Interview: Author Derek Tyler Attico On Exploring Star Trek’s Utopia In ‘The Autobiography Of Benjamin Sisko’

The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko is the latest of Titan’s series of Star Trek autobiographies. The author (credited in-universe as “editor”) of this fascinating take on the lead character of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was Derek Tyler Attico. TrekMovie had a chance to speak to Attico about his journey to writing Sisko’s story, revealing how it’s a book that involved intensive imaginative work long before the first word was ever written.

When Derek Tyler Attico was 10 years old, he saw George Lucas’ Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope in the theaters, and his life was transformed. “I wanted to know how George Lucas did what he did. And in my brain, as a 100-year-old, I was like, “Imma be like Batman. And instead of training physically, I’m going to train in writing.” Absorbing stories from sources as varied as William Shakespeare, Akira Kurosawa, and Denny O’Neil, Attico broke storytelling down into its most basic components, filtered through his love of science fiction and fantasy. “I’ve thought about it, and I think no matter what age you are, if you’re an adult, hopefully part of you is still that kid. And as a kid, even before Star Wars, I would watch Star Trek on TV with my parents. I’d watch Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, and a lot of that stuff. I’m a big fan of James Baldwin, and Baldwin says that it’s the responsibility of the artist to be a mirror to society. And I’ve always tried to make myself kind of like a little bit of Baldwin, and Roddenberry, and Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone, where I’m telling stories, but also entertaining.”

What do you see as the key thing that makes Sisko unique amongst Trek’s great captains?

Deep Space Nine is 30-plus years going, and Benjamin Lafayette Sisko is still the most balanced captain. I mean, look at all of them, from Kirk to Burnham, and they all have issues. Now at the end, we see that Burnham has found that balance through Book, but it took her a minute, right? Kirk never really finds it. Pike is still struggling with it. Picard kind of finds it in his bridge crew. There’s this theme that the captain can be a great captain and a good person, but not good at relationships, not have that balance. But when we see Ben, he’s already married and then widowed, and he has a son, and then later he remarries. My job is to take someone that’s in his 30s, maybe approaching 40s, balanced, and explain to the reader how he got all that. And so I thought it had to be from his family. And we’ve seen his family, like we have with very few captains. That was my start. And I realized that New Orleans would have to be a character in the book, jazz would have to be a character in the book, food would have to be a character in the book. I took a step backwards and created Ben’s grandparents, because I realized this is an opportunity to do more than tell the autobiography. I can talk about Earth, and about what happened in New Orleans and why I feel New Orleans would be the way it is. New Orleans has always been a service industry town, so what happens to a service industry town when that’s no longer needed, when replicators and transporters arrive almost overnight? And the people of Louisiana, or Japan, or other people that are rooted in tradition and culture, do they say, oh, yeah, we’re going to just throw all that out the window for the future? No, you’re gonna still hold on to those things, you know?

You’re kind of breaking down the homogenization of Earth in the 24^th Century. You’re saying, okay, Earth has a lot of different cultures and those cultures are valuable, beautiful and worth celebrating. And the fact that we have high tech doesn’t eliminate what’s valuable in those cultures.

As humans, we are always cautious and some cultures would say, ‘We might like little things about the technology, but we’re going to stick with our traditions and our history, because it got us this far,’ you know? And then I thought a lot about Joseph Sisko, and he is a great character, because he doesn’t like replicators or transporters, and I wondered why he doesn’t like those things. And I realized that he’s a Black man in Louisiana, and he could still carry some trauma from race and racism—even if it’s not fully conscious—you can still carry some of that, because some traumas take a long time to recover from. And so Joseph opened that window for me. And through Joseph, I started to see how I could talk about World War III, what happened after World War III? And then that led me to, well, if we had this 24^th-century utopia on the Earth, how did we get there? And I was like, well, we would have to have some sort of places, Museums of Remembrance, where people could go generation after generation after generation to understand that these things happen, and the only way to not repeat a mistake is to understand your history. So, I started to develop the Remembrance Centers. And this is all before writing a word! And I figured there would be at least one Remembrance Center in every major city around the world, and that this would be almost like a mandate, because people could go to these, and that that is how humans in the 24th century are elevated, because they’re always remembering, ‘Oh, look at the shit that we did.’

