Downtime on a movie or television set can often be a creatively debilitating experience, but for William Shatner it served as the impetus for creating the TekWar universe; a universe that has spanned numerous best-selling novels, comic books, trading cards, four television movies, a weekly series and, now, a brand new series of comics with talk of new TV adventures.
It was during the production of 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, on which he made his feature directorial debut, that Shatner began to create what would become his first work of fiction, TekWar. That novel was an attempt to blend elements from two of his most popular television series, Star Trek and T.J. Hooker, resulting in a unique science fiction adventure. Shatner does, however, admit that he may have been influence just a little too much by Star Trek in terms of his creation’s futuristic setting. “When I sat down to write the novel,” he explains, “I followed my instincts rather than any conscious desire.It was almost as though I didn’t believe anything more would come of it than my doodling around with the story. As a result, I wasn’t too careful about where I set it. Since I was working on a Star Trek movie at the time, I set it instinctively, almost, in the general time of Star Trek. So the novels are set 200 years from now and the world that I imagined was a world that I probably had absorbed from various contacts, pictures, paintings and covers of magazines and other science fiction that I had read from the multitude of sources that one gets their imagination from. I had a generalized feeling of the world of Tek, but what I was concentrating mostly on was this policeman whose life was torn asunder by the various things that had happened to him.” TekWar introduced ex-police officer Jake Cardigan , accused of murdering his partners while under the influence of Tek, a drug-like virtual reality experience that is oftentimes fatal in its addiction. As a result of this supposed crime, Cardigan is placed in cryogenic freeze for a 15-year sentence, but freed after four by the influential Bascom, who wants him to work for the Cosmos Detective Agency. Partnered with Sid Gomez, Cardigan goes up against one Tek lord after another in each subsequent adventure while simultaneously trying to repair the rifts between he and his wife and son, clearing his name and getting on with his own life. The basic concept of the Tek “drug” came about, Shatner says, “by the fact that I put a television set in a wall in my bedroom and used it – and use it – as a means of going to sleep. In the middle of the night when the dark hangs heavy, to light a candle was to open the television set so that the television, in a way, is something I’ve become accustomed to using both for information, of course, but to sleep as well. It’s almost something I try not to do because I do it so often. As a result, I extended the drug effect into a totality of drug, in that the television miniaturized can then become your fantasy and your fantasy becomes real. In that case, it would become difficult to even leave your house, which is what happens to a Tek user in addition to getting their neurons scrambled. That’s the lure of Tek, that your fantasy world can be better than your real world.”
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