I’ve worked with many editors in my career; almost all of them I have met in person. The best one that I never met, Margaret Clark, passed away this past weekend, according to our mutual colleague Dayton Ward, who got the sad news from her sister. She had edited for many years the Star Trek line of novels at Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books/Pocket Books, including all eight of my novels and my initial novella.
Editors don’t always get much in the way of plaudits — especially those working freelance, as Margaret was during the time I knew her — and she seldom went to conventions and did no social media that I’m aware of. Yet while she was mostly behind the scenes, she had everything to do with the high quality and huge quantity of Star Trek fiction that reached readers.
There are others who worked with her far longer and knew her better; what I can say is all from the more recent past. And what a past: She was the editor of seven of the last nine winners of the Scribe Award for Best Media Tie-In Novel (Speculative), including the last six in a row and three of mine (Star Trek: Discovery – Die Standing, Star Trek: Picard – Rogue Elements, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – The High Country). I guess it’s actually seven of the last ten, since one of the other years there was a tie — but seven of nine seems a propos. And it’s likely a record she’ll hold forever.
I knew Margaret’s name from when she worked at Marvel in Archie Goodwin’s office; she worked on the Return of the Jedi Super Special, among many other things, and our calls would always veer off into me asking about her time in comics. She also worked at DC, and would join Pocket Books in 1995; she took principal responsibility for the Trek line around 2009. There’s much more about her career here. When she first approached me to work on Star Trek prose in January 2013, it was for Absent Enemies, an e-novella in the Star Trek Titan line; she worked to help me make the shift from my Star Wars mindset. “Gene didn’t want the characters to be insulting one another,” she said. “Starfleet’s more respectful.”
My first full novel, 2015’s Star Trek: The Next Generation: Takedown, she green-lit after a one-line pitch — though she explained how with Riker having been promoted over Picard in the recent novels, my “Hunt for Red October with Riker chasing Picard” would work better with the characters reversed. She let me get some of my humor in, although my attempt to do a terrible pun on the “Next Generation” name did result in her note, “You are not getting away with that.”
Takedown wasn’t even out when she agreed to let me do the trilogy that would become Star Trek: Prey, the significance of which grew when she came back suggesting we could release the books monthly in late 2016 for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. The outlining process that followed was terrifying to me, as I’d not worked on a story that large all at once before or since — and when my first outline was correctly shot down, she suggested in a call the one idea that made everything work: I could have free use of the clone of the Klingon emperor, Kahless, who’d been absent from stories for years. Her suggestion unlocked every story problem I had.
But not the writing — which was, again, a terrifying marathon. The one-month breaks we had planned between novels in the trilogy vanished when my dad was hospitalized between books one and two and my wife had a bad car accident between books two and three — and by the time I was in the final volume, our joke had become “Prey that it’s on time.” I had half the final book left to write with ten days to go when she said in horror, “The book’s gonna crash” — possibly being delayed as much as a year after the first two monthly installments.
Her solution was something I’ve never heard any book editor doing for anyone in tie-in fiction: she let me turn in chapters daily. Somehow, I finished on time, and because I knew how to land the plane 250,000 words in, they were the strongest chapters of the book. When I asked in terror what she thought, her “Loved it, loved it, loved it” response restarted my heart. We were both really proud of that work.
Her “loved it” answer would be something I’d strive for when I returned—after a needed two-year break—to do my first novel for the streaming series, Star Trek: Discovery – The Enterprise War. Margaret was now navigating a new situation where in addition to working with her employer at Simon & Schuster and the licensing team at Paramount, Secret Hideout was now in the mix on the streaming side. Yet it worked very well, thanks to one of Margaret’s veteran novel writers, Kirsten Beyer, being part of the Discovery writer’s room and ready to collaborate. Margaret worked diligently to smooth over any complications as they came along.
My last three-novel run with Margaret involved books that couldn’t have been more different: a spy novel (Die Standing), a crime caper (Rogue Elements), and a western (The High Country). Although even then she was ready to see the story hiding within the story. “It’s not a western,” she said of the final book. “It’s a science fiction novel with horses in it.” And I enjoyed cracking her up with some of the wild scenes she gave me license to explore. Remembering her initial advice to me about Starfleet, I cautioned her that Die Standing, featuring the Mirror Universe Emperor Georgiou, had more insults and innuendo per page than any Trek novel in history. She laughed, “That means you understood the assignment!”
We didn’t talk for a long time after the Strange New Worlds book was finished in the spring of 2023— I would have Star Wars and Batman going in the interim, and everything from paper supplies to corporate takeovers played into the number of titles Trek was taking. But we did talk again this past fall, and I finally got to properly interview her about some of her Marvel editorial work. That’ll wind up in a project of mine one day. I had every expectation of talking with her again, but a fast-moving illness took her before that could happen.
Margaret preferred the phone, and it was after our umpteenth five-minute call lasted an hour that I asked one of my colleagues if that was normal. “That means she likes you,” he replied. I’m sorry I won’t get another such call, or get the chance to meet her — but I’m honored that she chose to include me in her body of work that has entertained countless readers. My condolences to her friends, family, and colleagues.