Joseph Sisko with Ben and Jake in “Homefront”

I think that’s one of the most genius things that you came up with, a way to have Gene Roddenberry’s post-racism Earth but also have a character in Ben Sisko who is definitely formed by his race, by his heritage and history. And you found a way to give Ben a deep awareness of his heritage, without having a racist world. And I was reading the book, and for the first time in in my Star Trek life, it gave me a way to understand how, Star Trek’s utopia could be race conscious, in a post-racist world.

A lot of Benjamin Sisko’s attitudes towards race is because of Mr. Avery Brooks. We all know that. But I’m writing a character. I have to explain why Benjamin has these feelings about not wanting to walk into a 1950s version of a holiday in New Las Vegas. Because he shouldn’t have that mindset, 200 years after we’ve overcome racism. And that was how I started thinking about Joseph. And anti-Black racism in America was around for 400-plus years. It’s a trauma that still carries, and it becomes less and less the further forward we go, but Joseph still carries it, and that’s why he wants to make sure no Sisko has left New Orleans, because he doesn’t want to lose any of these things that he’s garnered.

In the novel, because of his explorations with a transporter, a young Ben Sisko winds up hurting himself pretty badly and going into the hospital. What was important to you about how Sisko overcame adversity, even as a boy?

A lot of that is from personal experience. I think all writers write from personal experience. Throughout the seven years of Deep Space Nine, we see Sisko at one point put in charge of running and operating the war to save the entire Alpha Quadrant. No pressure, right? I thought about that, and for someone to be able to carry that, they’ve had to have some stuff happen in their life. And I’ve had some accidents and traumas in my life that were profound to me, and I’ve gotten through them. So, when I face something, I’m like, Oh, I got out of that. This is a challenge, but I can get over it. Since I was a kid, I have had problems with my hip, and I have had three artificial hips. I had to be hospitalized for six months, and I was in the cast for six months., and a kid is not meant to be stationary at that age. It allowed me to become more introspective and deal with a lot more things about the mind, and so there were certain experiences I could give to Ben that would help the character. And when I was in that hospital bed and losing my mind, my mom bought me models of starships to assemble. And that the patience you have to have while in a cast, in the bed to put together models, that develops a lot of mental fortitude, so I gave that to Ben, and then that helped with explaining his love for engineering. So, there are elements where my life intersects with Ben: a love for his mom, a love for his family. Getting that Maya Angelou book when he was a kid from his mom. And then we find out he still has that book with him, like, when he’s going out to take back the Alpha Quadrant. That book is in his tunic, and no one knows. That’s heavy, man.

One of the scenes that was a standout for me was when he’s a cadet at a Starbase, and Ben and his cadet crew are tasked with building a seagoing ship, and that’s where he really learns that he has it in him to command. Talk me through the development of that scene, because that’s the scene that most lives in my mind to this day.

That scene came out of a line from the episode “Explorers” when he’s building the Bajoran lightship. And then Jake comes with him, and it’s a beautiful father and son episode. And in the episode, he says to Jake twice, “We’re going to make a sailor out of you yet.” So the implication of that sentence is, I’m already a sailor, right? But we’re going to make one out of you. Well, how did Ben become a sailor? Where did that happen? We never saw that. And there were certain beats that I had to hit along the way, including Starbase 137, because in another episode [DS9’s “The Ascent”], he says going to Starbase 137 during the Academy was one of the most gratifying experiences of his life. And for years and years I’ve watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the bridge of Next Gen has that wood frame, that wraps around like a horseshoe. And that can’t just be regular wood, right? That should come from some special type of wood on a planet that’s harvested for Starfleet. And that stuck in my brain for years and years. And I took a character I created, John Leviticus West, ‘the Rock,’ a character I had from years ago, and I put him in there, and I was like, they need to build a ship.

