Place an ad today!

Typhon Station is a very fastpaced PBeM RPG with skilled, experienced players and a warm sense of bonding and community. We play at the turn-of-the-century, 2400, and are located in the Typhon Expanses, bordering the Neutral Zone, proximate to the Romulan Empire, and near the Iconian Digs, and are on the first warning route of the original Borg Incursion. We have three stations to post from, SB 185, USS Odyssey, and USS Wraith. They all have general and particular storylines and all interact. This game is not for the faint of heart! The writing is superb and comes hot and heavy. We have some open spots and also we will consider character suggestions. So, longtime RPGers and novices, check us out. See if you want to make Typhon Station your home away from home. (0 comments | Add)

Posted: 08:56:40 on September 01 2002
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: Trek Books

Dean Wesley Smith has been a writer and editor for Pocket Books for some time, editing the annual STRANGE NEW WORLDS fan fiction anthology, helping develop the new popular STARFLEET CORPS OF ENGINEERS (S.C.E.) e-book series and even writing the TNG novel A HARD RAIN of late. Sci-Fi Pulse caught up with Smith to discuss his various projects.

"Hard Rain is completely in Dixon Hill's point of view," he says of the novel uniquely-placed novel. "Of course I knew I was going to be limited being only on the Holodeck, so I really let it go and challenged myself. I put every different type of mystery plot in it, including locked room and gothic. I kept the viewpoint only Dixon Hill, and Picard never thinks of himself as anything but Hill. It's a comic novel that kept me laughing as I wrote it, but I'm not sure how some fans are going to like it, since it uses so many mystery elements."

Smith says he enjoys choosing the twenty SNW contest winners each year and they offer readers the opportunity to read ideas and premises you might not see anywhere else.

"This last year, on the AOL Strange New Worlds board under Star Trek writing, someone got kidding around about there being a Borg Tribble," he says. "I said I would love to see that story, and about five of the writers on that board tried to write a Borg Tribble story, and one of those stories got second place in the last contest. It is a hoot, and wonderfully written. It is called, 'The Trouble with Borg Tribbles.'"

Smith also talks about the callenges of penning the first ENTERPRISE novel, BY THE BOOK, with co-author Kristine Katheryn Rusch before the series had debuted on television.

"Actually, we had the first script, and the next two, but nothing else," he reveals. "We also did the very first original Voyager novel before we got a chance to see any of that show as well. Writing a novel with characters you haven't seen, but that the fans will see and know very well, is a scary thing. So far I think we've been lucky and managed to get most things right. But I have to admit; I think it was luck in some places. We just made guesses as to how we thought the characters might be, and with most of the guesses, we went the right way in hindsight."

For more comments on his ENT novel, the series itself and the SNW contests, visit this full interview.

Join our monthly e-mail newsletter!