Peter David, a writer beloved for his literary takes on dozens of popular franchise characters across a variety of media, died on May 24, 2025. He suffered a number of health issues in the final decade-plus of his life, including, in 2022 alone, multiple strokes, kidney failure, and a heart attack. He was 68 years old.
David was extremely prolific in the world of Star Trek novels, writing almost fifty between 1989 and 2011, nearly half of which belonged to the New Frontier series, his biggest and most ambitious footprint on the franchise, a sandbox all his own that successfully melded the cowboy sensibilities of the original series with the more strait-laced bureaucracy of the 90s shows and allowed him to indulge some of the more risqué and dangerous elements that were considered anathema by some of the less adventurous stewards of the TV arm of the franchise. Under the command of Mackenzie Calhoun, who was once the young leader of a revolution on his home world of Xenex and is still unpacking a lot of the trauma from those years, the Ambassador-class starship Excalibur holds it down in the Beta Quadrant while the Dominion War rages on elsewhere, its crew standing up to adversity with an ample supply of David’s trademark humor and humanity at every turn.
Some of David’s other Trek novels, like Q-in-Law, Imzadi, and I, Q (which I’m personally looking very forward to getting to as we approach the books of 1999), remain fan-favorite takes on their main characters to this day.
He was also a big name in comics, being lauded by fans for his similarly pensive takes on Aquaman and the Hulk in the 1990s.
David didn’t always hit the mark—his earlier Trek works were sometimes derailed by gratuitous puerility—but he always wrote with an inimitable style and could never be accused of merely taking the paycheck. He had a knack for naturalistic dialogue that many writers spend their whole lives reaching for and never get close to grasping. His own voice was a rare one in the world of Trek, one that strove to bring a different, more modern sense of humor to the franchise while still aspiring to its original ideals—and, more often than not, succeeded. He will be dearly missed.
