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August 6th

So, What's Happened Thus Far?

Without giving too much away, Omega's going to focus on the illustrious mysterious
unknown force, the famed "other presence" that every now and again would rear its
head in Space:1999 episodes like "Black Sun", "Testament of Arkadia", "Collision
Course" and others. Mateo Latosa, publisher of these books, and yours truly have spent
the past several years trying to come up with a unified field theory that somehow ties all
of the mythology together into something coherent (and considering that fans of the
show have been trying to do the same thing for more than twenty years without reaching
consensus gives you an idea of the challenge we're facing). Even coming up with an
approach to analyze this subject matter was difficult. We finally started coming up with
models, based on analysis of authors like H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C.
Clarke and others, and dug into our old copies of Edith Hamilton, Will Durant, and at
times, even works from the major religions to set a framework. All of this, just to plot out
a novel! In Mateo's case, it's undoubtedly a labor of love. In my case? I think the
challenge of doing something so off the wall was appealing to me somehow.

Omega is a Year Three book. It represents the final bits of housecleaning required from
tweaking the franchise after the great schism between the two different seasons of the
show, housecleaning that the other Space:1999 novels have dealt with in one way or
another. A key component of Omega actually will appear in the Shepherd Moon
anthology. So, I certainly can't take all of the credit for what Omega will ultimately be. A
lot of cooks have been in the bigger kitchen.

The biggest danger we face with this book is not wandering off into fanboyish tinkering
with the overriding series. Most of our debate has been over issues that seem to be
similar to concepts or plot points that appear in works outside of Space:1999 -- we're
always on the lookout for anything that might come along and do things we're doing,
which often means changing an aspect of the plot to keep it original, as if that's really
possible this many thousands of years into western civilization. We spend time saying:
Are people gonna think we stole this from Star Trek, or Babylon Five? That's one of the
reasons it takes so long to get these books out -- you need to stay current on genre
fiction, film, television, and comics just to keep things fresh.

I started writing Omega in earnest this week, and I'm already ten thousand words into
the book. It doesn't take long for the action to start, and there's going to be a lot of it in
this book. We're going all out this time to make something really epic, on a grand scale.
When I say there will be battles in this book, I'm not kidding. Just in what I've already
written, the Alphans have come pretty close to being annihilated, by a life form I came up
with in an unpublished story about seven years ago.

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