to go, and were always willing to listen to my rousing defenses of what I'd done.
ES: What is working with Lucasfilm like? Were there many changes, edits, or rewrites that they wanted to see done?
KM: The Lucasfilm notes & comments letters are lengthy and detailed, but most of the points addressed are very minor matters of the SW book style or continuity. I thought the edits requested were surprisingly light and very reasonable, and I feel like the books as published are very close to what I would have wanted.
ES: Did you need to do much coordination with other Star Wars authors when writing your novels? To avoid "stepping on toes" so to speak?
KM: Since I joined the party a bit late, I didn't have much opportunity to actively coordinate what I was doing with other writers--I simply had to deal with what they'd written, most of which was already published. I did pick the brains of several of the SW writers on various reference & background questions.
ES: In that vein... Just out of curiosity, is there, for lack of a better phrase, a "help desk" at Lucasfilm for authors like yourself who may have questions regarding some particular detail? You mentioned Sue Rostoni at Lucasfilm in your Author's Note as being particularly helpful...is that her position there?
KM: Sue's been my only first-name-basis contact at Lucasfilm. My understanding is that she has primary responsibility for keeping all the ducks in a row, insofar as how the various books, comics, and other media extend the storyline and timeline. She's also been terrific about getting reference material to me when I had a question about What Hath Come Before. Most of the books on my SW reference shelf came from Sue -- except for the (other author's) novels themselves, which came from Tom Dupree at Bantam.
I found that for the quickest answers to the picky-detail questions, there was no better resource than the Star Wars community online -- on Genie, on CompuServe, and on the Internet. The online fans have really done a great job of plugging the gaps in the published reference material.
ES: Do you feel your writing reaches a bigger audience being released in paperback as opposed to hardcover? How do you feel as the author knowing that people are more likely to try something new with a $6 paperback than they are with a $22 hardcover?
KM: I've been told that the writers who did paperback trilogies look at the writers who did hardcover singletons with envy, and vice versa -- with everyone envying Tim Zahn, who got the best of both worlds with his books. <g>...Hardcover publication has always had a prestige element which paperback publishing doesn't, and I'd guess that most of us who write for a living like seeing our work published between boards...
But apart from that element, I'm perfectly content to have my books released as paperback originals--and showing up on the New York Times Bestseller List. At the end of the day, I think we all know we're fortunate to have been picked to be part of this.
ES: Many people, having read Before The Storm, are already comparing your work to that of Timothy Zahn as being the best and brightest of the Star Wars universe...how does this sit with you?
KM: I'm flattered by the comparison, because I know how highly Tim's books are regarded by what seems to be a majority of Star Wars fans. It's also nice in another way -- Tim is an old friend, going back to when we were both selling most of our short fiction to ANALOG and haunting the same midwestern SF conventions. But at the same time, it's risky for a writer to become too conscious of either praise or criticism. I think we have to write to please ourselves first, and then hope for the best. My hope is that those who've been so kind to me and to Before the Storm will find just as much to like in Shield of Lies and Tyrant's Test -- because when the work's done, there's nothing better for a writer than knowing that a reader enjoyed the journey he or she took with you.
ES: On a more specific topic...You've got quite a task dealing with one of the greatest unanswered questions from the original films... "What ever happened to Luke and Leia's mother - the wife of the man who became Darth Vader?" Was it your idea to deal with this subject or was it given to you?
KM: None of the storyline for "The Black Fleet Crisis" was given to me -- I picked the biggest available hole in the timeline (the four years before Roger MacBride Allen's trilogy), looked at what had and hadn't been addressed in the preceding books, and asked myself what was missing...
ES: Heavy topic to choose! What brought the idea around?
KM: The first thing that came to mind was that Luke and Leia had never come to grips with the issue of how and why they came to be raised by foster parents, and what sort of person their mother was... Luke and Leia also know little to nothing about their mother's fate. No matter what happens in Episodes I, II, and III, that won't change -- as Akanah says to Luke, there's a great empty space where their mother should be.
ES: In regards to the mysterious "Black Fleet" that's been missing all this time and never accounted for... does it worry you that some people will see this as yet ANOTHER superweapon being dragged out to be thwarted by our heroes? Other Star Wars authors have been criticized for what has been seen as "going back to the well once too often" in this regard.
