sonny_whitelaw

Favourite to write for...hm... That's a tossup between Daniel Jackson and Rodney McKay. Jackson embodied the scientist with a whacko theory that proved to be correct, which is always fun, plus he had a deeply personal quest to find his wife, and classic quests create driven characters. Yet I also loved writing O'Neill: lots of personal baggage plus dry humour.

In Atlantis, Rodney began as the character everyone loved to hate, which is meat and potatoes for writers. David Hewlitt was an absolute gem because he was very invested in his character's flaws and really wanted to maintain them. So talking with David and getting his ideas added an important dimension to writing Rodney, kept me from giving McKay too many redeeming qualities but also allowed me to explore the depths of his insecurities and mess with them no end.

The hardest? At first it was Teal'c, but then I started getting into that Zen warrior mode and he began flowing quite easily.

Yeah, the cast and some of the crew came across a couple of times. Good people, very dedicated actors. Funniest (in a weird and not-so funny way) memory was Cliff Simon (Baal) playing a game of cards with my 12 year old son on the train from Parramatta to Sydney, in a section of the carriage where they were by themselves. Someone came up to me and warned me that she thought my son was with a dangerous man but she couldn't exactly place him. Didn't know whether to laugh or cry because Cliff is such a nice guy.

I didn't create the series, I was one of several novelists contracted to write tie-ins.

The Gou'ld are based on ancient Babylonian and Biblical mythologies that carried into modern alien mythologies. The serpent in the Garden of Eden, the motif of the serpent for everlasting life/regeneration (they shed their skins), the Babylonian creation myth and Old Testament Nephilim and so on. It's pretty ancient stuff that ties in with the idea that gods and angels came from the heavens, ergo the gods are aliens. The pyramids were built with such precision that since the late 1800s a few people have proposed they must have been built by a more advanced civilization, and since they align to Orion, the connection between Egypt and alien gods was a match made in (fictional) heaven. Heaps of storytelling potential using an endless supply of mythology.

I started to write a Stargate Universe novel but kept finding myself reverting back to the central Stargate characters as the Universe characters weren't formed enough in my mind. Around the same time I decided to move to New Zealand and spend two years sorting out the property and exploring the country. By the time I was ready to get back into writing, the series was cancelled for the same reason that any televisions show is cancelled, ratings had dropped.

Hard question to answer in a few lines. I have some 29 students at the moment, most of whom are writing speculative fiction. If you want a bit of insight into what I think works and why, and you can cope with a bit of academic writing, I wrote a Master's thesis on what worked in Stargate and why: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16547/1/Sandra_Whitelaw_Thesis.pdf