My novella "Seeds of Dissent" appears in Infinity's Prism, the first Star Trek Myriad Universes collection.

What If...?

Myriad Universes is the end product of a proposal that's been mooted in the offices of Pocket Books for several years, under several different titles (Star Trek: Possibilites, Star Trek: Apocrypha, Star Trek: Split Infinities etc.); it take a science fiction staple - the alternate history story - and gives it a Star Trek spin.

Alternate history tales have been popular almost since the birth of science ficiton, and Star Trek's not the first 'franchise' universe to tackle them - Marvel and DC Comics have done it for years with their What If? and Elseworlds titles. But its mainstream SF that's made the alt-history story a sub-genre in and of itself, taking real historical events and putting a spin of them through SF means, or just positing what things might have been like if things had taken a different track. What if the Roman Empire never fell? What if the Nazis won World War II? What if Elvis and JFK had lived?

We've seen different histories in Star Trek in the past - most notably the Mirror universe, but also in divergent timelines like the one in the original series episode 'City on the Edge of Forever', where the death (or life) of one person alters the entire course of the future. The idea behind Myriad Universes was to tell novella-length stories about diverging histories where something in the Trek timeline had gone a different way, allowing us to see versions of people, places and events that were familiar and yet totally new.

I pitched a handful of story ideas to editor Marco Palmieri, from an Enterprise-era tale about a downtrodden human race ruled by interventionist Vulcans to a story of a Federation shattered by a Borg invasion of the Alpha Quadrant, but the one that really fired me up was a story I titled "Seeds of Dissent"; I took what I saw as the archtypical alternate history idea and filtered it through a Star Trek lens.

The result features characters and situations from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but in a way you've never seen them before...

"Seeds of Dissent" joins two new novellas from Christopher L. Bennett and William Leisner in the first of two Myriad Universes volumes, edited by Marco Palmieri.

The book will be available in July 2008.

To pre-order a copy of Star Trek: Myriad Universes - Infinity's Prism, Click Here. An eBook version is available Here.

© J.Swallow, 2008. All images and copyright subjects © Paramount Pictures & Pocket Books.

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