Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 21, 1991 TAG: 9104190529
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER/ NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Actually, it's two writers, and they were both at the eighth annual Technicon science fiction and fantasy gathering at Virginia Tech last weekend.
Diane Carey and Greg Brodeur work together on the novels that come out under her name. She does the actual writing, they work together on things like plot development and characterization, and he edits the work for dramatic flow and emotional impact.
"In 1981 I said to Diane, `Hey, woman. With your talent 'n' my brains, we could go places' . . . She told me where I could go," Brodeur said.
They used to be teachers. "But writing was more fun and it paid better," Carey said.
Besides being writing partners, they became husband and wife. They have published romances, Civil War stories (by "D.L. Carey" since, she joked, "only men can write war stories"), and four "Star Trek" novels - which is why they were the guest of honor at the convention.
"We are very hard on ourselves and our characters," Carey said of the writing process. "We put our books through the grinder . . . and nobody is doing that on `The Next Generation.' "
As youngsters, she and Brodeur got hooked on the 1960s "Star Trek" TV series, which has inspired five movies so far. To them, that is the "real" Trek, not "The Next Generation" series, which has surpassed the original in number of episodes.
"I certainly wouldn't want to live in Picard's universe," Brodeur said of the USS Enterprise captain in the newer series. "They are very lifeless people."
They prefer James Kirk, the old captain, with all his human foibles and constant violations of the federation's non-interference doctrine involving other planetary cultures.
And they blame Gene Roddenberry, who got the original series on the air, eventually left it and now has creative control on the new one.
"He had one good idea in his life," Carey claimed, maintaining that it was then shaped by other hands. Now, she feels, his new Trek is populated by "weenie characters, weenie plots . . . No bad characters, no bad words, no bad thoughts and the ship never breaks down."
"And without conflict, I don't see that there's more there than glitz," added Brodeur.
They still managed to churn out one of the first "Next Generation" novels, "Ghost Ship," but prefer to stay in the older series.
"I hated that show, but I still made it work," Carey said.
Now they are upset at what they see as the blandness of "The Next Generation" encroaching into "their" universe. They say Roddenberry is trying to impose his view of the "Star Trek" universe on the books, too, more than 70 of which have been published by different authors.
If their third Trek book had not already been approved, Carey said, Roddenberry would have cancelled it. She said Roddenberry, a pacifist, objected to her putting an aircraft carrier in it.
"Gene says we're more evolved in the future. It seems like we've lost our humanity to me," said Brodeur. "I mean, is Kirk perfect? Far from it."
"It's become this divided world, where they are in charge," Carey said. "You have to play by their rules."
So they may not be writing any more Trek books for a while, even though their first one put the series back onto the New York Times best-seller list.
That one was "Dreadnought!" featuring a young female Star Fleet lieutenant named Piper as its heroine rather than the TV characters Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty and the rest of the Enterprise crew.
Piper and her friends - a young Vulcan like Spock, a doctor like McCoy, an engineer with a funny accent like Scotty - also turn up in the sequel, "BattleStations."
"It's a matter of taking something that somebody else has done and throwing a little twist on it," Carey said.
The switch in protagonists gives the reader a chance to see the familiar characters through someone else's eyes.
"We did it and Pocket Books [the publisher] called me and they said `You've broken every rule we've got. We love it!'" Carey said.
"I like to think that I am one of the keepers of the flame for the original `Star Trek,' " she said. "There are many Star Trek writers who are frustrated fantasy writers, so they sneak fantasy into it . . . I don't re-invent Vulcans my way, know what I mean?"
She said she watches tapes of the old series when she is writing a Trek book and visualizes the actors in the roles of the characters when she writes about them.
When she and Brodeur did a Gothic romance, a genre in which the heroine traditionally starts by being afraid of the mysterious man in the story and keeps trying to escape from him until they fall in love, she did a twist on that formula, too.
"In my book, he keeps trying to get rid of her and she won't leave," Carey said. "The d---ed thing almost won an award."
by CNB