KM: No, not worried at all. The Black Fleet isn't a superweapon -- in fact, I, too, am uncomfortable with the proliferation of superweapons. And that I let that discomfort guide me as Leia's and the New Republic's adversary took shape. The Black Fleet is all that it needs to be to be a problem, and nothing more -- namely, a powerful conventional armada, composed of a mix of familiar Imperial-design and not-particularly-exotic Yevetha-design warships.
ES: The Teljkon Vagabond seems to be loosely related to the Eye of Palpatine, introduced in the Star Wars book Children of the Jedi, in that it's a large vessel, with unknown capabilities and weaponry - and has been floating around in space for quite some time without anyone getting a handle on it. Was this a case of convergent evolution of thoughts, or did Ms. Hambly's book inspire the Vagabond's creation?
KM: To whatever degree there are real parallels, it's a case of parallel evolution--the vagabond was already firmly part of the Black Fleet Crisis storyline before any early material on or from the Hambly book was available to me. But, in any case, five hundred years of humans sailing the seas of Earth produced more than one Flying Dutchman legend, and more than one real story to support those legends -- with thousands of years of galactic space travel involving hundreds of thousands of species, I don't think the Star Wars universe is too crowded to accommodate both.
ES: Your book takes us to many levels never really looked at before such as what Leia really does all day, and the inside world of Intergalactic Diplomacy, which has captured a favorable response from many of your readers...can we expect to see more of the same in the coming novels?
KM: Readers can definitely expect the themes of Before the Storm to carry over to Shield of Lies... the narrative fragments a bit, as Luke and Akanah continue their journey, Lando &. Co. confront the mystery of the vagabond from inside, and Leia tries to recover from the personal and political shocks Nil Spaar contrived for her. There is virtually no overlap between those stories, and so they're told as self-contained novellas. In Tyrant's Test, they merge again into one narrative.
ES: Shield of Lies and Tyrant's Test are slated for release later this year... that's all we know. Have street release dates been established for these books yet? Can you give us the inside scoop on when we should be starting to look for them?
KM: Shield of Lies is scheduled for US publication in September, which will put it in US bookstores in August. Tyrant's Test is scheduled for the end of the year.
ES: No offense intended to the other author's that have written novels... we're all very grateful for the work they've done bringing our favorite characters back to us, but you seem to be writing with a different, more popular slant than they did...you've made the characters to be the more dominant personalities we'd expect them to be in the Star Wars universe ....is this something that you had noticed in the other novels as well and deliberately did on your own, or is this just a reflection of your writing style?
KM: I always intended to write a character-driven story. There's no escaping a certain amount of pushing and shoving, but in a novel, if you don't care about the people, if you aren't getting a chance to see them from all sides, the action remains flat....
The outcome of a dogfight doesn't matter much, emotionally, if you don't know at least one of the pilots -- and it's even more interesting, from a storyteller's perspective, if you know both of them.
Moreover, we're talking about a group of people whose collective fame exceeds that of any group of media stars you'd care to name. What do they do on the day after they save the galaxy from totalitarianism? What are the challenges of dealing with that status, and with the responsibilities that come with it? There's no way for any of them to ever have anything approaching a "normal" life, afterwards -- and some of them never had anything approaching a normal life before. That's a terrific storytelling opportunity -- to get close to them, get inside them. That's what I tried to do.
ES: Do you have other works in progress that newfound fans of your writing style should be on the lookout for?
KM: My next project is a collaboration with Arthur
C. Clarke, titled Trigger. I hope some of my earlier novels will find their way to the
bookstores again in reprint editions, but for the moment, anyone looking for them will
have to haunt the used bookstores. (All the previous novels were from Ace, and when I left
Ace for Bantam--you can fill in the rest.)
ES: One last question...you're obviously a Star Wars fan...do you have a
favorite moment from the films? If so, what was it?
KM: My favorite moment might be the first thirty seconds of Star Wars, when that incredible Star Destroyer rumbles in from the top of the frame until it nearly fills the screen -- that moment led to everything good that followed, including this terrific opportunity for me.
ES: Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview, Mike. I know your fans are going to love it. We'll see you around the threads as you post from time to time.
KM: You're welcome, Dave. Thanks very much.
Fetching Results...
