And with that, Dax exhales her last breath and dies.

STRANGE AS IT may seem, that was how it started. Back in April 1998, I read Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler's moving script, "Tears of the Prophets," the finale for the sixth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, confirming the rumors that had already been spreading for months. I read those words, and that's when I knew the book you now hold was going to happen.

Jadzia died, and something in the back of my mind just clicked.

But why do a book about Dax? I mean, let's face it, she doesn't fit into the usual formula for a successful Star Trek book-- she's not a captain, she's not bald, and she doesn't have pointed ears. The skeptics I encountered were beside themselves: How could I possibly expect people to be interested?

And it wasn't as if Jadzia's demise meant I could do with the character as I pleased. When "Tears of the Prophets" aired, I knew the death of one Dax would mean the birth of another. We all did, didn't we? She was a Trill, for cryin' out loud--that was the thing that most defined her, that she (or he; we still didn't know at that point) would be back. It would be a different host, of course--the ninth--with the memories of all the previous hosts, male and female, going back nearly four hundred years. Each new personality was different from the one before it, each new life always striving to distinguish itself from the last. I started to wonder about the periods in Star Trek history those hosts had lived through, the things they might have done, the familiar faces they might have encountered. And then I grinned like an idiot.

"Why Dax?" Are you kidding? Why not?

How could I ignore the storytelling possibilities im-plicit in the Dax character? The potential not only to flesh out its past lives, but to explore the ways in which they've always played a part in the Star Trek universe?

And then came the clincher--the inspiration that would, I was certain, make the project truly unique among Star Trek books. This wasn't going to be a biographical novel, with one voice trying to capture the entire scope of Dax's life. I mean, think about it: Dax is a living anthology--a collection of stories. The book would be one too.

So I went forward, and on the way Deep Space Nine's audience was introduced to a new Dax. Ezri came on the scene as the ninth host, and to the delight of Star Trek fans everywhere, myself among them, she proved as popular as Jadzia--precisely because, true to the nature of Dax, she was completely different from Jadzia! Wonderfully brought to life by Terry Farrell, Jadzia had been a strong, confident presence, someone who'd spent her entire adult life preparing herself to process the diverse lives embodied by the Dax symbiont. Ezri, masterfully portrayed by Nicole deBoer, was just the opposite; having been forced by circumstances to become joined to Dax, she was completely unprepared at first to balance the combined personalities of eight previous lives. We only got to watch her struggle for a year, but what a year it was.