Loves and stratagems

Robinson’s novel is structured as a letter from Garak to Dr. Julian Bashir - his best friend and longtime breakfast companion on Deep Space Nine. Much fan fiction about Garak speculates that his feelings for Bashir went beyond the platonic relationship depicted on television, a belief Robinson does not refute. Indeed, in A Stitch In Time, Garak has crushes on both men and women.

“I loved that sexual ambiguity,” Robinson states. “I wanted to get away from our sexual prejudices. I thought, this is an alien! Who knows what alien sexuality is, if indeed there is strict heterosexuality or homosexuality, those delineations? That’s something that I kept in the book. Though that was more interesting to me in the playing of Garak than the writing of it; this book is for kids too, so I chose not to get more explicit sexually because of that.”

Interestingly, the book scarcely mentions Dukat’s daughter Ziyal, Garak’s onetime lover, who was murdered by Damar when he believed she had betrayed Cardassia. “The reason for that is that the writers never got that right,” sighs Robinson. “They had three different actresses playing Ziyal, and when Garak comes back and finds out that Ziyal has been killed, basically it’s, “Well, that’s too bad,” and he moves on with his life.“

Near the end of the series, Garak and Damar worked together without any conflict over Damar’s murder of Garak’s love. “So I figured, what the hell. I guess he didn’t care as much as one would have thought.” Was the romance with Ziyal an attempt to heterosexualize Garak because the writers got nervous about the Bashir/Garak dynamic? “Probably,” admits Robinson. “It never really developed. There was never really any investment on their part.”