Headlong Flight

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Surveying a nebula as part of their continuing exploration of the previously uncharted “Odyssean Pass,” Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise encounter a rogue planet. Life signs are detected on the barren world’s surface, and then a garbled message is received: a partial warning to stay away at all costs. Determined to render assistance, Picard dispatches Commander Worf and an away team to investigate, but their shuttlecraft is forced to make an emergency landing on the surface—moments before all contact is lost and the planet completely disappears….

Worf and his team learn that this mysterious world is locked into an unending succession of random jumps between dimensions, the result of an ambitious experiment gone awry. The Enterprise crewmembers and the alien scientists who created the technology behind this astonishing feat find themselves trapped, powerless to break the cycle. Meanwhile, as the planet continues to fade in and out of various planes of existence, other parties have now taken notice….

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What was — albeit in much different form — originally intended as a component of what became Armageddon’s Arrow, gets spun out into its own novel. Why? The idea I had while plotting Arrow became a bit unwieldy, at least when coupled with everything else I had going on in that book, so I opted to pull that bit of plot stuff and file it away, perhaps for use another day. At the time I was writing Arrow, it was with a view that another author might be tasked with writing successive Star Trek: The Next Generation novels. Between that and the other stuff Pocket asks me to do from time to time, I had no idea when I might revisit Captain Picard and company.

Turns out, I didn’t have to wait all that long, at all.

It while I was working on Elusive Salvation that my editor came to me, asking about a new “standalone” TNG novel (as in not part of a series or mini-series or other multi-book project) for the 2017 schedule. Pressed for time and needing to come up with something just to satisfy a requirement for a 1 or 2-paragraph pitch, I gave her the very broad strokes of what became Headlong Flight, throwing in a couple of twists that weren’t in the original idea, and worked out the details later.

This is a very weird job, sometimes. 😀

At first, I worked under the impression that Headlong Flight would be the next TNG adventure following Armageddon’s Arrow. It was only as I was well into writing the new book that I was informed Picard and the gang would factor heavily into another project that was in development, John Jackson Miller’s Prey trilogy, which would come out before my book. So, a couple of things had to be retooled, but my marching orders were to keep to the trail I was already on: providing a largely standalone story featuring the Enterprise-E crew.

The book is now available at bookstores everywhere. If you’re still one of those folks who loves going to an actual store for your reading material, I humbly suggest patronizing your local independent bookseller. For me, that’s Reader’s World in bee-yootiful Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

If that sort of thing isn’t a feasible option for you, then of course we have online options:

Mass-Market Paperback, Kindle e-Book, or Audible Audio Edition from Amazon.com
Mass-Market Paperback or Nook e-Book from Barnes and Noble
Mass-Market Paperback, ePub format e-Book, or Digital Audiobook from Books-A-Million
Audiobook from iTunes

In addition to providing a permanent home for links to find and order the book, this blog entry also will serve as the book’s “official” Q&A thread. Those of you who want to chat about the book, feel free to post your questions/etc. to the comments section. For those of you who’ve found this page and perhaps not yet read the book, BEWARE THAT SPOILERS ARE POSSIBLE FROM THIS POINT FORWARD.