Q) Your very unusual stories are often cross-overs. What is it about cross-overs that so excites you?

In real life, we're all the heroes of the stories that are our own lives; or, depending on the health of our self-esteem, the anti-heroes. When you look at it that way, any human interaction at all is a crossover. I think this is why I've always been fascinated by crossovers: the meeting of fictional "universes" is symbolic of the meeting of perceptive "universes" that happens to and all around us almost every moment. And DOCTOR WHO's time machine the TARDIS, with its total mobility throughout space and time, is the ultimate dramatic device to facilitate crossovers.

The overall theme for my series of DOCTOR WHO/STAR TREK crossovers (though it isn't tapped for every story) is the conflict between the Starfleet captains' non-intervention Prime Directive and the Doctor's more proactive philosophy and actions. It's a theme that near as I can tell will never run dry nor ever be resolved, because near as I can tell they're both right - at least for themselves. And here we come back to crossovers as real life, because in every real life conflict, at least at the beginning, everyone involves believes s/he's the one who's right.

Q) Tell us about your creative procedure. How do you know when it's time to begin a new work, and what do you do to cajole your muse? Some people have a lucky pair of slippers they wear as they write, for example. Do you have a ritual that helps you to feel creative and productive?

I don't really have a routine except to let inspiration strike me or to sit at the keyboard and just slog on. Ordinarily I think in short-short stories or comic strip scripts; the bulk of the long stories on my website - both the prose and the stories serialized in comic strip form - were written 1997-1999, when I set myself the challenge of posting a new chaper to the net weekly (with reruns in summer). Sometimes I had a plot outline already, and sometimes I had a laundry list of scenes or story elements or chapter cliffhangers I laboriously built a plot under, and sometimes I just wrote and allowed the characters and/or dramatic necessity to determine what happened next as I went along.

Q) You are a huge fan of several shows, not just Star Trek. What do the shows you love have in common with Star Trek?

That's a difficult question. When you write a crossover, you look as the _contrast_ between the two properties' characters and philosophies, thereby to create conflict and so drama. I've never really thought about how, say, STAR TREK(s) and DOCTOR WHO are _alike_.

STAR TREK and M*A*S*H, though, are a different story. In the 70s I used to imagine and write STAR TREK scenes with M*A*S*H characters instead, and call the universe T*R*E*K. It was a way of bringing new STAR TREK into the world when no one else was. Now, of course... But it was easier than might be supposed. People to whom I described the idea objected that it wasn't workable: STAR TREK's characters are career paramilitary officers while M*A*S*H's are relucant draftees, they'd say; or, STAR TREK's principle characters are ranking officers while M*A*S*H's aren't. But both starship captains and MASH surgeons spend their careers cheating death.

Maybe that's what all my heroes have in common.

Q) I'm greatly amused by some of the ideas you have. Just the idea of King Arthur running around in space duplicating Kirk's (and other Trek Captains) adventures is funny to me, yet you approach such subjects with evident gravity. You ARE having fun, though, aren't you? Admit it.

Freely. But the fun is possibly esoteric enough that I'm always surprised and delighted to hear that people enjoy the KING ARTHUR IN TIME AND SPACE material as much or more than the fanfiction it's based on. The KAITAS stories are my fanfiction with the franchises' names globally replaced with names from the King Arthur legends, but they're often more than that too.

For instance the original, fanfiction version of 'Transformations' starts off with a scene between Kirk and David Marcus, which had to be scrapped and rewritten entirely when I put Arthur and Mordred in it, because what Marcus wants from Kirk and what Mordred wants from Arthur are entirely different.

But it all comes back to the same principles as are used in the theories of Jung and Campbell, and in the practices of Lucas and Roddenberry and Staczinski (sp?). The hero has a thousand faces. I'm just giving him back an old one that still has lots of mileage on it, for him to use in the modern setting.

Q) You obviously are inspired by things like the tales about Camelot. If your reader is familiar with the Camelot stories it helps them to appreciate your Arthur series. What other literature should a reader be familiar with if they want to feel truly ready to read and appreciate your fan fiction?

The thing about the Arthur legends is that theirs are the only characters I love as much as those of, e.g., STAR TREK who don't fall under someone else's copyright. Which isn't to say some research hasn't gone into determining many character-to-character analogies in the KAITAS stories. There's such a dearth of female heroes in the most common Western folklore that for Janeway I had to delve into obscure (to me, before I looked, anyway) Celtic or Irish myths. And for Buffy I ended up turning to one of the first Christian martyrs whom I encountered in Geoffrey Ashe's 'British Mythology'.

But I'm not sure what if any outside reading is required to follow the KAITAS stories. None, I hope, really, since they _are_ supposed to be for fun and they _are_ supposed to be redress of the familiar with the uncopyrighted but equally familiar. I hope the KAITAS stories stand alone as well as the fanfiction stories do to people who read fanfiction. But that doesn't mean there aren't three pages on my website of notes on the "imaginary KING ARTHUR IN TIME AND SPACE screen canon". Hopefully that's all a new reader should need.

Q) Your opinion please: Shakespeare - a Klingon? No, really what I'd like you to tell us is why you like Captain Kirk enough to keep writing stories about him.

Now you've stumped me again, asked me a question for which there must be an answer which however I've never even thought of articulating before.

My all-time favorite STAR TREK is 'The Wrath of Khan' and the reason for this is that Nick went back to Gene's first principle, Hornblower-in-space (and anyone who doesn't see that that's what he did, go watch 'Captain Horatio Hornblower' with Gregory Peck). The magic of James T. Kirk is the way he turns any situation his way. "Stand by to receive our transmission." "It was exactly what I would have done." "We surrender." "You said, 'every _warp capable_ ship'" ('Prime Directive', Reeves-Stevens*). There's a rawness to Kirk side-by-side with the civilizedness, that later Starfleet captains don't have because their generation doesn't need it, and that Archer's hasn't learned yet. Part diplomat, part hoodlum, as Diane Carey put it. The best example of this in my works is 'Half A Worm' on my website.

Then there's the fact that standing next to the Doctor makes even James T. Kirk seem like a stuffed shirt. Contrast.

And I'd be more likely to say Shakespeare _wrote of_ Klingons.

* Which see for a wonderful argument that no actions attributed to James T. Kirk in the screen canon were violations of a just Prime Directive, disguised as a neato adventure story.

Paul Gadzikowski - scarfman@iglou.com since 1995