IN THE WORLD OF TELEVISION, Judith and Garfield were invited by Manny Coto to join the fourth-season writing staff of Star Trek: Enterprise. In Star Trek Communicator magazine, Executive Producer Rick Berman praised the Reeves-Stevenses, saying, “They are just dynamite. We are kicking ourselves at not having found them years ago. They are both absolute cracker-jack writers, both incredibly impressive… they write crisp, clean dialogue and a good story. They are godsends.” Judith and Garfield wrote five episodes for the season. Aintitcool.com hailed their first, “The Forge,” as “not only the best episode of Enterprise, but the best episode of Star Trek.”
IN OTHER TELEVISION WORK, Judith and Garfield were supervising producers on location in Australia for the third season of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World—the syndicated one-hour action-adventure series from Coote/Hayes Productions and New Line. There, they wrote ten of the season’s twenty-two episodes. Judith and Garfield had joined the series as staff writers in its second season, writing five episodes. In addition to numerous other episodic credits, they have also developed television series with Dreamworks, Film Roman, Universal Television, the Edward R. Pressman Company, Alliance-Atlantis, Nickelodeon, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Another of their television projects was literally out of this world: Race to Mars, a four-hour miniseries for Discovery Channel Canada and the Science Channel. Part of an unprecedented television event produced by Galafilm, Race to Mars is the companion piece to Mars Rising, a six-hour documentary series detailing the current state of Mars exploration. Judith and Garfield worked with more than seventy scientific and technical advisors to create the dramatic story of the first human mission to Mars in the year 2031. The Toronto Star praised the miniseries as “a tautly written tale that simply zings with tension… a dramatic winner.”
IN ANIMATION, for their contributions to the Emmy Award-winning Batman: The Animated Series, Judith and Garfield shared an Emmy Certificate for Outstanding Achievement in Animation Writing. For Hearst Animation, they co-developed and served as Executive Story Editors on Phantom 2040, based on the classic costumed crime fighter created by Lee Falk. Wired magazine said of the series, “Not just another merchandising scam, Phantom 2040 is spectacularly written with smart dialog, an intricate story-line, and animation to match.” In a departure from television, for Universal Studios Judith and Garfield wrote Van Helsing: The London Assignment, the direct-to-DVD animé prequel to the Stephen Sommers blockbuster starring Hugh Jackman. The DVD was released the week following the movie’s opening and praised by Variety as “an excellent animated prequel... the intelligent story moves at a rapid clip and the action is nail-biting.”
IN THE WORLD OF PUBLISHING, Judith and Garfield are New York Times bestselling writers whose novel, Icefire, was praised by Stephen King as “a hardwired, totally riveting, dare-you-to-put-it-down story of disaster, heroism, and suspense. There’s no need for techno-thriller fans to wait for the next Clancy or Coonts; Icefire is the best suspense novel of its type since The Hunt for Red October.” Judith and Garfield conducted some of their research for Icefire during an expedition to Antarctica on assignment for Microsoft’s “Wild Lit” series of adventure-travel articles for the Internet. Among the eleven other bestselling authors selected by Microsoft for this series were Amy Tan, Clive Cussler, Tom Robbins, Ed McBain, Tama Janowitz, and Nelson DeMille.
Their newest book, Search, is a novel of “forbidden history,” featuring the writing team’s unique blend of cutting-edge science and unrelenting suspense in a breathtaking race to uncover the secret origins of human civilization. Search will be published in August, 2010, by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
Judith and Garfield are also among the Star Trek franchise’s biggest-selling original book writers, and their novel, Federation, is one of the top-selling original Star Trek novels ever published. Well-known to Star Trek fans, the couple appear in the supplementary DVD material that accompanies the release of Robert Wise’s director’s edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the collector’s edition of Star Trek: Nemesis, the season-four set of Star Trek: Enterprise, as well as the DVD releases of Star Trek: The Animated Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation 20th Anniversary Collection, and the “remastered” high-definition sets of the original Star Trek series. They also provided commentaries for the Blu-Ray editions of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek: The Final Frontier, as well as appearing in a series of four commercials promoting The Next Generation in syndication (available here).
In addition to five other Star Trek novels and four acclaimed nonfiction volumes chronicling the franchise’s production history, Judith and Garfield are William Shatner’s co-writers for an ongoing bestselling series of novels based on the character of Captain Kirk. The ninth novel in the series, Captain’s Glory, was published on September 8, 2006, to commemorate Star Trek’s 40th anniversary. Their tenth novel with William Shatner, Star Trek: Academy – Collision Course, was published October 16, 2007, and tells the story of how teenage Kirk and Spock first met and entered Starfleet Academy.
SOME OF JUDITH’S AND GARFIELD’S RESEARCH TRIPS prepared them for their Discovery Channel Canada miniseries, Race to Mars, though they didn’t know it at the time. Instead, they were researching their non-fiction book: GOING TO MARS: The Stories of the People Behind NASA’s Mars Missions, Past, Present, and Future. The book was co-written with Brian Muirhead of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, former Flight Systems Manager for the Mars Pathfinder mission, Chief Architect of NASA’s Project Constellation to establish a permanent outpost on the Moon in preparation for human expeditions to Mars, and now JPL’s Chief Engineer.
With many fans of their work at NASA, Judith and Garfield were invited by then-Administrator Sean O’Keefe to join a Space Policy Workshop of “distinguished forward-thinking individuals to bring new perspectives and new ideas into the debate” to produce a new vision for America’s future goals in space. The couple joined with sixteen other participants to meet with top NASA officials, including O’Keefe, Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr. Charles Elachi, NASA Associate Administrator for Science, Ed Weiler, and NASA Chief Scientist, astronaut John Grunsfeld.
Other members of this committee include filmmakers James Cameron and George Butler, “Segway” inventor Dean Kamen, astrophysicist Kip Thorne, and Steve Squyres, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
ON HIS OWN, Garfield Reeves-Stevens is the author of five thriller novels combining elements of science fiction and horror. Of Garfield’s two latest novels, Stephen King said, “Nighteyes and Dark Matter are two of the best speculative novels I’ve read in the past eight years.” Dark Matter won France’s prestigious Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. Past winners include Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Dan Simmons.
Bio & CREDITS
Onboard the space shuttle Atlantis.
The world’s deadliest natural disaster
isn’t natural...