But now, standing here with the Guardian of Forever before human beings had ever even evolved on Earth, before there had even been an Earth, he reconsidered. In many ways, he had all the time in the world. All the time in the universe, really.

“Guardian,” he said.

AFTERWORD

Here There Be Dragons

And by dragons, I mean to say spoilers. If you haven’t yet read the novel that you are holding in your hands, or if you intend to read either of the other volumes in the Crucible trilogy for the first time, then turn back now. You can always return here and read this afterword at a later point.

In the forewords to this and the other two books, I wrote in nonspecific terms about the process involved in penning the three tales. There, in those introductory pieces, I didn’t want to reveal too much about the stories, preferring to allow them to speak for themselves. Now, though, with the trilogy completely written-and, I hope, completely read-I thought that some readers might find interest in my revisiting in a more explicit way some of the details involved in the development and creation of Crucible.

After editor Marco Palmieri offered me the opportunity to write a Star Trek trilogy and I accepted the invitation, I began to consider just how I should go about crafting it. I decided almost at once that I didn’t want to plot out a single, large story that would spread across the three books. Rather, I preferred to tell a trio of individual tales, all self-contained, but also inter-weaving with and informing one another. With that viewpoint in mind, it soon became clear to me that one way to approach the trilogy would be to center each volume around one of the three main characters of McCoy, Spock, and Kirk. After all, the episodes of the Original Series had primarily been rendered in such a fashion, and since these novels would help celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Star Trek, why not have them reflect that aspect of the show?

At the same time, I also had a vague notion in the back of my mind that I would like to somehow follow up my own favorite TOS episode, one of those often found at the tops of various fan polls regarding Trek’s finest hours. For a long time now, I’ve held aloft Harlan Ellison’s “The City on the Edge of Forever” as a high-water mark of the Original Series. So I asked myself if I could find some compelling means of employing the elements of that episode in the trilogy.

While allowing that idea to percolate, I took the time to view the entire series from beginning to end, from the first episode to the last, and then through the seven feature films. Although I had already seen each installment on many occasions over the years, this time I watched them from a different perspective, with an eye toward finding some facet of the characters that either hadn’t yet been explored or that would at least permit me to say something about them in a unique manner. As I saw and enjoyed one hour after another, I also realized that since the novels would be a part of the show’s anniversary celebration, I should attempt to deeply ground them in those original episodes. I did not wish to limit the tales to the five-year mission necessarily, but I thought that period should in some way play a significant role in the books. Of course, if I managed to tie in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” that likely would be the case anyway.

In watching the complete run of the series, I began to notice something about Dr. McCoy that I previously hadn’t. While I had at first imagined that fashioning a story to tell about the Enterprise’s chief medical officer would be more difficult than doing so for the ship’s captain and first officer, I suddenly saw that might not be true. McCoy, I realized, had lived as something of a loner, at least in terms of romance. Such a circumstance might not be considered that unusual during a long space voyage in the service of Starfleet, perhaps, but I also spied hints that this might be true of the good doctor even apart from his time aboard the Enterprise.

In “The Man Trap,” the very first Star Trek episode ever aired, back on Thursday, 8 September 1966, McCoy briefly mentions his involvement a decade earlier with a woman named Nancy, now married to Professor Robert Crater. In his captain’s log, Kirk refers to her as “that one woman in Doctor McCoy’s past.” McCoy himself seems alternately anxious and reluctant to see her, but little else is revealed about the erstwhile relationship, other than that they “walked out of each other’s lives ten years ago.”

Later in the first season, in the episode “Shore Leave,” McCoy appears to enjoy a dalliance with crew member Tonia Barrows, but the red-tressed yeoman never appears in the series after that, nor do any of the characters ever even speak of her again. McCoy then traverses the entire second season without even a hint of romance. In Star Trek’s third year, he finally finds love again, this time with Natira in the episode “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” But McCoy’s entanglement with the high priestess of Yonada seems as much a consequence of the unexpected discovery that he has xenopolycythemia and only a year left to live as of a real depth of romantic emotion.

And that’s it. Through the seventy-nine aired hours of Trek, and then through the seven films, those are the only instances in which McCoy’s love life is at all revealed. Still, throughout the three seasons and the movies, there is ample evidence that the doctor has an appreciation for the opposite sex. In “Mudd’s Women,” he is bewitched by Ruth; in “Wolf in the Fold,” he is anxious to visit a place that Kirk knows “where the women are so…”- so something left to the imagination; in “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” he appears enamored of Dr. Miranda Jones; and in The Wrath of Khan, he notes Saavik’s good looks. In even more episodes than that, McCoy demonstrates an obvious fondness for women.

Despite all of that, though, he is almost never seen to be involved with anybody. Even in “This Side of Paradise,” when he falls under the uplifting influence of the spores on Omicron Ceti III, he remains alone, sipping mint juleps by himself. Now, I’m sure that the numerous writers of the Original Series did not intend to convey anything in particular about McCoy by this dearth of romantic relationships, that my observations about the character are merely the result of an accidental artifact of episodic television in the 1960s. Still, all of that led me to a question for which I wanted to find an answer: Why did Dr. McCoy have so little love in his life?

At that juncture, I recalled a piece of non-canon information about the doctor long accepted by many Trek fans, namely that he had a failed marriage in his past, a difficult, broken relationship that ultimately had driven him out into space with Starfleet. This backstory originated, I knew, in early drafts of the episode that would ultimately become “The Way to Eden.” Instead of Chekov’s former girlfriend, Irina Galliulin, McCoy’s daughter Joanna came aboard the Enterprise. Further supporting the existence of Joanna, McCoy makes reference to his daughter in one of the twenty-two animated Star Trek adventures, “The Survivor.” It then occurred to me that an unsuccessful marriage spun McCoy’s character in a slightly different direction. Coupled with the loss of his relationships with Nancy, Tonia, and Natira, his failed attempt at matrimony made the question not why he’d had so few romances, but why they had never worked out for him.

I speculated that perhaps something in McCoy’s personality prevented him from remaining in long-term relationships. He might have developed a fear of intimacy or a fear of abandonment. There are reasons that such characteristics arise in a person, oftentimes tracing all the way back to their childhood. I already knew from the fifth Trek film, The Final Frontier, that McCoy had with great difficulty assisted in his father’s suicide when the elder McCoy lay dying and in pain. But what of McCoy’s mother? I wondered.