Flashback Fun - Interview With Keith R. A. DeCandido, Science Fiction Novelist

Since everyone is talking Star Wars and J.J. Abrams, I thought it'd be fun to flashback to an interview I did with Keith DeCandido, where he talks Abrams doing the first Star Trek feature.  

This interview was originally published online in 2009.


Keith DeCandido is a prolific writer of media-tie in novels. He's written novels for Star Trek & the hugely popular video games, World of Warcraft & Starcraft.  Here, he talks about how he got his big break, the upcoming Star Trek film and more.

The joy of fandom holds a multitude of ways to reward the faithful.  A popular, profitable and stimulating course to help one further ingest more favored things is reading novels based around hit TV shows, movies and video games. Writers recruited for this media-tie work are a special class indeed.  Not only are they top notch scribes with original titles to their credit, but their knowledge and expertise must run the length of a world as complex as the Star Trek universe or a complicated comic book superhero like Spiderman.  

If you're a devoted reader of Star Trek, StarCraft, World Of Warcraft or Marvel Superhero novels, it's a sure bet you know of Keith R. A. DeCandido. His versatile work spans generations, timelines and multiverses to encompass Starship crews from Captain Kirk's era over to the dark delights of station Deep Space Nine right on up to currently popular genre fiction such as his novels based on the hit TV series Supernatural.  Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Keith to chat about his formidable contribution to the legendary Star Trek mythos and much more.

DeCandido's unbridled enthusiasm on his work and his approach to it is clear.  How he came by it all, however, was basically unplanned. "It was something unique to the circumstance I was in. John Betancourt and I both worked for Byron Preiss, who had just picked up the license to do books based on Marvel Superheroes. The first two books John and I edited together. When he left the company, I was promoted and took over. I was associate editor for Science Fiction, and worked on original stuff, but also licensed, like Isaac Assimov's work and Ray Bradbury.  Anyway, something that nearly took over my life were Marvel novels. We were ridiculously rushed; we wanted the books out by fall.  Marvel had trashed all our proposals.  At this point, we were past the 11th hour and Jose R. Nieto and I ended up writing it.  After tons of rewriting back and forth, I ended up with my first sale. It was a most bizarre set of circumstances."

As a prolific Star Trek novelist and also editor of its eBook Line (now since cancelled), DeCandido jokes he's been a Star Trek fan all his life - or earlier if his Mom can be believed.  "As a kid I fantasized about being a Trek novel author, so I took the opportunity and ran with it, both as a writer and editor.  I'm proud of the Star Trek work I've been given and managed to accomplish on those fronts."

Today the digital domain of video games both compliments and competes with TV and movies for fans.  For DeCandido, obsessive gamers who rally around Blizzard's StarCraft and World of Warcraft are now fans of novels he's written based on the properties. "I'm doing the StarCraft manual. That came about because of my relationship with Blizzard. I did a World of Warcraft book, Blizzard was very happy with my work. With StarCraft I'm excited by the challenge because there's more room to play with in that world, as it's not as highly developed as World Of Warcraft. Blizzard specifically requested I be approached for the job."

DeCandido is highly anticipating the new Star Trek movie from director J.J. Abrams (TV's LOST) coming in May 2009, which tells the tale of a young Captain Kirk and Spock having a first adventure together. "It's probably not a great idea to go backwards to do a remake or prequel, but having said that, you don't know what a movie will be like until you sit in a theater and see it. Examples of that which I experienced: Two scripts I saw in early stages were for Men In Black and the first X-Men.  Based solely on those early draft scripts, I thought both movies would suck hard. As we know, it didn't turn out that way."

Looking past the forthcoming Star Trek feature film, DeCandido muses whimsically on the sort of television show he'd produce if he were chosen to create a new Star Trek TV series, "I'd do a TV series centered around the Starfleet Corps. Of Engineers.  It would be high adventure problem solving stories involving the SCE, which has a great group of characters at its core.  Great ensembles are at the heart of great TV shows, and TV shows do character development so well.  I hope to see Star Trek as a television series again."