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First Contact Day

My latest project for Titan Books, Star Trek: First Contact – The Making of the Classic Film, has at last beamed down to terrestrial locations.


Here's the final cover:



And here are some early online reactions:



From the publisher’s blurb: ‘This beautiful coffee-table book is full to the brim of archival material, behind-the-scenes photography, concept art, production designs, and much more, and includes new and exclusive interviews with cast and crew, including Jonathan Frakes, Alice Krige, Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, Ronald D. Moore, Marina Sirtis, Herman Zimmerman, and Michael Westmore.’

Raw material for all of this consisted of sixteen new interviews that I conducted in April and May 2021. That added up to about 62,000 words of transcript, which evolved into a 20,000-word manuscript – approximately twice the length of an average Cinefex article. Add to that, another 3,500 words of captions that I cooked up to accompany imagery that I dug from the depths of the Paramount studio archives. It was a fun project, and I did my homework, consulting many sources. But it was my goal to make this a new and original appreciation of the film, a quarter-century later.


Thanks to all who assisted in the book’s creation, especially Mr. Frakes for his generosity and eternal twinkle, the film’s writers for their passionate insights, and producer Rick Berman for his candor and good humor. And thanks to Titan for allowing me to dedicate the book to my mum, a Star Trek fan. For more info, check out an exclusive author interview at Neil Shurley’s Star Trekking substack.






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