My novella “Seeds of Dissent” appears in Infinity’s Prism, the first Star Trek: Myriad Universes collection.
It’s been said that for any event, there are an infinite number of possible outcomes.
Our choices determine which outcome will follow, and therefore all possibilities that could happen do happen across countless alternate realities.
In these divergent realms, known history is bent, like white light through a prism — broken into a boundless spectrum of what-might-have-beens.
But in those myriad universes, what might have been…is what actually happened.
A Less Perfect Union: More than a hundred years after the Terra Prime movement achieved its dream of an isolationist Earth, humanity is once again at a fork in the river of history…and the path it follows may ultimately be determined by the voice of a single individual: the sole surviving crewmember of the first Starship Enterprise.
Places of Exile: Midway through Voyager‘s journey across the galaxy, Captain Kathryn Janeway and Commander Chakotay must choose whether to brave a deadly war zone or abandon their quest for home. But an attack by Species 8472 cripples the ship, and the stranded crew must make new choices that will reshape their destinies…and that of the Delta Quadrant itself.
Seeds of Dissent: Khan victorious! Almost four centuries after conquering their world, genetically enhanced humans dominate a ruthless interstellar empire. But the warship Defiance, under its augmented commander, Princeps Julian Bashir, makes a discovery that could shake the pillars of his proud civilization: an ancient sleeper ship from Earth named the Botany Bay.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Myriad Universes is the end product of a proposal that’s been mooted in the offices of Pocket Books for several years, under several different titles (Star Trek: Possibilities, Star Trek: Apocrypha, Star Trek: Split Infinities etc.); it take a science fiction staple – the alternate history story – and gives it a Star Trek spin.
Alternate history tales have been popular almost since the birth of science ficiton, and Star Trek‘s not the first ‘franchise’ universe to tackle them – Marvel and DC Comics have done it for years with their What If? and Elseworlds titles. But its mainstream SF that’s made the alt-history story a sub-genre in and of itself, taking real historical events and putting a spin of them through SF means, or just positing what things might have been like if things had taken a different track. What if the Roman Empire never fell? What if the Nazis won World War II? What if Elvis and JFK had lived?
We’ve seen different histories in Star Trek in the past – most notably the Mirror universe, but also in divergent timelines like the one in the original series episode ‘City on the Edge of Forever‘, where the death (or life) of one person alters the entire course of the future. The idea behind Myriad Universes was to tell novella-length stories about diverging histories where something in the Trek timeline had gone a different way, allowing us to see versions of people, places and events that were familiar and yet totally new.
I pitched a handful of story ideas to editor Marco Palmieri, from an Enterprise-era tale about a downtrodden human race ruled by interventionist Vulcans to a story of a Federation shattered by a Borg invasion of the Alpha Quadrant, but the one that really fired me up was a story I titled “Seeds of Dissent“; I took what I saw as the archtypical alternate history idea and filtered it through a Star Trek lens.
The result features characters and situations from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but in a way you’ve never seen them before…
“Seeds of Dissent” joins two new novellas from Christopher L. Bennett and William Leisner in the first of two Myriad Universes volumes, edited by Marco Palmieri.
COVER GALLERY
