Rough Trails is a Star Trek: New Earth

Star Trek: New Earth

Star Trek: New Earth is a series of Star Trek novels published by Pocket Books in the United States, as part of Pocket’s Star Trek: The Original Series line. Based on the titular TV series created by Gene Roddenberry, New Earth was created by Pocket editor John J...

novel written by L.A. Graf.

Synopsis

A vital colony, needed to support the eventual expansion of the Federation, is suffering problems. The home planet is ravaged by natural disasters. Alien threats endanger the lives of everyone due to greed for the mineral rights. As the Enterprise patrols the system, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov find that the colonists have outright decided they don't want the help of Starfleet anymore.

Inspiration

In Voyages of Imagination

Voyages of Imagination

Voyages of Imagination is a Star Trek reference guide written by Jeff Ayers. It covers every Star Trek novel published up to 2006 with interviews from authors and editors...

, L.A. Graf remarks: "This was fun for us, because we got to recreate a local western Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

 natural disaster: the Johnstown Flood

Johnstown Flood

The Johnstown Flood occurred on May 31, 1889. It was the result of the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam situated upstream of the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA, made worse by several days of extremely heavy rainfall...

! (If you check the names of several towns on the planet, you'll find they're from the Johnstown area.) By this time, Julia

Julia Ecklar

Julia Ecklar is a John W. Campbell Award–winning science fiction author and a singer and writer of filk music who recorded numerous albums in the Off Centaur label in the early 1980s, including Minus Ten and Counting, Horse-Tamer's Daughter, and Genesis...

 was also doing a lot of herding with her border collie

Border Collie

The Border Collie is a herding dog breed developed in the Anglo-Scottish border region for herding livestock, especially sheep. It is the most widespread of the collie breeds....

s, so we wrote border collies into the plot and used the names of many of our dog-owning friends (with their permission) as characters. And Karen Rose got to use another generation of geoscience students as the scientific crew!"

External links