My short story “The Black Flag” appears in Shards and Shadows, the Star Trek: Mirror Universe anthology.
Fractured history. Broken lives. Splintered souls.
Since the alternate universe was first glimpsed in the classic episode “Mirror, Mirror,” something about Star Trek‘s dark side has beckoned us, called to us, tempted us — like forbidden fruit on the Tree of Knowledge.
To taste it is to lose oneself in a world of startling familiarity and terrifying contradictions, where everything and everyone we knew is somehow disturbingly different, and where shocking secrets await their revelation.
Twelve new short tales revisit and expand upon that so-called “Mirror Universe,” spanning all five of the core incarnations of Star Trek, as well as their literary offshoots, across more than two hundred years of divergent history.
This new anthology features a dozen new twisted tales from a sinister yet eerily familiar world where history took a different turn, featuring the brutal, amoral, alternate versions of Star Trek’s heroes.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
After the success of 2007’s Mirror Universe novellas, Pocket Books decided to bring in a new group of writers to pen stories about other shady parallels of the Star Trek universe with the Shards and Shadows anthology;. I wrote a story featuring characters from the Star Trek: Vanguard novels.
“Mirror, Mirror” is one of my favourite episodes of the original Star Trek series, with its twisted take on the show’s mythos and characters; in 2007, publishers Pocket Books released a pair of trade paperbacks – Glass Empires and Obsidian Alliances – containing several novellas set in the Mirror Universe and response from readers was so strong that the choice was quickly made to go ahead with another set of tales, this time collecting a handful of short stories, covering ground that hadn’t been written about in the earlier books.
Shards and Shadows is the end result, and I was pleased to be offered a chance to write for the collection; previously, I had pitched some ideas to editor Marco Palmieri for the ongoing Classic Trek-era series Vanguard, about a space station in an uncharted region of the galaxy called the Taurus Reach. While my pitch didn’t make the cut, Marco recalled my interest in the Vanguard characters and gave me the chance to write about their Mirror alternates, picking up on a line from a story in Glass Empires hinting at the fate of the station in this parallel reality.
I’m a big fan of Chinese actor Chow Yun Fat, who was used as the model for one of Vanguard’s characters, the ill-fated Captain Zhao Sheng; and so when I decided to write “The Black Flag”, I took the opportunity to bring him back and make him the hero of the piece. As I sat down to write the story, I had only just seen Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End, in which Chow stars, and the piratical nature of his role in that movie informed the way I wrote this alternate version of Zhao. I also took the opportunity to drop a couple of sly reference to some of the actor’s other performances in Hong Kong classics like the Better Tomorrow series…
“The Black Flag” joins brand-new stories from Christopher L. Bennett, Margaret Wander Bonanno, Peter David, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Michael Jan Friedman, Jim Johnson, Rudy Josephs, David Mack, Dave Stern, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, and Susan Wright, edited by Marco Palmieri.
