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Michael A. Martin
interviewed by Jens Deffner (March 29th 2010)

So, whose decision was it to keep him alive, and to effectively rewrite much of what These Are the Voyages... established? “I hated the way Enterprise ended its run on television,” says Michael, adding that he “hated the casual way Trip Tucker was killed off. And I particularly hated the fact that the finale was written so that the Enterprise cast members were actually guest stars on their own farewell show - remember, the only ‘real’ characters we encountered in that episode were members of the Enterprise-D crew, more than two centuries after the time of Captain Archer and Enterprise NX-01.”

And he wasn’t the only one seeing things this way. “Andy had very similar feelings, as did our editor, Margaret Clark, who had first let us come aboard Enterprise with Last Full Measure - a book that, incidentally, made the initial ‘reveal’ that Trip was destined to live to a ripe old age, These Are the Voyages... notwithstanding.

“The idea of allowing Trip to survive his apparent death originally came from Margaret,” Michael reveals. “Andy and I loved the idea that we just might get the rare privilege of ‘rehabilitating’ what we considered a flawed episode - usually an unthinkable notion, since canon is generally inalterable - and Paula Block at CBS agreed that this was the way to proceed. We followed up on LFM’s glimpse of ‘old Trip’ in our second Enterprise novel, The Good That Men Do. So we adapted as much of the original episode as possible and inserted the results into the frame of the much larger story we wanted to tell: that of the beginning of Trip’s ‘afterlife’ - his new career as an undercover intelligence operative working behind the lines during the time leading up to the Romulan War.”

The decision wasn’t without its detractors, though, so how would Michael try to convince those people to give the Enterprise post-finale novels a try nonetheless? “The vast majority of this sort of criticism amounts to a slavish devotion to canon without bothering to think through what canon really is,” he believes. “As I said before, canon is ‘generally inalterable’, which means you can’t just rewrite it or dismiss it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find legitimate loopholes once in a while.

“This story presented us with an extraordinary circumstance that so far as I can tell exists nowhere else in the Star Trek canon: the fact that the events related in These Are the Voyages... were presented at a remove, filtered through the prism of a holodeck program. We used the holodeck as a continuity loophole by questioning the quality of the program that Will Riker was running, which made the holodeck a classic case of what’s known in prose fiction as ‘the unreliable narrator’,” Michael explains, and elaborates that “for all we know, Riker’s NX-01 simulation program could have been written hastily only a month earlier, and might have been the product of shoddy research.

“Also, consider the fact that the American heroes of the Revolutionary period are about as far removed from our time as Captain Archer is from Will Riker’s time. How much of what Americans consider ‘common knowledge’ about the American Revolution is distorted by propaganda, tall-tale telling, and hero worship?” he ponders. “Why should Riker’s image of Jonathan Archer be any more accurate than the ideas most Americans have about their own nation’s Founding Fathers? And you have to add to that the implication we made that Section 31 may have made a deliberate effort to obscure certain historical events.

“Those who have gotten bent out of shape over the supposed ‘violation of canon’ we committed in reversing Trip’s death - and/or our adjustment of the story calendar from the eve of the first Federation Day to the run-up to the Romulan War - usually stop arguing once I’ve brought the preceding stuff to their attention,” Michael tells from experience. He’s also not sure whether Trip’s canon fate was as definitive as we were led to believe. “The finale episode itself contains a scene in which Archer, Phlox, and Trip exchange a strange look right before Trip’s apparent death that made me wonder whether Berman and Braga might not have been planning something not all that different from what Andy and I ended up doing with Trip - that is, faking his death while perhaps allowing history to record it as a fact - had the television series lasted another season.”
And despite the fact that he was involved with this perceived canon violation, Michael is trying to adhere to what was established onscreen as close as possible, but without falling into the trap of writing “continuity porn”.

“In comparison with many other properties, Star Trek has an exceptionally broad and deep continuity canon,” he acknowledges. “With the sole exception of the canon loophole the holodeck gave us for These Are the Voyages…, we approached Enterprise just as we did any of the other Trek franchises. Continuity-wise we didn’t stuff the kitchen sink in there just to do it, but we also didn’t want to overlook any references from the past that seemed particularly relevant to whatever here-and-now we were creating at the time.

Zane Gray wrote:Interesting... according to Memory Alpha, D.C. Fontana apparently intended Shariel to be the name of the Vulcan God of Death. This was apparently revealed in the text commentary track by the Okudas for the episode Amok Time on one of the DVD sets. Martin certainly does his research.