A few months ago, I went on the Podcast VJ Talks. The host, V.J. Harris, is a TikTok mutual of mine, and I was excited that they invited me on to talk about worldbuilding, conlanging, and Obligate—the mini-series I was best known for at the time. I had a great time talking with V.J., but there was one admission that I made on that podcast that I’ve been hesitant to talk about on TikTok, that the universe I write in started as a derivative work.
Yes, the universe that my conlangs, my novel in progress, my short stories, Obligate, and most recently The Boston Androids exist in was originally a Star Trek original series that I called Star Trek: Apgar. The Apgar portion was taken from the name of the galaxy-class starship where the series would take place (I named the ship in honor of the scientist Virginia Apgar whose creation of the Apgar score has saved the lives of many newborns).
Star Trek: Apgar was a quarantine project. In the year 2020, I had just started my third year of college, my mom had just had major brain surgery, and we had just had one of the most contentious elections in US history. Emotionally, I wasn’t doing too hot. My answer to emotional instability was to start watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I fell in love with the series. The characters, the setting, and the story spoke to me. I took the world building, and I ran with it. I started wondering what the show could look like free from the constraints of 80s technology and TV budgets. I imagined complex life support equipment and languages that didn’t translate. I developed a new alien species, the Beskarans, who were amphibious, quadrupedal, and clear-blooded.
I soon remembered that Beskarans sounded a bit too much like Beskar (a fictional material from Star Wars). As a consequence, Beskarans became Lacerti, based on the Latin word for lizard. Beskaran also became the basis for Beshan, the family name of my new protagonist, Ehno Beshan.
I wrote Star Trek: Apgar as an episode concept. In it, Lt. Cmdr. Beshan’s homeplanet is considering joining the Federation, and the USS Apgar is ordered to oversee talks. It dealt with Beshan’s conflicting feelings on her family, her home, and her decision to leave it all behind to join Starfleet.
I wrote somewhere around 12,000 words before I realized that Star Trek was being used as window dressing. I wanted to write a character-driven story that felt like Star Trek, but that didn’t mean that I had to write within the confines of Star Trek. I think that’s the beauty of derivative works; they give you a familiar space to process what kind of story you want to tell.
There are a lot of stories that could be told in the sand box that is Star Trek, and I needed that sand box to assure me that I had the capability to write a compelling story. As soon as I felt confined by the preexisting worldbuilding of Star Trek, I realized that I could write compelling original content.
This was the push that got me to rewrite Star Trek: Apgar as my own original work, and I realized that once I took away the titles and transporters, there was very little Star Trek worldbuilding left behind. Now, my worldbuilding includes android societies, morally ambiguous parasites, and glassmaking physics that probably wouldn’t work out in the real world, but most importantly, it’s a universe of my own design.
Though I still worry that the echoes of Star Trek could one day cause some overzealous fanboy to call Major Ehnno Beshan an OP OC or Mary Sue, I have the self-confidence to know that this isn’t the case. I’m grateful to Star Trek for inspiring me to write complex characters that go on compelling adventures, but Star Trek doesn’t have a monopoly on this concept.
When we write derivative works, we write out of love for the franchises that give us creative insight. I’m not ashamed that The Astroauroran Chronicles is reminiscent of Star Trek. The nature of existence, the draw to the unknown, and the complexity of the human experience are universal themes, and there’s more than enough room for one more franchise that explores them.
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