Quick Facts
Biography
David Alan Mack is a writer best known for his freelance Star Trek novels. Mack also has had a Star Trek script produced, and worked on a Star Trek comic book.
Early career
Mack attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts as an undergraduate, from 1987 to 1991. There he majored in film and television production and screenwriting as well as writing for the student-run comedy magazine, The Plague.
After receiving several rejections on early spec-script submissions to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Mack teamed up with John J. Ordover, then an editor in Pocket Books' Star Trek Department. Working together, the pair combined Ordover's ability to arrange pitch meetings with the shows' producers with Mack's training in screenwriting.
In 1995, the pair made their first story sale, to Star Trek: Voyager, though the project was never produced. A few weeks later they made another sale, this time to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, for the fourth-season episode "Starship Down". Another story pitched by the pair during that same meeting was bought three years later, as the basis for the seventh-season episode "It's Only a Paper Moon", for which the pair received a "story by" credit.
During the 1990s, Mack performed freelance editorial work for Pocket Books. That work led to Mack being invited to draft a 5,000-word supplement for John Vornholt's novel The Genesis Wave, Book One, which in turn earned Mack an invitation in 2000 to write his own first full-length Star Trek book.
Mack and Ordover wrote the four-part Deep Space Nine/Next Generation comic book miniseries Divided We Fall for WildStorm. With Keith R.A. DeCandido, Mack co-wrote the two-part Starfleet Corps of Engineers (SCE) e-book story Invincible.
Solo work
Mack's first solo project was the two-part SCE e-book novel Wildfire. His other SCE e-books are Failsafe and Small World. He next wrote the short stories "Waiting for G'Doh, or, How I Learned to Stop Moving and Hate People" for the anthology Star Trek: New Frontier: No Limits; and "Twilight's Wrath" for the anthology Star Trek: Tales of the Dominion War.
Mack's first direct-to-paperback novels were a Star Trek: The Next Generation duology: A Time To Kill and A Time To Heal. Mack also wrote Harbinger, the first volume of the Star Trek: Vanguard novel series, which he co-developed with editor Marco Palmieri.
His first non-Star Trek novel was the Wolverine spy-thriller Road of Bones, published in October 2006 by Pocket Books. His first original novel, The Calling, which he described as "a modern-day fantasy-thriller," was published in July 2009.
Other work includes the Star Trek: New Frontier minipedia, the Starfleet Survival Guide, the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine post-finale novel Warpath, the Mirror Universe short novel The Sorrows of Empire (first published in 2007, with an expanded version scheduled for release in 2010), and the multi-series crossover trilogy Star Trek: Destiny.
Upcoming projects by Mack include More Beautiful Than Death, one of four novels based on the film Star Trek, and Zero Sum Game, a part of the Star Trek: Typhon Pact series following Star Trek: Destiny.