My short story "Ordinary Days" appears in The Sky's The Limit, the Star Trek: The Next Generation 20th Anniversary anthology collection.

Nothing so Ordinary

After writing a short story for the 10th Anniversary Star Trek Voyager anthology Distant Shores, I was approached once again by editor supremo Marco Palmieri to pitch another tale for the following year's collection, this time celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Star Trek The Next Generation.

Redefining a familiar universe for a more modern time, Star Trek: The Next Generation introduced Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the officers and crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D, and the worlds of the twenty-fourth century to a new legion of Star Trek fans. In the two decades since, viewers and readers have embraced these heroes, thrilled to their personal achivements, their shared victories, their passionate loves ... and mourned their painful losses.

Celebrate the twentieth anniversary of this landmark series by joining these now-legendary characters for all-new adventures: fourteen stories that span the time from before their earliest voyages through their missions onboard the Enterprise-E - untold tales of intrigue, action, insight and exploration.

It's amazing to think that it's been two decades since TNG was on our screens and Star Trek gained a new lease of life and a whole new audience - I feel my age now when I talk to fans who consider the adventures of Picard and company to be the "old" show... I can remember first hearing about the return of Trek to television, right around the time I was coming to the conclusion that I wanted to follow a career as a writer - and although I never got the chance to write for the series, all these years later I've been granted the opportunity to return to those characters and tell a new story.

Like Distant Shores, the concept behind The Sky's The Limit is to showcase the heroes of the Enterprise-D (and -E!) and tell unseen tales of their lives and the challenges that face them. As before, I knew there would be a struggle between the writers pitching stories for the anthology for the most popular characters from the show, and so I decided I'd tackle someone who I felt had never been well-served on the series, a character who many fans outright disliked - the boy genius Wesley Crusher.

I always felt sorry for Wes; smart kids never have it easy, and whenever we saw him on board the Enterprise, Wesley never seemed to have a life outside of the occasional science project. I decided to give him a different path to take, and that was how "Ordinary Days" came about.

"Ordinary Days" joins brand-new stories from Christopher L. Bennett, Greg Cox, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Bob Ingersoll & Thomas F. Zahler, David A. McIntee, Scott Pearson, Michael Schuster & Steve Mollmann, Susan Shwartz, Amy Sisson, Geoff Trowbridge, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore and Richard C. White, edited by Marco Palmieri.

To order a copy of Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Sky's The Limit, Click Here. An eBook version is available Here.

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

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