While we no longer have Steven Barnes coming up as a local convention Guest of Honor, I wanted to go back to my runthrough of his work, for a number of reasons. One is that his voice is singular, not just as a black science fiction writer who started in an era when that was unusual, but because he refuses to be pigeonholed in any particular genre. Sure, he's best known for his science fiction, but much of that crosses into action, horror and historical fiction. What's more, while he's written many books on his own, he often collaborates with a highly varied set of other writers. Of course, I've already reviewed fifteen of his books, so I'm pretty close to halfway. Why not keep going and see where else he went as a writer?

This was his fourteenth novel, one which proved hard to track down, so I'm out of order. It slots in between four standalone novels I've already reviewed, three solo and a fourth with Larry Niven. Before it, 'Blood Brothers' looked like science fiction but was truly supernatural horror and 'Iron Shadows' blurred horror with thriller. After it, 'Saturn's Race' was traditional science fiction and 'Charisma' merged sf, horror and thriller. Next up: the 'Insh'Allah' duology of alternative history. Not far beyond them, a series of mysteries, written with his wife Tananarive Due and actor Blair Underwood.

Just as 'Saturn's Race' was a standalone novel set within the same universe as all the other books he co-wrote with Niven, this is a standalone novel set within an established media franchise, 'Star Trek'. In particular, it's a novelisation of 'Far Beyond the Stars', the thirteenth episode of season six of 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine', which seems to be highly regarded. When 'Empire' compiled a list in 2016 of the best 'Star Trek' episodes across what was then five shows, it ranked fourth, thus ahead of 'Darmok', arguably the quintessential 'Next Generation' episode and 'The Trouble with Tribbles', likely the most famous episode from the original series.

I hadn't seen this episode, or indeed any episodes of 'Deep Space Nine', when this came up in my runthrough, but I couldn't track down a copy anyway. So, after reviewing 'Iron Shadows', I moved on to 'Saturn's Race', with the mindset that I probably wouldn't understand what was going on in the episode anyway. Ironically, I would have done it because this can be watched entirely apart from the rest of the show, something I only found out after watching the first half dozen or so episodes for an Awesomelys convention panel and this episode specifically before reading its novelisation. Therefore that fear was ungrounded.

While we start and end on the space station Deep Space Nine, the only space station to sit next to an active stable wormhole, we really don't need to know anything about beyond the fact that its captain, Benjamin Sisko, is incredibly stressed. Apparently there's a war raging or some such and people he knows well have been lost with their ship. The details don't matter. All that matters is that he's incredibly stressed and it affects his perception of reality. People who aren't there start to talk to him and, trying to figure out why, he walks through a door into New York City in 1953, in which the majority of the episode is set, with Sisko suddenly Benny Russell.

If that's all we know about 'Deep Space Nine', we'll understand the episode. A deeper knowledge wouldn't hurt, however, for a couple of reasons. One is that most of the characters Benny meets and interacts with are regulars on the show, merely out of costume and make-up as other people. Most of them are good guys, if we see 'good' as a spectrum, but the cops aren't: a Cardassian and a Vorta. Midway through season six, we'd know this. In the novelisation, Barnes carefully explains who everyone is so we have that context. Also, Sisko isn't only a starfleet captain running a space station; he's also the Emissary of the Prophets, who live inside the wormhole by Deep Space Nine and guide the Bajorans through religion. Knowing that helps too.

Otherwise, it's pretty straightforward. Benny Russell is a black man who lives in 1953 Harlem, but he's also a science fiction writer, working for 'Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder', the third most successful such magazine in the world. And, just as Sisko is seeing the past blur his reality, Russell is seeing the future blur his. The two are connected and, while Sisko puzzles, Russell writes. This is inspiration to him and, before long, he's turned out the best story of his career, about a starfleet captain called Ben Sisko who runs a space station called Deep Space Nine.

The catch is that his editor won't print it. He thinks it's a great story, as do all the other writers at the magazine, but he has a publisher and his publisher has distributors and none of the people in that crucial chain want to see the lead character in one of their science fiction stories be black. As this editor, Douglas Pabst, points out, "The way I see it, you can either burn it or you can put it in a drawer for fifty years or however long it takes the human race to become color-blind." As Barnes points out in his afterword, 'Deep Space Nine' was the first dramatic television show in the U.S. to feature a black lead and it started its seven season run in 1993, so Russell would only have had to wait forty years rather than fifty, but still...

