My short story “Ordinary Days” appears in The Sky’s The Limit, the Star Trek: The Next Generation 20th Anniversary anthology.
Taking its title from the final words spoken by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the series finale, The Sky’s the Limit is a collection of brand new original stories spanning and celebrating the entire twenty-year history of the most popular and successful Trek series of all.
Redefining a familiar universe for a more modern time, Star Trek: The Next Generation introduced Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the officers and crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D, and the worlds of the twenty-fourth century to a new legion of Star Trek fans. In the two decades since, viewers and readers have embraced these heroes, thrilled to their personal achivements, their shared victories, their passionate loves … and mourned their painful losses.
Celebrate the twentieth anniversary of this landmark series by joining these now-legendary characters for all-new adventures: fourteen stories that span the time from before their earliest voyages through their missions onboard the Enterprise-E – untold tales of intrigue, action, insight and exploration.
Stories by a variety of authors — some old favourites, some new — set during the events of the television series give the authentic feel of a newly discovered ‘missing season’ of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
After writing a short story for the 10th Anniversary Star Trek: Voyager anthology Distant Shores, I was approached once again by editor supremo Marco Palmieri to pitch another tale for the following year’s collection, this time celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It’s amazing to think that it’s been decades since TNG was on our screens and Star Trek gained a new lease of life and a whole new audience – I feel my age now when I talk to fans who consider the adventures of Picard and company to be the “old” show…
I can remember first hearing about the return of Trek to television, right around the time I was coming to the conclusion that I wanted to follow a career as a writer – and although I never got the chance to write for the series, all these years later I’ve been granted the opportunity to return to those characters and tell a new story.
Like Distant Shores, the concept behind The Sky’s The Limit is to showcase the heroes of the Enterprise-D (and -E!) and tell unseen tales of their lives and the challenges that face them. As before, I knew there would be a struggle between the writers pitching stories for the anthology for the most popular characters from the show, and so I decided I’d tackle someone who I felt had never been well-served on the series, a character who many fans outright disliked – the boy genius Wesley Crusher.
I always felt sorry for Wes; smart kids never have it easy, and whenever we saw him on board the Enterprise, Wesley never seemed to have a life outside of the occasional science project. I decided to give him a different path to take, and that was how “Ordinary Days” came about.
“Ordinary Days” joins brand-new stories from Christopher L. Bennett, Greg Cox, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Bob Ingersoll & Thomas F. Zahler, David A. McIntee, Scott Pearson, Michael Schuster & Steve Mollmann, Susan Shwartz, Amy Sisson, Geoff Trowbridge, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore and Richard C. White, edited by Marco Palmieri.
