My short story "The Black Flag" appears in Shards and Shadows, the Star Trek: Mirror Universe anthology.

Pirates of the Taurus Reach

After the success of 2007's Mirror Universe novellas, Pocket Books decided to bring in a new group of writers to pen stories about other shady parallels of the Star Trek universe with the Shards and Shadows antholog;. I wrote a story featuring characters from the Star Trek: Vanguard novels.

The third all-new collection of deliciously twisted Star Trek tales, showing the dark, amoral, alternate versions of Voyager, New Frontier, and Deep Space Nine.

This new anthology spanning more than two hundred years of alternate Star Trek history by well-known authors, including Peter David and Keith R.A. DeCandido features a dozen new twisted tales from the other universe - a sinister yet eerily familiar world where history took a different turn, featuring the brutal, amoral, alternate versions of Star Trek’s heroes.

"Mirror, Mirror" is one of my favourite episodes of the original Star Trek series, with its twisted take on the show's mythos and characters; in 2007, publishers Pocket Books released a pair of trade paperbacks - Glass Empires and Obsidian Alliances - containing several novellas set in the Mirror Universe and response from readers was so strong that the choice was quickly made to go ahead with another set of tales, this time collecting a handful of short stories, covering ground that hadn't been written about in the earlier books.

Shards and Shadows is the end result, and I was pleased to be offered a chance to write for the collection; previously, I had pitched some ideas to editor Marco Palmieri for the ongoing Classic Trek-era series Vanguard, about a space station in an uncharted region of the galaxy called the Taurus Reach. While my pitch didn't make the cut, Marco recalled my interest in the Vanguard characters and gave me the chance to write about their Mirror alternates, picking up on a line from a story in Glass Empires hinting at the fate of the station in this parallel reality.

I'm a big fan of Chinese actor Chow Yun Fat, who was used as the model for one of Vanguard's characters, the ill-fated Captain Zhao Sheng; and so when I decided to write "The Black Flag", I took the opportunity to bring him back and make him the hero of the piece. As I sat down to write the story, I had only just seen Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End, in which Chow stars, and the piratical nature of his role in that movie informed the way I wrote this alternate version of Zhao. I also took the opportunity to drop a couple of sly reference to some of the actor's other performances in Hong Kong classics like the Better Tomorrow series...

"The Black Flag" joins brand-new stories from Keith R.A. DeCandido, Peter David, and many more, edited by Marco Palmieri.

The anthology is on sale in March 2008. To pre-order a copy of Star Trek: Mirror Universe - Shards and Shadows, Click Here.

© J.Swallow, 2007. All images and copyright subjects © Paramount Pictures & Pocket Books.

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