GW: Hydra explores what SG-1 might be like if the team was completely devoid of their heroic qualities. It was fun, if not somewhat disturbing, to see what evil they were capable of. And it surprised me that Teal'c, the great warrior, was the most benign of the bunch.
HS: Teal'c had lived over a hundred years by the time he was duplicated in "Tin Man," and was Apophis's First Prime for many years, a warrior with scruples and doubts who was committing heinous acts at Apophis's command. One assumes he learned a thing or two about the judicious use of power, so it would stand to reason that he's already learned to assert his own power and be brutal when he feels it's necessary and useful, rather than being indiscriminately violent, in order to be an effective First Prime.
This understanding would be layered into any robot iteration of Teal'c as well, provided that the duplicate wasn't insane (as the original was, due to Harlan's program flaw regarding the symbiote), since it's the experiential learning of a long-time warrior and leader, not personality per se. With the possible exception of Jack -- who functions with the same military strategic precision even when "evil" -- the others don't have these lessons to draw on, and with the restraints of conscience and morality off, they are running a bit amok.
Teal'c and the rest of SG-1 are duplicated in the Season One episode "Tin Man." |
JD: What she said. We talked a lot about what each iteration of the team represented in the overall dynamic of team relations, and Holly always had a really good take on the Teal'cs. I wish that we could have explored his iterations more. For instance, I would love to follow the life of epsilon Teal'c, whose response to his situation is really interesting and tantalizing for me.
I feel like there are lots of stories folded up on phantom pages in this book. I don't know that I really see Teal'c in any iteration as the most benign. Maybe the most restrained, as Holly says, or pragmatic in his use of violence. The thing about the duplicates that we wanted to keep in sight is that, however changed, they are in key ways still themselves. The duplicate Teal'cs are very much in line with the Teal'c we see in the series, I think, as Holly's explained. He may be standing still, but that doesn't mean he's not dangerous.
GW: The novel is told from multiple view points, and it jumps back and forth in time. It creates a somewhat fractured narrative that I thought effectively conveyed the fractured perspectives of the various SG-1 teams. Can you talk about your strategy in how you structured the novel?
JD: This is me laughing and laughing, because ... wow. Come, let me show you our charts. Our many, many charts. The ones breaking down the action by planet. The ones breaking down the action in real time (yes, down to the minute, because we're on the clock, teams! Tick-tock!) and the ones breaking it down in novelistic structural time, chapter by chapter, section by section, with the multiple time-lines woven together. Let us walk through the multiple time-frames, the flash-backs, the reminiscences to make sure that all the time stamps are correctly lined up. Allow me to extol the virtues of highlighter pens of many colors. Witness the authors looking at each other and saying, "Weren't we going to keep it simple this time?!"
The point is, though, that the story couldn't be told in a linear fashion if we wanted to achieve certain effects, if we wanted to build (hopefully) the kind of attachments and emotional arcs we were aiming for. The non-linear structure is predicated in some ways on setting up through juxtaposition certain resonances between the backstory and the present-day story.
HS: Some of the scenes simply could not be told from the perspective of any of the SG-1 team members because it would be too confusing. As it was, there were places we feared the POV would be hard to track, so we needed a device to lend outside perspective to the various personalities and issues with the robot teams.
Piper was that necessary outside perspective. He started out as a listening post character whose sole function was to relay information between teams and write mission reports, but we realized quickly that this wouldn't work. Piper had to have a heart and soul and a connection to the teams, a personal stake in what takes place. Once we fleshed him out and got him chatting with alpha Daniel, we had a character who could bridge the emotional arcs of the robot teams.
Duncan and Scott were eager to write the relationship between Jack and Maybourne. |
JD: Yeah, as Holly says, Piper turned out to be a key element because of his function in articulating the emotional arc. Ultimately, we concluded that all the characters need to be people if the story is to have any impact at all. They can't just be drones or bugs (or bug-eyed monsters) that come in battalions to be destroyed without a sense of consequence. The outcome of that decision was multiple points of view and timelines that situate each team in its own motivational structure.
That said, the original model for the novel was much more complex in terms of those narrative points of view and we had to make some tough decisions to pare things down a lot for the sake of clarity. This is where the folks who read early drafts became really essential. We needed them for the reality check, to make sure that everything tracked for someone who didn't have all our multi-colored charts.
GW: I was particularly pleased by the appearance of Colonel Maybourne. The dynamic between him and Jack must have been really fun to play.
HS: Maybourne is the man! I really can't imagine how we could write a novel involving the N.I.D. without bringing him in somehow, with his snark and his appearing/disappearing act, since the mere fact of his continuing free existence drives Jack totally bonkers.
I think Harry lives to annoy Jack; he has made it his special project. But he also was a true believer in saving Earth -- as long as it didn't conflict with saving his own butt -- and so his odd loyalty to Jack, and the way he passes information to him from time to time, really isn't all that odd, from a character perspective. Both Jaimie and I had a hand in writing that scene, and it was such a riot to let them banter and bicker. I wish there had been room for more of it.
JD: Yes! Poor, long-suffering Jack. Maybourne actually fits into the overall structure thematically as well, since I think in a way he's as much Jack's alter-ego as the theta O'Neill is. I think that Maybourne is what Jack might have been, in some way -- what he could be if he's not careful, if he didn't have his team. Because, yeah, he shares Jack's commitment to Earth but he doesn't have Daniel and Sam to tie him to it in a concrete, emotional way, or Teal'c to remind him that Earth's interests are not insular but situated in a broader galactic context. Maybourne's perspective is narrow; Jack's is broader, less self-interested, more compassionate.
Maybourne also functions to tie the action in the S.G.C. and offworld to a real world, Earth-bound context. And, yeah, he's the man.
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