Join us for another in a series of interviews with winners of awards from our 2024 Awards Ceremony. Our goal is to give you insight into how our fleet’s best simmers write, and imagine their characters as well as their out of character contributions and achievements.
This month we’re interviewing the writer behind Lieutenant Junior Grade Kimberly Stapledon playing a female human assigned to the USS Chin’toka. She has won the Prestigious Service Medallion for Engineering
These are awarded to members of the fleet who are steady and unwavering in their chosen Duty Post. This is a divisional award for each (Gold, Red, Blue) to celebrate a continuing player in the divisional role who has already won (and still qualifies in the eligibility criteria) a duty post award in a similar vein to how we enhance the Service Ribbons each time one is won.
Nilsen: Can you introduce yourself to us, where in the world do you hail from? Any hobbies?
Stapledon: I live in Canada. I enjoy creating digital art and writing as hobbies.
You’ve recently transferred to the USS Chin’toka, where you helped relaunch the ship. Tell us about that experience and how you approached that task in character.
It was a fairly fast experience. I had been hanging around a number of crew there and I also liked the prospect of getting Kim involved in more action-oriented plots that challenged her fairly insulated upbringing. In character Kim was surprised. It was a very jarring transition to go from what was a comparably scenic mission helping a colony to get back on its feet again to suddenly being assimilated and weaponized during Frontier Day.
What inspired you to create an engineering character? And how did you come about creating Stapledon?
Engineering has always come naturally to me as a duty post, likely because I have spent all of my adult life working in software. The character name was created initially as a cross between the author names Kim Stanley Robinson and Olaf Stapledon, two major science fiction authors. I envisioned someone with very youthful creative energy combined with technical know how and an adventurous spirit.
When presenting your award, Jalana Rajel gave so many examples as to why you should get the awards, Rajel cited a whole bunch of examples, two of which include using holographic bugs and spiders to distract and herd a group of very angry Nausicaans, then taking a boarding party out by turning off Gravity. What has been your favourite engineering solution?
I sort of enjoy engineering solutions that involve collecting some kind of new gadget or program. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of characters having equipment that personalizes them. So I think so far my favourites have been the back hack to take over the Fake Enterprise and, more recently, the tetryon fields Kim was using to locally disrupt Borg communications on Frontier Day.
Rajel also said “Kevin has a knack for technical solutions, ideas and improvements that some of us wouldn’t even think of – I know I wouldn’t – while making sure that all of us understand what he is thinking of, including others into solutions” My question is, how does one make engineering accessible to other simmers, without losing the nuance of the duty post?
Well I guess I would say it helps to be a visual thinker, to imagine what a good solution to something would look like given the situation. Then, try not to make the gadget or solution you come up with too powerful so that it gets us closer to the solution but still leaves lots of room for others to add to it.
Finally what’s next for Stapleton?
At the moment Kim is serving as the acting head of science. Kim herself took an interest in science and philosophy during her schooling, so this isn’t too much of a departure. I hope to have her provide more detail and challenges to upcoming missions as she views the worlds the crew finds themselves in through her unique eyes.
Thanks for your time, Lieutenant Junior Grade Kimberly Stapledon!
You can read more about Lieutenant Junior Grade KimberlyStapledon on the wiki