The episode doesn't end well. Russell sticks to his guns, but accepts advice to frame the story in a slightly different way, as the dream of a character who wouldn't seem threatening to a majority white audience. However, the publisher pulps the entire run and that's that. Of course, Russell's also fired and its implied that he has a heart attack in the magazine office dealing with the news. While he's carried out on a stretcher, it's possible that he's heading for an asylum rather than the expected hospital. With one political wing in the States pining for the fifties, this is a timely note as to what the fifties really were.

I mention the pulping of this issue not to spoil the rest of the story, which goes much deeper than that, but as a way to illustrate what else would have been lost were this our reality. Take a look at the cover art. It might look overly busy, but it's really the pulped October 1953 issue of 'Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder' with 'Far Beyond the Stars' by Benny Russell its lead short novel and a list of other stories by his colleagues. The episode mildly hints at who they might be, but Barnes is happy to make it more obvious.

Albert Macklin, the odd writer who prefers stories about robots, is clearly Isaac Asimov. His story, 'Me, Android', is therefore a thinly disguised 'I, Robot', just as the novel, 'Infrastructure', the first in a trilogy that he's just sold to Gnome Press, is thus 'Foundation'. K. C. Hunter and Julius Bass, a husband and wife team, are likely to be C. L. (Catherine) Moore and Henry Kuttner, so 'A Wrinkle in Space' would be valuable, whichever real story it represents. Temperamental Herbert Rossoff must be Harlan Ellison, ironically the writer of 'Empire'’s top ranked 'Star Trek' episode, 'The City on the Edge of Forever'. 'Hazardous Images' is presumably thus 'Dangerous Visions', though that was a pioneering anthology rather than a story.

While Barnes adds details like these to deepen the story, he also adds a whole extra level beyond what the episode could cram in. The episode works two times, Benny Russell in the mid-twentieth century and Ben Sisko in the twenty-fourth. Barnes adds a third, Harlem in 1940, when Benny is an imaginative sixteen-year-old living with his aunt. While this deepens his relationships with Cassie, his girlfriend in 1953 (also Kasidy Yates, Sisko's girlfriend on Deep Space Nine), and Willie Hawkins, the neighbourhood athlete, who becomes a baseball star in 1953 (and Worf on Deep Space Nine), it goes much further than that.

In particular, it takes Benny to the New York World's Fair, as its second season was winding up. His aunt was already wondering, "Lord, Lord, what are you going to do with that imagination, boy?" even before this, but suddenly he sees the future in the form of unbreakable glass, television and air conditioning, all on display at the fair. Cassie also has ideas about the future, believing it to be somewhere that female boxing would be acceptable. However, while the future is bright, it's also white. Across the exhibits, there isn't a single black human being. This episode already focuses on the importance of representation but Barnes hammers that home.

He also ties the Bajoran Prophets, who have their own unconventional relationship with time, to the mythology and religion of the Dogon people of Mali, especially the suggestion that it talks of visits by ancient aliens from Sirius. The Malian exhibit includes a Dogon orb, which Benny touches and gains certain abilities. While they're fleeting, he can occasionally see the very near future, a useful skill for a poor family in Harlem, and at least once sees his lineage both back and forward, the former through slavery to Africa, eventually to the first alien to arrive from Sirius; the latter through drug addiction to heroism, a black president and out to the stars, eventually to a leader of men, who we can assume is Ben Sisko.

In short, there's a lot here and it's neatly layered. It's a story about a twenty-fourth century black man who we know as the heroic lead captain in a network science fiction series, Ben Sisko. It's also a story about a twentieth-century black science fiction writer, Benny Russell, though the inherent racism of the time prompts his race to be kept secret, just as K. C. Hunter's gender is kept secret behind initials. It's all told in novelisation by a real twentieth-century black science fiction writer, Steven Barnes, who must have encountered some of this in his own life and career. The fiction all feels more real because of that.

However, the central conceit, that we can't distinguish between dream and dreamer, means that we don't know if Benny Russell is dreaming Ben Sisko or if Ben Sisko is dreaming Benny Russell. In this book, Barnes plays that up all the more, explaining that Russell started out writing stories of white men in space, though he threw occasional black characters in as support. It's clear from the context and eventually through names and species that Russell created the 'Star Trek' franchise. His earliest stories were rejected, though he's already had three years worth of stories published with Kirk and Picard, Tribbles and Borg, Vulcans and Klingons. I like. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Steven Barnes click here