bethinexile

Sam cut herself off and examined Daniel’s expression, trying to figure out whether he had actually followed any of her explanation.

“Like playing Hangman with glyphs?” he said at last.

“Well, yeah. Pretty much.” She frowned thoughtfully at Teal’c’s apparent lack of expression. “Okay, Teal’c. Spit it out.”

Teal’c considered his now empty plate. “There is nothing for me to spit out, Captain Carter.”




Jack decided to start with the Gate complex, which ought to be interesting at least. Of course, there was that old saying about what the Chinese meant by ‘interesting’. From a Chinese point of view, Jack’s life had always been interesting.

Actually, he’d start by finding his way back to the transport rings, if he could, without getting lost or going in circles. He’d picked up a handy trick some years back from a group of Norwegian SFs, and it was even more useful off-planet than it had been on Earth: if the landscape was unfamiliar, you damned well made it familiar ASAP, using whatever mental tricks or shortcuts you needed. Jack checked the bearings he’d taken the previous night: the rocky spire of the Setesh Guard’s Nose over to the south, and the fine bald granite crown of Hammond’s Dome.

The actual idea came from my partner – and I’m not telling you what it was until much, much later, because it’s dreadfully spoilery. So, instead, I’ll talk about getting started. I will say this about the core idea: it had its own requirements, and drove several of the early decisions.

One early decision was when to set the story. Think about it: there’s a huge timeline available, and you can go anywhere on it. My first impulse, at the very beginning (before Missy gave me the shiny Idea), was to write very early in the series arc, when the relationships were first developing, because that’s a truly fascinating process. Then I read Julie Fortune’s Sacrifice Moon, my hands-down favourite of all the Stargate novels. It’s set in S1, and is actually the first SG-1 mission after the pilot arc: right after The Enemy Within! And it’s brilliant. So, no writing the Team’s First Mission: that had already been done.

But I was still drawn to the early arc, while the SG folks are still learning things that they later took for granted. They have fewer resources. They know less. And – rather to my surprise – it’s less-traveled territory: most of the Stargate novels I read or looked at were set later. (In particular, there’s a near-obsession with post-Abyss Jack.) Also to my surprise (at first), from what I could see in the fandom, the published novels have never been embraced as canon. After I had read more of them, this no longer surprised me; at the time, it mostly just relieved me. Accommodating the massive weight of canon is already intimidating as hell, and the thought of absorbing a dozen Official Novels on top of that had been daunting. Don’t get me wrong: I love working with canon. I especially love looking for dropped threads and intriguing gaps, and weaving them back in with my own imagined answers.

In the end, I set my book at a very specific point, which happens to be late in S2: after Show and Tell and before Out of Mind, because Reasons. This immediately created a whole new set of questions and problems, and one of the biggest was Reetou Charlie.

You see, I have Jacob Carter arriving at the SGC in chapter 1 – and it’s his first visit there since the Reetou business. The Reetou are one of the most startlingly dropped balls in that whole section of the story arc. Wham, they’re there, and then they’re gone, and they’re never mentioned again. Period. I could have written a book about Why No More Reetou, but that didn’t interest me. It did leave me with an immediate sticky situation: I knew that the first thing Jack would want to say to Jacob was “How’s Charlie”?

If you’ve read the first two chapters, you know what I decided the answer would be. Reetou Charlie is another dropped ball. He’s never mentioned again, ever. So I made a tough call: I decided he hadn’t survived. It’s a plausible decision, although not a happy one. And it gave me a priceless resource for that half of the chapter: another really good motive for tension and conflict between Jack and Jacob.

The second half of Chapter 1 is, after all, the bane of Stargate writers: the briefing room scene. Those scenes are eeevil. They’re talky. They’re static. They’re an open opportunity for data dumps. On the show, they were able to make them short and sparky, but on the page . . . Sacrifice Moon managed to make its briefing room scene so full of Teamy Goodness that it shone, but I gave up on another Stargate novel after it spent 100 pages in pre-mission prep. Angst is a fine seasoning but a thin source for essential story nutrients.

I wanted the book to showcase my strengths, after all, and one of those is action. So chapter 1 starts with a full-bore action sequence (the technique is more or less stolen wholesale from the Opening Gambits from MacGyver, and I make no apologies for this). Before the shooting starts, the prologue (seasoned with angst) sets the story firmly in the series timeline – and gives me a chance to start out inside Jack’s head. I can’t spend all my time there (there ARE three other team members), but I wanted to establish my master beachhead, as it were.

Accordingly, it’s halfway through Chapter 1 before we’re finally in the briefing room, trying to accomplish an infodump with enough Teamy Snark as leavening so that the dump feels less dumpy. Even without the loss of Reetou Charlie, there’s a lot of food for conflict. The Reetou story was a mess. It’s the third appearance of the Tok’ra, and they’ve gone from obnoxious and arrogant to obnoxious, arrogant and stupid. It’s no wonder they’ve accomplished nothing in 2500+ years, if their tactics suck that badly. The episode bugged me the first time I saw it, and when I re-watched it, I wanted to smack the Tok’ra upside the head and tell them they were idiots.

And then – in the next episode arc, the Tok’ra turn around and save SG-1’s butts. That’s quite a turnaround, if you think about it. It’s a full-bore relationship change! And that is the kind of gap in canon that really intrigues me. What might have happened, between point A and point B, to bend the direction of that relationship?



I know that the Tok’ra have their own fanbase, and that this story – if any of them actually stumble across it – will not meet their needs or appeal to their preferences. That’s how it goes. And in case anyone’s actually worried, no, I haven’t killed Jacob Carter. (We need him for later, and Canon, y’know.) But I’m not going to apologize for shooting him. I has a Reason.