And then doing research, I found out that there was Egyptian barge that used no rivets, no nails, you know? And I started doing a crazy amount of research on that. And I was like, That would be so dope, because, you know, you’re bringing these young engineers together, watching them learn to work together. Using whatever’s on this planet, and they can’t use 24^th-century technology, which is a strength of Ben’s by this point. And so he steps up to lead, because he’s comfortable. And other people fall away as this is happening, and West doesn’t care. He’s like “Just get it done” in this amount of time. Space is a harsh environment, and I’m trying to keep you people alive when you when you grow up. And historically we see the Academy and sometimes I feel like the edges of the Academy are rounded off, but space is harsh. You’re encountering all kinds of things. These kids have to have a certain amount of fortitude. And so they start to create the barge, and people start to fall away, to quit. And I got that from the Navy SEALs with the bell, and they could quit, but they had to ring the bell. And then I actually realized, while writing one night, that they need a name for this ship. And that’s the point where everything that you’ve prepared has lined up and you’re helping yourself now. And maybe in my subconscious it was being set up, that of course, the name would be Defiant, yeah? And now, the actual ship has its own arc.

Benjamin and Jake Sisko in “Explorers”

What was your view of the father-son relationship between Ben and Jake on Deep Space Nine, and how did it inform this autobiography?

So in the last episode of Deep Space Nine, “What You Leave Behind,” that last shot is a pullback. And it’s Jake with Kira, waiting for his father, and Ben speaks to Kassidy, but never speaks to Jake. It’s gut-wrenching, man. Because then you start to feel shadows of “The Visitor,” and so I knew whatever I did, the first person Ben would want to speak to would be Jake. And I’ll just say really quickly, the last three people we see in the last episode of Deep Space Nine are Nog, Kira, and Jake, and those are the first three people we see in my book. And that’s intentional, because I’m saying to the reader, we’re connecting that then to a year later.

So in your mind, is Ben Sisko a character in Benny Russell’s mind? Or is Benny Russell a character in Ben Sisko’s mind?

What’s really cool about that last page of the autobiography is that it is a nod, of course, to “Far Beyond the Stars.” And that last page, it’s very meta, you can take it a lot of ways. I wrote a 2016 Star Trek: Strange New Worlds short story called “The Dreamer and the Dream,” and it’s about Benny Russell. It’s like 10 years later, and he’s still in the asylum. But he’s been writing Star Trek for 10 years now. So, he has boxes in his room with the names of captains, and his therapist convinces him that, in order to get out, he has to put all his anger and depression and even hatred into one last Deep Space Nine episode called “Deep Space Nine: Epilogue.” And so he starts doing that, but he doesn’t realize that what he’s writing is actually happening in the 24th century, and his therapist is a Pah Wraith! Manipulating him. So knowing that I had written that years before, this was a way of me, taking one last time for us to see Benny Russell in this last page. I figured, it could be whatever you want. It could be the dreamer or the dream. It could be either way, you know.

Sisko sees reflection of Benny Russell in “Far Beyond the Stars”

Just to close, what’s next for you? Where should people be looking for Derek Tyler Attico next?

Well, right now I’m teaching with the TASQ Academy of Sequential Art. I’m teaching a class on the fundamentals of storytelling. That’s been a lot of fun. I’m writing, working on some of my own material. I have partnered with the Syfy Sistas, and I’ll be starting next month a podcast called Soul of the Story where I’ll be talking to established artists in different genres: painters, choreographers, directors, writers, actors, and getting their perspectives on storytelling. That should be a lot of fun and something that hopefully will be of interest to a lot of different people, because it’ll be interesting to see how each of these different artists look at storytelling. We’ll start by doing two a month, and probably a 12-episode season to start. And they can find me on my website, DerekAttico.com, or @dattico is my handle pretty much anywhere on social media. Give me a shout. I love talking and chatting with everybody and anybody.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko is available at Amazon for $20.00 in hardcover or $10.96 on Kindle/ebook.

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Note: The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.