down to the final three choices alongside Gerrit Graham and René Auberjonois, with the role going to Auberjonois. He was invited back to the series to audition once more to portray the last Cardassian on the station, Garak, for the second episode of the series. Garak went on to become a recurring character. The novel itself originated from a biography of Garak, written by Robinson to flesh out the character, which he described as "an old actor's trick, if you’re hired for a role that you’re not familiar with, you write a biography of the character". The biography was written in the format of a diary, which Robinson would then read extracts from for fans at Star Trek conventions as he found that he was being asked similar questions at every convention and wanted to do something more for the fans. David R. George III had just completed the novel The 34th Rule with actor Armin Shimerman. George heard Robinson read from the biography at a Star Trek convention, and suggested that it would be suitable to be turned into a novel. Robinson submitted the proposal to the publishers of Star Trek novels and received a positive response, and so set about turning his biography of Garak into a full-length novel using the Star Trek Encyclopedia as a guide to ensure that references to other events within the Star Trek universe were correct. However, one inconsistency did show up in the novel where, Garak does business with Quark when he initially comes to the station. However, in the episode, "The Wire", Garak states that they had never done business before. He agreed an outline of the narrative within the novel with the publishers, and Margaret Clark was his editor at Pocket Books. One element he found he once again had to tone down was the sexual content of the novel, due to the family orientated market of the books. Robinson had previously deliberately portrayed Garak as sexually ambiguous in the television show, but found that the writers wrote the character out of situations where this would show. Robinson has stated that one of the reasons he wrote the novel was to get "total closure" of the character, and compared Garak in the novel to the spies from the works of John le Carré such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He said of the novel, The novel was half completed when