My short story “Closure” appears in Distant Shores, the Star Trek: Voyager 10th Anniversary anthology.
Washed up on a faraway galactic shore, Captain Kathryn Janeway of the U.S.S. Voyager faced a choice: accept exile or set a course for home, a seventy-thousand-light-year journey fraught with unknown perils.
She chose the latter. Janeway’s decision launched her crew on a seven-year trek pursuing an often lonely path that embodied the purest form of the Starfleet adage “to boldly go…”
Committed to that difficult road, Voyager‘s crew was rewarded with unimaginable experiences on strange and fantastic worlds, encountering exotic alien species and astonishing phenomena…and challenged along the way by conflicts from within as well as from without.
Yet none of their adventures tempered their shared determination to find a way back to friends and family.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
With the end of Star Trek Voyager‘s seven-year run in 2001, the crew of Starfleet’s lost vessel returned to Earth in the episode “Endgame” and their odyssey was at an end; or at least, it was at an end on television…
After Voyager‘s sister series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had come to an end, Pocket Books (publishers of the Star Trek tie-in novels) elected to take a new approach to their fiction line; they would continue the dramas of DS9 into future ‘seasons’ in book format, evolving storylines and introducing new characters. The idea was such a success that Star Trek: Voyager followed suit after its conclusion with author Christie Golden’s duology Homecoming and The Farther Shore. But as well as charting the future of the Voyagers, the novels have also ventured back in time to tell stories that occured while the starship was crossing the Delta Quadrant – and for the 10th anniversary of the series’s debut, Pocket Books decided to celebrate Star Trek: Voyager‘s first decade with an anthology of short fiction set during the show’s seven seasons.
In 2004, I had been discussing some Star Trek fiction projects with editor Marco Palmieri when he offered me the chance to pitch a story for the anthology which would become Distant Shores. As a commemoration of Voyager, the brief for the book was to come up with stories that had fallen through the gaps in the television show; Marco wanted the writers to find the character moments and loose ends that perhaps hadn’t been as well served as they might have been.
I thought hard about who or what I would write about… And Neelix came to mind. In truth, a lot of fans didn’t much care for the goofy guy – too much comic relief, too funny lookin’ – but I’d always been fascinated by the relationshop between the Talaxian and his delicate Ocampa lover Kes. Why were these two together? What kind of bond did they have? It was something that the show touched on here and there, but never really plumbed the depths of. I remembered seeing actor Ethan Phillips at a convention talking about the breakup between Neelix and Kes, and it crystalised the thought for me. Like most TV affairs, the couple had gone their seperate ways and that was that. This, I considered, was not a resolution that seemed real to me. I didn’t buy Neelix getting over the girl of his dreams so fast, because (like the song says) love hurts.
And so came “Closure“. With Seven of Nine in a supporting role, I put Neelix and Kes back together for a heart-to-heart to let the Talaxian’s buried feelings rise to the surface – and proved that I’m something of a hopeless romantic at heart. Like visiting old friends, I thoroughly enjoyed returning to the characters and I was delighted to join Star Trek writers old and new for this celebration of Voyager and her noble crew.
In terms of continuity, “Closure” takes place early in Star Trek Voyager‘s fifth season, several weeks after the episode “One” (read about my contribution to that show here). The story also references events (in actual and alternate incarnations) from “Caretaker“, “Cold Fire“, “Warlord“, “Fair Trade“, “The Gift“, “Fury“, “Homestead” and “Endgame“.
